̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Simon Szreter

Queen Elizabeth I would tell Boris to tax the rich rather than cut universal credit, a new book argues

ta385 — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Tudor Monarch introduced the world’s first universal welfare state in 1601, groundbreaking at the time, in response to repeated plague outbreaks and famines. ̽��ֱ��‘Poor Laws’ required all of England’s 10,000 parishes to take responsibility for their poor – anyone who refused to contribute could face prison. For the next 200 years, England was better placed to weather plagues, crop failures, and recessions than anywhere else in Europe and it laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution.

Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy at Cambridge and co-author of After ̽��ֱ��Virus – Lessons from the Past for a Better Future, said: “ ̽��ֱ��evidence of history is that societies and economies fare much better with a strong welfare state and when you cut welfare to make savings, you damage society and the economy.

“Elizabeth was able to introduce an extraordinary and comprehensive response to the problems that had worried her for so long. Her ‘Poor Laws’ of 1598 and 1601 put the responsibility on local communities to care for their neighbours to make sure no one would fall into destitution. This included orphans, widows, the old, infirm, sick, involuntarily unemployed and single mothers and their children. This was the world’s first social security and welfare system – nothing like this had existed before.”

In After ̽��ֱ��Virus, Szreter and his co-author Hilary Cooper, a former government economist and senior policy maker, explore why the UK was so unprepared for the Covid-19 pandemic and suffered one of the highest death rates and worst economic contractions of the major world economies.

̽��ֱ��book draws lessons from history and its authors say that ‘Good Queen Bess’, as Elizabeth I became known, was truly revolutionary and would not have accepted Boris Johnson’s government’s cut to universal credit. ̽��ֱ��£20 weekly increase to universal credit was introduced last year in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it has been controversially halted in October 2021.

Cooper, an expert in labour markets, children’s services and local development, said: “Elizabeth would absolutely have taxed the rich to support the poor in the aftermath of a virus that has claimed the lives of nearly 140,000 people in the UK.

Cooper said: “ ̽��ֱ��lesson today is the same: we cut welfare – including education and health - at our peril. Covid-19 hit the poorest the hardest, with death rates highest in deprived areas and among people of colour. We must learn from the successes from our past and start investing in our population’s wellbeing instead of repeating the mistakes of austerity.”

Szreter, Fellow at St John’s College, said: “Britain had the world’s first welfare state – put in place 400 years ago by Elizabeth I – and the country actually became richer for it. With an unavoidable responsibility to provide for the poor the wealthy increased their philanthropy, funding alms houses, schools, apprenticeships and hospitals to prevent them falling into hardship in the first place.

“It was a welfare system that worked because the prosperous set about contributing and investing in their fellow citizens while Justices of the Peace rigorously enforced payments into the poor law funds. With the old and the sick cared for, the young in particular were liberated to follow the work, migrating to towns and cities where new jobs were becoming available, secure, too, in the knowledge that their parish would support them if things didn’t work out.

“This security ended famine nearly 150 years ahead of other European nations and paved the basis for Britain to emerge as the world’s first industrial nation. ̽��ֱ��labour mobility and rapid urban growth that was unique to Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was facilitated by the security the poor law provided.”

Szreter’s research encompasses economic, social and public health history. He was the first non-American to win the American Public Health Association’s Viseltear Prize. He added: “This week’s cuts to universal credit and the continued inflexibility of the five-week wait to receive benefits will not encourage anyone to take risks in today’s labour market, while the dire state of social care leaves many unable to move from where they can easily care for ageing relatives. Welfare savings are simply a false economy.”

Although the book offers optimism and a clear manifesto for change, it also offers a warning – that Covid-19 is a ‘dress rehearsal’ for bigger crises ahead. Cooper explained: “Covid-19 is a warning shot across our bows, there are going to be many more global crises – climate change and biodiversity collapse are the big threats. Perhaps Covid-19 will be the warning the world needed to learn lessons from the past.”

Reference

After the Virus: Lessons from the Past for a Better Future by Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

A new book about how Covid-19 rocked the world argues that Elizabeth I would have supported the poor in the aftermath of the pandemic.

̽��ֱ��evidence of history is that societies and economies fare much better with a strong welfare state

Simon Szreter

National Portrait Gallery, London

Queen Elizabeth I by unknown continental artist (c.1575), NPG 2082.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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(When) are you going to have children?

jg533 — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 17:05:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��decision about if and when to have children can be one of the most significant many people will ever make. But – for those who have the choice – what influences come into play, and how have these changed over time?

Syphilitic City: one in five Georgian Londoners had syphilis by their mid-30s, study suggests

ta385 — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 08:45:00 +0000

250 years ago, over one-fifth of Londoners had been treated for syphilis by their 35th birthday, historians have calculated.

Cambridge historian and his family members announced as joint winners of one of the biggest cash prizes in world economics

cjb250 — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 01:05:25 +0000

̽��ֱ��inaugural IPPR prize was introduced to reward innovative ideas to reinvigorate the UK economy that force a ‘step change in the quality and quantity of the UK’s economic growth’.

Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, Hilary Cooper, economics consultant, who is married to Professor Szreter, and their son Ben Szreter, chief executive of Cambridge United Community Trust, worked together on a detailed plan to enable faster UK growth by investing in generous and universal welfare provision.

Professor Szreter said: “ ̽��ֱ��key proposal, emanating directly from history, is that generous and inclusive universal welfare provision should be reconceptualised as an absolutely crucial economic growth promoter, not as merely a ‘tax burden’ on the productive economy.

“It has been proven to perform this function twice before in our history and its abandonment has twice led to faltering and then disastrous declines in national productivity, as is being currently experienced with the much-vaunted ‘productivity puzzle’.”

̽��ֱ��trio shared the first prize with the other joint winner - seven co-workers at the London Economics consultancy who argued that a ‘big push’ towards decentralisation would unlock prosperity around the UK.

Stephanie Flanders, head of Bloombery Economics, chaired the panel of judges as they looked for the best answers to the question, “What would be your radical plan to force a step change in the quality and quantity of the UK’s economic growth?”

Following the financial crisis, the UK economy experienced the slowest recovery in the post-war era. In common with other advanced economies, the UK has had sluggish economic growth over the past decade. In the period since the crash, the UK growth rate has averaged 1.1 per cent compared to the long-run world average of 3.5 per cent: even if the growth rate doubled, it would still be nearly 40 per cent behind the world average.

̽��ֱ��judges praised Szreter, Cooper and Szreter’s ‘radical’ historical, economic and community led policy solutions to the economic challenges faced by the UK.

They said: “ ̽��ֱ��authors draw on a historical analysis of the economy, looking at previous periods of British economic history to identify the enabling conditions for our most successful episodes of economic growth. Prescriptions include a new, equitable social contract alongside an intergenerational contract, incentivised and funded through tax changes, to re-establish the ethical principles on which the economic success of the Golden Age was built.

“They each brought their different perspectives to bear on their core idea, that economic growth has been historically highest when collective welfare security is greatest – and their radical plan to incentivise altruistic economic behaviour today.”

̽��ֱ��proposals had to ensure fair and sustainable outcomes, including protecting the environment and reducing inequalities. The judges wanted creative thinking on whether the downward trend in the rate of UK economic growth could be reversed, whether it was realistic, desirable and achievable for the UK economy to grow at 3 or 4 per cent in the 2020s.

̽��ֱ��family said: "We’re really pleased that, in a world where economics seems to have increasingly veered towards models and mathematical abstractions, this prize has recognised the value of a different approach. Ours looks at history and how it can be applied to today’s practical challenges and brings the insights of political economy to propose a solution to the problems we face, especially the inequalities that threaten our productivity, our well-being and our democracy.” 

Two further prizes of £25,000 were also awarded. One went to the best under-25 entry, which was won by a Masters degree student who proposed a new way to use the fruits of the digital economy to reduce working time. ̽��ֱ��other went to the overall runner-up entry, which was authored by two investment professionals who argued for a rebalancing of the UK economy to reverse low investment and productivity.

All four prizes will be awarded at an event in London today, where each winning entrant or team will present their ideas and discuss them further with judges. Each paper is published in full by IPPR today.

A ‘radical’ plan by three members of the same family to boost UK growth has been named as one of the first winners of the £100,000 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Economics Prize, one of the world’s largest prizes in the discipline.

̽��ֱ��key proposal, emanating directly from history, is that generous and inclusive universal welfare provision should be reconceptualised as an absolutely crucial economic growth promoter, not as merely a ‘tax burden’ on the productive economy

Simon Szreter

Graham CopeKoga

Left to right: Hilary Cooper, Simon Szreter, Ben Szreter

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Pox populi: Study calculates 18th century syphilis rates for first time

tdk25 — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 05:00:41 +0000

A new study has, for the first time, provided statistical information about the likely rate of venereal disease in a community in 18th century urban England. These rare findings are limited to a single city, but if they are representative of other urban centres, they suggest that the rate of sexually-transmitted infection was both surprisingly high, approximately equal among the two sexes and significantly greater than in rural areas.

Very unusually for a pre-census period, the research succeeded in measuring levels of venereal disease in the city of Chester, as well as its immediate surroundings, during the 1770s. It was carried out by Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who used two unique and contemporaneous sources to construct a picture of the rate at which people were contracting syphilis, then known as “the pox”.

He found that STI rates in Chester were surprisingly high. ̽��ֱ��study estimates that in the mid-1770s, approximately 8% of residents of both sexes had been infected with syphilis before the age of 35. ̽��ֱ��estimated infection rate among under-35s in rural communities within a 10 mile radius of the city, however, was a little under 1%.

Such figures contrast with the much lower infection rates of modern times. A recently published report by Public Health England, for example, shows that there were 5,920 diagnoses of syphilis across England as a whole during 2016. Even this is abnormally high; it represents the highest level since 1949 and has led to warnings about cuts to sexual health services.

̽��ֱ��prevalence of sexually-transmitted diseases during the pre-modern era influenced both fertility and mortality rates, and being able to determine the rate of infection potentially allows historians to make better judgements about population change. But sources containing statistical information about STIs before the start of the 20th century are virtually non-existent, and the rate has therefore typically been regarded as incalculable.

Szreter’s study was made possible by the extraordinary coincidence of two unique pieces of evidence – the Chester Infirmary’s admissions register, or “Journal of Patients”, which survives for the years 1773-5, and a census carried out by an eminent local physician, John Haygarth, in 1774.

Although a national census only began in 1801, Haygarth – who in a further coincidence had studied at St John’s College, where Szreter is now a Fellow – was an unusually enlightened practitioner who developed his own census for Chester to calculate the prevalence of different types of disease.

“When I heard about the infirmary records, I thought, bingo!” Szreter said. “We have just enough information from Haygarth to reconstruct the most probable age structure of the City of Chester in 1774 – the middle of the three years for which we also have detailed information about who was entering the infirmary and why.”

“Not many academics have the chance to collaborate in their research environment with an eminent member of their own College who died over 200 years ago. But this brand new research would have been impossible without Haygarth’s highly original older research from the 1770s.”

̽��ֱ��Chester Infirmary recorded 177 cases of “venereal distemper” during the 3 years 1773-5. These would have been treated depending on whether the condition was mild, and therefore likely to have been gonorrhoea (“the clap”), or more serious, and therefore syphilis (“the pox”).

̽��ֱ��gruelling but almost universally-accepted treatment for syphilis involved the continual, supervised application of mercury, which caused patients to produce pints of saliva, supposedly flushing out the venereal poisons. Side-effects included swollen gums, mouth ulcers, and severe halitosis. Typically, the process took at least 35 days.

Because of this, Szreter was able to identify likely syphilitic cases at the infirmary depending on the length of stay among patients reporting a venereal “distemper”. He then compared the figure with a set of age-specific estimates about the size of the at-risk population based on Haygarth’s census. Finally, he was able to make a comparable estimate for the rural population within a 10-mile radius of Chester itself.

Together, the results show that almost exactly 8% of residents in Chester had been infected with what was probably syphilis before they were 35, and that the urban population was approximately 8.65 times more likely to contract the disease compared with people living in the surrounding 290 square miles of countryside.

“It is the first time that we have had any historical statistical evidence like this for sexual disease rates anywhere in Britain,” Szreter said. “ ̽��ֱ��demographic story of this period is defined by mortality and fertility, and rates of venereal disease could of course affect both. But because we haven’t been able to study the impact of STIs, much of the history of British population change has been written as if there wasn’t any.”

Aside from his pioneering census work, John Haygarth is known to have kept detailed patient records, which could provide further, valuable information about medicine and disease at this time. So far, these documents have never been found.

Szreter hopes that they may one day turn up, although his own search – including in the St John’s College archives – has proven fruitless to date. “It’s possible that they were thrown away some time after Haygarth’s death,” he added. “If they were ever discovered, it would be the medical historian’s equivalent of finding Richard III in a car park.”

̽��ֱ��study, Treatment Rates for the Pox in early modern England, is published in the academic journal, Continuity and Change.

̽��ֱ��unlikely coincidence of a local hospital record and a census led by a pioneering physician has enabled the first study charting rates of venereal disease in 18th century England, revealing high infection levels in the city of Chester at this time.

"Because we haven’t been able to study the impact of STIs, much of the history of British population change has been written as if there wasn’t any.”

Simon Szreter

Wikimedia Commons

Detail from plate 5 of Hogarth’s “A Harlot’s Progress”, with the protagonist, Moll, dying of syphilis.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Cutting welfare to protect the economy ignores lessons of history, researchers claim

tdk25 — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 06:00:14 +0000

Cutting welfare and social care budgets during times of economic hardship is an “historically obsolete” strategy that ignores the very roots of British prosperity, a group of Cambridge academics have warned.

Writing in the leading medical journal, ̽��ֱ��Lancet, a team of researchers argue that squeezing health and welfare spending in order to reduce taxes, and on the basis that these are luxuries that can only be afforded when times are good, overlooks a critical lesson of British history – namely that they are central to the nation’s economic success.

̽��ֱ��authors are all part of a group based at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, which is studying the causes of health inequalities and looking at how research in this area can be used to inform policy interventions.

Drawing on recent research, they argue that the concept of a British welfare state, widely thought to have begun after the Second World War, actually dates back to a “precocious welfare system” forged during the reign of Elizabeth I, which was fundamental to England’s emergence as “the most dynamic economy in the world”.

While the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said that there will be no further welfare savings during the present Parliament beyond those already announced, the paper is directly critical of the continuation of those existing policies, which have reduced welfare spending overall in the name of economic austerity.

Referring to the statement made by the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, that “you can only have a strong NHS if you have a strong economy”, the authors argue: “ ̽��ֱ��narrow view that spending on the National Health Service and social care is largely a burden on the economy is blind to the large national return to prosperity that comes from all citizens benefiting from a true sense of social security.”

They continue: “There are signs that Theresa May subscribes to the same historically obsolete view. Despite her inaugural statement as Prime Minister, her Chancellor’s autumn statement signals continuing austerity with further cuts inflicted on the poor and their children, the vulnerable, and infirm older people.”

By contrast, the paper argues that a universalist approach of progressively-funded health and welfare spending is an integral part of economic growth, and something that modern states cannot afford to do without. That conclusion is echoed in a new educational film, developed from work by Simon Szreter, Professor of History & Public Policy at Cambridge and a co-author of the Lancet piece.

“We are arguing from history that there needs to be an end to this idea of setting economic growth in opposition to the goal of welfare provision,” Professor Szreter said. “A healthy society needs both, and the suggestion of history is that they seem to feed each other.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the paper traces that feedback loop to the Tudor era, and specifically the Elizabethan Poor Laws in 1598 and 1601. These enshrined in law an absolute “right of relief” for every subject of the Crown, funding the policy with a community tax and applying both through the local Parish.

̽��ֱ��authors say that this not only represented the world’s first social security system, but also made the elderly less reliant on their children for support, increased labour mobility, enabled urban growth and eased Britain’s transition to an industrial economy. ̽��ֱ��system also maintained a level of demand by supporting the purchasing power of the poor when food prices rose.

Rather than stifling Britain’s economy, the paper argues that the system was therefore essential to helping the country to become the most urbanized society in the world, and the world’s leading economy, between 1600 and 1800. Although the population more than doubled during this time, key indicators of prosperity - such as life expectancy - actually improved.

“Overall, it facilitated the most sustained period of rising economic prosperity in the nation’s history,” the authors observe.

̽��ֱ��authors go on to link the economic growth that the nation experienced under the welfare state after 1945 with similar universalist principles of progressively-funded health and welfare provision, arguing that these stimulated a dynamic period of per capita economic growth, and cut the rich-poor divide to an all-time low during the 1970s.

Conversely, they argue that the economy has stagnated when such principles have been abandoned. ̽��ֱ��Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 overhauled the earlier Elizabethan Laws in an effort to prevent abuses of the system that were felt to be draining the pockets of honest taxpayers. Infamously, this involved providing relief through workhouses in which the appalling conditions, seared into social consciousness by authors like Charles Dickens, were so bad that only the truly destitute sought their help.

̽��ֱ��study suggests that there is no evidence that this approach, which came close to criminalising the poor, actually brought about much economic benefit. In fact, British growth rates gradually fell behind the country’s rivals’ after 1870 - and only recovered after 1950, in the postwar decades of the revived, universalist welfare state.

̽��ֱ��authors also point out that to cut welfare budgets because this will relieve taxation on “hard-working families” implies that those who need welfare are somehow unproductive. Just as the Victorian 1834 measures attempted to address a perceived problem with the “idle poor”, current strategies often dub benefits claimants, directly or indirectly, as “scroungers”.

“ ̽��ֱ��interests of the poor and the wealthy are not mutually opposed in a zero-sum game,” the authors conclude. “Investment in policies that develop human and social capital will underpin economic opportunities and security for the whole population.”

̽��ֱ��paper, Health and welfare as a burden on the state? ̽��ֱ��dangers of forgetting history is published in ̽��ֱ��Lancet.

Amid ongoing welfare cuts, researchers argue that investment in health and social care have been integral to British economic success since 1600.

There needs to be an end to this idea of setting economic growth in opposition to the goal of welfare provision. ̽��ֱ��suggestion of history is that they seem to feed each other.

Simon Szreter

Peter Higginbotham via Wikimedia Commons

Dinner time in St Pancras Workhouse, London, 1911. Workhouses, established under the Poor Law Amendment Act, were part of a Victorian programme that cut universal welfare support and stigmatised many poor people as “unproductive”.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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