Public or private?

Lawrence Alfred Powell, Contributor

Among the most deeply engrained 'habits of the heart' of any nation is the tendency of its citizens to prefer either public solutions or private solutions to problems that arise in their lives. Do people expect the individual, or the government, to solve problems of poverty, health care, education, employment, housing, employment training and so on?

Anthropologists tell us that these public/private preferences are often, in turn, a function of the degree of individualism or collectivism embedded in the customs of the culture as a whole — which affects what kinds of policy solutions people will deem appropriate and fair, and are willing to tolerate.

In individualist cultures, the independence of the individual takes precedence over the needs of the group and society as a whole, whereas collectivist cultures emphasise interdependence, with group harmony taking precedence over the private wishes of the individual.

Certainly, Jamaica has seen its fair share of these public/private, state/market debates over the past several decades. Most actions taken in this regard have been the product of discussions among government elites within PNP and JLP, in consultation with private sector elites - with little direct democratic feedback from ordinary citizens.

In its 2006 and 2008 national surveys, the University of the West Indies's Centre for Leadership and Governance resolved to address this feedback gap by measuring the preferences of ordinary Jamaicans in several related areas. We looked at Jamaicans' basic cultural orientations to individual versus government responsibility for solving problems, their satisfaction with the private-market economy model, their sense of fairness with respect to the market economy and their views of the 'privatisation' of formerly public services.

A preference for 'government' solutions

In the 2006 and 2008 surveys, Jamaicans were presented with a list of 14 "things people typically need at different stages of their lives." They were then asked who is primarily "responsible" for solving problems related to those needs. The expectations of most Jamaicans leaned in the direction that "government should be responsible for providing it to all as a basic citizen benefit," rather than "individual citizens should be responsible for providing it for themselves." The 14 life domains in which we asked about these needs, not accidentally, are those around which debates over the proper scope of the welfare state have been waged over the past century within industrial democracies.

The table shows average scores across all of the Jamaicans sampled, combining results from the 2006 and 2008 national surveys. A score closer to 10 means that Jamaicans have a preference for public or government solutions; a score nearer to 1 shows a preference for private or individual solutions.

As can be seen in the table, most of the respondents indicated that it is "the government" that is primarily reponsible for addressing problems of adequate health care, providing financial assistance to elderly, disabled, students and the poor, and nutrition for school-age children.

For social problems related to employment, job training, adequate housing and child-care assistance, the responsibility is seen as being somewhat more mixed - involving a combination of governmental and individual responsibilty for need provision.

Note that Jamaicans are strongest in their preference for government responsibility in areas that relate to the protection of potentially helpless, socially-disadvantaged groups - such as the sick, disabled, poor and elderly. However, where there is the presumption of potential self-support among able-bodied persons, the balance then tips towards a mixed individual-government responsibility for need provision. Thus the figures for employment, training, university support, housing support and injury compensation are somewhat lower, closer to the middle of the scale.

Weak support for neoliberal solutions

This dependency-oriented cultural preference for governmental over individual solutions apparently also extends to a disapproval of the way in which the market economy, private enterprise, and privatisation have been applied as approaches to solving people's social and economic problems in recent years. Nearly two-thirds of Jamaicans (62 per cent) report that they are "not satisfied with the way the market economy works," as compared with only 29 per cent who are satisfied with its operation. Similarly, when asked if they feel "the market economy, the private enterprise system, is a fair system for working people," 72 per cent say that "under private enterprise working people do not get a fair share of what they produce." With respect to privatisation of formerly-public services, three quarters of Jamaicans (75 per cent) say they are "less satisfied" with these privatised services.

Considered as a whole, it is hard to find much evidence in these 2006 and 2008 surveys that would suggest that US-style 'individual self-reliance' and 'deregulated free market' models of rapid economic development are likely to be accepted by the majority of the Jamaican public for any length of time, as being fair or appropriate. As can be seen in these national findings, the strong interdependence and community-oriented cultural values that have evolved historically in Jamaica (as compared with more radically individualistic cultures like the US), do not appear to be consistent with that approach in the long term.

Preference for 'the middle way'

What these results do suggest, is that most Jamaicans would apparently prefer that the nation's policies be based on a pragmatic balance of public and private approaches, administered by a nurturant state that heavily regulates market forces in the public interest — with mixed governmental and individual responsibility for solving people's problems. This is a model that more nearly resembles the middle way of social-democratic welfare states like Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands as prototypes of successful modernisation, rather than the hands-off-the-market radical individualism that prevails in the United States. Since its heyday in the Reagan-Thatcher years, the neoliberal-market model of development, with its emphasis on individualism, deregulation, privatisation, and market solutions to society's problems, has always been controversial. It is even moreso today, in the wake of a global recession linked to excessive speculation in pursuit of such policies, and with mass opinion now having turned against this model in a number of South American countries.

Jamaicans are certainly not alone in this preference for a pragmatic mixture of public and private solutions to their problems. In the wake of the 2008-2009 recession, this middle way between the extremes of unregulated capitalism and state socialism is now preferred by most citizens of most countries in the world. A November 2009 BBC World Service global survey of more than 29,000 adults, across 27 countries, found that dissatisfaction with free market solutions is widespread, with an average of only 11 per cent believing the free market model "works well and efforts to increase regulation will make it less efficient." In only two of the 27 countries surveyed by BBC, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five persons still have confidence that this model can work.

Most people, in most of the countries, felt that stronger government regulation of the free market system was needed. Across the 27 countries in the BBC study, about half of the respondents (51 per cent) say this model has problems that need to be "addressed through more regulation and reform." Another quarter (23 per cent) believe that it "is fatally flawed and a different economic system is needed." When asked specifically about the role government should play, about two-thirds (67 per cent) prefer that it be "more active" in "distributing wealth equally" and 56 per cent also prefer that it be "more active" in "regulating businesses."

Note, however, that this global loss of faith in free market individualism does not necessarily signal a swing towards embracing state socialism as the alternative. In the same BBC survey, 54 per cent agreed that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had been "mainly a good thing," with only 22 per cent saying it was "mainly a bad thing."

So this popular preference for a middle way compromise - between individual and government responsibility for meeting needs, and between radical capitalism and radical socialism - is becoming the dominant global trend. And the views of most Jamaicans would appear to be consistent with that.

Lawrence Alfred Powell serves as polling director for the Centre for Leadership and Governance, UWI, Mona. (Lawrence.Powell@uwimona.edu.jm) National surveys on which this article is based were made possible through support from the United Nations Development Programme, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Latin American Public Opinion AmericasBarometer (www.LapopSurveys.org).

J'cans' ratings of 'individual' vs 'government'

responsibility for solving their problems

(1="individual should be responsible" 10="government should be responsible")

Type of problem or need ... Average score on1-10 scale

Health & medical care for the elderly 8.6Health & medical care for the poor 8.5Financial assistance to the disabled 8.5Retirement income in old age 8.2Health & medical care (for all citizens) 8.0Financial assistance to poor families 8.0Nutrition for school-age children 7.5Employment training and retraining 7.2Financial assistance to university-level students6.8Employment, a decent job 6.8Financial assistance during periods of unemployment6.5Housing, a decent place to live 6.3Replacement of income lost due to injury at work6.3Child-care assistance for working parents 4.8

Figures are averaged across the 2006 (n=1338) and 2008 (n=1499) national Leadership & Governance surveys.