I am fairly libertarian-leaning, but I have qualms about going full libertarian.
Prices are really great. Prices are a really great thing about markets. For instance, consider flow restrictors (example chosen for being extremely unimportant and having a delightfully pissed off article written about them). Most showers in the US have flow restrictors, which means that their showers use less water, but also are less enjoyable, at least to some people.
Prices are a much better way to solve this problem than requiring flow restrictors is. If the price of water reflects the costs of water– either due to the Magical Free Hand of the Market, or because the government has put a tax on it equivalent to the externalities of using too much water– then that guy who wrote that delightfully pissed off article can have as unrestricted a shower as he pleases. If he pays for it, that is prima facie evidence that the shower is more valuable to him than the cost of the water. On the other hand, if you’d rather spend your money on hookers and blow, you can install your own flow restrictor, or take a shorter shower, or some other method of conserving water. Since people have different preferences, this lets everyone satisfy their own preferences.
At least, as long as everyone has the same amount of money. If we both make $20,000 a year, the fact that I take that shower and you don’t is a pretty good sign that I care more about the shower and you care more about hookers and blow. If I make $20,000 a year and you make $200,000, it might just mean that you can’t be arsed to install a flow restrictor to save an amount of money that is comparatively meaningless to you.
Of course, you don’t actually want to require that everyone make the same amount of money. Some jobs are more desirable than other jobs. If your job is soul-crushingly mind-numbingly boring and my job is taste-testing ice cream, then it makes sense that you earn more money. We can model that as you and I working the same job, except that I paid a $180,000 Getting To Eat Ice Cream For A Living fee.
(Totally worth it.)
The same thing goes for jobs with longer hours vs. shorter hours, jobs working with nice people vs. jobs working with complete assholes, jobs that help people vs. tobacco company executive, etc. If your job has good traits other than money, then– all things equal– one should expect you to make less money at it.
But all things are not equal. In fact, you can observe that the jobs that make the least money are often the worst in terms of working conditions. Fast-food employee, retail clerk, guy who holds up a sign telling you that there’s a “sale!!!!!!” at the jewelry store– these jobs are ill-paid and also terrible.
The reason is that people have different abilities. Through no fault of their own, some people are smart, hard-working, and charismatic; other people are dumb, lazy, and in possession of voices so soporific that Pfizer is considering marketing them as a sleep aid. Some people have parents who are willing and able to pay for them to get training or the $100,000 conscientiousness and intelligence certificate; other people don’t. Some people have friends who can tell them about well-paying jobs and vouch for their good qualities; other people have friends who can tell them about the fact that the McDonalds down the street is hiring; still other people don’t have friends at all. Some people inherit billions; other people grew up on the street. None of these have anything to do with your desires: if you’re in the fifth percentile in conscientiousness, you probably really want to be more hard-working, but as it happens you were born with a lazy brain and you’re probably not going to become as rich as an effortless workaholic.
The most striking case of this is disabled people. Many disabled people– including myself– are incapable of working a job that will support ourselves. Many others require significant and potentially expensive accommodations to work a job.
What this means is that the market will tend to oversupply the preferences of some people (those that have skills and abilities that mean they have a lot of money) and undersupply the preferences of other people (those that don’t). From many moral perspectives (including utilitarianism, contractualism, and veil-of-ignorance Rawlsianism) this is unsatisfactory. It is unfair that society cares less about someone’s preferences just because they were born stupider than other people.
Of course, it’s often hard to distinguish impairments and preferences. It is hard for a government or society to tell apart “I am low conscientiousness but would prefer to be able to do more work than I am capable of” from “I don’t like working that much and am gladly taking a lower salary so I don’t have to.” (Hell, it’s hard for an individual to tell those two apart.) We want to care about group #1’s preferences as much as we care about everyone else’s. But we also want The Magic of Prices to allow group #2 to make an informed decision about how much they should work.
I think the least distortionary way of dealing with this problem is by transferring sufficient cash to poor people that they can maintain a reasonable standard of living, gradually phasing it out as people earn more money, such that people will always earn more money the more they work. That isn’t perfect. Some unimpaired people will not pay the full social cost of their desire to work less. And it isn’t treating impaired people completely equally; they still won’t have the option to work $200,000/year jobs. But I think that that is the least imperfect tradeoff. It makes sure that impaired people can fulfill their most important needs, while minimizing the distortion to prices.
I also think it makes sense to transfer cash to disabled people, with more money to more severely disabled people. Most disabled people are impaired, not people with unusual preferences. Of course, any attempt to give something to disabled people and only disabled people creates gatekeeping problems: wherever you draw the line, some disabled people will not be able to take advantage of it and some people who probably aren’t that impaired will be able to. But the other option is undervaluing the preferences of all disabled people, which I think is worse.
Thing of Things 
The problem of course, is that the state can’t give without taking, it can’t help anyone without hurting someone else.
On a more lighthearted note: a demonstration why politics should be kept as far, far away from romance as possible:
http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/14/libertarian-valentines-day-cards-new-at
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That’s not so much a problem, but rather a trade-off.
I would also argue that Western society is actually giving the winners in our system a lot, as the system is set up to make them prosper. I would be much poorer without the ‘meritocracy’ & centuries of work by others that happens to make my skills valuable.
So it seems perfectly fair and just to me that the people who profit most from the system buy the support from other people who can’t profit as much from the system. Given how much better my life is than pretty much all my ancestors, I seem to be getting a great deal.
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It’s not “Western society” giving stuff to “the winners”, but individuals trading money for goods and services they value, with some producing more value than others.
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@blacktrance
The services and goods that have value are greatly influenced by the system that we live under. Just to give an example, politics and science used to be a hobby for the independently wealthy. Nowadays we tax the population to give politicians and scientists a salary. The result is that in the past, politicians and scientists were usually from the upper class and thus different kinds of people than today’s politicians and scientists. So if you are a lower/middle class person who is a politician/scientist, you are a winner by virtue of the system. In the past, you could not have leveraged your skills in the same way.
I’m also pretty sure that I was given a lot of stuff just by virtue of being born in my country, that a person born in Somalia doesn’t get. So the system makes me a winner both relative to people in other nations and to people within my nation.
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Except that there is no such thing as “western society,” and it certainly isn’t “giving” anyone anything.
The minute you start accepting and anthropomorphizing a reductive abstraction you can reach all sorts of bogus (and occasionally horrific) conclusions. A greedy, selfish, evil person who only cares to advance themselves and their own can do some damage, but to get to Holomodor/Great Leap Forward levels of atrocity, you have to believe in an abstract entity whose worth is greater than that of any concrete individual.
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I agree that I applied a certain framing to insinuate that our system has a goal.
I disagree that this is a faulty way to reason, as humans have substantial power to shape our system and thus can influence the outcomes. As such, the outcomes can be said to be ‘willed’ goal by those who are running the system.
Of course, you are free to believe that our system is a law of nature, but then you need to explain how other systems like serfdom ever existed.
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I disagree that this is a faulty way to reason, as humans have substantial power to shape our system and thus can influence the outcomes. As such, the outcomes can be said to be ‘willed’ goal by those who are running the system.
Of course, you are free to believe that our system is a law of nature, but then you need to explain how other systems like serfdom ever existed.
But in this case, not only is the map not the territory, it’s not even a map. It’s just some lines and creases on a piece of paper that conforms to your idea of what a map looks like, and has the added distraction of having a few half-begun actualmaps scattered here and there.
But if you try and use it to navigate, your results will be sub-optimal.
For your statement to convey meaning, it has to assume at least the following three things:
1 The “system” exists at all.
2. The “system” exists to the extent that you think it does
3. There are people who “run” the “system.”
The great disproof that economics, politics, social structures and the like are governed by knowable, actionable, determinative laws is the fact that scientific authoritarianism has been tried multiple time on all six inhabited continents with uniformly “failed to achieve utopia” results.
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@Fisher
You seem to be reading things into my words that I did not say. I don’t claim that everything that happens is controlled by a system that is governed by man, but rather that there is a system and that is has influence on reality, much of which can be measured and/or predicted, based on which we can change the system and get different outcomes. When humans value one outcome over another and tweak their system so the measured and/or predicted outcomes are more to their liking, that outcome can logically be described as the goal of the system, in the same way that moving people is the goal of a car. That doesn’t mean that the car is sentient, but rather, that matter was configured in such a way by an engineer that the proper usage of the configured matter (aka the car) results in a person moving from A to B.
Similarly, using the welfare state as designed leads to (for example) almost all young people spending a lot of time in school learning things.
That doesn’t mean that we can get whatever outcome we want. The flaw of various Utopian systems is that they assume an outcome is possible and refuse to accept that there are limitations. To go back to the car analogy, I can desire that my car travel in time, but in the absence of new technological developments, I have no actual way to design a car that has that ability. If I start sacrificing virgins based on a theory that this will make my car travel in time, that goal won’t be achieved. I’ll just end up with with a bunch of dead virgins.
PS. Note that I am very much an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary; as I believe that it is very hard to predict outcomes, so a change -> measure -> change -> measure process is generally preferable.
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One response is- redistribution hurts those it takes from way, way less than it helps those it gives to.
The other is- property is theft.
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Note that the former statement is consequentialist and the latter is deontological.
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This isn’t necessarily correct- the value of money is based on supply/demand, and currently the American government is undershooting its inflation targets, not overshooting. Theoretically, as long as the economy is still growing and demand for money is still increasing, we could proportionally increase our budget without ever taxing anyone.
(EY has said something about inflation and such that is relevant to this, but I don’t know if he also endorses the part about spending the money.
Also, taxes would still have to remain as methods of control (controlling money supply, encouraging certain incentives, etc.) and also as ways to ensure people keep using the currency.
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Human needs are infinite, but productivity is not. The math doesn’t work.
You’re a progressive, own it!
A libertarian-leaning person wants to smoke pot without interference from the state… but is willing to pay for the pot, and any health side-effects, xirself.
Or bang lots random of people… but pay for zhair birth control, STD meds, abortions, psychotherapy, and childcare zhomselves.
If there was a guaranteed income, I’d probably quit my professional job, and become a musician. Wouldn’t have to provide from myself or my family. Being productive is a drag.
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Most GBI proposals I see are for something along the lines of $6000-$10000 a year. If you want to live on $6000 a year and be a musician, you are welcome to it. (It seems plausible to me that you could have achieved this goal already.)
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In what sense are human needs actually infinite?
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I’m human (I think), and happy with what I have, so my needs are demonstrably finite. But on the other hand, I have a weird mental quirk in that I don’t give a fuck about positional goods, which seems to be a bit atypical for homo sapiens [citation needed]. If even some people require having more than their neighbour to be happy, then the needs of humanity as a whole are infinite…
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I sometimes think human needs are relatively finite, yet wants wax and wane over time. In the early years they seem to be infinite. Yet later on you spend more time getting rid of the stuff you previously acquired. Perhaps that’s maturation. I look at big houses and think oh christ, more to maintain and store more crap in. But if one wants that as you certainly don’t need it then fine by me. Most stuff is more ego driven than anything else. But if you make your own way you can spend it anyway you want.
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In what sense are human needs actually infinite?
In the same way that “infinite” is typically used: that if they were greater, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
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@Autolykos – are you saying you would refuse more if it was free?
Possibilities: more leisure (say an extra paid overseas vacation a year and extra 3 weeks of time to spend it); more security (a guaranteed retirement, starting earlier, or the chance to start a business or explore a new career, the knowledge that if you need a million dollar surgery, you can get it); more consumption (go out to eat another time a week, or get physical therapy/massages); or more of any of that for your loved ones?
Some of that goes to Histadines “needs” vs “wants.” Literally, humans don’t need much more than 1400 calories a day and basic shelter, but we typically think it’s appropriate to want more.
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@jossedley
Having a similar quirk as Autolykos, I would answer that nothing is truly free. Having a bigger house means more cleaning, more maintenance, etc; maximizing leisure time (having no job and still getting money) isolates introverted people from society and can result in a state similar to wireheading for some (like spending all day playing computer games or watching TV). Of course, leisure time cannot even become infinite, as it is bound by time and my time is finite. At a certain point, my stomach is filled and I don’t want to eat out more, even if I get it for free.
There is a point where marginal utility goes down so much, that the unavoidable costs become too high. You can even see this in the behavior by those who buy positional goods. Rich people don’t buy thousands of Prius’s to show off, they buy one or a few very expensive cars. They don’t buy thousands of mediocre paintings, they buy a Pollack.
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@Aapje – I’m not going to tell you what to buy.
Are you saying that if you got the chance to get a 50% raise for doing the same work, you would be completely indifferent? You wouldn’t even be pleased by the chance to save the money, or to donate it to people or causes you care about.
That’s pretty interesting if so.
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@jossedley
I think that the correct question is not whether I would be 100% indifferent, but rather whether I would gain any real utility from that money and I don’t believe I would. I do worry about the risk that a graying population will need so many resources that my future quality of life will be less than for the current elderly. However, I perceive myself as having a fairly fixed level of anxiety. So I will have the same level of anxiety if this risk goes away, I will just rationalize the cause differently.
The same goes for charity. I have a certain level of guilt over being born into great circumstances. I don’t think this level of guilt will change if I donate more, it will just change my rationalization of why I don’t have to feel too guilty for not giving most of my money away.
IMO, there is a lower bound to this, where having less of something starts to actually make you more anxious, more guilty, etc and thus impacts your quality of life, but no upper bound. Once you cross a certain threshold, N becomes indistinguishable from 2 * N or 100 * N.
Scientific research seems to strongly suggest that the same is true for most/all people.
My perception is that many people are greatly delusional about this and do believe in a sort of ‘grass is greener’ scenario, where they become happier if they just achieve their goal, even if both their current state and their goal are above the threshold. When they achieve their goal, they then experience merely a temporary high and then simply pick a new goal to delusionally attribute future happiness to.
IMO, ‘the journey is the reward’ is a more rational philosophy for behavior. This philosophy implies a finite limit on what you need for a pleasant journey.
PS. The human desire for social status requires being superior over others, which complicates things since it encourages leapfrogging to infinity. So if you want a just and ecologically sustainable world, this is something that you need to tackle (but there are methods for this, like having multiple, preferably incompatible hierarchies, so everyone is both inferior and superior to everyone else, where they can cherry pick an identity and/or ‘frame’ that gives them high status).
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@jossedley:
I’m mostly on board with what Aapje said, so I’m just going to clarify a few details:
There are lots of types of having “more” that I would simply never use and don’t anticipate to gain any utility from (in some cases even disutility; I would feel lost if I lived alone in a place, even if I didn’t have to maintain it). So I could just as well refuse.
Money is a bit tricky, since it mostly provides potential utility, not actual utility. So as long as it only rests in my bank account without me ever planning to use it, I have in some sense not “taken” anything; I’m just holding on to government-issued IOUs. And that’s what I anticipate I would do with most additional money after a certain point. I would not refuse (but probably donate most once I don’t need it for security), but if I don’t plan on ever using it, it would be a bit of a stretch to count it as a “need”.
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Ozy writes: “What this means is that the market will tend to oversupply the preferences of some people (those that have skills and abilities that mean they have a lot of money) and undersupply the preferences of other people (those that don’t). From many moral perspectives (including utilitarianism, contractualism, and veil-of-ignorance Rawlsianism) this is unsatisfactory. It is unfair that society cares less about someone’s preferences just because they were born stupider than other people.”
I’m not sure that it’s unsatisfactory under the three named moral perspectives. It’s arguably the least bad outcome, in which case it’s only unsatisfactory in the sense that mortality is unsatisfactory and unequal distribution of talent.
The problem is that in order for everyone to have water in their showers, and shower heads at their home improvement store, and everything else, we need to produce all the goods and services that everyone wants.
In a free marker, we pay neurosurgeons and football stars more than street sweepers not because we think they deserve it, or because they work harder, but because the produce a service that people really want, and that not many people can produce as well. If we paid them less, some neurosurgeons and athletes would take up ice cream tasting, or retire earlier, or just go home earlier on Fridays.
So when the neurosurgeon enjoys longer showers than the street sweeper, it’s not because we think she’s a better person or deserves it, it’s because (for mostly unfair reasons), her services are worth more to her customers, so we want her to have more incentive to produce them.
That’s unfair, but if the libertarians are right, any other solution produces less total goods and services that people want.
p.s.: In a very depressing argument, one of the econbloggers on Marginal Revolution argues that since the poor don’t produce much that people want anyway, and since we are going to provide basic assistance for most people regardless, there aren’t likely to be many material negative effects of UBI.
p.p.s.: Orthoganal to this, Greg Mankiw proposed a height tax several years back. The idea is (1) we know that taller people earn more money on average; (2) since a adult’s height is not in their control, a flat tax of $100/year per inch above average wouldn’t cause tall people to change their employment activity (apart from income effects); and (3) it would reduce inequality.
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>That’s unfair, but if the libertarians are right, any other solution produces less total goods and services that people want.
Well, yes. That’s about the tamest trade-off out there. I *would* take less total good and services in exchange for the least well-off being better off. No shit. Even if it makes phones, clothes, cars, etc more expensive and less advanced, etc. It’s hardly morally commensurable with alleviating suffering.
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And to add to that: more goods/services is not even necessarily a good thing. See the broken window fallacy for one reason.
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@multiheaded
Except, you can’t take that tradeoff. If you have less goods and services, you have less resources that can be allocated to the poor. The only way life has ever gotten better has been through total economic growth.
@Aapje
That is not what the broken windows fallacy is about. At all. The broken windows fallacy is about the forcible misallocation of resources.
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Yeah, that’s fair. I think for most people, it’s a question of how much total value and growth you are willing to sacrifice to improve the lives of the less well off.
Proponents of utilitarianism and Rawlsian ignoranance* definitely tend to support *some* welfare over *none*, so I guess I agree with Ozy and was just reading a magnitude into the argument that wasn’t there. Thanks!
* I don’t know enough about contractualism in practice to have an opinion, but I’m sure Ozy’s right.
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@Fisher
“The parable of the broken window was introduced by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen) to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.”
The point is that higher economic growth is not automatic evidence of people being better off.
Your comment to Multiheaded also completely misses the point in that allocating resources to the poor tends to result in less economic growth in the short term, at least, based on the modelling as used by the officials in my country. So if you value higher economic growth as a higher priority than helping the poor, you probably will end up never helping the poor.
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@Aapje: I enjoy your posts, but I disagree with your interpretation of the parable of the broken window.
Bastiat’s point isn’t that growth isn’t necessarily good,* it’s that the destruction of the window doesn’t produce growth at all. As Bastiat points out, if the shopkeeper hadn’t spent his hypothetical 6 francs on fixing the window, he would have spent them on something else, such as shoes. There is no growth because the destruction of the window merely shifts consumption from something else, and now instead of a window and new shoes, the shopkeeper just has a window.
To quote Bastiat:
“Now let us consider James B. himself. In the former supposition, that of the window being broken, he spends six francs, and has neither more nor less than he had before, the enjoyment of a window.
In the second, where we suppose the window not to have been broken, he would have spent six francs on shoes, and would have had at the same time the enjoyment of a pair of shoes and of a window.
…
What will you say, Monsieur Industriel — what will you say, disciples of good M. F. Chamans, who has calculated with so much precision how much trade would gain by the burning of Paris, from the number of houses it would be necessary to rebuild?
I am sorry to disturb these ingenious calculations, as far as their spirit has been introduced into our legislation; but I beg him to begin them again, by taking into the account that which is not seen, and placing it alongside of that which is seen. The reader must take care to remember that there are not two persons only, but three concerned in the little scene which I have submitted to his attention. One of them, James B., represents the consumer, reduced, by an act of destruction, to one enjoyment instead of two. Another under the title of the glazier, shows us the producer, whose trade is encouraged by the accident. The third is the shoemaker (or some other tradesman), whose labour suffers proportionably by the same cause. It is this third person who is always kept in the shade, and who, personating that which is not seen, is a necessary element of the problem. It is he who shows us how absurd it is to think we see a profit in an act of destruction. It is he who will soon teach us that it is not less absurd to see a profit in a restriction, which is, after all, nothing else than a partial destruction. Therefore, if you will only go to the root of all the arguments which are adduced in its favour, all you will find will be the paraphrase of this vulgar saying — What would become of the glaziers, if nobody ever broke windows?”
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@Aajpe:
“The parable of the broken window was introduced by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen) to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.”
Correct, this is the misallocation of resources (from the (in the parable, deliberately) broken windows) instead of them being put to productive use.
The point is that higher economic growth is not automatic evidence of people being better off.
Incorrect. The point is that economic *activity* is not the same as economic *growth.*
So if you value higher economic growth as a higher priority than helping the poor, you probably will end up never helping the poor.
Except that this is demonstrably untrue. Just as prostitution predates the existence Homo sapiens The “poor” have seen their standard of living increase for millennia prior to any systematized concept of economics, let alone the welfare state. Saying you’d take the tradeoff of helping the poor over economic growth is fine and all, *except that’s not something you can actually do.*
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@jossedley
Arguably I was thinking beyond the parable, using the same reasoning to make a stronger claim:
Imagine that the shopkeeper doesn’t want to (or can) sacrifice buying shoes to repair the window. So he extends the opening times of his shop to earn an additional 6 francs. Now he has become more economically productive. However, compared to a situation where the window was not broken, he is worse off, despite earning 6 more francs overall, as he has merely lost free time compared to that situation.
My argument is that a lot of people merely look at the GNP or salaries to determine whether a policy is good, while ignoring that you can have situations like these where people are less happy overall, but more productive.
If you accept the above and combine it with a belief that increasing income/wealth has decreasing marginal utility, then you may be able to imagine one society where wealth transfers make high earners less productive, but where the actual loss to them in utility is fairly low compared to the gain in utility to those who receive the wealth transfers.
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@Fisher
I would argue that the increases in the standard of living were very small for most of human history, until we started funding (and mandating) formal education for all. I attribute much of the rapid technological advances to this (with some other factors), because it allowed for far more people to maximize their potential.
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@Aapje
Ok, thanks for the clarification. That’s definitely not Bastiat’s point.
In your hypothetical, the shopkeeper prefers having a window and an extra hour of leisure to having a window and 6 extra francs. If you break his window, he prefers having a fixed window to having an extra hour of leisure.
You’re correct that in your example, measuring economic productivity is misleading because it doesn’t measure the leisure that the shopkeeper was enjoying in the first example.
Normally, we can assume that if government doesn’t shift the relative prices of leisure and work, people will chose the balance that maximizes total value of leisure + production. (It definitely doesn’t equalize enjoyment though – people who are more productive will tend to enjoy more, and people with enjoyment functions that produce more enjoyment with less consumption will also enjoy more).
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@jossedley
Determining what brings ‘enjoyment’ is actually one of the more complex philosophical issues, IMO, as it certainly doesn’t seem to scale with needs being met very well, if you look at self-reported happiness. It may be that depressing happiness beyond people’s natural baseline is much easier than boosting it beyond that.
I am pretty skeptical that more productive people (in economic terms) actually enjoy much more. Studies tend to find that happiness is connected to wealth mostly in relative terms: slightly richer people in poor countries are relatively happy, while poor people in rich countries are fairly sad, even if the poor person in the rich country has way more buying power than the richer person in the poor country. So it seems likely that in our meritocracy, wealth provides social status, which is what actually makes people happy, not so much the wealth itself.
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The problem with this argument (and to some sense, Ozy’s argument) is that how much a doctor is paid depends heavily on completely arbitrary factors like culture. We do in fact pay doctors more because we “think they deserve it”.
How can I be so sure of this? Because how much doctors are paid varies wildly by country, from American-level guaranteed six figure incomes, to Poland and Mexico where even specialists are paid about as much as an American janitor.
This isn’t an education thing, or a rarity thing. The Netherlands, highest paid on that list, has a number of doctors per capita between Poland, the lowest paid, and Mexico, the second lowest paid. It’s also not about doctor quality, because medical education in Poland is as rigorous as medical education anywhere else in Europe i.e. it’s about six years. This is specifically very similar to the medical education in the Netherlands, which is also about six years, where the Netherlands also have some of the highest paid doctors in the world.
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Thanks – let me try to clarify:
1) IMHO, how much money someone deserves morally is a potentially different question from how much value the people who want that person’s goods or services put on the product of their goods and services. That’s what I was trying to get – if you break the price system by paying people based on how much they deserve morally, you end up with less total value of goods and services to distribute.
2) Doctors were probably a bad example – I picked them mostly because it’s pretty easy to see that an hour of a talented neurosurgeon’s work is generally more valuable (in terms of how much money you would pay to obtain an extra one) than an hour of an average worker’s time.
One issue is that people are on average richer in the US than in Mexico and Poland. Is it surprising that they would pay more for services like extra doctor time? The other issue is that in many countries, doctors work for the state and get paid what the state says. In those cases, we would have to measure demand by some function of wait time which is much more complicated.
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How much money could smart people in Poland and Mexico make by going into other fields? In the US, there are lots of other fairly lucrative careers that smart people can pursue, many of them with better working conditions than that of a typical doctor. If you want to have lots of doctors, you have to pay them enough money that they’re willing to forego the alternative careers that don’t require four years of expensive graduate school, 3-5 years of low paid and incredibly stressful residency, and frequent interaction with other people’s bodily functions. If smart people in Poland and Mexico don’t have as many compelling alternatives, not as much money is required to encourage them to overcome the downsides of a medical career.
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I don’t see how any of these arguments can justify an intra-first-world welfare state when there’s people in el crapistan that are an order of magnitude poorer than pretty much anyone in the first world with the possible exception of the homeless.
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Many of my blog posts are about topics which are not the single most important topic in the world. If you aren’t complaining about romance novel blogging then you probably shouldn’t complain about first-world welfare state blogging either.
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I don’t think that’s a valid comparison at all. Romance novel blogging is what you’re doing with your time. I have no standing to complain about it, even if I did think it was a waste of time. It’s *your* time. The welfare state is what the government is doing with my money. So if your argument is “I’m in favor of the government taking half of what you earn and spending a large fraction of it giving it to this set of people”, I think you need to address why this *other* set of people shouldn’t get it first, given that all of your arguments apply more strongly to the other set.
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I can think of a few reasons:
1) The stability of Western nations is really important to giving foreign aid to poor nations, and foreign aid is orders of magnitude bigger than charitable contributions to those countries. Giving welfare to poor Westerners helps ensure that foreign aid gets to poor foreigners.
2) Fairness is a consideration on all scales. Allowing an unfair thing to happen nationally because there’s a greater injustice on the international scale is not just.
3) The reductio ad absurdium of any “but we should instead be giving that money to the global poor” argument is that, because anything anyone in the West spends money on is less ‘worthy’ than giving money to the global poor, all Western money should go to the global poor. Obviously, this is absurd, if for no other reason than if that happened the global poor wouldn’t be poor any more. [This is I think essentially what Ozy is trying to go for here.]
4) There’s actually no reason, in principle, why the government couldn’t just tax people quite a lot and give the money to both foreign aid and a strong welfare state. People’s distaste for that idea is mostly because of their distaste for very high tax rates and not because it would not in principle be possible. Sweden and Norway, for example, give quite a large proportion of their national income as foreign aid in addition to having very strong welfare states.
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There is another point to this. The American government is solely responsible to the American people. Those are the people that elected it, and whose interests and preferences it should satisfy. Foreign Aid can sometimes satisfy those preferences, either as a terminal goal (if Americans care about the poor Crapistanis) or as an instrumental goal (because Americans want Crapistan to be stable enough that their companies can mine the precious Unobtainium there). But if the American government was for some utilitarian considerations trying to give Crapistanis the same standard of living as Americans, without having a mandate by the people to do it, it would be embezzling tax money.
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@Autolykos
“The American government is solely responsible to the American people”. I think that’s completely morally indefensible. The government is only *accountable* to the American people. But it is deeply responsible for acting justly and efficiently and that responsibility arises from the fundamental nature of government, which is the use of force.
@argleblarglebarglebah
1) That might be valid.
2) This is possibly an argument for a welfare state conditional the foreign aid budget being fixed. It is not an argument not to reallocate welfare state budget to foreign aid.
3) I addressed the reductio in my other comment. Diversification is justified, but not in this case.
4) At any plausible level of taxation foreign aid should still take precedence over welfare.
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Put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others. Not because you don’t care, but because otherwise it is that much more likely that both of you end up dead. (Or, since welfare/aid is more long term, in this case you have concurrency, but the principle holds). Otherwise (to go to the long term again), you burn out, and then you’re no good to anyone and quite the opposite.
(About the same idea as argleblarglebarglebah #1, I think).
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So we disagree, and I’m pretty sure that’s not changing, but I’m going to point out that ozy has what amounts to a policy proposal, and you don’t.
A country can set up an infrastructure to transfer money to its poor people, who are right there and whose monetary info it is privy too, and its disabled people, who are also right there, and whose medical information it can be privy too. Trying to do this to another country’s people is nowhere near that straightforward. Like, you could say ‘the US should donate money to Give Directly’ or whatever, but that’s going to hit a ceiling fast, and what about everyone who lives elsewhere? Where does the infrastructure come from? Sending one’s people or hiring locals? Are we trying to borrow the other country’s tax records or conducting our own census? What happens if the other government doesn’t like all that? Or are we just transferring money directly to other government (in which case, it might not be used to do what we were going for).
(If one wants, one can produce practical arguments re intra-state stuff – people provided for are less likely to turn to (local) crime, etc. Caregivers can stay in the workforce. Children are more likely to grow up to do stuff society wants. Etc, etc.)
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Maybe. But that’s a huge leap into the understanding of human behavior.
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I really don’t think it’s nearly as hard as you’re trying to make it sound to give away vast amounts of money to very poor people. The policy proposal is, do more or less what Give Directly does, on a much larger scale. Find poor individuals and give them money.
Yes, it requires hiring some people to administer it. So does any welfare state. So what?
Yes, governments might try to appropriate it. Monitor them and cancel the program in that country as soon as they start trying. Some governments will be smart enough to leave it alone. Those that don’t miss out. If the monitoring and cancelling is done strictly enough then I very much doubt that a shortage of eligible countries will be the limiting factor, but if it is, at least we tried right? How about try the much more effective policy first and then if it it fails fall back on less effective options, rather than just assume it’s impossible without even bothering to find out.
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The macroeconomic effects of Give Directly are literally unknown. It is also an order of magnitude less effective than other GiveWell top charities. I think this is not a good plan.
Is your belief that we cannot afford a welfare state *and* foreign aid, or that it is wrong to write blog posts about policies I like if I am not writing about other more important policies I like?
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I’m really not criticizing you for your choice of blog topics, I’m criticizing your policy proposal.
It is my belief that the marginal dollar spent on the welfare state would be much better spent on foreign aid. Also, that this would remain true even if we reallocated most of the welfare state budget to foreign aid.
I’m not asking you to go full libertarian, and declare “taxation is theft”. I won’t go that far myself either. But anyone who is libertarian leaning should at least accept the principle that taxes should not be squandered. “This is one policy like, you shouldn’t criticize it because it’s not some other policy that’s better” doesn’t work, because both policies are being paid for out of the same pool of tax revenue. Every dollar we spend on one is a dollar we can’t spend on the other.
You might respond that by my logic the government should only spend money the single biggest problem. And that would actually be true, but there’s a lot of uncertainty and disagreement about which problems really are the biggest, and what the price is to address them. This uncertainty justifies diversification, but it cannot justify diversification in this particular case, because all of your arguments for your favored policy apply better to my favored policy. There’s no plausible argument that the marginal dollar spent on social security wouldn’t be more effective spent on Give Directly. There may be some plausible argument about how well efforts like Give Directly can scale. This is the point Neb was making. But that only justifies reallocating gradually rather than all at once.
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Personally I see your argument as a fluffed up version of tax the wealthy. That seems to be the political vision du jour today.
I could care less why you either make it or don’t. Life’s a bitch. There’s a concept that you chose this life for your eternal growth. Not any more outlandish than a welfare state. What I’d like to see are the barriers to success be examined and reworked if necessary. I don’t believe a corporate exec is worth bazillion s just because s/he scrambled better to the top of the shit pile. Nor do I think the kid from the Bronx who can hit a hoop from 30 yards deserves multi quadrillions either. But apparently lots of people think it’s OK and pays to see him do it on a regular basis. So if it’s worth that to the league or the business to pay the person that then I say it’s fair.
What I’d also like to see is everyone having a roof over their head and food to eat. So they can’t buy the latest version of an iPad. Too bad. As I said life’s a bitch. We squander billions of dollars onstupid shit every year. The disabled or anyone, read homeless, working poor, else does not deserve X just because they can’t make enough to obtain it. They do deserve to eat and have a. roof to stay dry and warm. At the very least we can offer that. But the other trappings of materialism is not any right at at all. It is largesse at best. But it by no means required.
You probably won’t like what I’ve said. I really don’t care. I work damn hard and don’t drive a jag u arh. I don’t belong to a country club nor have a private jet to watch someone else wash it. I consider myself to be a lucky man indeed for the simple fact I live here and not some shit hole in the world. No one owes me a damn thing, no matter how hard I work or don’t. Where I am is a collection of decisions I was fully capable of making in different ways that may have changed things for better or worse. Bottom line is I think there’s way too much of an entitlement mentality that has created nothing but chaos and despair. But on the hand things can be improved and we should spend our time and resources looking for way to provide the opportunities for the individual to maximize their version of a life and to what they’re capable of.with the abilities they have.
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How much more efficient is the welfare state than foreign aid?
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You seem a tad dismissive of the investment to learn skills.
I get that in the US system training like university costs far more than it should but even in countries/systems where the state covers the cost of education there’s a cost to becoming skilled enough that people want to give you money for it.
I don’t make particularly amazing money but I can be reasonably confident that if I need a job in a hurry I can call up a recruiter and be sitting at a desk with a new reasonably steady paycheck within a week or so.
It’s partly because I got a piece of paper certifying that I turned up to some exams but the bigger factor is the [estimated]500 to 750 evenings over the course of 15 ish years of time I could have spent out drinking that I instead spent in front of a keyboard learning how to do stuff. As a result I’ve breezed every technical interview over the years. There’s a fairly strong link between my ability to solve the problems I’m being paid to solve now for research teams and the problems I stayed late solving after my classmates gave up and went to the pub to complain over beers about the mean old professor giving “impossible” problems.
If there was no extra pay for being able to do that stuff vs mowing lawns I’d go with the lawns 100%.
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Yes, amount of training is one of the things included in the etc. here: “The same thing goes for jobs with longer hours vs. shorter hours, jobs working with nice people vs. jobs working with complete assholes, jobs that help people vs. tobacco company executive, etc.”
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And yet you *could* solve those problems, when you put in that time, and you *could* make the choice to spend evenings that way, and have it work. Not everyone has those things. (Which is not to invalidate your contribution and work. But it’s also true.)
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Sure, but most people with the ability still choose to spend that time otherwise. There’s (mostly) nothing wrong with the brain of someone who can tell you the match history and point scored by every player in their favorite team since 1976
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Ozy, you seem to have written a compelling argument for welfare without making a case for a state, as opposed to voluntary welfare.
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Simple answer: people can’t live on pocket lint and moths.
Slightly longer answer: Most people aren’t willing to accept a state that leaves people to die on the street for the sake of your ideological purity. Historically in the days before the government took responsibility for orphans orphanages were so woefully underfunded vs animal shelters that some shelters started taking in human children.
Saying “voluntary welfare” hides the true horror of emaciated, starving children. It simply 100% does not work. At all.
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“Most people aren’t willing to accept a state that leaves people to die on the street”
But they’re not willing to voluntarily donate money to keep that from happening? If people are more willing to fund animal shelters than orphanages, maybe our collective values aren’t exactly what you think they are.
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I actually this tracks very well with values that were talking about. Domesticated animals simply don’t have any reasonable way to make choices that make their lives better or for that matter more miserable. They rely completely on our largesse and care to survive. I feel the same way about human babies. Which is one of the reasons I don’t support abortion as a woman’s choice, nor accept the argument that it’s about her health. Except in VERY limited circumstances. And in those cases I actually do support abortion That’s absolutely bogus and a cover up for a political position.
By the time a human is truly sentient they are fully responsible for the choices they make, in the vast majority of cases. Whether they want to accept them or foist them off on others is where I have a real problem.
Now lets say Downs. Syndrome kids or adults. They can’t make it on their own. We need to help them. Wheelchair bound folks don’t fit that category. They can use their minds just fine. Do we need to remove the barriers for them to live their lives as fully as possible given the limitations of their physical obstacles.
The truly mentally ill also cannot function in their lives to be responsible. So we need to assist them. Depression is a semi hard one. Look around the world and most of can get depressed. But we are responsible for getting help and urging along. Help has to be there. But not to crawl in a hole and have everyone else take care of them.
I’m still a believer that the progressive point of view has created this and the sense of entititlement and being a victim without any sense of your own part you are in this.
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The current US foster care system results in children being abused every single day. Would you say this also 100% does not work at all?
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I like this argument, because by making it you accept my point!
However, it does not really point for the need for a welfare state in a nation state, so much as to the need for a global welfare state and/or more more effective needs for the social provision of global welfare generally, as many emaciated children are not under the jurisdiction of your state.
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@shemtealeaf Many might be perfectly willing but not rich. Indeed in any such system the less willing an agent is to hand out free money to all and sundry the more wealthy they’re likely to end up being and money attracts more money, anyone actually willing to give away their net worth to keep the countries orphanages open for a few months quickly lose the wealth to affect that.
Under a system of “voluntary welfare” the only “collective values” that get met are those of the richest. Everyone else gets to rot.
Fortunately democracy allows even the non-wealthy a degree of power that does not wholly depend on how much money they have in their wallet.
@mdaniels4
And the unfortunately inept and merely stupid? I’ve tutored kids who I’ve felt terribly sorry for. Ones who try their damnedest and will never succeed because they got unlucky in the genetic lottery and ended up close to the borderline of learning disability. Those who stare at a problem their classmates solve in moments trying not to cry because they just can’t make it make sense in their heads. They’ve done nothing wrong. Moral culpability cannot be placed upon them yet they’re going to struggle all their lives to find anything they can do that others are willing to pay them a living wage to do.
It’s easy to pretend everyone is high-functioning and just needs to *try harder* because then moral culpability for failure can be laid at their feet but I’m reminded of 2 slate star codex blog posts, “Burdens” and “The parable of the talents”
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@misterjoshbear have you ever heard the phrase “Perfect is the enemy of good”. yes it would be better to feed all the orphans in the world but we should…. what? give up on doing it for just the ones in our own state because we don’t have power to do it everywhere else at the same time?
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@Murphy – Ah, ok, I think you’re arguing that if we have a state, it might as well be a welfare state. Ok, I agree!
But starting from scratch, I think we should prefer to allocate the resources we can make available to welfare by need rather than proximity, to the extent we can, which means that I don’t think much of welfare as a justification for the states we actually have.
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Define “reasonable standard of living.”
No, seriously. Try it.
Government cheese, powdered eggs, and a concrete block room? Refugee camps? Daily pasta and a two-room flat in a rundown development? Organic greens and a single family house in suburbia?
Phones? Cell phones? Smart phones? Computers? TV? Cable? Shared bathrooms, or private? One burner stove, or range with oven? Free medical care? Dental care? Eye care? Free schooling? Transportation? And how do you address their preferences: if North Dakota has cheap land and cheap food, do you expect folks to move there, instead of paying for them to stay in San Francisco? Or do the North Dakota folks just end up a lot richer?
And if you provide funds: What do you do when people make bad choices with the money you give them? When they gamble it? When they lose it? When they make a smart investment but it doesn’t work out, because life is cruel? When they have bad outcomes for any reason, whether it’s their fault or not?
You are using “treating equally” but I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
If you treat groups equally, then you end up replicating their input differences.
OTOH, if you are trying to address inequality in order to reach identical outputs with different inputs–for example, affirmative action or disability preferences–then you CAN’T treat groups equally.
So, every system will be gamed, because people–including disabled people–are collectively a bunch of selfish and self-interested and greedy animals. The more benefits you give to any group–poor people, disabled people, etc.–the more that you encourage gaming.
Unemployment benefits, for example, are supposed to be contingent on folks “trying to find work.” But practically they also provide a great incentive NOT to work, because they halve the marginal benefit of working. Working generally sucks, and the greater the benefits you give to any group the more you have people trying to become LESS productive in order to qualify for benefits.
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In practice, a “reasonable standard of living” would be determined by the political process and likely vary depending on how rich the country is. My understanding is that most developed countries could theoretically finance a GBI of $6000 to $10,000.
I meant treating people equally with respect to how important their preferences are.
I agree that that is a tradeoff. However, the other side of the tradeoff is that sufficiently severely disabled people will literally all die. I think the correct thing to do is to allow *some* of the severely disabled people to die, and reduce the marginal benefits of work *some* (where the definition of the word “some” is dependent on various economic factors).
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Pushing this issue down the road is removing the most salient data point.
For example, we already give subsidies to many U.S. citizens which almost certainly exceed an average value of $6,000/year. Some folks claim it’s $14,000/year. A more consertvative estimate is lower. Here’s one at $9,000: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/05/04/the-average-us-welfare-payment-puts-you-in-the-top-20-of-all-income-earners/#4d921ae49d8f
Let’s use $6,000 as a floor for existing benefits.
If you want to remove all welfare and give that amount in GBI that won’t provide added benefit to the poor and you need to address those issues I raised above about how they use it.
If you want to add on GBI as an extra for poor people then you have some folks who are getting $12,000/year, and you can’t use those numbers any more.
And if you want to offer GBI to everyone irrespective of need then you have a more complex issue which you haven’t addressed.
But the argument isn’t about people, it’s about which preferences we should give as priorities.
Pretty much everyone has the preference “do not starve”. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that everyone also has the preference “eat expensive food.”
We try to respect all “do not starve” preferences; we only respect the “expensive food” one for rich folks who are spending their own money. Rich and poor are “treated equally” insofar as we think it’s OK for anyone who has money to eat expensive food; the poor folks just don’t have that money.
Well, at SOME level of severity that is probably true because there’s nothing we can do otherwise. But not usually. You don’t seem to think we do a good job now, but we do not routinely kill most (let alone “literally all”) disabled people, I am glad to say. Nor have we really done so.
One interesting effect of capitalism is that it makes people have extra money which they wouldn’t have otherwise. And one interesting effect of extra money is that some people will end up using it to do good things, like “caring for the disabled.” When you tax them more to provide services they have less time and money, so they give less of it away.
But this is so vague as to be almost meaningless–it’s like saying “there should be some level of taxation and some level of social support.” Which, sure: but under that definition Trump and Sanders are indistinguishable. When your definition won’ allow you to distinguish between those viewpoints, I don’t think that’s a good definition.
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Suppose you have a preference that makes you more likely to need public assistance – for example, dangerous sports in which you might have a disabiling accident, or eating lots of donuts, which might put you in the hospital sooner. In a free society, it doesn’t matter – you accept the risks and pay for the consequences if anything bad happens. But with a welfare state, either others end up paying for your preferences (so you take more risks, imposing even more costs on others), or you get regulated.
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Yes, that is in fact part of the tradeoff we’re making here.
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“We”
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The issue that I’m having is that this is obviously an argument of degrees: you are not proposing a full-Communist state, and I don’t think anyone here is proposing tax-free self-subsistence. Everyone is discussing a change in the margins.
So the whole argument rests on specificity. But you’re not being specific enough, so we can’t really respond. Are we discussing a UBI to replace welfare (in which case you need a lot more than $6000?) Are we discussing a small UBI on top of existing programs?
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The actual tradeoff is even less favorable for the welfare state, because the criterion that’d actually be used for regulation would be whether an activity can be spun as causing a burden on the public, regardless of whether it actually does. For example, “gay men have a higher rate of STDs, so gay sex should be banned”. Or, a more common argument, that immigration should be restricted because illegal immigrants use American health care and don’t pay for it because hospitals can’t refuse them.
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(I oppose the kind of regulation you mention and did not see this article as supporting it.)
Do you think that having disabling accidents or being in the hospital is fun? As far as I know, when humans are bad at the ‘if I do this, something bad might happen to me’ calculation the big factor is certainty (such that people can go ‘it won’t happen to me’) not severity. People who want to skydive or whatever are being undettered by the fact that they might *die* (as are people driving cars, btw!). I have doubts that welfare state is going to be a significant enough factor here.
Also, society always pays. Society pays when people leave the workforce to take care of disabled relatives, when people have nowhere to turn and turn to crime, when someone who could have made all sorts of improvements with physical therapy and made further social contributions can’t afford it and never does, when untreated PTSD becomes intergenerational, with uninformed voters, etc, etc.
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The post didn’t support it, but it’s a reasonable consequence of a welfare state. If I have to pay for you, then I have an incentive to make your behavior less costly.
Of course having disabling accidents isn’t fun, but on the margin, they’re less bad than they’d normally be if someone else has to bear some of the cost, so the incentive to avoid them is lower. The effect need not be as simple as a straightforward cost-benefit calculation, it can flow through culture – “Don’t worry, if something bad happens, the government will pay for you”, so you don’t think about the negative consequences of your actions as much.
As for “society always pays”, the question is, who and how much? If someone chooses to take care of a disabled relative, that’s them paying for it, not society. If someone turns to crime, society does pay, but to what extent is the welfare state a substitute? (It’s also like paying the Danegeld – “give me a welfare state or I’ll turn to crime!” – and giving in is a bad idea.)
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