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How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources

2011; Volume: 49; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1352/1934-9556-49.6.477

1934-9556

Wolf Wolfensberger,

Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies

A few of us lonely voices have long been warning (e.g., Wolfensberger, 1994, 1997) that the culture of modernism, as embraced by the United States and more or less all other Western societies, is not sustainable, and that collapses both are bound to occur and could be very sudden. Experts on systems theory are well aware that complex systems in particular can collapse much more quickly and drastically than simple ones and are also more difficult to restore. The recent economic crisis is the result of one such unsustainability, and happened with such startling suddenness that even the world's leading economic experts were taken by surprise.There are several points about the current financial crisis of relevance to our discussion.1. The current crisis has been brought about by a combination of the country living beyond its means and a systematic transfer of wealth by immoral (even if legal) means from the lower and middle classes to the uppermost—and widely unproductive, parasitic—class. There is no work that warrants someone getting paid $464 million a year, as many hedge fund managers were in 2008 (Armangue, 2009). No one creates any real new wealth like that, even in a lifetime.Strangely enough, even the economic experts of the world, and the world-class mathematicians ("quants") who built the mathematical models for the financial market, not only failed to foresee the coming disaster but even contributed to it happening, yet they cannot fully explain it. They have not yet understood the dynamics of postprimary and postsecondary production economies like ours that produce less and less and surrender much manufacture and agriculture to other countries, from whom they then buy commodities and products by going into debt. This is said to "save money" when, in fact, it ruins a country over the long run. Ironically, the leading "quant" who was a major actor in bringing about the 2008 collapse, Daniel Xi Li, was well on his way to a Nobel Prize when his theories blew up (Philips, 2009).2. Societal developments always find expressions in the domain of human services, and a big expression at present—and the one we are concerned with here—is a reduction, as well as feared further reduction, of public funding of human services and advocacy. Even such bodies that are privately funded are experiencing hardships because of reduction of their investment income, capital, paying clients, and/or private donations, the latter despite fairly desperate appeals. When all of society suffers hardships, service and advocacy bodies, and families of vulnerable people, should not imagine that the hardships will pass them by.3. Economic hardships are known to have particularly severe impacts on already vulnerable people.4. There are many authorities in economics, politics, and the media who tell us that the current crisis will be short lived, that recovery will soon (or "is bound to") take place, and that economic growth will continue where it left off in 2007. However, there are also some doubters, myself included, who suspect that we will never see the prosperity of 2007 again, or for very long. Also, we need to face the fact that as the lonely voices keep pointing out, an even bigger collapse of Western cultural ways is inevitable, sooner or later. Yet, a large proportion of the population does not want to hear these things. They want to be given "good news" and what they call "hope" —in other words, they want to be lied to.5. Even if the financial markets recover somewhat, sooner or later, things must get much worse. There are at least eight reasons why it is doubtful that economic recovery will occur, or will last long if it does.6. What is fairly well understood—though also ignored—is that there are not too many ways in which a country can live beyond its means, as we have been doing.The American government is currently borrowing 50% of its expenditures (Brooks, 2009). Almost all our current bail-out packages are being financed by going deeper into debt to other countries. We have also been selling the infrastructure and the means of production to foreign countries, which we have been doing in a hidden way for the sake of short-term income up front and which is another way of going into debt to foreign holders. Also, Social Security in the United States is a big Ponzi scheme to which the country now owes $2.5 trillion that the next generation has to pay. There are also hundreds of billions of dollars of unfunded liabilities by states and local governments, including health benefits and pension funds, and these too are a debt to the future. These liabilities are being kept hidden from the public. The federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation may soon need a bail-out itself.One manifestation of people and nations not willing to live within their means is what the experts and leaders offer as the answer to the decline in domestic production, excessive consumption, low savings, and foreign borrowing, namely "more of the same": resumption of consumption, no more than small savings, and dramatic increases in foreign borrowing. The U.S. budget deficit is anticipated to quadruple in a single year.British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told us that 20 billion more people in the world need to quit being producers and become consumers (Flaherty, 2009). The cover of Newsweek (March 23, 2009) even trumpeted, "Uncle Sam wants you to start spending," and headlines demanded, "Stop the Frugality" (p. 5), "Stop Saving Now!" (p. 27). Time reported, "Savings are up, unfortunately" (2009).One of the responses of our Congress was to lard the February 2009 bail-out bill with wasteful spending, special interest deals, and 15,000 member items (read "pork"), which averages out to roughly 30 items per member of the two chambers of Congress (Grunwald, 2009). All this in violation of the economist Herb Stein's law that says that if something can't go on forever, it won't.7. So far, I have not seen any sign that the different interests in society and human services are willing to acknowledge that major sacrifices will have to be made on everybody's part, though there has been plenty of willingness to sacrifice other people's interests.Cutting back on spending and consumption would be a way of living within one's means, but virtually no one wants to do that. The "masses" have little appreciation of what has been going on. They want lower prices and higher wages, and if these are an impossibility given a country's situation, they may riot, and/or overthrow their governments, as has happened in a number of countries during the current, as well as previous, crises. Because of such riots, a scared Greek government quickly reversed public spending cuts, probably by going into debt or inflation. The governments of several other countries have fallen without riots after being blamed for the advent of economic reality. The debts of several countries have been demoted to junk status, and others are teetering on the brink (e.g., Hall & Day, 2009; Margolis, 2009).Similarly, hardly any parties that rely on government funds have shown any willingness to voluntarily effect savings or shoulder their part of the societal burden. As I said, everybody wants everyone else to cut back but not themselves.At least 46 U.S. states face a total of $350 billion in budget deficits over a 30-month period (Basler, 2009), and some are facing outright bankruptcy, like California.But if you follow the news, you will have seen innumerable oppositions to specific budget cuts. For example, major organizations, including the American Association of Retired People, are even opposing state budget caps altogether, even in bankrupt California. They want something cut, but not anything that benefits older people, even affluent ones. Even though the czars of the financial world live or work in New York State, it has the country's highest taxes, and yet a huge budget shortfall, hence a huge deficit and debts. Its governor, David Paterson, said in spring 2009 that the state had the "worst fiscal crisis in its history," and asked members of the legislature for suggestions on where to cut, and not one single legislator proposed any. Different human service interest groups held rallies around the state, though in my opinion more to protect their jobs than the people they serve. Public worker unions and other groups spent millions of dollars to convince the public of how poor they are. One thing the governor said was that the well-paid state employees union must agree to reduced compensation or face a cut of 9,000 positions. Replied the public employees' union president, "We will not agree to any changes…that reduce compensation" (Brynien, 2009). A union counterproposal was to rely on federal bail-out money instead (Tedisco, 2009). When the governor suggested some very sensible and relatively painless new taxes, such as a tax on sugared soda drinks and on luxuries such as beauty treatments, massages, gym memberships, and entertainments, he was shot down on all of them, and his previous popularity waned to almost nothing. The governor then called an emergency meeting of the state senate, which agreed to no cuts at all. The meeting was emotional and chaotic, and legislators almost came to fisticuffs. A newspaper editorialized that the governor was the only adult in the room (Riede, 2008). Eventually, New York state passed its biggest budget ever, 10.3% above that of the previous year, also increasing the deficit by 11%, but it was interpreted as "cutting spending" by $6.5 billion.In one instance when it was proposed in New York to cut a state subsidy to the arts, a howl went up. Some people would rather sacrifice a few dozen group homes than their enjoyment of a live symphony performance, or the display of unintelligible or morally offensive paintings or sculptures.What is happening in New York state is just one example of innumerable instances all over the country of people sticking their heads into the sand.8. One day, the reckoning will arrive. Lenders will demand their money back, and the only way to pay off our unimaginably large debts will be by impoverishing the country. In essence, our progeny will pay for our profligacy. Confronted by comparable situations, several countries in the past have defaulted on their international obligations.9. The response in human service and paid advocacy circles has been loss of nerve and panic. In turn, this has set in motion first a desperate competition of the service and its related advocacy sector against all other expenditures, and, second, a vicious and irrational competition among service and advocacy bodies for the remaining funds. An example is the area of cancer research, where the lung, bladder, brain, and other organ-centered cancer organizations are at each other's throats, trying to take money away from each other, as a result of which funding becomes arbitrary and irrational. In order to make shameless lobbying for money for oneself or one's own cause look better, some people have begun to call it "advocacy," and training to do lobbying may be called "advocacy training" (Forsyth, 2009). The parties that protest proposed or actual cuts for their own services hardly ever make counter-proposals as to where savings might be achieved, though the implication is very clear that it should be some other program that should be cut. As of 2008, there were 16,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, DC, alone, up 50% over 1998, plus 295,000 other unregistered high-level influence peddlers (Samuelson, 2008).The fights over the shrinking dollar have also contributed to intergenerational adversarialness. Younger adults want more unemployment benefits and more tax rebates; older people would rather have pension protection (Economic Stimulus Priorities, 2008).All of this has become animalistic and disgraceful, and is of the nature of cries, "Don't take our money, take that of the other service or advocacy sectors or bodies, and let the devil take the hind-most." I have seen no sign that the different service and related advocacy parties are willing to acknowledge that major sacrifices will have to be made on almost everybody's part, though there has been plenty of willingness to sacrifice other people's interests.We need to wake up to the fact that in human services as in other sectors, we have gotten very spoiled, and taken a lot of things for granted that a distressed economy or society will now or soon no longer be willing to fund, or even able to afford.Declines and collapses of and in Western culture and lifestyles are and will not be surprises to us lonely voices.At the 1976 convention of our association in Chicago, I gave a plenary presentation (entitled "A Look at the Future Directions of Human Services in Light of Historical Developments") in which I warned of the signs of decadence and collapse of our society, and the impending deathmaking of societally devalued people. After that, I became a pariah in the field, even to people who had previously celebrated me for my work on the principle of normalization and citizen advocacy. My message was totally rejected, and I was practically declared insane.In 1992, I spoke again at another plenary meeting of our association here in New Orleans. By then, many of my 1976 predictions had come true, but also by that time, a great many members who, in 1976, had denied that these would come about had embraced the very elements of decadence and deathmaking that I had predicted. In 1992, I spoke on the signs of the times, underlined the increasing decadence and the deathmaking of vulnerable and devalued people, and made further dire predictions, many of which once again have come true.The 1992 plenary was published in our Association's journal, Mental Retardation, in February 1994. The abstract of the article probably set a record of brevity for the journal: "The world is going to hell in a wheelbarrow, and this is not going to do retarded people any good" (Wolfensberger, 1994, p. 19). You can also read there that I said the following, "In an intermediate state of collapse are the financial institutions, such as banks, credit systems and insurance" (of course, by 2008, "intermediate" collapse had slipped into "total" collapse). I also said, "I believe that now entering a state of collapse are…private pension funds." (I actually had started to draw attention to the increasing theft of people's pension funds in the October 1989 issue of the human services newsletter TIPS that our Training Institute published, and in many issues thereafter.) And I added, "Even people with graduate degrees can no longer deal with taxes, banks, credit cards, insurance," because of how complex these had become.One of the other things I said in 1992 was that people should stop trusting government because it habitually lies (p. 32). I also said that the people of the culture of modernism—including academia, scholarship, the research culture, the professions, and professional and scientific organizations—were being insanicerated, meaning made crazy and insane, and that unpleasant truths are not and cannot be dealt with (p. 75). Ask yourself: are you, or do you want to be, insanicerated? Do you want to embrace what I called "normative insanity"? If not, what are you going to do about it?I said also that "truth and reality are like the mighty Mississippi River a few steps away from this hotel. It is there whether one sees or knows it or not, and especially relevant to people of our day, whether one likes it or not…one cannot wish it away…" (p. 25). This was aimed at the new constructivist mentality that makes up realities to suit one. When one makes up "false realities," the "real realities" will eventually assert themselves with a bite.Further, I said that at times of societal distress, mentally retarded, impaired or dependent people will fare poorly, and I called for anticipatory planning for the difficulties ahead.To my surprise, the 1992 presentation was well applauded, probably for the wrong reason, because it was promptly also forgotten. There was probably more consternation over the fact that I did not use politically correct language than that the world was going to hell in a wheelbarrow, and no anticipatory planning ensued. However, one reader in France called it a "pre-mortem" on our society.Although we are still a very wealthy country in which even the poor live in comparative luxury, one thing that may be beginning to sink in is that vulnerable people will suffer first and worst when things get rough.Not all service sectors and expenditure patterns are equally threatened by the current fiscal crunch. Six that have considerable protection at least over the short run are the following.1. The states are not likely to cut back programs that are totally subsidized by the federal government, or that are so federally subsidized (e.g., under Medicaid) that the states in essence are "making money" from them.2. Programs that were generated in response to lawsuits and court decrees have a certain amount of protection.3. So do service or benefit sectors that have very strong constituencies and lobbies, such as the hospital and nursing home ones, and the American Association of Retired People. Families who take care of a family member may belong to no relevant organization, or only a local one, and therefore have no clout in the competition for funds.4. Sectors that benefited from the capricious nature of the bail-outs. Some have gotten windfalls; others were left to the devil to take. However, this funding source will not last very long, maybe 2 years.By the way, we keep being told that there was one big bail-out, when in truth, we have had four. The first was near the end of the Bush administration, the second one soon after the Obama administration came in, the third was hidden in the mammoth deficit federal budget, and the fourth was an almost totally unheralded infusion of $1.2 trillion by the U.S. Federal Reserve into the economy. This exemplifies what I mean by the government lying to us.5. Services that thrive on the anxiety of people who still have money. Thus, fear is driving people into the arms of psychological counselors. There was a recent summit meeting of the American Psychological Association on how the present crisis will "enable psychological practice to thrive" (Martin, 2009). The chief executive (Norman B. Anderson) of the American Psychological Association shamelessly said that one of the recent bail-out packages offered psychologists "tremendous opportunities" (Anderson, 2009).6. State and local service providers will try to protect their workforce even if they have to sacrifice their clients. In other words, the economic crunch will fall more severely on actual or potential service clients than on service agency people. Is that good news or bad news?However, tomorrow, even the currently still protected service sectors may no longer be favored, and the people in the still protected services (especially those receiving bail-out monies) are apt to be lulled into a likely false sense of security.When resources are tight and competition for them fierce, we in human services and advocacy need to think rationally, strategically, and ahead of time about (a) what to propose to our funders, and (b) what we can do that is in our power to get the most service value for the dollar. We need to develop a cost/yield mentality, and ask ourselves questions such as the following.If we were given a certain limited amount of money, how would we allocate it so as to get the most service value for it?What are the most basic kinds of services?If we had to sacrifice something, what would it be? What sacrifice would do the least harm? What service would trump the others? If having homes for so many people goes up against getting dance therapy for them, which are we going to fight for?What will we fight for to the bitter end?On our part, we also need to develop a mentality of parsimony. Can we think of clever ways of holding costs down while still meeting the most pressing needs?Services and advocacies also need to evolve a relatively united front, with shared strategies, or the government will play one party against another, and beat both down.If we fail to do these two things, cuts will be made capriciously by ignorant, partisan, irrational, and unstrategic parties, and any number of patterns of cuts can leave vulnerable people far worse off than if the same amount of cuts had been made rationally. Often, the cutting decisions are made by management people in government who do not really know the service sector. How did people like that get into the most powerful decision-making positions? Sometimes, they came with schools of management degrees, and sometimes, they rose in the administrative hierarchy without ever having had much clinical experience, or even training.It is, of course, possible that no matter what we try to do, we will have no voice in the decisions being made. But we should have some rational proposals to make to the degree that we are given a voice.I will now make a series of broad strategy proposals that aim at a favorable cost/yield ratio.1. We should be willing to cut services that are of low, if any, validity or productivity. This includes the many human service crazes that keep washing over the human service scene in great waves that come and go. One day it is est, then "patterning," then touch from a distance, then Reiki, then dolphin therapy, then waving one's hands before people's eyes, and so on. At any one time, a significant proportion of human service consists of the transaction of invalid crazes. Much of this craziness arises out of magical and superstitious thinking that is not recognized as such, and even masquerades as science. Shamanism would be much more straightforward. What goes by the wayside are valid pedagogies that sometimes have been known to work for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. This explains why children are no longer learning to talk, read, write, cipher, or even walk right.Unproductive service activities include a great many of those that are done for what I call nonprogrammatic rationales. Programmatic issues are those that are raised by the needs or identity of a person or class—in other words, what gets done to or for the party in the way of services and helping that is based entirely on what the real needs of that party are, and would benefit that party rather than another party. Thus, we can speak of programmatic service issues not only in formal service contexts, but also in informal and unpaid ones.Nonprogrammatic issues are those that affect the way a service is rendered but that are not derived from considerations of the people's identity or needs. They include things such as what the law, regulations, or courts forbid, allow, or mandate; what the funding enables or disallows; how certain historical realities express themselves in the service; what political processes enable, distort, or prevent a programmatic measure; and whether there are people available who can and will do the right thing.It is very rare that a service gets shaped exclusively on the basis of what is needed by, and is best for, a service recipient. Typically, a large number of nonprogrammatic issues shape a service, and especially formal ones. Nonprogrammatic measures can facilitate the address of recipients' needs, as when funding is attached with requirements for accountability to show that the funding actually benefited recipients. However, typically, the nonprogrammatic issues constitute obstacles to providing what is needed and to maximizing the quality and efficiency of the service, and programs tend to be distorted and subverted in all sorts of ways by the nonprogrammatic issues. For instance, a law or funding mechanism may disallow a provision that would benefit people. Available staff may not be competent to do what would address a person's need. And so on.Extremely problematic is that the minds of people, especially those of human service workers, have been shaped so that they commonly treat nonprogrammatic concerns as if they were programmatic ones. For instance, many human service workers believe—or at least act as if it were the case—that if the law requires something, then it must be good for recipients, and whatever the law prohibits must be bad for them. People also tend to drift into thinking that legal, administrative, and fiscal categorizations of services and of recipients reflect actual recipients' needs and/or possibly meaningful clinical syndromes and diagnoses.A vernacular way to think of the nonprogrammatic considerations is that they all are examples of the big "buts…" that we hear so often: "But the law won't let us," "but our funder requires," "but our staff don't," and so on. So whenever one of those "buts" comes up in one's mind, one should ask oneself whether it is a "but" that is an objection because of some nonprogrammatic constraint.Nonprogrammatic activities have become increasingly required for bureaucratic reasons, for self-defense of administrative structures, for warding off lawsuits, and so forth. This includes a lot of record-keeping, spending time on computers and in meetings.One type of work that could be cut out because it is done for largely nonprogrammatic reasons (and at any rate is not very productive) is most of individual program planning, and even case management. While these can be very helpful, in my opinion, they have become so pro forma and bureaucratized that in terms of recipient benefits, they pay back only a small fraction of their enormous costs. Some people do "IPP work" full-time, and computers are programmed to spit out identical "individual plans" by the millions. There is also the problem that what a plan aspires to often goes far beyond the basics, is costly, and there is either no money to fund it, or only inequitably so. Better to retain that which the manager was supposed to manage, and the planner to plan. Otherwise, we will have plans, but nothing with which to fulfill them, like plans to nowhere, and managers of nothing. This is not an exaggerated statement, because there are, in fact, people who are unemployed, hungry, homeless, and friendless, but who do have one or more case managers, and a great deal of individual program planning.Of course, there is no obstacle to people doing personal planning on an unpaid, voluntary basis, as some people have been doing all along.Another example: school people—often in conjunction with parents—spend countless hours in justifying some educational provision for a child with a handicap (e.g., Lindsley, 2009). In essence, they are being paid to fill out forms and write justifications for being paid, a wonderful way to employ people unproductively and stimulate the economy. Reduction of bureaucratism would also make the lives of service recipients and their families so much easier.Here is another example. There are small state-run residences and day centers for troubled youths scattered throughout New York State. Nine of these have been virtually empty though they still had full paid staff complements. One such 24-bed residence had 25 employees but no residents. A bed, even though unoccupied, costs between $50,000 and $100,000 a year (Goldberg, 2008). The state wanted to close these underutilized, low-security centers and use the money to serve youths some other way, but both unions and legislators opposed the closures (Common-Sense Cuts, 21 Nov. 2008).Altogether, low-validity and nonprogrammatic activities get funded even as many people are left without the essentials.A lot of costly bureaucratism is imposed from above, especially by the federal funding categories. One substrategy is to lobby for legislative relief, and another is to practice resistance and outright noncompliance as long as possible.2. When pretty much the same service is delivered by a more expensive operator and a less expensive one, the more expensive one should be reduced or eliminated.An example is services that in some states are being provided by both public and private agencies, but at a much higher cost by the public ones. We see this in New York state, where a huge community service system is operated by the state very bureaucratically and at great expense, side-by-side with much less expensive, private nonprofit agencies, even when these are funded by the state. The state might be able to save hundreds of millions of dollars by spinning off its services to nonprofit private providers, retaining only a quality-control function over those private services that it funds.Also, privately run services can be reconfigured much less expensively than government ones, illustrated by the above story of the state-run homes for troubled youths.3. We should be prepared to cut funding for services that are, or come close to being, luxuries, in going above the basic bread-and-butter issues.In Syracuse, a so-called autistic boy goes to school with a so-called service dog, even though the boy is not blind, deaf, or halt. The dog supposedly "calms" him, and helps him concentrate. Since he has such a dog, he also has a paid "dog handler" who comes to school with him. The dog alone cost $12,000 to train, partially paid for via Medicaid. A law got written that children have a right to have service dogs with them, though two of the child's potential teachers are allergic and cannot be in the same room with the dog (Doran, 2009a). This was happening even as the governor was accused of wanting to cut school funds. Paying for both a dog and a handler, on top of all the other special arrangements for this child's presence in a generic school class, is the kind of luxury that someday will be unaffordable, and we need to be capable of recognizing the difference between this kind of arrangement, and those that pay for giving any kind of education for impaired children who at