Becker saw welfare as destroying the family’s natural insurance function

Evidence

Becker had a very similar position to Friedman but as a microeconomist was always much more attentive to the intimate, domestic underpinnings of human capital investment and therefore has the merit of rendering explicit what remains unsaid in the work of the other neoliberals. Free public education, Becker argued, could be critiqued on the same grounds as the progressive income tax, which (in his words) “initially narrows inequality” but ends up raising the “equilibrium level of inequality … because families reduce their investments in descendants.” If we could only turn off the spigots of government spending, then families would spontaneously rediscover their natural altruism and start investing in their children again. The argument was improbable and at odds with the evidence but it enabled Becker to identify private credit markets as a logical alternative. In Becker’s ideal world, students would once again look to the family as a source of economic support, and yet the old stratifications of family wealth would simultaneously be deferred and elasticized by expanding opportunities for private debt. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 253 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Becker held that public spending crowds out families’ natural altruistic investment in children — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 253; Becker blamed the welfare state, not feminism, for postwar family breakdown — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 210; Early US anti-welfare arguments framed socialized risk as destroying family moral solidarity — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 219 (+1 more)

Related

• Becker held that public spending crowds out families’ natural altruistic investment in children (similarity 0.95)
• Becker argued government welfare spending paradoxically raises equilibrium inequality (similarity 0.91)
• Neoliberal economists saw the family as a privatized insurance that welfare destroyed (similarity 0.89)
• Becker’s family-investment crowding-out argument inverted the business-focused deficit critique (similarity 0.88)
• Becker blamed the welfare state, not feminism, for postwar family breakdown (similarity 0.85)
• Chicago School economists blamed the welfare state, not feminism, for family breakdown (similarity 0.82)
• American neoliberals saw family altruism as a substitute for the welfare state (similarity 0.80)
• Neoliberal economists advocated private credit to deliver inclusion without wealth redistribution (similarity 0.80)
• Early US anti-welfare arguments framed socialized risk as destroying family moral solidarity (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Becker held that public spending crowds out families’ natural altruistic investment in children #corroborates (0.95) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 253