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> the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. As with many similar topics,

> the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. As with many similar topics, the US actually spends a much higher amount on social welfare than people realize, more than most developed countries. As always, it just does so uniquely inefficiently, for reasons that are complicated and possibly related to our sclerotic politics. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/09/how-the-u-s-spends-more-helping-its-citizens-than-other-rich-countries-but-gets-way-less/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/09/how-t...

OJFord 6y ago
It would be oddly specific, IMO, to claim that a country doesn't spend enough on (for example) social security. What people actually talk about is outcomes. Interesting that a lot is spent on it, but not really much of a counterpoint since, as you say, it's done so 'uniquely inefficiently' that the outcome remains less.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  > What people actually talk about is outcomes. This is not my experience at all. I feel like the vast majority of conversation on the topic I've read is about differential _political will_ for social welfare and other redistribution, usually due to perceived cultural failings. Eg, "the US doesn't want to take care of its most vulnerable because of muh freedom" The notion that the US has lots of _political will_ for infra, redistribution, homeless care, etc but simply has an incompetent government is anathema to polite-company discourse, usually leading to handwavy rationalizations about how "starving the beast" has caused the government to be incompetent.
tialaramex 6y ago
> more than most developed countries Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all. I look forward to a study showing that the US has really good paid leave compared to the rest of the world, so long as you denominate it in dollars not hours so that a marketing exec's six months "gardening leave" to prevent them stealing accounts outweighs Amazon warehouses with zero paid holiday...
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  > A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all. Does this comment have a point, beyond lurid and ill-thought-out analogies? Notice that even your contrived example isn't self-consistent: the only way the steelworker's unemployment check "wouldn't count" is if 100% of it was taxed away in the course of spending it. Even your fevered conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense! What motivation do you imagine the paper author has? The paper[1] spends a substantial amount of time focusing on poor US outcomes, and its point is that current US policy isn't actually saving us any money relative to the rest of the OECD, so our outcomes aren't even trading off against net economic benefit (at least first-order). Suboptimal distribution of our social spending (as in your ridiculous examples) falls squarely into this category, and as such is a potential target for the paper's criticism. [1] https://www.piie.com/publications/pb/pb15-4.pdf https://www.piie.com/publications/pb/pb15-4.pdf
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    I'm not really imagining any "motivation" beyond the intellectual exercise of proving America spends lots of money on things it actually doesn't spend money on, by squinting until the whole world is blurry. Economists would like everything to be dollars, because that means you can plug numbers into a spreadsheet and get answers that work. Centuries of this not working haven't dissuaded them and I don't expect my rant to change that. People who actually think we should care about population welfare do not try to squint at the dollar figures like this paper, you'll see them looking at policies qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and this way you don't need to draw a dozen charts to come to the apparently startling revelation that the US is a wealthy country in which money is being stolen from the poor to be wasted by the rich and this is a bad idea. Sometimes this sort of work will be excused on the rationale that it will guide political decision making. This is an error perhaps everywhere and certainly in the US. A Republican is not going to read this paper and say "Aha! My policies were mistaken, I can actually have better impact by reducing tax breaks on the wealthy and directing the increased income to the poorest". They're going to glance at it, conclude it does not support the policies they wish to enact and so it's irrelevant.

OJFord 6y ago

It would be oddly specific, IMO, to claim that a country doesn't spend enough on (for example) social security. What people actually talk about is outcomes. Interesting that a lot is spent on it, but not really much of a counterpoint since, as you say, it's done so 'uniquely inefficiently' that the outcome remains less.

wutbrodo 6y ago
> What people actually talk about is outcomes. This is not my experience at all. I feel like the vast majority of conversation on the topic I've read is about differential _political will_ for social welfare and other redistribution, usually due to perceived cultural failings. Eg, "the US doesn't want to take care of its most vulnerable because of muh freedom" The notion that the US has lots of _political will_ for infra, redistribution, homeless care, etc but simply has an incompetent government is anathema to polite-company discourse, usually leading to handwavy rationalizations about how "starving the beast" has caused the government to be incompetent.

tialaramex 6y ago

> more than most developed countries Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all. I look forward to a study showing that the US has really good paid leave compared to the rest of the world, so long as you denominate it in dollars not hours so that a marketing exec's six months "gardening leave" to prevent them stealing accounts outweighs Amazon warehouses with zero paid holiday...

wutbrodo 6y ago
> A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all. Does this comment have a point, beyond lurid and ill-thought-out analogies? Notice that even your contrived example isn't self-consistent: the only way the steelworker's unemployment check "wouldn't count" is if 100% of it was taxed away in the course of spending it. Even your fevered conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense! What motivation do you imagine the paper author has? The paper[1] spends a substantial amount of time focusing on poor US outcomes, and its point is that current US policy isn't actually saving us any money relative to the rest of the OECD, so our outcomes aren't even trading off against net economic benefit (at least first-order). Suboptimal distribution of our social spending (as in your ridiculous examples) falls squarely into this category, and as such is a potential target for the paper's criticism. [1] https://www.piie.com/publications/pb/pb15-4.pdf https://www.piie.com/publications/pb/pb15-4.pdf
- tialaramex 6y ago
  I'm not really imagining any "motivation" beyond the intellectual exercise of proving America spends lots of money on things it actually doesn't spend money on, by squinting until the whole world is blurry. Economists would like everything to be dollars, because that means you can plug numbers into a spreadsheet and get answers that work. Centuries of this not working haven't dissuaded them and I don't expect my rant to change that. People who actually think we should care about population welfare do not try to squint at the dollar figures like this paper, you'll see them looking at policies qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and this way you don't need to draw a dozen charts to come to the apparently startling revelation that the US is a wealthy country in which money is being stolen from the poor to be wasted by the rich and this is a bad idea. Sometimes this sort of work will be excused on the rationale that it will guide political decision making. This is an error perhaps everywhere and certainly in the US. A Republican is not going to read this paper and say "Aha! My policies were mistaken, I can actually have better impact by reducing tax breaks on the wealthy and directing the increased income to the poorest". They're going to glance at it, conclude it does not support the policies they wish to enact and so it's irrelevant.