The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State

by Yascha Mounk

A novel focus on "personal responsibility" has transformed political thought and public policy in America and Europe. Since the 1970s, responsibility--which once meant the moral duty to help and support others--has come to suggest an obligation to be self-sufficient. This narrow conception of responsibility has guided recent reforms of the welfare state, making key entitlements conditional on good behavior. Drawing on intellectual history, political theory, and moral philosophy, Yascha Mounk shows why the Age of Responsibility is pernicious--and how it might be overcome.

Personal responsibility began as a conservative catchphrase. But over time, leaders across the political spectrum came to subscribe to its underlying framework. Today, even egalitarian philosophers rarely question the normative importance of responsibility. Emphasizing the pervasive influence of luck over our lives, they cast the poor as victims who cannot be held responsible for their actions.

Mounk shows that today's focus on individual culpability is both wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe our fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to other key values, such as the desire to live in a society of equals. Recognizing that even society's neediest members seek to exercise genuine agency, Mounk builds a positive conception of responsibility. Instead of punishing individuals for their past choices, he argues, public policy should aim to empower them to take responsibility for themselves--and those around them.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Economics, History, Society, Social Work

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 9, 2017

About the author

Yascha Mounk is a writer, academic and public speaker known for his work on the crisis of democracy and the defense of philosophically liberal values.
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Born in Germany to Polish parents, Yascha received his BA in History from Trinity College Cambridge and his PhD in Government from Harvard University. He is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, where he holds appointments in both the School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. Yascha is also a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Moynihan Public Fellow at City College. He is the Founder of Persuasion, the host of The Good Fight podcast, and serves as a publisher (Herausgeber) at Die Zeit.

Yascha has written five books: Stranger in My Own Country – A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, a memoir about Germany’s fraught attempts to deal with its past; The Age of Responsibility – Luck, Choice and the Welfare State, which argues that a growing obsession with the concept of individual responsibility has transformed western welfare states; The People versus Democracy – Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, which explains the causes of the populist rise and investigates how to renew liberal democracy; The Great Experiment – Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, which argues that anybody who seeks to help ethnically and religiously diverse democracies thrive has reason to embrace a more ambitious vision for their future than is now fashionable; and his latest, The Identity Trap – A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which tells the story of how a new set of ideas about race, gender and sexual orientation came to be extremely influential in mainstream institutions, and why it would be a mistake to give up on a more universalist humanism.

Next to his work for The Atlantic, Yascha also occasionally writes for newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. He is also a regular contributor to major international publications including Die Zeit, La Repubblica, El País, l’Express and Folha de São Paolo, among others.

Reviews

[Vipassana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The age of responsibility, as Yascha Mounk calls it, places emphasis on the moral status of an individuals, as opposed to the needs of a community; and on the past action of particular agents as opposed to their ability to contribute in the future. However, the point of institutions is not reward good behaviour and punish bad bahviour, but to serve a whole set of values and sustain those values over time. Deciding what those values are, depends on what we see the purpose of institutions to be, and those values dictate how the welfare state functions.

The central theme is that people across the political spectrum have a punitive notion of personal responsibility and we need a positive conception of it. He claims that both the left and right believe that welfare recipients should be denied welfare if it can be established that the recipient's actions has lead to his/her impoverished state, it's just that the right has a very low threshold to establish a causal relationship whereas the left has a very high threshold.

A key issue with the welfare system is that it doesn't treat the recipient as someone with agency but rather a hopeless being who may be subjected to a humiliating process in order to receive welfare. Mounk claims that the time limits on welfare assistance (imposed by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) don't help either. Punitive conditions on the receipt of welfare don't provide the welfare recipient with agency. This kind of conditionality keeps the people who need welfare the most out of the system. A positive notion of responsibility is one that should allow an individual to have some control on the outcome of his/her efforts. An example of this is a field experiment at a JobCenter in Essex where job seekers were asked to make specific commitments for the future rather than prove that the had been making efforts to seek a job in the past. The number of job seekers going into paid employment rose significantly.

The path to understanding the positive conception of responsibility starts with a chapter dedicated to a philosophical examination of attributing responsibility for an outcome to an agent. He asks whether there has to be a causal link between action and outcome in order for the agent to be held responsible in an institutional sense. His answer is no. However, he doesn't believe that it is necessary to impose conditions on welfare unless help recipients progress. It made me think that the ascription of responsibility should be done by the agent, in this case the welfare recipient. To understand why this is important, apart from being a decent way to treat a person, Yascha Mounk makes the case that humans need to feel like they have agency in order to feel fulfilled, and while many arenas of public life allow a person to feel that was, the welfare system does not.

The examination of luck, choice and institutional values made me examine to point behind the work that I do, the pointlessness behind some other things and not be bothered by the lack of concrete answers to either issue. I'm sure Mounk did not set out to write a self-help book but for me it was one. However, he concludes the chapter by saying that we should thus give up the idea that we could ever integrate a philosophically subtle notion of reponsibility into political practice. He argues that ascribing responsibility in public policy should be about upholding the values that institutions stand for. What those values are is up for discussion but Mounk believes that the establishment of an equal world is one of them.

As an example of how the punitive conception of personal responsibility affects activism, there is a brave and necessary exploration of gay rights and the language surrounding the movement that I had longed to hear. Yascha Mounk doesn’t attempt to find any root causes to queer-ness but attacks the premise that queer-ness has to be an inherent 'born this way' aspect of a person to be legitimate. How does that matter? Irrespective of why people are queer, they are and have right to life and community the way any straight-cis person would. I've always found the 'born this way’ language quite patronizing and Mounk made it so much clearer in my head as to why.

The operating principle of this book is taken from Quentin Skinner's Liberty Before Liberalism and states that it is easy to become bewitched into thinking that the way of thinking about [the concepts] bequeathed to us by the mainstream intellectual tradition must be the way of thinking about them and Yascha Mounk masterfully excavates the ossified intellectual reasoning behind welfare policy and to some extent policy making more broadly.

[Rianna · Rating 3 out of 5]

well, after i couldn’t get through a second attempt at this book even after two months, it’s time to shelve it as dropped. in part, this book taught me a lot about the origins of personal responsibility in welfare (and helped me greatly in my poverty law final). but mounk is constantly referencing scholars and theories with no explanation that makes this extremely hard to read, and it’s just written at way too high of a level. would love a book on the same topic but significantly easier to comprehend.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book, well-written and thought provoking. Complex topics but very readable. I'd love to read his thoughts about crime and the justice system; he mentioned these issues a little bit but I think he didn't want to get side-tracked away from welfare-type issues. (And hurrah for 200 page books!) But the questions of responsibility and deservedness seem very similar.

I thought the one shortcoming of the book is that it seemed to be only looking at the relationship between the state and welfare recipients, and I think it may not have paid adequate attention to citizens who are (mostly, usually) not welfare recipients. Their perspective is important also - if they feel used and ignored (by both the state and the recipients) they turn into a nasty political force that isn't good for anyone...

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

We live in the age of responsibility. But, Yascha Mounk argues, we have progressively narrowed our view of what responsibility means in the political sphere. It has been reduced solely to personal responsibility for outcomes in one's own life, and we have come to believe in the notion that benefits should be conditional on that responsibility. The left has responded by denying that individuals are responsible--focusing on structural flaws. While there is truth in their arguments, it ultimately buys in to the responsibility framework. Rather than attacking conditionality itself, it says that it doesn't apply. Since people don't like the perceived message that they lack personal agency, the argument can turn off those it's meant to excuse. Mounk argues that instead, we need to reconceive the notion of responsibility in a positive form.

This is not an easy book to read--it was Mounk's dissertation, and it shows. Familiarity with the basics of philosophy and political philosophy are mandatory, and although it's a short book, it's not an easy read. Nonetheless, the ideas are fascinating and potentially an important contribution to political debate. We spend all our time arguing about individual responsibility for outcomes, and none about our responsibility towards others and the responsibility of our institutions towards others. The last chapter is in some ways the weakest, because Mounk tries too hard to keep it apolitical and the examples are nonspecific.

[Jakub Dovcik · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very thought-provoking work of analytical philosophy, an edited version of the author’s PhD thesis under Michael Sandel (whose work it heavily draws on). Its primary focus is not necessarily in the realm of policy analysis, but rather the shifts in the political and to a lesser degree moral philosophy since the post-war era (from consequentialism to contractualism), which is contrasted or connected with the shift towards “responsibility-tracking” mechanisms in welfare policies in countries like the US or UK.

The book develops a complex philosophical argument that debates the appropriateness of the ascription of responsibility - understood as responsibility-as-accountability (as opposed to responsibility-as-duty) to agents within the policy sphere of the welfare state. This is firstly from the perspective of a “punitive conception of responsibility” - behaviour-conditioned welfare provision based on deserving benefits in some prescribed way - and then secondly from the perspective of “denial of responsibility” - essentially an argument of modern Left that argues for the extreme primacy of structure in determining the success or failure of an individual.

Eventually, Mounk develops his own argument, about what he calls a “positive conception of responsibility” - an attempt to move beyond the Age of Responsibility, “to reconceive of our moral and political lives in the language of other, long-neglected values.” He argues for a reconceptualisation of welfare policies from “pre-institutional” or “pre-political” responsibility towards its ‘institutional’ form. This perspective does not deny the responsibility of agents - making a solid argument why it is important - but rather bases the provision of welfare support on institutional values - like the fact that people in this setting are always helped in this particular way.

This more empowering conception of responsibility would allow people to develop deeper responsibilities toward others and towards their personal projects. He purposely does not specify or define the institutional values, leaving that to the conscious decision of the polity, about which values it exercises through its set-up of welfare provision.

“Since political institutions are meant to serve the citizens who created them, each of these desires and aspirations has implications for how we should design public policy. Social and economic policies should recognize that many people value being in productive work, especially when the form that work takes leaves some real agency to employees. But it should also recognize that most people value many things beyond work, and use its regulatory arsenal—including rules about overtime pay, legislation that facilitates the creation of part-time work, the decoupling of health care and paid work, and much more—to enable people to contribute meaningfully to the projects and commitments that matter to them beyond their work lives. Similarly, and perhaps most importantly, the singular focus on people providing for themselves should give way to a recognition that one large social contribution can consist in raising children, or caring for needy relatives.”

Throughout the book, there is another point seeping throughout the pages - that many of the institutions - in this case, mechanisms and programs of the welfare state - do not perform the roles they were set up for, but rather something else, more punitive or ideological (he does not make this point explicitly, but one can understand it. Mounk thus challenges policymakers to ask - what is the actual role of the policy? And is the design - depriving people of dignity or inflicting some form of mental price or pain on them - just a budgetary necessity, or a misconstruction of its original purpose?

The book is easy to read, yet not always that easy to comprehend fully, especially if one, like me, is not too accustomed to the style of writing of modern analytical philosophy. There are also quite little of policy implications until very late in the book when Mounk contrasts Danish and US welfare administrations (Danish being less punitive and more in line with his “positive” approach to responsibility), as well as Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) with Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) - SSDI being, again, more in line with his positive conceúption of responsibility, due to it being set up for people “widely perceived as being more deserving of help because they are less responsible for their fate”.

I really enjoyed the book and find it useful in providing a novel way of looking at the modern welfare state and its commitments. It is, however, relatively detached from the beginning of its argument and for instance, does not show how harmful is the Earned Income Tax Credit (sure, I admit I am a fan of it, but would like it to be firstly truly deconstructed to see it as evil), and relies probably too a great deal on the name of Clinton’s welfare reform act - the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996.

Mounk’s way is both intellectually sound, as well as humanly kind and I believe it could inform new social contracts, not just concerning collective social safety nets.

[Andrew Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Am not learned in this subject and had some difficulty reading this book; however, there was much to appreciate in the presentation of ideas. It seems to me that much of the focus on the welfare situation addressed either personal choices gone bad or the environment in which the recipient resides and the difficulty of reaching a clear focus in dispersing welfare. I like the more positive or supportive approach...one that views the effort being extended by the potential recipient to achieve some level of recognition or self sufficiency. Is someone really trying to be more self sufficient and what can others do to facilitate the outcome.

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a highly scholarly study on personal responsibility and free choice. Naturally, the argument is all about the merits & excesses of the welfare state, deserved outcomes & basic fairness. The author seeks to establish a new & more useful view of the concept of responsibility that being the responsibility we all bear to each other. This is a comprehensive & extremely well researched work but it is a bit tedious.

[Eli Weinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinarily clear and well reasoned, concise arguments that all fit together beautifully. Integrates public policy, cultural criticism, history, and many areas of modern philosophy and political theory.

[feux d'artifice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this! Really insightful and nuanced and eloquent. 👌

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! Mounk does a fantastic job of carefully pulling apart the threads to examine the shift of understanding of responsibility in the western world over the past few decades, following a change of predominantly responsibility as duty to responsibility as accountability, and the implications to the welfare/workfare state and systems. Laying out a detailed argument against the punitive nature of current views on responsibility and accountability, he makes the case for a more positive responsibility/accountability to replace it. Well worth the read!

[Why-why · Rating 2 out of 5]

preaching to the choir