1930s: Social Insurance
1930s: Social Insurance
On April 27, 1933, the Rockefeller Foundation approached the Social Science Research Council asking for urgent support from the social and behavioral science community as the newly elected Roosevelt Administration mobilized to address the Great Depression.
“...within 48 hours, suggestions for immediate research relating to urgent problems confronting the Federal Administration in the current national emergency”
The Council established a Committee on Social Security, which took as its mission a quote from Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural speech two decades earlier:
Woodrow Wilson is inaugurated as President of the United States
“There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential in the body of politics, if men and women and children are not shielded . . . from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”
SSRC Committee on Social Security member Charles Merriam is invited to discuss emergency relief in Washington, DC.
The Council charged the Committee on Social Security with advising the Administration’s Committee on Economic Security by examining the economic effects of different forms of social insurance and relief:
“...the problems involved in social insurance and relief, in the relations of the various social insurances to each other and to relief, and in the effects of insurance and relief on economic stability, keeping constantly in sight the problem of social security in its entirety.”
1935: FDR signs the Social Security Act
The Committee was also directed to ensure that its work was policy-relevant and effectively communicated to decision makers:
“...maintaining contact with public officials and private agencies . . . orienting research into socially useful channels . . . assembling and stating the results of research in comprehensible terms . . . [and] bringing these results to the attention of officials and others in position to utilize their potential value to society.”
For the next seven years, the Council’s Committee on Social Security maintained a research presence in Washington, DC and served as a forum for bringing social and behavioral science to bear on the creation of a national system of social security, providing research and advising government agencies.
Frank Bane, who chaired the Council’s Special Temporary Committee on Social Security, went on to become Executive Director of the Social Security Board when it was established in 1935
Economists J. Douglas Brown and Eveline M. Burns, members of the Council’s Committee on Social Security, went on to serve on the Federal Committee on Economic Security
Joseph H. Willits, the first chair of the Council’s Committee on Social Security, had been the Executive Director of the Federal Committee on Economic Security
In the last 100 years social and behavioral scientists have made substantial progress in understanding the many beneficial economic and societal effects of social insurance policies.
Social Security reduces the elderly poverty rate by 75 percent, an effect 62 times as large as the second most important program for the elderly (SSI).
When states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, deaths in those states went down by 9.4 percent.
Subsidies for health insurance reduce out-of-pocket expenses and lower home delinquency rates.
Outreach letters sent by the IRS increase health insurance coverage and reduce mortality rates.
Social Security explainer video, 1936
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The Social Science Research Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 1923 by seven professional associations in the social and behavioral sciences, mobilizes policy-relevant social and behavioral science for the public good.