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But at what level do we accept there's assholes and move on and not let them ruin it for all of us? If we have a program that helps 1 person and 1 person scams

But at what level do we accept there's assholes and move on and not let them ruin it for all of us? If we have a program that helps 1 person and 1 person scams it, we might get rid of that program. What if it helps 10 for every 1 scammer? 1,000? 1,000,000? Certainly with the last we'd say it's ok.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
We stop when the marginal cost of additional oversight exceeds the marginal benefit of additional fraud prevented. I.e., we keep increasing oversight until diminishing returns causes $1 of additional fraud prevention spending to reduce fraud by $0.99. I don't know where that point lives, but as NPRs expose demonstrates, that amount is certainly larger than zero and probably a lot larger than where we are now.
- heartsucker 10y ago
  I was taking the most simplistic approach. Your point is better than mine, but usually the argument I see is that "there are welfare queens, and that's not fair, therefore there shouldn't be welfare at all." I was more arguing against that.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    I'm arguing for good government, not no government. Unfortunately good government requires carefully understanding and administering a bureaucracy, taking into account individual incentives, and building something non-simple. Basic income is just a cheap mental hack used to seduce the lazy. It's like looking at a webapp, realizing that 75% of your compute cycles are doing error handling and then saying "aha, the solution is to ignore all errors!" It's seductive, brilliant in it's simplicity, and complete idiocy. Among other things, this is why essentially no basic income proponents are willing to even do a back of the envelope calculation to show how it would work. (Similarly, "eliminate all error handling" guy will refuse to write a proof of concept.) [edit: I altered this comment to explain in better detail what I think is wrong with BI, but eliminated a sentence that SandBOx replied to. I believe the real goal of most BI proponents is to create a vote bank of government dependents.]
    - SandB0x 10y ago
      Out of interest, what do you think their real goals are? (I agree with the sentiment of your comments FWIW)
    - ebalit 10y ago
      This proposition by Marc de Basquiat seems to be a lot more than "back of the envelope calculation": http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09-15_MdeBasquiat.pdf http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09... It's a reform of the French tax system based around a basic income and flat taxes on income and wealth. The resulting redistribution is similar to the current system without the nasty border effects and bureaucracy.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  That is mathematical, but the marginal benefit can't exclusively be considered in terms of the financial health of the program. The imposition of fraud prevention creates a lot of negative externalities (in relation to the finances of the program) on people who are recipients or potential recipients. False positive detections of fraud, or heavy burdens of evidence will cause a feedback effect by causing people who we would want to qualify as recipients to commit fraud in order to elude oversight, thereby (if focused on the solvency of the program) justifying even further oversight, and higher overheads. Also, since the purpose of the program is to reduce poverty, not to detect fraud, another effect is that the additional oversight will keep people away from the program, either by (as above) their inability to navigate the efforts to protect the program from fraud, but also by the effect of intrusive (and possibly personal and demeaning) questions and inspections has on people's self-image who choose to accept the aid (as per TFA), causing them to avoid taking it to avoid social stigma. I know these are the types of points that laissez-faire libertarians laugh at i.e. "imagine someone who is taking my money refuse any indignity; they can always choose to starve," but those sorts of libertarians don't think that poverty is a concern anyway. When those types get to design programs like this, they end up largely populated by people who are willing to navigate them as a job, hence largely fraudulent, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The vast bulk of overhead is ultimately fraud control in some form, and as that expands, so the program expands, while the number of people being helped stays steady or even shrinks. This massive administration is farmed out to contractors to reduce ballooning costs (cronies, friends of friends and/or benefactors - an externality that affects us all as a rise in corruption) who are rewarded for finding more fraud with a higher proportion of the budget of the program. Their primary motivation then becomes to find excuses to exclude people from the program. This is depressing to even type. The reason one would have basic income is to eliminate this. I believe that every millionaire should receive a check. Means-testing is a scam.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

We stop when the marginal cost of additional oversight exceeds the marginal benefit of additional fraud prevented. I.e., we keep increasing oversight until diminishing returns causes $1 of additional fraud prevention spending to reduce fraud by $0.99. I don't know where that point lives, but as NPRs expose demonstrates, that amount is certainly larger than zero and probably a lot larger than where we are now.

heartsucker 10y ago
I was taking the most simplistic approach. Your point is better than mine, but usually the argument I see is that "there are welfare queens, and that's not fair, therefore there shouldn't be welfare at all." I was more arguing against that.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I'm arguing for good government, not no government. Unfortunately good government requires carefully understanding and administering a bureaucracy, taking into account individual incentives, and building something non-simple. Basic income is just a cheap mental hack used to seduce the lazy. It's like looking at a webapp, realizing that 75% of your compute cycles are doing error handling and then saying "aha, the solution is to ignore all errors!" It's seductive, brilliant in it's simplicity, and complete idiocy. Among other things, this is why essentially no basic income proponents are willing to even do a back of the envelope calculation to show how it would work. (Similarly, "eliminate all error handling" guy will refuse to write a proof of concept.) [edit: I altered this comment to explain in better detail what I think is wrong with BI, but eliminated a sentence that SandBOx replied to. I believe the real goal of most BI proponents is to create a vote bank of government dependents.]
  - SandB0x 10y ago
    Out of interest, what do you think their real goals are? (I agree with the sentiment of your comments FWIW)
  - ebalit 10y ago
    This proposition by Marc de Basquiat seems to be a lot more than "back of the envelope calculation": http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09-15_MdeBasquiat.pdf http://www.allocationuniverselle.com/doc/BIEN_Munich_2012-09... It's a reform of the French tax system based around a basic income and flat taxes on income and wealth. The resulting redistribution is similar to the current system without the nasty border effects and bureaucracy.
pessimizer 10y ago
That is mathematical, but the marginal benefit can't exclusively be considered in terms of the financial health of the program. The imposition of fraud prevention creates a lot of negative externalities (in relation to the finances of the program) on people who are recipients or potential recipients. False positive detections of fraud, or heavy burdens of evidence will cause a feedback effect by causing people who we would want to qualify as recipients to commit fraud in order to elude oversight, thereby (if focused on the solvency of the program) justifying even further oversight, and higher overheads. Also, since the purpose of the program is to reduce poverty, not to detect fraud, another effect is that the additional oversight will keep people away from the program, either by (as above) their inability to navigate the efforts to protect the program from fraud, but also by the effect of intrusive (and possibly personal and demeaning) questions and inspections has on people's self-image who choose to accept the aid (as per TFA), causing them to avoid taking it to avoid social stigma. I know these are the types of points that laissez-faire libertarians laugh at i.e. "imagine someone who is taking my money refuse any indignity; they can always choose to starve," but those sorts of libertarians don't think that poverty is a concern anyway. When those types get to design programs like this, they end up largely populated by people who are willing to navigate them as a job, hence largely fraudulent, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The vast bulk of overhead is ultimately fraud control in some form, and as that expands, so the program expands, while the number of people being helped stays steady or even shrinks. This massive administration is farmed out to contractors to reduce ballooning costs (cronies, friends of friends and/or benefactors - an externality that affects us all as a rise in corruption) who are rewarded for finding more fraud with a higher proportion of the budget of the program. Their primary motivation then becomes to find excuses to exclude people from the program. This is depressing to even type. The reason one would have basic income is to eliminate this. I believe that every millionaire should receive a check. Means-testing is a scam.