Three European scholars have confirmed the obvious: Government social programs crowd out private ones.
Franz Hackl, Martin Halla, and Gerald J. Pruckner, all of Austria’s University of Linz, have this to say:
* “An increase of in public social expenditure by 1 percentage point of GDP decreases the individual’s probability of volunteering by 1.7 up to 2.9 percentage points.” Total volunteering declines by 5.1 to 8.7 percent.
* People tend to volunteer less when their preferred politician is in control of the government.
* “Religiosity and a more unequal income distribution in a country increase individuals’ willingness to volunteer.” This last point would seem to hold true in the U.S., which features, compared with the typical wealthy European country, (a) a higher degree of religiosity; (b) more income inequality; and (c) more volunteerism.
There’s a lot more in this paper than I’ve touched on, including the effects of a civil-liberties culture, and income redistribution. Also, the paper covers OECD countries, including but not only the U.S. That’s both good and bad. That means it speaks more to the human condition generally than a U.S.-focused paper would. But it also dilutes what may be unique qualities of American government (federalism, a presidential system) and culture. It might be useful to compare this paper with other work in the American context, especially that of Arthur Brooks. This is one of those papers I’d like to revisit when I have more time.
(Hat tip to Harvard Business Review, which carried this headline: Volunteerism drops as governments raise social spending.)
One data point I have a hard time gleaning from that report is, “is this good or bad?” Sure, volunteering goes down, but a government would have billions of dollars available to put people to work in specialized jobs. Does that make up for the lost volunteer hours? Based on the differences in life expectancy in countries that seem to spend more on things the USA depends more on volunteers to do, perhaps?
Or, is life expectancy a poor measure of a country’s success?
Ed, I don’t think that life expectancy tells us much about the value of a country’s policy environment, if we’re looking at, say, OECD countries. The variation there is fairly small when compared with the variation across all 200+ political units in the world. In addition, there are lots of factors that go into life expectancy that a look at politics/policy can’t capture.
As for the value of volunteerism, it’s much less prone to the logic by which bureaucracies perpetuate themselves. (To be fair, many non-profits, especially large ones, can be just as bureaucratic as government agencies-but their funding is more precarious, meaning they stand a better chance of going out of business.)
I think there are some moral / cultural benefits that are hard to capture. The authors, mention on page 3, for example, that volunteerism may contribute to social capital, which may be “seen as a prerequisite for economic growth and well-being.” There are non-economic values, too. Marvin Olasky makes some good points about the difference between voluntary action to benefit someone and professional helpers.