Social Security

Proposals for the Transformation

• System for the process of transformation.

• Avoiding future path dependencies (e.g. with regard to time banks → establishment of a bargaining, care not done by humanity, but by reward-seeking).

Vision

• Access to Care should be unconditioned and guaranteed to everyone.

• Independence of economic growth, of financial markets, of government budgets (?).

• Resilient system that can be maintained in every kind of economic crisis: Resilience can be achieved by building the system on different pillars (e.g. one framing governmental pillar (professional care) and one pillar based on the communities (non-professional care).

• Resilience by community support.

Open Questions

• Conditionality of access to goods and services still to be discussed (could be e.g. conditioned by a contribution to the non-professional care sector → this would also free the Care sector partially from the performance of the economy).

Questions for further research

• What can we learn from countries being /having experienced times of economic crises → What happened with the security systems? Which (maybe community based) systems established? Can we use these experiences for organizing the care sector? What is with pensions?

• We need laboratories of the reality: i.e. With regard to community based systems that organize the provision of social services (care) (e.g. evaluation of time banks and other systems on the community level)

• How can civil services help to free from the dependence on public spending? Empirical analysis of what happened in Germany after the abolition of the civil service? How can the contribution of civil services to the public sector be measured/ estimation of economic contribution?

Here you can find the results of the GAP at the Degrowth Conference 2010 in Barcelona that are particularly relevant for this working group. More.