Introduction: what scale for social policy?

The obvious starting point for social policy making is of course ‘the social’. Social policies are aimed at improving the welfare and well-being of both societies and individual citizens (Alcock, 2016: 7). Throughout the history of social policy and around the globe, the appropriate balance to be achieved between the welfare of society and the individual are the subject of enduring debate. This chapter explores how behavioural and neuroscientifically informed public policies are reworking the parameters of this debate by carving out new spatialities of social policy. They do so by raising questions of scale and politics: at what scale is government intervention necessary, effective and efficient; who should be responsible for health, productivity and well-being in liberal societies – individuals, local communities, regional bodies, nation states, global institutions? The predominance of ‘welfare retrenchment’ – the gradual decline in state provision of welfare associated with contemporary neoliberal economies characterised by state austerity, contracting out of public services, managerial and marketised forms of workfare – has sharpened the focus on the latter question in particular. Yet the established economic and political orthodoxy of neoliberalism as a deregulating, marketising and privatising impetus since the 1980s is being somewhat eroded. Today neoliberalism faces new challenges on several fronts: the rhetoric of economic protectionism in Trump's America; disaffection with free movement and free trade associated with Brexit; recognition of the perpetual economic crises caused by unfettered capitalism, most recently in the global financial crisis of 2008. Acknowledgement of the failure of both markets and governments to correctly understand the behaviours, preferences, motivations and decision-making capacities of citizens is at the centre of these challenges.

Specific developments in the behavioural sciences and neurosciences concerning the nature of decision making have been pivotal in acknowledging the new challenges faced by social policy. The primary contention of these scientific insights is that human behaviour can no longer be understood, as within neoliberal thinking, as being economically rational – rather, people's behaviour is subject to psychological heuristics and biases which are intuitive and automatic rather than deliberative and considered. Whilst such decision-making shortcuts often work well, they are subject to systematic errors.