Practical Reason in Hard Times: The Effects of Economic Crisis on the Kinds of Lives People in the UK Have Reason to Value

Abstract

The capabilities approach (CA) was developed partly in response to the problem of adaptive preferences, which is considered by many to be a fatal flaw in utilitarian approaches to well-being. However, an important critique of the CA is that it is subject to an analogous problem of adaptation to deprivation: if well-being is defined as the capability to live the kind of life one has reason to value, but conceptions of value are conditioned by external circumstances or subject to adaptation, evaluations of well-being in the capability space may suffer similar distortions. This paper investigates the effects of the recent economic crisis in the UK on practical reasoning—on people's conceptions of the good and their freedom to deliberate about the planning of their lives. Using data from the European Social Survey and an Exploratory Structural Equation Modelling approach, it is shown that hard economic times did cause adaptation in conceptions of value, with particularly large effects among the economically vulnerable and the youngest generation. It is concluded that conceptions of value should be included in the definition of capability, and that this strategy can enhance the analytical power of the CA.

Keywords:

• Capabilities
• Well-being
• Practical reason
• Adaptation
• Values

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to John O'Neill, Nick Shryane, Hillel Steiner, and Stephen Jeffares for their advice and invaluable comments on this work, and thanks to two anonymous reviewers for many suggestions that helped to improve the paper. Thanks to colleagues at the Human Welfare Conference 2014 at Templeton Green College, Oxford, and the 2014 Human Development and Capabilities Association conference in Athens, Greece, for useful feedback. Many thanks to David Buckley and the Buckley Scholarship for funding support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A classical scale approach was used to measure the eight core values, rather than individual confirmatory factor analyses. Although a classical approach introduces the possibility of increased measurement error, it allows the grand-mean centring of the survey items; this approach to operationalizing the eight values was therefore judged to better express the idea of differential prioritization of personal values.

2. Measurement invariance at four levels—configural, weak, strong, and strict—was tested using a multiple-group extension of the exploratory factor measurement model, and the results confirmed that meaningful comparisons can legitimately be made across the two time periods of interest. Details available on request.

3. Any analysis that examines change over time or investigates the effects of time-specific phenomena (e.g. an economic crisis) must take into account distinct possible sources of change, namely Age, Period, and Cohort effects. These are exactly collinear with each other (each is a linear function of the other two), and so all three cannot be directly entered into a single equation. A work-around found in the literature is to use “social ageing” or “lifecycle characteristic” variables as proxies for age (e.g. Ford 2008).

4. The education reference category is A-level and above: although “A-level” is distinguished from “Degree and higher” in the survey, multicollinearity diagnostics suggested that a single “higher education” category was optimal.

5. Household income categories were calculated with reference to the median household income for each year of the survey, using data from the Office for National Statistics (Household Income and Expenditure Table 14: Average Incomes, Taxes and benefits by decile groups of all households, 1977–2012/2013). Categories are based on unequivalized data, and income is assumed to be uniformly distributed within categories.

6. It is notable that, despite being markers of economic vulnerability, unemployment, and long-term sickness/disability are not associated with a prioritization of subsistence values. More detailed research about the value priorities associated unemployment and long-term illness would be useful.

7. Limitations and future research: The principal limitation of this analysis was the trade-off between survey design and content: as noted in Section 3, due to the absence of suitable longitudinal data on value priorities in the UK, the analysis was limited to comparing equivalent groups across time periods. Future research that took a longitudinal perspective would enable analysis of the longer term consequences of economic crisis for combined capabilities and achieved functioning, for different sections of society. In addition, future research could use more sensitive indicators of income poverty, for example, hybrid approaches that combine relative and absolute indicators, and take direct account of the different resources requirements of different sized households. Another promising avenue of future research would be to extend this work cross-nationally, using a comparative case-study approach or a multi-level quantitative analysis, in order to examine questions about context effects, including, for example, the role played by different institutional environments and policy responses to hard times.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annie Austin

Annie Austin is a post-doctoral researcher at the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research at the University of Manchester, UK. An earlier version of this paper won the Kuklys Prize for best paper by a graduate student at the 2014 Human Development and Capabilities Association conference.