State welfare benefits systematically discouraged workers’ savings behavior

Evidence

It was impossible, Schmölders maintained, to instill a behavior that had no support in the life worlds of the strata of society in question. Despite looking at the upper classes for behavioral orientation, workers adopted only the openly visible markers of success but not savings behavior. Moreover, according to Schmölders, the many additional benefits such as Christmas or sickness allowances systematically discouraged “responsible savings behavior.” Thus, he argued, a mixture of natural, political, social, and cultural factors was responsible for the impossibility of encouraging the accumulation of wealth among workers. “Well-intended” measures neglecting people’s behavioral patterns could not succeed in “imposing a certain behavior.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 335

Categorization

• XREF: Directly joins the austerity/neoliberalism map — this is the moralized anti-welfare argument in seeds, echoing the later underclass-deficit literature and Reagan-era welfare critique. — connects to: Welfare functions as social control by giving workers something to lose — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1661; Treasury officials blamed the crisis on workers’ unwillingness to save once wages rose — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 885
• SEED: An essay on how ‘behavioral’ language became the respectable vehicle for class-coded paternity: Schmölders’s ‘inner prerequisites’ anticipates the cultural-deficit framing of welfare critique by decades.

Broader Connections

• Welfare functions as social control by giving workers something to lose #corroborates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1661