Need For Welfare Felt From Wi-Fi
The new dormitory BTL, which was newly built this semester, had a lot of expectations even before joining the dormitory. But there was an unexpected inconvenience. For example, right after the semester started, students living in a dormitory complained that the Wi-Fi connection failed. Usually, anyone could use public Wi-Fi for free, but there was a problem with the Wi-Fi in the new dormitory, so some students had to use the paid service data to use the Internet in their rooms.
While experiencing the above case, I thought buying daily convenience with money became a very natural thing in today's world. It seems we have to spend money to enjoy even the small happiness, such as using the Internet or watching Youtube videos comfortably. But when I thought about it the other way around, I was worried that I couldn't be happy without money.
Fortunately, we don't have to buy all the conveniences of everyday life with money. It's because the nation helps pay for some conveniences. We call it ‘welfare policy’. The state helps us everywhere in our daily lives to ensure the convenience of citizens. For example, it provides free Wi-Fi on public transportation that many people use. After experiencing the BTL Wi-Fi chaos, I suddenly want to know more about welfare citizens, which is a grateful existence that allows people to enjoy basic conveniences and basic life.
(Source: https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%B6%81%EC%9C%A0%EB%9F%BD)
Correlation Between Welfare and Happiness
The correlation between welfare and happiness can be found in the annual World Happiness Report published by the Sustainable Development Resolution Network (SDSN), a United Nations advisory body. The report says five Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland) are ranked continuously in the top 10 much happier countries. In particular, the report cited ‘Welfare state generosity’ as one of the reasons why Nordic countries are happy.
Then, what does ‘welfare state generosity’ mean? Generosity means to treat kindly and politely in lexical meaning. When this word is applied in welfare policy, it can be interpreted as not just spending a lot of money on welfare, but as carefully planning how and who to spend the budget on. Contrary to the common notion that Northern Europe is happy because it spends a lot on welfare expenses, how much of the budget was spent on welfare did not have a significant impact on happiness. Instead, detailed welfare plans in Northern Europe ,such as medical accessibility, safety nets for unemployment, and guarantees of mobility, have been found to increase the happiness of Nordic countries.
Let's take a closer look at Finland's welfare system among those Nordic countries. Contrary to the common notion that only people in need of help become an object of welfare, Finland's welfare target is close to almost all citizens. For example, in Finland, parents receive a monthly child benefit of 100 euros (about 140,000 won) until their children are 18 years old. In addition, since elementary education to university education is free of charge and there is no private education, the only educational expenses they spend are daycare centers. Even this cost is supported by the welfare system for low-income families. Today, Finland is well known as a representative welfare country because it has a very systematic welfare policy not only in education, but also in unemployment benefits, medical expenses, and pension support after retirement.
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About National Basic Livelihood Security System
As it can be seen in the case of Nordic countries and Finland, welfare is a thankful system that allows people to enjoy minimal happiness. To compare with the situation of BTL that I mentioned earlier, Welfare is similar to ‘public Wi-Fi’ that anyone who needs it can easily have. If so, is Korean society providing enough ‘public Wi-Fi’?
To answer this question, I would like to focus on the ‘National Basic Livelihood Security System’, which I think is the most similar to public Wi-Fi’ among various welfare systems. Through this system, known as the basic living system for short, the state guarantees basic living such as livelihood, education, medical care, and housing to low-income people who are unable to make a living by themselves. The standard for selecting recipients of the basic living system is the ‘standard median income.’ The median income refers to the income of the person in the middle, when the entire population lines up in order of income. Simply put, assuming that there are 100 people in the whole country, the income of the 50th person in income size is the median income.
The basic living system has a selective nature of providing the targeted population with cash and in-kind benefits, so it might be considered far from ‘public Wi-Fi’ that everyone can use. However, public Wi-Fi is not just universal. This can be especially useful for people who are in special financial situations where data is not available. Just as our society supports public Wi-Fi for those who cannot use unlimited data, the basic living system provides various benefits —livelihood benefits, housing benefits, medical benefits, education benefits, dissolution benefits, funeral benefits and self-support benefits—to low-income people.
To see if these basic living systems well guarantee minimum living standards and minimum happiness, let's look at its effect on poverty reduction. According to a study by the Korea Institute of Health and Social Affairs, the effect of reducing the poverty rate has increased. This is because the requirements of recipients began to ease somewhat in 2015. It is a very positive phenomenon that the poverty rate has decreased.
The efforts to reduce poverty rate do not stop here, and the government has been continuously making efforts to reduce the blind spots of poverty and increase takeup rate. The Ministry of Health and Welfare announced the second comprehensive plan for basic living security with the goal of ‘guaranteed better basic living for more people’ in 2019. The core of this plan is to eliminate poverty blind spots by abolishing the mandatory supporting family standard for the living allowance, one of the major allowances provided by the Basic Livelihood Security Policy. The ‘Mandatory supporting family policy’ means a policy that prevents people who are eligible for the Basic Livelihood Security from receiving the state benefit, if they have any immediate family like parents or children. Until now, there have been cases that people cannot receive state benefits just because they have immediate family even though they have no exchanges with their family (usually family only on paper) or their family is unable to support them. To reduce such unfair cases, the government has been trying to gradually abolish the standard which has been implemented since 2000, trying to help recipients.
These efforts are meaningful in enabling more people to take a living benefits.According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare's announcement in 2020, the scale of livelihood recipients has increased by about 20% compared to when the basic living system was implemented in 2015.
About the Blind Spot of Welfare System
But even if the scale of livelihood recipients increases, not everyone can get out of poverty. Although the conditions to being recipients are gradually easing, the poverty blind spot has not disappeared due to the nature of the basic living system, which still maintains strict selection criteria as the last possible safety net. There are people who suffer because they do not receive support on time or not receive support at all due to the strict selection criterias. In addition to the welfare blind spot problem, the issue of negative branding of recipients and deliberately breaking up their families to receive more support are shadowy issues that follow the basic living system.
Hot-spot Wi-Fi We Can Make: Donation
How nice would it be to have a world that can provide unlimited welfare benefits without financial limitations and does not miss every single welfare blind spot? Unfortunately, our current welfare system currently has various realistic limitations, with only 5% of the total population receiving the basic living system, and the many shadowy problems mentioned earlier.
However, there is no need to be discouraged that we cannot create a world where everyone enjoys minimal happiness. No matter how big a crisis is, some small help that an individual can do always exists. It is not easy for everyone to install ‘public Wi-Fi’ such as a huge welfare system managed at the national level, but ‘hot spots’ can be turned on by individuals for those who need it. For example, making small donations for the socially weak people, who are in the welfare blind spots, can be an example of turning on a ‘hot spot’. Lastly, I hope someday there will be a world where no one is alienated.