8 ms·

Denmark’s Welfare State Became a Surveillance Nightmare

53 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

ovi256 4y ago
https://archive.ph/34YV8 https://archive.ph/34YV8 My take: we've asked the state to supplant the good part of old support networks (economic and social support through welfare), and hoped it wouldn't do what we didn't like about those support networks (enforce social conformity, now with networked computers). Turns out the state likes power and will take over all available mechanisms if we let it! Why are we perpetually surprised
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - olliecornelia 4y ago
    Who said that, somebody with dementia?
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      I think it was Ron Swanson as a joke.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      President Ronald Reagan.[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCedOQJ0ZEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCedOQJ0ZEA
      - pc86 4y ago
        We would have also accepted "yes."
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        Well, you are clearly not a man of culture.
      - jtbayly 4y ago
        No he didn't. He said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" Perhaps you didn't mean to, but your comment implies that Reagan said the opposite of what he actually said.
  - andrelaszlo 4y ago
    "We're from the factory and we've come to play"
  - akiselev 4y ago
    I’m from FTX and I’m here to make you money.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Tell me you know nothing about economics or policy, without telling me you know nothing about economic or policy.
- kardianos 4y ago
  Which is why socialism trends to authoritarianism in practice. Freedom requires keeping the responsibility, duties, and outcomes clustered together as tightly as possible. If I break it, it affects me.
  - Z7YCx5ieof4Std 4y ago
    Same as conservatism
    - soco 4y ago
      Uninvolved citizens lead to authoritarianism. Either some "enlightened leader" will take over the conservatives, or some apparatchik system will take over the socialism... or any other forms of soul- and life-crushing abominations just waiting to take over.
  - dbingham 4y ago
    The United States is arguably one of the least "socialist" of the developed countries and by far one of the worst for surveillance and authoritarianism. Indeed it's on the cusp of a full scale fascist take over. This isn't nearly as simple as "socialism trends toward authoritarianism". Which let's also clarify what we're calling "socialism" here. In this case we using it to describe having the government provide a social safety net. All too often "socialism" gets applied as a blanket term for "any government provided service" which obfuscates the actual issues rather than clarifying anything. It just makes the whole conversation devolve into a pointless ideological battle.
    - rendall 4y ago
      > it's on the cusp of a full scale fascist take over Not really. Or, rather, that claim is being used as justification for overreach and power grabs from the same authoritarians who claim to be against fascism.
      - mkmk3 4y ago
        "No, but yes, because it's a different unnamed party than the one I imagine you intended"?
- m0llusk 4y ago
  Sounds like a problem related to means tested benefits which could to some extent be avoided by transitioning to a universal basic income which has no such strings for manipulating behavior.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  If you read between the lines of the article the root of the issue is not that but rather the destabilising effect of large numbers of immigrants.
  - Loic 4y ago
    Sorry but no. The root of the issue is: "The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world." Please note the clear wording: "The perception ...". The far-right/populist in the EU is very good at using such perception to increase surveillance and control.
    - mytailorisrich 4y ago
      Where does this perception come from? And why has it become such an issue? Again it is largely because large numbers of immigrants have a destabilising effect on society, which fuels resentment and at least the perception that the national welfare system is being too generous and abused by immigrants, which in turn leads to politicians calling for more restrictions and controls, etc. It's the same across Europe and it's not helpful to blame the far right for this. The far right only uses existing concerns to its advantage like all political parties do, especially when other parties sometimes refuse to acknowledge those concerns.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        > Where does this perception come from? From the same folks who benefit from that perception. > The far right only uses existing concerns No, they're happy to invent/exaggerate concerns. (As, to be clear, are other parts of the political spectrum.)
        Spivak 4y ago
        Yeah, you can't turn on the news for two seconds in the US without "Can you believe that thing that doesn't happen could be happening in your community? Here today is senior speculative analyst and lead fearcaster at The America is Great Heritage Foundadtion."
nivenkos 4y ago
Nothing in the article seems too bad and they recovered several times their budget from fraud. It's good that they use technology effectively though. But the real question is why they don't do the same for tax evasion?
- short_sells_poo 4y ago
  Because with welfare your "adversaries" are people in dire situation who won't be able to fight back much. Tax evasion will generally run up against well informed and heavily lawyered entities (people or corporations). Alternatively, it will again degenerate to destroying the lives of small time tax dodgers.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >But the real question is why they don't do the same for tax evasion? Because "taxpayers" are a big enough demographic that you can't just kick them in the dick without consequence. Welfare recipients are a smaller and poorer demographic so the state can abuse them with invasive policy with less blow-back.
- bow_ 4y ago
  > But the real question is why they don't do the same for tax evasion? Who says they don't? If I had to guess, I would say the magnitude of the problem is just more complex. The tax system is more complicated and impacts more people. They did attempt to change the law to give the tax agency more similar powers[1]. Last I checked, it was rejected due to public outcry[2]. I do not expect this to be the last attempt. -- [1] https://kammeradvokaten.dk/nyheder/nyt-lovforslag-kunstig-intelligens-skal-bekaempe-skattesvig https://kammeradvokaten.dk/nyheder/nyt-lovforslag-kunstig-in... [2] https://pro.ing.dk/datatech/artikel/efter-massiv-kritik-minister-afviser-aendre-ny-lov-om-ml-i-skat https://pro.ing.dk/datatech/artikel/efter-massiv-kritik-mini...
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > Who says they don't? Here in the US, they don't. https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea... "Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to."
dfxm12 4y ago
Will lording over welfare recipients become another horseman of the infocalypse? "We have to surveil your every movement, including who you may or may not be dating, or else a single mother might get a few extra bucks to buy food for her kids." If you're so worried about fraud, one easy fix here is to make benefits universal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  The whole "preventing fraud" thing is 95% strawman. Most of this dystopian bullshit within various nations welfare/safety net systems is implemented in the name of "nudging these people into making the right choices" to the applause of the very same people who are generally enthusiastic about the existence of these systems in the first place (whereas the whole fraud shtick mostly comes from people who don't want these systems to exist at all). The people running these systems are not incentivized to care about fraud, quite the opposite really. The more money they dispense and the more people the serve the more important their program or department is and important they are. When government says they're doing something that increases their power over people at their expense you need to look at it the same as BigCo doing something that increases profit at the expense of consumers. Sure the pretext of fraud or theft or ambulance chasing lawyers might exist but it is not the whole story.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    The nudging being required is basically the fraud. The systems are set up to be used "in case of emergency", not as a life style. If you need to be nudged towards "hey, maybe get a job and start contributing to society", you're abusing the welfare system. It's for those who can't, not for those who prefer not to.
  - pizza234 4y ago
    When the country I live in started to give money to Ukrainian refugees, an Ukrainian friend of mine requested them as well (although they aren't a refugee), and told me that _all_ of their friend were doing the same (again, all defrauding the state). Which means, here there has been a lot of fraud in relation to this scheme. When it comes to welfare schemes, I'm very skeptical (like the current top post) that fraud rate can be as low as presented.
heywherelogingo 4y ago
[flagged]
- olliecornelia 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312
- zenapollo 4y ago
  Same thing and “same thing” - “same thing”
mamonster 4y ago
1. I find it extremely hard to believe that France has a 0.39% fraud rate, I still have not seen an even remotely convincing debunk of Cartel des Fraudes by Charles Prats to suggest that the Cour des comptes numbers resemble reality. Just putting this here because article says that the supposed 5% fraud size in Denmark is very disproportionate to Europe and lists France as one of the examples. 2. The social contract of welfare is that you have a right to receive money from government when you hit hard times and the corresponding responsibility to not abuse the privilege. It's not a contract if it isn't enforceable by either of the parties.
- meowfly 4y ago
  My brother works for a non-profit that distributes HIV drugs to the homeless. The biggest issue he has is that people will stop taking meds and disappear. They try to bribe them to come back with gift cards. He's expressed how valuable it would be if we could track these persons, but that it would be politically untenable. To me, it seems society should have some ability to do this for the sake of public health, however I also understand not wanting to wanting to grant this kind of power to the state, even if we are trading it for welfare.
- ouid 4y ago
  2 is an incredibly stupid system. Means tested welfare incentivizes people to meet the criteria of the welfare system. Welfare should just be a negative tax bracket. People mostly don't cheat on their taxes.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Mostly... :D
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  Meh, if I have to pick between 5% fraud rate while the other 95% get the help they need without hassle, or a 0% fraud rate and a system that's highly exclusionary and invasive, you're damn right I'm picking the former. Will there be some free riders? Sure. But in any system where support is available, accessible, and sufficient, that will always be the case. I'm not falling for the nirvana fallacy and you shouldn't either. Edit: as an aside, consider that these discussions always center around the fraud rate--that is the number of people receiving benefits who shouldn't--and not the unintended exclusion rate--that is the number of people who genuinely needed help but couldn't get it. That skewed framing is all about undermining the value of the welfare state over promoting it's health for the good of the citizenry.
singularity2001 4y ago
I'm hoping for a future where we can set a global browser setting / cookie "news-style=scientific" so that the article will aitomatically be transformed from "In a sparsely decorated corner office …" into something which I would read.
nbzso 4y ago
Social rating? Anyone? It is not visible for you yet? All that's left on the table is some form of major economy crisis, centralization of agriculture of government and renting it to Black Rock, Vanguard, and you have the start. Add to it wartime economy and things are coming to fruition. Or may be universal basic income? Choose your poison carefully, the governments always love double standards and outreach of power.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Yes. To the extent that the expansion of the welfare state means the expansion of the surveilance state, we will be in a vicious, vicious cycle of perverse incentives that will lead to virtual slavery for all except the tyrants.
euix 4y ago
I used to do this kind of work in the banking world, we built massive models to predict fraud in retail banking. The key observation - improvement in model performance was directly related to its invasiveness - i.e. the more you know about the client the more accurate and powerful the model became. In the end you end up tying together every piece of knowledge you have all the client or prospective client, across all databases and business channels and LOBs and building massive decision trees. But even at that level the false positive rate is very high - simply because fraud is a rare event as a proportion of the whole pool. In the end I came to the conclusion that the blind pursuit of model performance and thereby business metrics in this realm was simply incompatible with the idea of privacy. One must be willing to philosophically accept a level of fraud just as a free society accepts a level of dissent or a parent a level of rebellion in her/his children.
- mablopoule 4y ago
  It's the main point of the (excellent) book "Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World" by Dan Davies: That the optimal amount of fraud is above zero. The optimal amount is the one where you lose less value from fraud than you would have lost with overly-strict checks and false positives.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
It's almost like centralizing power into the hands of a small number of people makes it easy to abuse that power, who knew?
nix23 4y ago
They also canceled a holyday to invest the tax into the military :)
jacooper 4y ago
I remember seeing some danish users here on HN saying that they trust their government, and that surveillance only helps to optimize their taxes. Well let's see how long that trust lasts, it certainly didn't last in Europe[1] 1. https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on-germanys-angela-merkel-report/a-57721901 https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on...
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  What does this have to do with Danish welfare? Allies also spy on each other to make sure they're still on the same team and not dealing under the table with non-friendlies. The weren't spying on average joe citizens, but on high ranking politicians and weapons manufacturers. When you're in a military alliance with them you want to know what those parties are really up to.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    > What does this have to do with Danish welfare? I meant that the government isn't particularly trustworthy, so they will spy on everyone. They did it on their allies, they will do it on their own citizens and use it against them too. > Allies also spy on each other to make sure they're still on the same team and not dealing under the table with non-friendlies. The weren't spying on average joe citizens, but on high ranking politicians and weapons manufacturers. I doubt your reaction would be the same if it was Germany spying on the US.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >I doubt your reaction would be the same if it was Germany spying on the US. I'm not American but European and I support US spying on German politicians if it means keeping them in check from their ties and dependency they had with Russia till recently, since we're all in this political alliance called the EU and in this military alliance called NATO, and if German politicians decide to do some dumb shit, if affects us all in a big way as Germany is Europe's biggest economy so if they sneeze we all catch a cold. US and allies warned Germany repeatedly over their overdependence on Russian gas and Germany said "nah mate, it'll be fine". As a high ranking politician you wave your right to privacy when entering office and being handed insane amounts of power, so expect to be spied on. "Trust but verify" should be the norm for them.
b1c1jones 4y ago
Modern conservatism: the paranoid fear that someone, somewhere, might possibly be getting something for free. And they, horror of horrors, don't look like you.
wtmt 4y ago
Lots of disturbing things in the report, but I’d like to highlight a slight parallel elsewhere in the hopes that people can see where this could be headed if it’s allowed to proceed without opposition — India and its deeply flawed Aadhaar system. When Denmark lands on biometrics and 360° surveillance by linking various accounts and documents, it will get far worse. This “unique” number in India is assigned to residents (not just citizens) based on biometrics (probabilistic) across a population of more than a billion people (which magnifies the effect of even tiny error rates). Aadhaar is claimed by the government as saving money, but its results have been denial of benefits, including causing deaths due to starvation and people not getting pensions that they’re entitled to. It has also suffered a lot of scope creep where it is now the only document that the government as well as private entities demand as an identity document for various purposes. > Armed with questionable data on the amount of benefits fraud taking place, conservative politicians have turned Denmark’s famed safety net into a polarizing political battleground. > The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world. Same thing happened in India. The “savings” were also debunked through information obtained from the government (though the Supreme Court of India just took the government’s words on savings at face value and eventually decided that this whole program is constitutional). > The bill was backed by all of the major political parties in Denmark and became law in April 2015. In India, though the opposition political parties opposed the bill, there has been no difference on the ground. All the state governments, including those where the opposition parties (centrally) are in power have embraced this number. All of them have a standard formula: a) link Aadhaar with everything b) deny subsidies to beneficiaries due to network issues, biometric issues, etc. (Aadhaar is a centrally managed database that requires network connectivity for authentication) c) deeply cut or remove the subsidies entirely after some time > Jacobsen says her algorithms don’t actually cancel benefits—they only flag people as suspicious. Ultimately, it is up to a human fraud investigator to make the final call, and citizens have the right to appeal their decisions. In India too, the law says that nobody shall be denied any benefit for want of Aadhaar. But the reality is that nothing moves without it working. At least Denmark would have to consider privacy issues and privacy laws. India does not yet have a privacy and data protection law. It’s been open season for a lot of private companies (and probably other countries) for a long time with the amount of data that has leaked and/or is cheaply available.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

53 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

https://archive.ph/34YV8 https://archive.ph/34YV8 My take: we've asked the state to supplant the good part of old support networks (economic and social support through welfare), and hoped it wouldn't do what we didn't like about those support networks (enforce social conformity, now with networked computers). Turns out the state likes power and will take over all available mechanisms if we let it! Why are we perpetually surprised

Dalewyn 4y ago
[flagged]
- olliecornelia 4y ago
  Who said that, somebody with dementia?
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    I think it was Ron Swanson as a joke.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    President Ronald Reagan.[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCedOQJ0ZEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCedOQJ0ZEA
    - pc86 4y ago
      We would have also accepted "yes."
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        Well, you are clearly not a man of culture.
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      No he didn't. He said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" Perhaps you didn't mean to, but your comment implies that Reagan said the opposite of what he actually said.
- andrelaszlo 4y ago
  "We're from the factory and we've come to play"
- akiselev 4y ago
  I’m from FTX and I’m here to make you money.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  Tell me you know nothing about economics or policy, without telling me you know nothing about economic or policy.
kardianos 4y ago
Which is why socialism trends to authoritarianism in practice. Freedom requires keeping the responsibility, duties, and outcomes clustered together as tightly as possible. If I break it, it affects me.
- Z7YCx5ieof4Std 4y ago
  Same as conservatism
  - soco 4y ago
    Uninvolved citizens lead to authoritarianism. Either some "enlightened leader" will take over the conservatives, or some apparatchik system will take over the socialism... or any other forms of soul- and life-crushing abominations just waiting to take over.
- dbingham 4y ago
  The United States is arguably one of the least "socialist" of the developed countries and by far one of the worst for surveillance and authoritarianism. Indeed it's on the cusp of a full scale fascist take over. This isn't nearly as simple as "socialism trends toward authoritarianism". Which let's also clarify what we're calling "socialism" here. In this case we using it to describe having the government provide a social safety net. All too often "socialism" gets applied as a blanket term for "any government provided service" which obfuscates the actual issues rather than clarifying anything. It just makes the whole conversation devolve into a pointless ideological battle.
  - rendall 4y ago
    > it's on the cusp of a full scale fascist take over Not really. Or, rather, that claim is being used as justification for overreach and power grabs from the same authoritarians who claim to be against fascism.
    - mkmk3 4y ago
      "No, but yes, because it's a different unnamed party than the one I imagine you intended"?
m0llusk 4y ago
Sounds like a problem related to means tested benefits which could to some extent be avoided by transitioning to a universal basic income which has no such strings for manipulating behavior.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
If you read between the lines of the article the root of the issue is not that but rather the destabilising effect of large numbers of immigrants.
- Loic 4y ago
  Sorry but no. The root of the issue is: "The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world." Please note the clear wording: "The perception ...". The far-right/populist in the EU is very good at using such perception to increase surveillance and control.
  - mytailorisrich 4y ago
    Where does this perception come from? And why has it become such an issue? Again it is largely because large numbers of immigrants have a destabilising effect on society, which fuels resentment and at least the perception that the national welfare system is being too generous and abused by immigrants, which in turn leads to politicians calling for more restrictions and controls, etc. It's the same across Europe and it's not helpful to blame the far right for this. The far right only uses existing concerns to its advantage like all political parties do, especially when other parties sometimes refuse to acknowledge those concerns.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > Where does this perception come from? From the same folks who benefit from that perception. > The far right only uses existing concerns No, they're happy to invent/exaggerate concerns. (As, to be clear, are other parts of the political spectrum.)
      - Spivak 4y ago
        Yeah, you can't turn on the news for two seconds in the US without "Can you believe that thing that doesn't happen could be happening in your community? Here today is senior speculative analyst and lead fearcaster at The America is Great Heritage Foundadtion."

nivenkos 4y ago

Nothing in the article seems too bad and they recovered several times their budget from fraud. It's good that they use technology effectively though. But the real question is why they don't do the same for tax evasion?

short_sells_poo 4y ago
Because with welfare your "adversaries" are people in dire situation who won't be able to fight back much. Tax evasion will generally run up against well informed and heavily lawyered entities (people or corporations). Alternatively, it will again degenerate to destroying the lives of small time tax dodgers.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>But the real question is why they don't do the same for tax evasion? Because "taxpayers" are a big enough demographic that you can't just kick them in the dick without consequence. Welfare recipients are a smaller and poorer demographic so the state can abuse them with invasive policy with less blow-back.
bow_ 4y ago
> But the real question is why they don't do the same for tax evasion? Who says they don't? If I had to guess, I would say the magnitude of the problem is just more complex. The tax system is more complicated and impacts more people. They did attempt to change the law to give the tax agency more similar powers[1]. Last I checked, it was rejected due to public outcry[2]. I do not expect this to be the last attempt. -- [1] https://kammeradvokaten.dk/nyheder/nyt-lovforslag-kunstig-intelligens-skal-bekaempe-skattesvig https://kammeradvokaten.dk/nyheder/nyt-lovforslag-kunstig-in... [2] https://pro.ing.dk/datatech/artikel/efter-massiv-kritik-minister-afviser-aendre-ny-lov-om-ml-i-skat https://pro.ing.dk/datatech/artikel/efter-massiv-kritik-mini...
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > Who says they don't? Here in the US, they don't. https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea... "Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to."

dfxm12 4y ago

Will lording over welfare recipients become another horseman of the infocalypse? "We have to surveil your every movement, including who you may or may not be dating, or else a single mother might get a few extra bucks to buy food for her kids." If you're so worried about fraud, one easy fix here is to make benefits universal.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
The whole "preventing fraud" thing is 95% strawman. Most of this dystopian bullshit within various nations welfare/safety net systems is implemented in the name of "nudging these people into making the right choices" to the applause of the very same people who are generally enthusiastic about the existence of these systems in the first place (whereas the whole fraud shtick mostly comes from people who don't want these systems to exist at all). The people running these systems are not incentivized to care about fraud, quite the opposite really. The more money they dispense and the more people the serve the more important their program or department is and important they are. When government says they're doing something that increases their power over people at their expense you need to look at it the same as BigCo doing something that increases profit at the expense of consumers. Sure the pretext of fraud or theft or ambulance chasing lawyers might exist but it is not the whole story.
- luckylion 4y ago
  The nudging being required is basically the fraud. The systems are set up to be used "in case of emergency", not as a life style. If you need to be nudged towards "hey, maybe get a job and start contributing to society", you're abusing the welfare system. It's for those who can't, not for those who prefer not to.
- pizza234 4y ago
  When the country I live in started to give money to Ukrainian refugees, an Ukrainian friend of mine requested them as well (although they aren't a refugee), and told me that _all_ of their friend were doing the same (again, all defrauding the state). Which means, here there has been a lot of fraud in relation to this scheme. When it comes to welfare schemes, I'm very skeptical (like the current top post) that fraud rate can be as low as presented.

heywherelogingo 4y ago

[flagged]

olliecornelia 4y ago
https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312
zenapollo 4y ago
Same thing and “same thing” - “same thing”

mamonster 4y ago

1. I find it extremely hard to believe that France has a 0.39% fraud rate, I still have not seen an even remotely convincing debunk of Cartel des Fraudes by Charles Prats to suggest that the Cour des comptes numbers resemble reality. Just putting this here because article says that the supposed 5% fraud size in Denmark is very disproportionate to Europe and lists France as one of the examples. 2. The social contract of welfare is that you have a right to receive money from government when you hit hard times and the corresponding responsibility to not abuse the privilege. It's not a contract if it isn't enforceable by either of the parties.

meowfly 4y ago
My brother works for a non-profit that distributes HIV drugs to the homeless. The biggest issue he has is that people will stop taking meds and disappear. They try to bribe them to come back with gift cards. He's expressed how valuable it would be if we could track these persons, but that it would be politically untenable. To me, it seems society should have some ability to do this for the sake of public health, however I also understand not wanting to wanting to grant this kind of power to the state, even if we are trading it for welfare.
ouid 4y ago
2 is an incredibly stupid system. Means tested welfare incentivizes people to meet the criteria of the welfare system. Welfare should just be a negative tax bracket. People mostly don't cheat on their taxes.
- mantas 4y ago
  Mostly... :D
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Meh, if I have to pick between 5% fraud rate while the other 95% get the help they need without hassle, or a 0% fraud rate and a system that's highly exclusionary and invasive, you're damn right I'm picking the former. Will there be some free riders? Sure. But in any system where support is available, accessible, and sufficient, that will always be the case. I'm not falling for the nirvana fallacy and you shouldn't either. Edit: as an aside, consider that these discussions always center around the fraud rate--that is the number of people receiving benefits who shouldn't--and not the unintended exclusion rate--that is the number of people who genuinely needed help but couldn't get it. That skewed framing is all about undermining the value of the welfare state over promoting it's health for the good of the citizenry.

singularity2001 4y ago

I'm hoping for a future where we can set a global browser setting / cookie "news-style=scientific" so that the article will aitomatically be transformed from "In a sparsely decorated corner office …" into something which I would read.

nbzso 4y ago

Social rating? Anyone? It is not visible for you yet? All that's left on the table is some form of major economy crisis, centralization of agriculture of government and renting it to Black Rock, Vanguard, and you have the start. Add to it wartime economy and things are coming to fruition. Or may be universal basic income? Choose your poison carefully, the governments always love double standards and outreach of power.

jollyllama 4y ago
Yes. To the extent that the expansion of the welfare state means the expansion of the surveilance state, we will be in a vicious, vicious cycle of perverse incentives that will lead to virtual slavery for all except the tyrants.

euix 4y ago

I used to do this kind of work in the banking world, we built massive models to predict fraud in retail banking. The key observation - improvement in model performance was directly related to its invasiveness - i.e. the more you know about the client the more accurate and powerful the model became. In the end you end up tying together every piece of knowledge you have all the client or prospective client, across all databases and business channels and LOBs and building massive decision trees. But even at that level the false positive rate is very high - simply because fraud is a rare event as a proportion of the whole pool. In the end I came to the conclusion that the blind pursuit of model performance and thereby business metrics in this realm was simply incompatible with the idea of privacy. One must be willing to philosophically accept a level of fraud just as a free society accepts a level of dissent or a parent a level of rebellion in her/his children.

mablopoule 4y ago
It's the main point of the (excellent) book "Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World" by Dan Davies: That the optimal amount of fraud is above zero. The optimal amount is the one where you lose less value from fraud than you would have lost with overly-strict checks and false positives.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

It's almost like centralizing power into the hands of a small number of people makes it easy to abuse that power, who knew?

nix23 4y ago

They also canceled a holyday to invest the tax into the military :)

jacooper 4y ago

I remember seeing some danish users here on HN saying that they trust their government, and that surveillance only helps to optimize their taxes. Well let's see how long that trust lasts, it certainly didn't last in Europe[1] 1. https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on-germanys-angela-merkel-report/a-57721901 https://www.dw.com/en/danish-secret-service-helped-us-spy-on...

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
What does this have to do with Danish welfare? Allies also spy on each other to make sure they're still on the same team and not dealing under the table with non-friendlies. The weren't spying on average joe citizens, but on high ranking politicians and weapons manufacturers. When you're in a military alliance with them you want to know what those parties are really up to.
- jacooper 4y ago
  > What does this have to do with Danish welfare? I meant that the government isn't particularly trustworthy, so they will spy on everyone. They did it on their allies, they will do it on their own citizens and use it against them too. > Allies also spy on each other to make sure they're still on the same team and not dealing under the table with non-friendlies. The weren't spying on average joe citizens, but on high ranking politicians and weapons manufacturers. I doubt your reaction would be the same if it was Germany spying on the US.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >I doubt your reaction would be the same if it was Germany spying on the US. I'm not American but European and I support US spying on German politicians if it means keeping them in check from their ties and dependency they had with Russia till recently, since we're all in this political alliance called the EU and in this military alliance called NATO, and if German politicians decide to do some dumb shit, if affects us all in a big way as Germany is Europe's biggest economy so if they sneeze we all catch a cold. US and allies warned Germany repeatedly over their overdependence on Russian gas and Germany said "nah mate, it'll be fine". As a high ranking politician you wave your right to privacy when entering office and being handed insane amounts of power, so expect to be spied on. "Trust but verify" should be the norm for them.

b1c1jones 4y ago

Modern conservatism: the paranoid fear that someone, somewhere, might possibly be getting something for free. And they, horror of horrors, don't look like you.

wtmt 4y ago

Lots of disturbing things in the report, but I’d like to highlight a slight parallel elsewhere in the hopes that people can see where this could be headed if it’s allowed to proceed without opposition — India and its deeply flawed Aadhaar system. When Denmark lands on biometrics and 360° surveillance by linking various accounts and documents, it will get far worse. This “unique” number in India is assigned to residents (not just citizens) based on biometrics (probabilistic) across a population of more than a billion people (which magnifies the effect of even tiny error rates). Aadhaar is claimed by the government as saving money, but its results have been denial of benefits, including causing deaths due to starvation and people not getting pensions that they’re entitled to. It has also suffered a lot of scope creep where it is now the only document that the government as well as private entities demand as an identity document for various purposes. > Armed with questionable data on the amount of benefits fraud taking place, conservative politicians have turned Denmark’s famed safety net into a polarizing political battleground. > The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world. Same thing happened in India. The “savings” were also debunked through information obtained from the government (though the Supreme Court of India just took the government’s words on savings at face value and eventually decided that this whole program is constitutional). > The bill was backed by all of the major political parties in Denmark and became law in April 2015. In India, though the opposition political parties opposed the bill, there has been no difference on the ground. All the state governments, including those where the opposition parties (centrally) are in power have embraced this number. All of them have a standard formula: a) link Aadhaar with everything b) deny subsidies to beneficiaries due to network issues, biometric issues, etc. (Aadhaar is a centrally managed database that requires network connectivity for authentication) c) deeply cut or remove the subsidies entirely after some time > Jacobsen says her algorithms don’t actually cancel benefits—they only flag people as suspicious. Ultimately, it is up to a human fraud investigator to make the final call, and citizens have the right to appeal their decisions. In India too, the law says that nobody shall be denied any benefit for want of Aadhaar. But the reality is that nothing moves without it working. At least Denmark would have to consider privacy issues and privacy laws. India does not yet have a privacy and data protection law. It’s been open season for a lot of private companies (and probably other countries) for a long time with the amount of data that has leaked and/or is cheaply available.

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