Are the cuts and the Gvt's spending priorities sexist?

[AWholeLottaNosy]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and although I don't know much about economics it has strict me that whilst at the same time the Gvt has proposed massive spending cuts in councils etc, they are also proposing spending millions on HS2, road expansion and flood defences ( all works that benefit men in terms of employment ). How can they justify this if they are on the one hand claiming that cuts to public spending are unavoidable. Am I stupid or do I just not understand how this is fair or makes any sense..? Any ideas??

Another name changer here, and as my current name suggests, I am not up to date, but buffy re weighing up benefits etc

See Annex 5 of the HMT Green Book for detail

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/220541/green_book_complete.pdf

In summary (with caveat that I'm rusty on all of this) first you attempt to assess who benefits and how much. Then you look at the characteristics of the people affected.

For example, you attempt to assess how much benefit (and how much of the cost) accrues to people in each income quintile. You can then weight the benefits according to who* benefits, with a greater weight for benefits (and costs) that fall on poorer people.

These weights are based on the idea that extra resources gained or lost have a greater impact on poorer people than on richer people."Broadly, the empirical evidence suggests that as income is doubled, the marginal value of consumption to individuals is halved: the utility of a marginal pound is inversely proportional to the income of the recipient. In other words, an extra £1 of consumption received by someone earning £10,000 a year will be worth twice as much as when it is paid to a person earning £20,000 per annum." If you "decide not to use distributional weights to make an explicit adjustment, this decision must be fully justified" (page 93, Green Book)

For characteristics other than household income, e.g. gender, race, disability status etc, you don't do this numerical weighting exercise (largely I suspect because it would be impossible to reach agreement that, say, benefits for a woman are worth X more than the same benefits accruing to a man - whereas there are, perhaps surprisingly, conventions about income for the poorest quintile being worth x more than extra income for the richest quintile). But you are required to attempt to assess the impact on different groups, and take steps to mitigate.

Does that help answer the question you were asking?

• cost - this is the cost of the programme itself, nothing to do with who is paying taxes, but e.g. if a road is built the someone's land is taken up, someone's peace is disrupted, habitats destroyed, all that sort of stuff, plus and the money isn't being used for something else, so someone else isn't benefiting and this is counted as a cost too.

I'm a namechanged regular civil servant too, in Ministry of Justice. The Minister is hell bent on building this super youth prison in Derbyshire to be his 'legacy' despite EVERYONE saying youths fare much better the closer they are to home, it will facilitate gang carnage, massively increased costs for social workers to visit - a criminally stupid idea before the first stone is set. And £45m bill. All to be spent on young men, as they are the vast majority of incarcerated prisoners, usually 90%.

Labour have made an election promise to stop this. That alone would win my vote.

No Puffins I'm a lawyer specialising in discrimination issues in employment. I earn a living dealing with discriminatory policies and practices.

Public sector projects are subject to equality impact assessments.

Are you? Odd that you weren't aware of the gender pay gap then.

Public sector projects are subject to equality impact assessments.

Yes, one of the Civil Sevants involved in it all has already told us this.

Fully aware of the gender pay gap thanks

Benefits to people from different income groups are assessed looking at household income, yes. But it's worth saying that the benefits to rich builders are actually costs of the project, which will need to be exceeded by benefits, (eg faster train journeys, and businesses being attracted to new areas by these faster train journeys) for the project to be considered viable.

(Also, just to be clear, benefits aren't necessarily pecuniary: a cost-benefit analysis of eg, the sure start programme would have assessed benefits in terms of eg social inclusion and health).

How the "other" distributional effects are taken into account... here I think you need to be asking a government social research specialist, not an economist - sorry! But I would guess haphazardly - not sure there are many govt social researchers...

Sorry, that was to buffy

To be fair to my former colleagues, things may have moved on since my time. But the equality impact assessments I saw varied from cursory, at one extreme, to effectively redundant at the other extreme because the lead on that project was a social researcher who ensured that equalities considerations were woven into the whole policy. So, in my limited experience, it was haphazard.

Buffy sorry - you was to OP, who appears to suggest infrastructure spending would be better spent on higher benefits/ current spending.

WholeLotta I completely understand how it looks. But in many cases (particularly with European money) the rules attached to the money mean you have to spend it, now, on growth projects, or lose it. It doesn't always come out of one pot where if you don't build the shiny building you can provide extra money to councils. You have the option not to build the shiny building and let the funds revert to Europe, but then you have no shiny building AND no council services either.

Actually with European funding the councils are often partners who stump up the match funding for projects - they take the decision with their own budgets that it is better to put up the match funding to make a project happen - even if it impacts on their ability to do other things - because in the long term what they need is growth. That is the only thing that will repair their finances. So it's not just central government that has an influence here.

Buffy I will talk more about measures tomorrow or at the weekend - must sleep now.

Re the OP's opening question

the cuts are about cutting annual spending every year, to get closer to a balanced budget, while this infrastructure stuff is one off spending. So the scale is completely different.

Eg hs2 is about £40bn over the spending period, which is say the next 20 years, so £2bn a year or so, while say the nhs is about £100bn every single year, education about £50bn a year, etc. and total govt spending something like £800bn a year. (All quite approx, but ballpark)

So the £2bn out of £800bn a year is affordable.

Am not saying hs2 is the best way to spend it - but am saying that it is not inconsistent to be able to afford one off infrastructure projects while slashing overall spending.

No, it's not sexist. Road building/maintenance needs to be done regardless of which gender benefits the most.

Scallops - "I'd also say (as we are in FWR) that the projects AWholeLottaNosy are talking about are 'heroic', 'man builds, man drags us out of recession' type stuff (or they are being pitched as that)."

Who exactly is saying that the gov spending projects are about 'men' saving the day? I haven't heard one politician or journalist saying anything remotely similar.

I would have thought that they are different budgeting areas, and in practice its difficult to move money from one division to another.

There may be a valid point that womens support services fall through the cracks, who should be responsible for them - NHS? - Home Office?

Interesting! and a completely different approach to your typical economist.

Orthodox economics has little to say about power dynamics.

The hallowed supremacy of the market mechanism is premised on the idea that exchange is free: individuals trade according to what will benefit them, constrained only by their income and their tastes (and the technological limits on production) and, as all of these indivuals make choices that will optimise their own lives, the result is that everyone ends up better off. Conventional economists do not really do class analysis - the individual is the unit under analysis.

There are, however, Marxist economists, say, or feminist economists, who would analyse at something more like a class level. But this is non-standard, and you don't hear anything of this in government. (Or certainly I never did.)

Orthodox economists would, however, acknowledge the influence of, say, social norms in influencing behaviour, as per the stuff that the Behavioural Insights Team do. but this is different again.

The introduction of the equality impact assessments was, I imagine, geared at compensating for the economist's lack of consideration of impacts on different groups - but they are focused on examining the specific impacts of a specific policy on specific groups, rather than thinking more widely about power in society.

Re extra dough for fat cat builders being a problem in its own right - I think its fair to say that we (boldly speaking for govt economists here) wouldn't even think about this. The perspective is:

1. government doesn't object to the richer getting richer. It's better if poorer people get richer, but anyone getting richer is felt to be a good thing.

2. they get a one-off payment for services they provide. This is free, fair exchange - and, in a viable project, the benefits (which may accrue to women, men, poorer groups etc) will outweigh the cost of this payment.

Economists could conduct appraisals that took this into account, by weighting income gains to the richest groups negatively, so that a project would cease to be viable if it made the rich too rich. I've never seen this done.

An alternative approach would be to impose a windfall tax on the "winners" from one-off government projects. Can't imagine this being imposed on builders though, or you'd never get them to build another road or whatever for you.

So it's a completely different perspective, and it misses a lot - but I suspect that much of this stuff would be completely intractable in the absence of a fairly simple framework for making decisions.

I probably have digressed wildly. Am realising that although a lot of this stuff is obviously a bit mad, I think I actually miss it! :D

Sexist or not the priorities for cuts and spending seem to be completely at odds with any moral consideration.

So we're bringing in more hoops to jump through for disability payments but we've got enough money to spare to build a megabucks HS2 line to knock 20 minutes off the journey from London to Birmingham?

If we're cutting services and spending to the most vulnerable whilst supporting big businesses and companies then of course women are going to be penalised for this. After all, we're more likely to be unemployed, under employed, caring for the elderly or the disabled or just our own children, in poverty, suffering from domestic violence or financial abuse and so on and so forth. But of course these aren't priorities when we can build a big penis extension of a train line.

And I entirely missed the whole second page and jumped into a decent economic debate with train line penis extensions... embarrassing!

I may be misunderstanding here, but what is being described here seems to be a set of descriptions of how decisions are made about equality within one specific project or within a group of related projects.

I am not going to interrogate the rights and wrongs of how that is carried out. The central question seems to be one of scale. If you create projects which benefit men more than women, even if it is justifiable within the context of the project, someone at a higher level should be looking at that situation in a broader context and looking for ways to balance that situation by prioritising areas of women's employment elsewhere.

If male employment opportunities were expanding with higher or the same wages as previously being offered, that is not an issue in itself. What is an issue is when what is also happening is that the sectors expanding for women are offering jobs with lower average wages than before, poorer working rights than before and so on.

Justifying why a particular project has followed the rules and cannot be changed does not justify what is happening at a bigger scale.

And actually, this whole economic discussion makes me pretty annoyed. Essentially, we are creating an economic situation which is damaging to women and the justification for that is:

1. The Government only does this kind of economics.
2. We don't have a good way of measuring what happens to women.
3. There are rules already in place.
4. Any possible solution that considers women would be too complicated to be useful.

You need a better kind of economics. If you can't take women into account, your economics is fantastical.

I also dislike the implication that this is just how economics is done, and any other possible kind of economics is some kind of fringe activity that no normal Government economist should particularly know about. Are we really that bad at educating economists? Why is the standard so low?

Then isn't the Government rather lagging behind the times? What about changes in Scotland, France, India? If other countries are changing laws, policies and setting up commissions to move away from 'orthodox economics' because it doesn't measure or change what we want it to measure or change, why is the UK not doing the same? Why are we so behind?

Most of the so called fringe economics is objectivist and rationalistic, so whatever the reason, I'm not convinced that is it.