Erring on the side of kindness in social welfare policy

Social welfare administrators inevitably err, and in one of two ways: either they err on the side of harshness (denying benefits to people who deserve them), or on the side of generosity (granting benefits to those who do not deserve them). The same things making errors inevitable also make inevitable a tradeoff between these two kinds of error, so at least for a large class of cases reductions in one kind of error can be accomplished only by increasing the other. Here I develop a criterion for striking the right balance. This criterion implies (contrary to all ordinary political and administrative impulses) that when times are tough and demands on welfare budgets heavy, administrators should not clamp down on applicants but should instead bias their decisions in favor of erring on the side of generosity.This paper was written during my tenure as Research Fellow in the Social Justice Project, RSSS, Australian National University. I am grateful to my colleagues there (particularly Valerie Braithwaite, Dorothy Broom, Diane Gibson and Julian LeGrand) for their advice and encouragement, and to various anonymous referees for suggesting subsequent refinements.