7 ms·

The subhead asks: "Why should governments give cash-handouts before providing free, quality public services to all?" That's pretty clearly because "free, quali

by gojomo 7y ago

The subhead asks: "Why should governments give cash-handouts before providing free, quality public services to all?" That's pretty clearly because "free, quality public services to all" are really hard & expensive to deliver. Without prices & competition, they're prone to massive inefficiencies, over-provision or under-provision due to various political distortions, and resource- or agenda- capture by insider managers/public-employees/organized-lobbies. Smaller, tightly-knit polities can often manage more-efficient public services. The two examples given in this article – "quality public housing" and "free public transport" – work well in some places! But giant geographically, economically, ethnically diverse polities like the US have a much harder time. Public housing in the US sucks. Mass public transport here faces costs 5x as large in as other developed countries – due to the sclerotic interplay of dysfunctional bureaucracies, mercenary contractors, and powerful public employee unions. That is, those exact unions in the "Public Services International" federation which employs this op-ed writer. So of course she's arguing, "pay us first, and more, before spending more directly on the poor". But the point of UBI, if it were to work as hoped, is to route around such non-poor middlemen – those who claim to be serving the poor, but rarely seem to reduce overall poverty. Cutting checks is comparatively easy to do, and most non-addicted adults can spend $X for their own welfare better than any supposedly altruistic outsider could spend the same $X.

0x262d 7y ago
everything in this comment is completely, empirically wrong. public services are more efficient and have been basically forever. where public services are bad, it's generally because they are desperately underfunded and cut into by the private sector and austerity governments, which under capitalism are nearly all governments. https://newint.org/features/2018/05/01/the-private-sector-efficiency-myth https://newint.org/features/2018/05/01/the-private-sector-ef...
- legitster 7y ago
  This is a VERY biased source. Also, there is a difference between how efficiently those services provide, and how well those services actually match consumer needs. The government can likely build cars more efficiently than anyone else, but would do a very bad job at determining what should be in a car or determining who those cars go to.
  - 0x262d 7y ago
    I don't think "unbiased" sources exist, that's a technocratic myth as well. And I think your second concern is only valid for bad public versions of this. The state is perfectly capable of whatever product planning our handful of car companies do.
  - mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
    It appears to me that you're referring to the means testing part of government assistance, which doesn't have much to do with the parent comment. In addition, I'm curious in what ways is this source biased? I'm not sure an unbiased source exists, but I'm curious of your reasoning here.
    - legitster 7y ago
      Not means testing so much as allocation: I bought a small car because I did not need a big car and wanted to save money. This decision is easy in a market. If the government provides cars for all people, who gets big ones and who gets little ones. Does everyone get a tiny car? They can build cars cheaper than anyone but can allocate them inefficiently.
      - mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
        This still comes back to a means test of some variety. For your example with vehicles, if you possess the means to not require a large vehicle (such as being single or having a small family), then you would obviously be allocated the smaller vehicle. This is vastly simplified than what such a thing would likely look like in reality. For govt assistance in the US for example this usually begins with your income level. On a separate note, I'm still very curious of your answer to my question referring to the source.
        legitster 7y ago
        > New Internationalist does not slavishly follow the conventional news agenda. They specifically call out that they are an alternative journal, with a focus on very left policies. Which I can respect, but I thought it was a poor choice of source to make the point. A stronger case could be made by pulling a more independent observer who may site a more gracious collection of sources. And I would like to point out that the article advocated for eliminating all means testing. So in the case of this (admittedly strained) argument. I get a car, but it must be the same car for all.
- lolsal 7y ago
  Isn't underfunding a form of inefficiency?
  - 0x262d 7y ago
    no, efficiency is value in divided by value out.
theslurmmustflo 7y ago
Look at how well competition works in our broken healthcare system. Our costs are the highest in the world yet our life expectancy and infant mortality isn’t all that great. Or look at education at all levels, where costs have also skyrocketed and public options keep getting cut because bureaucrats from “competing” private industries try to push their agenda (you could argue this is even worse in healthcare and pharma). Competition and profit motive hasn’t been proven to work so well for public goods, in my opinion, but would love to hear of examples where it worked. This is why for some things we still agree we should pay for at a government level (local or national), such as firefighters, defense, mail, etc, etc. Not even going to get into how inflationary ubi would be, instantly driving up costs due to “rational” economic behavior.
- 0x262d 7y ago
  competition and capitalism work well to drive technological improvement in conditions of extreme scarcity such as existed 100+ years ago. of course, it does this pretty violently. there's no reason to believe it is better than democratic, central planning (note: not stalinism) in either this or the last century. public planning would, of course, go out of its way to incentivize automation and further technological improvement... something that has historically been publicly funded anyway. edit: typos and stuff
  - icelancer 7y ago
    > there's no reason to believe it is better than democratic, central planning Can you name an example of this succeeding at the same rate American capitalism has if Stalinism is not one?
    - 0x262d 7y ago
      I can't, because American capitalism bombs every attempt to provide an example of an alternative out of existence, precisely to cause people to think there is no alternative in conversations like this. I will say that despite massive sanctions and material scarcity, and an incomplete level of democracy, Cuba gets a lot of things more right than the US (for instance, healthcare for non-rich people). They are also fucking up their environment way less. But it's still scarcity socialism and could be way better. the US also has a very incomplete level of democracy edit: escaping asterisks
orbifold 7y ago
This is a self fulfilling prophecy. Whether the services are like you describe is largely a function of government competence, attention to detail, culture etc. Compare the Greek Internal Revenue Service to the German one. One did not manage to collect even basic taxes on a population that actually had a lot of real estate property, the other one has a pretty good track record (far from perfect of course). When it mattered the Ecole de Mines (A french grand ecole) produced some of the best mine inspectors, that had a fantastic salary (Poincare was one of them). If you run your country properly and efficiently, none of the things that you mention must be true. This is really a question of mindset and culture, nothing more. Of course rich people and their lap dogs, like Milton Friedman would like you to believe differently. Ultimately if the private sector outcompetes the public sector for (most of) the best and brightest, you will end up in a situation like in the US. At various points in time, you could not achieve much higher prestige than being an elite public servant in France (all the grand ecoles recruited for that) or be part of the diplomatic corps in Germany. Some of these positions still have very competitive salary to this day. Hopefully converting government services to digital services (the German government is planning to do this for all of its ~500 functions over the next decade) will eliminate a lot of the lower / middle management in the administration.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  Perhaps ironically, the Federal government's bureaucratic approach to equitable pay is why public-sector jobs are not competitive in the United States. Why would a talented person work for a fraction of the pay that the private sector offers?
  - hollerith 7y ago
    I got curious about your assertion, so decided to get some numbers. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/999101.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/999101.htm -- annual mean wage of the 2,639,180 employees of the federal government, $76,810 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm -- annual mean wage off all 144,733,270 employees in the nation, $51,960 Of course the federal government might legitimately need higher average skill levels than the rest of the economy does. I wonder how that ratio, $76,810 / $51,960, compares to the ratio in other countries, particularly those with a reputation for being well-governed.
opaque 7y ago
> But giant geographically, economically, ethnically diverse polities like the US have a much harder time. I've heard this refrain from a number of otherwise sensible people and it always makes me shiver. Not only does it imagine all the world's non-US megacities are quaint "tightly-knit" monocultures, but the dog-whistle "ethnically diverse" component is particularly repellant. To give the benefit of the doubt: that's probably not intentional, but I really wish we could end this meme as to why the US has inadequate public services.
- EthanHeilman 7y ago
  Are you arguing that racism has played no part in why the US has inadequate public services?
- gojomo 7y ago
  You've heard it from sensible people because there's a significant social-sciences literature studying the idea, and largely confirming it – no "dog-whistles" required. I want more ethnic diversity in the US, but my eyes are open that in practice, such diversity (for at least a generation or two, maybe longer) tends to weaken political support for public services, and strain such services' competent administration. The right cultural & policy innovations might be able to overcome this effect! But probably not, if merely acknowledging it becomes a taboo, and we pretend it's not an effect at all. And it's not just ethnicity – it's many dimensions of "largeness" and "diversity", including geographic dispersion, variety of economic industries and incomes, religions, density, etc. Only 2 countries in the world have a larger population than the USA: China and India. They're not known for top-notch free public services, either – though China's anti-union, anti-local-control authoritarianism allows public infrastructure development at a crazy pace, and (forced relocation into) public housing. The other 7 most-populous countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico) aren't stellar examples of public services, either. The "high services" models most often highlighted tend to be less than 1/30th the population of the USA and far more culturally/economically homogenous (the Nordics), or at most 1/6th to 1/5th the population of the USA (UK, France, Germany), and still less varied geographically, economically, and culturally.
- negzero7 7y ago
xmonkee 7y ago
>adults can spend $X for their own welfare yes, but spend on what? Rent, privatized healthcare, and uber rides? This article is exactly right, it's idiotic to think that giving money to people with no affordable services to spend it on is going to improve their lives. Give people $1000 per month and watch the next rent cheque go up by $900.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Why do you think housing would capture a majority of excess cash that people have, and not food vendors, or other groups that provide essential services?
gremlinsinc 7y ago
In some instances it's probably cheaper to give money than build buildings, hire staff, etc that cost more money than the dole being given. If we could give 2-3k per month for less than the cost of other handout programs, then why not automate the process of check writing as much as possible and just make it happen? Though, this must be combined with major healthcare reform (single payer or something akin to Europe/Japan/Canada). If people have food, housing,and medical without fear of losing any of those then they will have less stress. Less stress = less anxiety, anxiety leads to fear, fear leads to the darkside aka crime/suicide/mass-murder then suicide/becoming Donald Trump.

by gojomo 7y ago

0x262d 7y ago

everything in this comment is completely, empirically wrong. public services are more efficient and have been basically forever. where public services are bad, it's generally because they are desperately underfunded and cut into by the private sector and austerity governments, which under capitalism are nearly all governments. https://newint.org/features/2018/05/01/the-private-sector-efficiency-myth https://newint.org/features/2018/05/01/the-private-sector-ef...

legitster 7y ago
This is a VERY biased source. Also, there is a difference between how efficiently those services provide, and how well those services actually match consumer needs. The government can likely build cars more efficiently than anyone else, but would do a very bad job at determining what should be in a car or determining who those cars go to.
- 0x262d 7y ago
  I don't think "unbiased" sources exist, that's a technocratic myth as well. And I think your second concern is only valid for bad public versions of this. The state is perfectly capable of whatever product planning our handful of car companies do.
- mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
  It appears to me that you're referring to the means testing part of government assistance, which doesn't have much to do with the parent comment. In addition, I'm curious in what ways is this source biased? I'm not sure an unbiased source exists, but I'm curious of your reasoning here.
  - legitster 7y ago
    Not means testing so much as allocation: I bought a small car because I did not need a big car and wanted to save money. This decision is easy in a market. If the government provides cars for all people, who gets big ones and who gets little ones. Does everyone get a tiny car? They can build cars cheaper than anyone but can allocate them inefficiently.
    - mAEStro-paNDa 7y ago
      This still comes back to a means test of some variety. For your example with vehicles, if you possess the means to not require a large vehicle (such as being single or having a small family), then you would obviously be allocated the smaller vehicle. This is vastly simplified than what such a thing would likely look like in reality. For govt assistance in the US for example this usually begins with your income level. On a separate note, I'm still very curious of your answer to my question referring to the source.
      - legitster 7y ago
        > New Internationalist does not slavishly follow the conventional news agenda. They specifically call out that they are an alternative journal, with a focus on very left policies. Which I can respect, but I thought it was a poor choice of source to make the point. A stronger case could be made by pulling a more independent observer who may site a more gracious collection of sources. And I would like to point out that the article advocated for eliminating all means testing. So in the case of this (admittedly strained) argument. I get a car, but it must be the same car for all.
lolsal 7y ago
Isn't underfunding a form of inefficiency?
- 0x262d 7y ago
  no, efficiency is value in divided by value out.

theslurmmustflo 7y ago

Look at how well competition works in our broken healthcare system. Our costs are the highest in the world yet our life expectancy and infant mortality isn’t all that great. Or look at education at all levels, where costs have also skyrocketed and public options keep getting cut because bureaucrats from “competing” private industries try to push their agenda (you could argue this is even worse in healthcare and pharma). Competition and profit motive hasn’t been proven to work so well for public goods, in my opinion, but would love to hear of examples where it worked. This is why for some things we still agree we should pay for at a government level (local or national), such as firefighters, defense, mail, etc, etc. Not even going to get into how inflationary ubi would be, instantly driving up costs due to “rational” economic behavior.

0x262d 7y ago
competition and capitalism work well to drive technological improvement in conditions of extreme scarcity such as existed 100+ years ago. of course, it does this pretty violently. there's no reason to believe it is better than democratic, central planning (note: not stalinism) in either this or the last century. public planning would, of course, go out of its way to incentivize automation and further technological improvement... something that has historically been publicly funded anyway. edit: typos and stuff
- icelancer 7y ago
  > there's no reason to believe it is better than democratic, central planning Can you name an example of this succeeding at the same rate American capitalism has if Stalinism is not one?
  - 0x262d 7y ago
    I can't, because American capitalism bombs every attempt to provide an example of an alternative out of existence, precisely to cause people to think there is no alternative in conversations like this. I will say that despite massive sanctions and material scarcity, and an incomplete level of democracy, Cuba gets a lot of things more right than the US (for instance, healthcare for non-rich people). They are also fucking up their environment way less. But it's still scarcity socialism and could be way better. the US also has a very incomplete level of democracy edit: escaping asterisks

orbifold 7y ago

This is a self fulfilling prophecy. Whether the services are like you describe is largely a function of government competence, attention to detail, culture etc. Compare the Greek Internal Revenue Service to the German one. One did not manage to collect even basic taxes on a population that actually had a lot of real estate property, the other one has a pretty good track record (far from perfect of course). When it mattered the Ecole de Mines (A french grand ecole) produced some of the best mine inspectors, that had a fantastic salary (Poincare was one of them). If you run your country properly and efficiently, none of the things that you mention must be true. This is really a question of mindset and culture, nothing more. Of course rich people and their lap dogs, like Milton Friedman would like you to believe differently. Ultimately if the private sector outcompetes the public sector for (most of) the best and brightest, you will end up in a situation like in the US. At various points in time, you could not achieve much higher prestige than being an elite public servant in France (all the grand ecoles recruited for that) or be part of the diplomatic corps in Germany. Some of these positions still have very competitive salary to this day. Hopefully converting government services to digital services (the German government is planning to do this for all of its ~500 functions over the next decade) will eliminate a lot of the lower / middle management in the administration.

i_am_proteus 7y ago
Perhaps ironically, the Federal government's bureaucratic approach to equitable pay is why public-sector jobs are not competitive in the United States. Why would a talented person work for a fraction of the pay that the private sector offers?
- hollerith 7y ago
  I got curious about your assertion, so decided to get some numbers. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/999101.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/999101.htm -- annual mean wage of the 2,639,180 employees of the federal government, $76,810 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm -- annual mean wage off all 144,733,270 employees in the nation, $51,960 Of course the federal government might legitimately need higher average skill levels than the rest of the economy does. I wonder how that ratio, $76,810 / $51,960, compares to the ratio in other countries, particularly those with a reputation for being well-governed.

opaque 7y ago

> But giant geographically, economically, ethnically diverse polities like the US have a much harder time. I've heard this refrain from a number of otherwise sensible people and it always makes me shiver. Not only does it imagine all the world's non-US megacities are quaint "tightly-knit" monocultures, but the dog-whistle "ethnically diverse" component is particularly repellant. To give the benefit of the doubt: that's probably not intentional, but I really wish we could end this meme as to why the US has inadequate public services.

EthanHeilman 7y ago
Are you arguing that racism has played no part in why the US has inadequate public services?
gojomo 7y ago
You've heard it from sensible people because there's a significant social-sciences literature studying the idea, and largely confirming it – no "dog-whistles" required. I want more ethnic diversity in the US, but my eyes are open that in practice, such diversity (for at least a generation or two, maybe longer) tends to weaken political support for public services, and strain such services' competent administration. The right cultural & policy innovations might be able to overcome this effect! But probably not, if merely acknowledging it becomes a taboo, and we pretend it's not an effect at all. And it's not just ethnicity – it's many dimensions of "largeness" and "diversity", including geographic dispersion, variety of economic industries and incomes, religions, density, etc. Only 2 countries in the world have a larger population than the USA: China and India. They're not known for top-notch free public services, either – though China's anti-union, anti-local-control authoritarianism allows public infrastructure development at a crazy pace, and (forced relocation into) public housing. The other 7 most-populous countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico) aren't stellar examples of public services, either. The "high services" models most often highlighted tend to be less than 1/30th the population of the USA and far more culturally/economically homogenous (the Nordics), or at most 1/6th to 1/5th the population of the USA (UK, France, Germany), and still less varied geographically, economically, and culturally.
negzero7 7y ago

xmonkee 7y ago

>adults can spend $X for their own welfare yes, but spend on what? Rent, privatized healthcare, and uber rides? This article is exactly right, it's idiotic to think that giving money to people with no affordable services to spend it on is going to improve their lives. Give people $1000 per month and watch the next rent cheque go up by $900.

oh_sigh 7y ago
Why do you think housing would capture a majority of excess cash that people have, and not food vendors, or other groups that provide essential services?

gremlinsinc 7y ago

In some instances it's probably cheaper to give money than build buildings, hire staff, etc that cost more money than the dole being given. If we could give 2-3k per month for less than the cost of other handout programs, then why not automate the process of check writing as much as possible and just make it happen? Though, this must be combined with major healthcare reform (single payer or something akin to Europe/Japan/Canada). If people have food, housing,and medical without fear of losing any of those then they will have less stress. Less stress = less anxiety, anxiety leads to fear, fear leads to the darkside aka crime/suicide/mass-murder then suicide/becoming Donald Trump.