Reframing Social Policy for Welfare and Equal Opportunities in a Digital Culture

Abstract

A primary and crucial goal of social policy is to ensure, within prevailing economic frames, equality and social justice in the pursuit of sustainable development. An integrated pattern of beliefs, values, customs, and goals in its wider meaning constitutes culture as a whole perspective in human life. In the globalizing world, cultural diversity exists that complicates the achievement of consensus in decision-making. However, a welfare culture is evolving based on new values and perspectives of the society. A digital culture is also strongly asserting itself, allowing new application methods such as quantum computing in problem-solving. Within the expanding horizons of social policy, many calculations and forecasts have made it possible to reduce poverty rates. However, poverty as a great divide still plagues the world.Child poverty is a huge global as well as national problem. Lack of opportunities for education and employment is dividing our societies. Children and young people who are growing up in poverty, or at risk of poverty, also have inadequate nutrition, insufficient access to health services, and are thus not well equipped for employment on reaching working and productive age. Participation in early childhood care and education is nowadays given high priority in political agendas simultaneously with the effective organization of health care and social eldercare of the aging population. The economic recovery, getting started again in 2021 after strong efforts to curb the corona virus disease (COVID-19), together with good governance, guides transformative social policy. Risks and tensions have been shown to cause deviant and disruptive trends that require risk management actions to avoid, for example, cybercrime. Human-ethical principles become crucial supportive means to control and evaluate the effects of a rapidly increasing technological capacity.The purpose of this article is to awaken awareness of global inequality with focus on poverty causing social disadvantage. Responsible governance based on humane ethical values, new thinking together with acceptable risk management, could lead to a social policy aiming for social justice, solidarity, and equal values. Advanced technology could be efficiently used to assess these values in society, although concerns remain about the negative appearance of dark sides.