2002b) Some tendencies of social welfare and the problem of interpretation

Recently, economic historians have stumbled upon some tenden-cies or “constants ” of social welfare in the United States that span more than 150 years. From the 1820s to the 1990s, the length of time families received private or public assistance was roughly constant; in the 1880s and 1890s and from the 1960s to the 1990s, the percentage of households making the transition from welfare to higher paying jobs was relatively constant; and from 1850 to the 1990s, total spend-ing for private and public welfare as a percentage of average wages was also very stable. The lack of movement in key economic indica-tors of social welfare suggests that the cost of changing social insti-tutions is rather high. The Search for Constants That an economist would search for constants in the economic universe is no less plausible than a physicist searching for constants in the physical universe. It is true that the usefulness and the duration of the constants, economic versus physical, may vary. For example, the manner in which the constant can be defined by the scientist or constituted by the environment is going to have implications for the use value and the duration of the observed constant. The bias points favorably toward the physical. But the economic universe will pro-duce a curiously stubborn constant every now and again. Labor’s share of output is probably the leading example