Nothing can possibly go wrong (Part 3: The Rest)

So funny thing.  When I started this… god, was that 3 weeks and change ago?  I had figured I’d talk about the cross section of Immigration and Welfare.  But y’know what, basically all things Immigration related come down to a fact and knowledge gap.  Unless you’re in a step by step dialog with someone, the conversation needed to sway them on the matter looks incredibly lopsided and strawman-ish, because basically you have to posit every response, then say

“Why do you believe that?”



Because it will boil down to those cognitive shortcuts again.  You believe things that facts contradict because it plays to innate human tribalism, the brain’s reliance on stereotypes, etc etc etc.  Even tying it to the intersection with welfare programs turns into boiler plate liberal generalizations, and that’s boring even when you agree with them unless you’re just looking for a ‘Sick Burn’ instead of persuasive rhetoric.

Welfare programs meanwhile are much more interesting.  While it would be irresponsible to ignore the role all those delightful cognitive biases, as well as Reagan-era and beyond rhetorical gibberish played in increased hostility towards those programs, I want to focus on the positive case here.  That is, I want to tell you why I believe what I believe.  I hope you engage in good-faith questioning of why you believe what you believe too.

The short short version here could be summed up as “If some undeserving people get rewarded for gaming the system, that’s acceptable so long as deserving people are also getting the help they need.”  But thinking of it this way gets into some of the biggest flaws to how we approach the whole thing, and I think a reason so many people are really against it.

These laws have a certain obsession with ensuring that only people who ‘deserve’ help get it.  We seemingly can’t put together enough means testing and arbitrary work requirements to make people ‘earn’ their ‘free’ money.  Which creates a whole bunch of new flaws.

1. Putting so many strings on assistance programs intimidates a lot of people in need into never filing.

2. It turns assistance programs into jobs unto themselves, delaying someone’s ability to right their own ship so to speak- if you’re ‘volunteering’ at the Good Will or mindlessly filing a set number of applications per week, that’s time you’re not building yourself up for a living-wage position (harder and harder to come by as time goes on; more on that later.)

3. It turns the entire process into a treadmill, creating the perception that once you are on assistance you can never get off… which is used to justify defunding or time limiting those programs, further stigmatizing the whole process and preventing yet more people unwilling to file and falling into inescapable poverty.

4.  All of which rewards the unscrupulous of course.  When the entire program is a series of hoops, the ones who do the best will be the ones whose only skill is jumping through hoops… which then creates juicy media stories that feeds back into the increased stigmatization of the whole process.

So if we obsess over who gets aid, we ensure that fewer people in need of it get it.  Nevermind the purely practical concern that spending money on bureaucrats to do the means testing or drug testing or testing testing is that much less money going where it’s needed and, on the whole, costs more money than is saved by eliminating unqualified candidates.

But backing up a bit before going further, what is our philosophical interest in welfare programs to start with?  Sure, it’s nice to help people and all, but that’s not really the prime motivator.  Instead I think we’re seeking equality of opportunity.  We as a society have decided that a stroke of bad luck or a minor mistake with disproportionate consequences shouldn’t torpedo someone’s entire life, and wanted to create a platform to get them back into society as a whole.  Social safety net and “hand up, not a hand out” are phrases in the collective memory for a reason and all that.

So now that we’ve covered the broad consensus, I’m going to get a bit more personal, since this topic is one that’s been bouncing about for months for me.  It involves a bold starting premise.

We should just be giving everyone free money.

Okay, so this is an idea that’s pretty common if you circulate the right parts of the internet, but you may be unfamiliar.  Universal Basic Income is the most common term, and it’s what it sounds like: the government issues a check for a predetermined amount to every citizen, regardless of income.  While no government has ever done a full study on UBIs, let alone implemented one, a lot of the research is promising, and it has all sorts of nifty benefits.

1. Lets you roll up existing social programs into one no fuss no muss package.

2. Eliminates all of the overhead.  Do you have a social security number?  Cut ‘em a check.

3. Provides a stable platform to pursue higher risk opportunities.  That is to say: how many people stay in terrible jobs because they can’t afford to lose their benefits?  Because they’re afraid of taking a hit to their retirement?  Because they only have a few months of savings and will lose everything if it takes too long for their new opportunities to bear fruit?

4. Puts bargaining power back in the hands of workers.  Oh right, I’m not going to starve or become homeless if don’t take this bottom rung garbage job, go to hell.

5. Gets terrible workers with no interest in doing anything but cashing a check and the bare minimum out of the workforce.  We’ll all be happier in our work without them I think.

That third one in particular is important.   Because here’s the thing; the world has big problems, and they’re only going to get bigger because the way we’ve organized society the past ~250 odd years is working less and less every day.  While we no longer practice capitalism in its naked form, it’s still a big foundation of how countries are organized, and it’s built on an assumption that’s not really true anymore- that it takes 95% of the working-age population of a nation to produce the goods and services necessary for that nation to proper.

Which is to say: how many people out there have jobs that their employer doesn’t actually need done?  Or split into two or three positions that really just one person could do?  How many levels of managers do we make that really could be done with half as many people and a third as much paperwork.  And how much of that paper work is actually getting read and helping things run better in the first place.

Now yeah, I’m describing mostly office-type jobs, but that’s the perverse thing about all this.  The more potentially frivolous an industry is, the higher it is on the pay scale.  We’ve managed to price food so low that the average farmer sells everything at a loss, manufacturing positions pay less with fewer benefits every year, the skilled trades pay about the same as they did 30 years ago… so on.  But that’s technology for you- one farmer can feed 50 people when it used to take 50 farmers to feed 55 people.  And this is true all over the place- it only takes about 10% of the population to feed, clothe, and house the other 90%, so what are they doing with themselves?

But if we assume they must work in some fashion at all times, they aren’t doing much that’s terribly productive.  And that’s the real boon of the UBI; we free up everyone to find the best use of their talents and intellect, and everyone is better off because we’re developing that many more new technologies, putting that many more people on the hard problems, and if we do it right distributing the work of the 10% doing necessities to 20 or 30 or 50%, everyone working a comfortable amount rather than a few people basically killing themselves invisibly in the background.

But that means making the hardest change.  We have to separate what people do for a living from their value as human beings.  To define people not by their job, but by the sum of their talents, ambitions, and character.  Americans in particular have always struggled with this, but if we want there to be a future for our civilization, we must reckon with these issues somehow.  Perhaps this isn’t the right answer, but it’s a novel idea worthy of investigation.  And that starts with accepting the value of those programs we already have, and not judging those who utilize them.