Are people who live in welfare states more tolerant?

I am not sure why I ever thought that people who live in welfare states would tend to be more tolerant than people in countries with smaller governments. It might have something to do with all the talk about social solidarity and social cohesion by those advocating collectivist policies. Rather than thinking about egality and fraternity I should have been thinking about liberty - and the historical links between respect for the rights of others and civility.


World Values Surveys ask a relevant question about the people respondents would not like to have as neighbours. People were asked to choose from a long list including drug addicts, heavy drinkers and people with criminal records. Reluctance to live next to people belonging to some of these groups may have more to do with safety concerns than with intolerance. Three groups that seem to me to provide a fairly neutral test of levels of tolerance in different countries are people who have aids, immigrants or foreign workers and homosexuals.

As in other recent posts on differences in values between people living in countries with relatively big and relatively small governments (here and here) I have focused on14 high-income countries with broadly similar European heritage for which data is available from the most recent World Values Survey (WVS 2005 – 2008). These countries have been ranked by size of government, using government spending as a percentage of GDP as an indicator of size of government (OECD Economic Outlook data on general government outlays as a percentage of nominal GDP, averaged over the three years 2005–08).

In the table below the five highest percentages for each variable are shown against a red background and the five lowest percentages are shown against a blue background.

Apart from Swedes, it seems that people who live in countries with big governments are relatively intolerant about who they want as neighbours. Social solidarity apparently does not include people who are perceived to be different.

Are we losing faith that hard work brings success?

I have recently been thinking about differences in values held by people in high income countries with big governments and those with smaller governments. In my last post I looked at evidence from the World Values Survey of differences in qualities that people consider are important for children to learn. One of the differences noted was that people in countries with relatively small governments tend to place more emphasis on hard work as an important characteristic to encourage in children. In this post I look at more evidence relating to beliefs about hard work.


The survey question I am looking at requires respondents to assign a value from one to ten depending on whether their beliefs are closer to the proposition that ‘in the long run, hard work usually brings a better life’ (1) or ‘hard work doesn´t generally bring success - it´s more a matter of luck and connections’ (10). I have focused on the percentages who are most optimistic that hard work brings success, looking at population averages and averages for young people aged 15 - 29.

As in the last post I have focused on 14 high-income countries with broadly similar European cultural heritage for which data is available from the most recent World Values Survey. The results are presented in the table below, along with the data in my last post on the importance for children to learn the virtue of hard work. As in the last post, the five highest percentages for each variable are shown against a red background and the five lowest percentages are shown against a blue background.

As might be expected, there seems to be a reasonably close correspondence between emphasis on the importance for children to be encouraged to learn the virtue of hard work and the belief that hard work usually brings a better life. People in countries with small governments are more likely to hold those beliefs than those in countries with big governments.

What should we to make of this result? It could mean that incentives associated with big government tend to weaken the work ethic. It could mean that a weakening of the work ethic tends to promote big government. Or, as seems more likely to me, the results might reflect a complex interaction between cultural heritage and changes in beliefs, values, ideologies and economic incentives.

The results in the last column of the table are particularly interesting (and somewhat disturbing to me as an Australian). In most of the countries considered the proportion of young people who are optimistic that hard work brings success is somewhat lower than for the population as a whole. In the case of Australia, however, the difference is more substantial. Closer inspection of the data indicates that the proportion of young Australians who think that success is a matter of luck and connections is also lower than for the population as a whole. So, members of the younger generation are not particularly cynical about the rewards of hard work – they are just markedly less optimistic about this than older generations.

It would be premature to conclude that these results indicate that we are heading toward some kind of brave new world where few people bother to work hard because no-one believes strongly any more that hard work brings success. I need a better understanding of the implications of changes in beliefs about the relationship between hard work and success before reaching any conclusions. If anyone knows where I can find relevant research perhaps they could enlighten me.

Does the importance of values encouraged in children vary with size of government?

If big government is taking us towards a brave new world we might expect this to show up in differences in values held by people in countries with big and small governments. As discussed in my last post there seems to be some evidence that people in high-income countries with big governments tend to hold more secular-rational values than those in high-income countries with small governments. In this post I explore this further by looking particularly at differences in the values that children are encouraged to learn at home.


World Values Surveys ask a directly relevant question about what qualities it is especially important for children to be encouraged to learn at home. Respondents are asked to choose from the following list: good manners, independence, hard work, feeling of responsibility, imagination, tolerance and respect for other people, thrift (saving money and things), determination/ perseverance, religious faith, unselfishness and obedience.

I have focused on the 14 high-income countries with protestant or catholic heritage for which data is available from the most recent World Values Survey (WVS 2005 – 2008). These countries have been ranked by size of government, using government spending as a percentage of GDP as an indicator of size of government (OECD Economic Outlook data on general government outlays as a percentage of nominal GDP, averaged over the three years 2005–08).

Child qualities which apparently differ in importance between the countries with big and relatively small governments were identified by looking at the differences between the averages for the four countries with largest and smallest size of government. The differences were greatest (relative to the mean) in the case of hard work, thrift, religious faith and unselfishness.

The results are shown in the following table in which countries are ranked by size of government. For each variable the five highest numbers are shown against a red background and the five lowest ratings are shown against a blue background.

The results suggest that hard work tends to be more strongly encouraged in the countries with relatively small governments, while thrift tends to be more strongly encouraged in countries with big governments. (I find that result surprising because hard work and thrift often tend to be linked together as traditional virtues.) The results for religious faith and unselfishness do not appear to be consistently related to size of government.

It will be interesting to see whether any consistent patterns emerge from an examination of other values that apparently differ according to size of government.

Is big government taking us towards a brave new world?

In my last post I discussed Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and ended up asking whether culture and public policies in pursuit of happiness are moving systematically in directions that dehumanize people. I suggested that the next step could be to consider what dehumanizing involves and hinted that it could have to do with taking away liberty i.e. individual responsibility for making choices and bearing the consequences actions. If you accept, as I do, that the nature of adult human beings is such that their flourishing must be a self-directed process (discussed in an early post on whether freedom is necessary for human flourishing) then I think you should also accept that restrictions on liberty are dehumanizing.


I must admit, however, that I would find it hard to argue that governments are dehumanizing me when they impose restrictions on my liberty to do things that I don’t want to do or compel me to do things that I would do in any case. Nevertheless, that kind of paternalism is not benign – it is disrespectful and encourages people to become dependent on government for guidance about how they should live their lives.

Rather than pursuing that line of reasoning, what I want to do in this post is to consider in general terms where cultural change is taking us. I think the best place to begin is with the work of Ronald Inglehart on changes in cultural values that have occurred with economic growth. (At this point readers who are familiar with Inglehart’s research may wonder how it is relevant to the topic of the post. Please be patient!)

Inglehart has documented that a substantial shift from survival values to self expression values has generally occurred in countries with rising per capita incomes. This has entailed, among other things, less deference for external authority, rising demands for participation in political decision making, more emphasis on gender equality, more tolerance of diversity and more emphasis on imagination and tolerance as values to teach a child and less emphasis on the virtue of hard work. This shift in cultural values has been followed through successive age cohorts over the period from 1970 to 2006, with the younger generation apparently continuing to establish values during their formative years that place greater emphasis on self expression (‘Changing values among western publics from 1970 to 2006’, 2008).

Inglehart (with Wayne Baker) has also examined shifts in another dimension of values – the change from traditional values to what he refers to as ‘secular-rational values’. Traditional values, which are most prevalent in pre-industrial societies, place a strong emphasis on religion and national pride, and have relatively low levels of tolerance for divorce, homosexuality and abortion. However, the relationship between economic growth and secularization is more complex than that between economic growth and self expression values. Secularization seems to apply mainly to the shift to an industrial society, which was completed some time ago in most advanced industrial countries. The authors suggest that the fact that the broad cultural and religious heritage of a society leaves an imprint on values that endures despite modernization (‘Modernization, cultural change and the persistence of traditional values’, 2000).

Researchers have used the two dimensions of cultural change outlined above to prepare the cultural map of the world shown below.

Source: Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005: p. 64 based on the World Values Surveys, see www.worldvaluessurvey.org .

The point that strikes me in this chart – apart from the apparent importance of cultural and religious heritage in explaining values – is that the countries with relatively high secular-rational values in Protestant and Catholic Europe tend to be countries with big governments. I don’t know whether these countries have secular-rational values because they have big governments, whether they have big governments because they have secular-rational values, or whether cultural heritage explains both big governments and secular-rational values. It is possible that causation runs in all those directions and that ideological factors (e.g. the influence of Marxism in continental Europe) are also important.

What does it mean if people in high-income countries with big governments tend to have secular-rational values? Is this evidence of movement towards a brave new world? I don’t know, but it seems like a good idea to look more closely at the data from the world values surveys to see what it shows about differences in values of people in OECD countries with relatively big and relatively small governments.