Today I Learned...

There are a lot of policy proposals, mostly but not exclusively progression, that I find troubling. I agree that the thing they are aimed at is negative, and that if their policy works as proposed it will weaken the effect, but I don't trust it. I either end up criticizing the proposals on libertarian grounds or just expressing a vague sense of unease, neither of which has the slightest effect on proponents.

Affirmative action used to fall into this category, but I now have some more articulate objections. Affirmative action is premised on the idea that the solution to black poverty is for white people to give them things. Not that the jobs are charity, but they're still given at the whim of white people, and ensure that the most rewards go to minorities who are best at assimilating into white middle class protestant culture. I would much rather have funded black entrepreneurs so they could be successful on their own terms. Or maybe just extended the protection of law so that white people didn't burn down their businesses *quite* so often. Or not used eminent domain to tear down black businesses to build housing projects, nominally aimed at helping the poor, and structured bidding so only white firms had a chance.*

Now I can move "fighting inequality" out of the inarticulate-unease/libertarian-sputtering category and into the real reasons category, thanks to Ezra Klein. He suggests that while inequality is bad, unemployment is worse, and we change priorities accordingly. I agree, but that's not impressive because I don't think inequality is bad. I also think most government efforts to increase employment are counterproductive and harmful. But Klein brings up the excellent point that there's at least one thing the government does that actively raises unemployment, and all they would have to do to lower unemployment is stop doing it.

They're not doing it for no reason, of course. They do it in the name of fighting inflation, which is generally considered to be good. But why? And have we ever measured how good low inflation is, relative to the costs of high unemployment? Unemployment makes people really fucking miserable. Moreover, inflation hurts net savers (i.e. wealthy people) and helps net debtors (i.e. poor people). And the closer we run to full employment, the less employers can get away with the soul crushing shit they pull on McJob holders (i.e. poor people). So prioritizing low inflation over high employment benefits the rich at the expense of the poor in every possible way.**

My conspiracy theory? The proposed solution to inequality is usually taxes. Taxes will always be worst for the people with the least flexibility. Flexibility increases with wealth. So in general, taxes will be worse for the rich than the truly wealthy. But there is no dodging inflation. That will hit the wealthy and there is very little they can do about it.***

Inflation also incentives people to invest in high-risk/high-reward ventures (which have a higher likelihood of creating jobs, although also a higher risk of royally fucking up the economy. Tto be fair, that risk will hit the rich harder than the wealthy) as opposed to letting it sit in bonds. It fights entrenched wealth by reducing the value of it, without the nasty side effects of an estate tax. It pushes everyone to keep creating rather than rest on accumulated wealth.

Let me note that as a net saver, I'm advocating against my own interests here. But however bad inflation may be, I think the moral thing right now is to tolerate a bit more of it in exchange for higher employment.



*Source: The Pruit-Igoe Complex

**Note: I'm assuming the alternative to low inflation is higher but *steady* inflation. Hyperinflation and unexpected spikes are still really bad for the economy as a whole.

***I'm not an accountant, I think that overseas investing might be an option, and that would have consequences for the US.

When the Mother Jones article on worker condition inside an Amazon warehouse came out, I was not sympathetic. Yes, the company wants you to work fast. I don't consider it damning that a writer on an assignment was unable to meet quota for a highly physical job. Okay, it sounds mean that they will fire you for saying "This is the best I can do" but again, they have the right to retain the fastest workers. It is weird that they will fire you for missing a day your first week, no matter what the excuse, but then hire you back. That's expensive to them and could be fixed with some discretion. And not giving employees lockers is a total dick move. They can't even keep their keys or phones on them in the warehouse, so they have to hide them and pray. Making all the employees break at once is pretty cruel too, given the bottlenecks of metal detector and bathroom.

Debt talks a lot about how slavery, debt, and ripping people from their contexts are intimately linked. Slaves don't get to have social networks like owners, or even poor free people. Slavery often originates as a way of paying off debts/response to debts unable to be paid. Debt itself is about removal of context- people will do things to get out of debt they never would have for the the same amount of money outright. People will accept treatment of debtors for being debt that they would never accept as conditions for getting out of whatever caused the debt in the first place. Somehow the gap between original conditions (sick child) and when the payment comes due changes the moral calculus. And since money's entire purpose is to reduce the context necessary for economic exchange, it does the same thing.

I've had shitty jobs, but I never had a McJob, and I am beginning to recognize the importance of that distinction. I have never felt interchangeable. My shittiest job was summer school tutor. The teachers didn't even want me, my position was funded by a federal grant meant mostly to help the tutors themselves, finding people qualified to take the position would have been trivial... and yet, once I was in the classroom and working with kids, I was an individual with an individual position. I was not irreplaceable, but replacing me had a cost. If I had screwed up, the school would have had reason to pause before letting me go. The thing about McJobs is that no matter how good you are at them, you're replaceable. Even the fastest warehouse picker can be replaced by a finite number of other pickers. It's not until you get late 90s level unemployment levels that unskilled labor any leverage over your employers.

Which explains the unmeetable picker quotas. But why can't they get some g-ddamned lockers? I know the employees are replaceable and the margins low, but I can't imagine there wouldn't be some productivity benefit to employees not spending their entire workday wondering if their car will be there when they get back, and that that benefit exceeds the cost of the lockers. I'm having trouble typing this because I feel like a dirty commie*, but I believe my friends' explanations that it's a deliberate attempt to keep the workers down. That if you consistently tell them they're not even worth lockers, they won't be able to ask for more. I've talked about government and sick systems in poverty, and those are at least nominally designed to help people. Corporations will proudly state they're not allowed to have morals.

Yesterday I talked about the gaslighting involved in subtle racism: why wouldn't the same thing apply here? Once you've accepted that employers want you to fear losing your phone every day, it's not crazy to wonder if they're deliberately setting your quota beyond what a mortal is capable of so they can yell at you. Especially when they will fire you for not promising to try harder, regardless of what your numbers do. Maybe the McWorkers aren't in a position to judge exactly where economic rationality ends and arbitrary cruelty begins and letting that devalue their point is choosing to let the toxin win.

*And then I swing around to "only an unfeeling neocon would be feeling that"

I have finally found a convincing counterargument to my belief that cash aid is better than in-kind and restricted aid (e.g. public housing and housing vouchers). My belief was based on the following:

1. Data showing that cash transfers are better at lifting people out of poverty than specific aid.
   
2. Intuition that people are generally better at knowing what they need than the government
   
3. Intuition that if they don't, they need to learn, and this is how to do it.
   
4. A willingness to let mentally competent adults starve for their own bad decisions.
   
5. Belief that the government claiming to best know how people should spend their money was inherently paternalistic and poisonous to a healthy citizenry even when it's government provided money.
   

My goal in anti-poverty intervention is not to eliminate poverty or suffering, but to make sure that an individual's suffering is mostly a result of their own, recent choices, and not bad luck, environmental factors outside their control, other humans, or shitty choices they made when they were 15. Or even mildly poor choices they made a month ago, depending on the cost to do so.

Here are two things I have thought of recently. One, decision fatigue is a thing. There is space to recognize and accommodate that without creating a cycle of dependency. Of course, our current programs often manage to be condescending and induce decision fatigue, so this is no defense of them, but the theory is there.

The second specifically applies to housing, and other consumables requiring extended contracts. Low, and especially high variance, income can easily lead to a poor credit rating. Poor credit makes housing harder to find, lower quality, and more expensive- and justifiably so, since tenants with low credit ratings are more likely to miss payments. You can compensate with a higher deposit, but that doesn't help the poor. A dedicated housing allowance that is paid to the landlord in a timely manner (which the current housing voucher system demonstrably does not do) credibly commits you to paying for housing. That insulates people not only from their own past poor decisions, but from the decisions of other poor people who have created the statistical association between poverty and irregular payment. Stable housing is almost fundamental in establishing a stable life and pulling out of poverty.

I am more and more seeing poverty not as a problem of too-low income, but of unpredictable income. And some sort of minimum income guarantee makes a really credible solution.

My municipality has public (government funded) assistance programs to help people make the balloon payment required to rent an apartment (security deposit/first + last month's rent, etc). As assistance programs go, I'm pretty okay with this one: it's a one time investment that helps people get into long term better, more stable, cheaper living arrangements. It increases mobility and threat of exist from bad situations. I like all those things.

But why is it necessary? At least part of the reason is the insane tenants' rights laws. If it takes three months from missed payment to eviction, landlords will demand three months rent up front. A friend of my is being evicted because he missed a payment. The landlord isn't out any money yet because my friend paid last month's rent when he moved in, but he doesn't want to risk a repeat next month. If they could evict on two day's notice, the economically optimal thing would be to take a more wait and see attitude.

Except those rules didn't come about for no reason. I couldn't move on two days notice, and allowing my landlord to force me to do so would give him an extraordinary amount of power. It becomes trivial to extort people, and it's most effective against the most vulnerable, which is the opposite of how I like my extortion to go.

Full disclosure: I already dislike laws that give tenants substantial lead time before eviction, because 1. they're unfair and 2. they push us towards more professional landlords and fewer individuals renting out spaces, and thus hurt both small time capitalists and renters, to the benefit of large capitalists.

This is a thing I've been thinking about a lot since I read Debt. It makes the point that medieval European peasants tended to be heavily involved on both sides of the free market. A household was extended credit by the miller, but they were themselves extending credit to the cobbler. It kept the system from spiralling into wage slavery* or debt peonage, while still giving useful signals about what things were and weren't wanted. It bears a striking resemblance to the ghetto economics described by Sudhir Venkatesh in Off the Books. I'm hoping that things like lyft and airbnb will move more of us back to that, but as they grow they're running into tax and regulatory obstacles.

And we have those regulations on hotels, and taxis, and restaurants for reasons too. Food poisoning, bed bugs, and kidnappings are real things that I think the government should work against. Regulatory capture makes it worse, but that's a distraction from the fact that every safety regulation disproportionately discourages new and small entrepreneurs.

Third, initially unrelated thing: I've been thinking a lot about parenting lately, and how we tend to emphasize protecting children from dangerous things, or teaching them to protect themselves. Avoiding dangerous situations costs them a lot, both in good things they miss out on, and bad things they would have learned from. If I have kids**, I want to emphasize resilience and recovery from trauma, not avoidance out of fear.

This is relevant because the government's current tact is a lot more like wrapping your kid in bubble wrap, and a lot less like teaching them to stand up and brush themselves off. Speculatively, what if we lessened food safety restrictions but provided free treatment for food poisoning? What if anyone could run a cab but everyone had a panic button that could summon the police immediately? I already think the government should spend infinite money in the War on Bed Bugs because fuck bed bugs it's a public safety issue. New reputation mechanisms are arising that could substitute for the closeness of a medieval village.

Once again I have no closing paragraph, just a bunch of thoughts.


*A phrase I still find ludicrous and diminishing to the horror of genuine slavery, but am now beginning to see what it's getting at.

**A thing I have been feeling more positive about since the hypochlorhydria was treated.

I think the commenters at boing boing are accusing wal-mart of free riding, by paying a wage that qualifies its employees for aid. That just seems sort of weird to me. It's predicated on the employees' health being a public good, a thought I find profoundly disturbing. In fact, it creates that same sort of unease when I heard people describing individuals' health as a public good to justify government funded medicine. It's just too close to owing other people your health.

It's also a little frustrating when people justify high taxes on the rich by saying it will be invested in public goods like health care, and then object when the rich actually receive some benefit from it. That just seems unfair to me.

And if you want to argue that Wal-Mart is able to offer lower wages because of that aid... yeah, that's plausible. Libertarians and conservatives have been shouting about that for years, only we/they were using it as an argument against the aid. Don't call me mean for pointing out the rain and then get mad when you get wet.

Both major political parties seem to yearn for the 50s: Democrats for the tighter wage distribution and the fact that people could raise a family of five on the salary of one person with a high school diploma working forty hours a week, Republicans because they view it as a time of "traditional values". If you ask them they say they mean less sex and more marriage, but liberals accuse them of yearning for the racism and sexism as well. And they're probably right: some conservatives actually wish we would go back to Jim Crow; some others don't, but also prove their points with statistics that register a woman who is regularly beaten but can't afford to leave as a marriage success.

I don't think this places the liberals on the winning side of the issue, however. Because when we reflect on how nice it was for people to walk from high school to union jobs, where they could earn a solid income until they died, we're really reflecting on nice it was for white men to walk from high school to union jobs, where they could earn a solid income until they died. White men had essentially created a cartel of labor through which they extracted a larger share of corporate profits, which was great for them, but hurt everyone else who would have liked to work. Slow food? Dependent on the mother having all day to cook. The "good death" at home? Dependent on free labor from women. Cheap schools with excellent teachers, and caring nurses with all the time in the world to take care of you? Dependent on women being unable to work in other industries.

There's also a pretty good argument that meritocracy will lead to a widening of the income distribution. If you were a smart kid born poor, the best strategy for you in the 50s was to unionize, so you could harness the power of all the other workers to raise your salary via collective bargaining, which the collateral effect of raising theirs as well. Now, the best strategy is to study and get a middle class job (which is not as easy for you as it is for middle class kids, but vastly easier than it would have been in the 50s), which leaves the average-intelligence-and-poor out in the cold. It also allows people who are good at investment, or thrift, or are simply incredibly hard workers, farther up than they would go in a more class limited system.

It would be nice to get the best parts of the good old days without the associated bad parts, but I think those are a lot more entangled than we'd like to believe.

There seems to me to be a conflation of the issues of poverty and inequality. These are different things, and fixing one does not necessarily help the other. First, poverty tends to be measured as income, and inequality tends to be measured as wealth. But ignoring that, you could halve the consumption of the top 1% without making a damn bit of difference in the lives of the poor. Or you could double the income of the bottom 20%, and it still wouldn't noticeably impact measures of inequality.

But, more frustratingly, it wouldn't make a difference in the official poverty percentage either. Government statistics define poverty relative to the spending of a family in a certain percentile. While this doesn't fix the poverty percentage at the exact same number forever, because you can have a lumpy curve, it does make it impossible to eliminate, or even particularly make progress against, poverty, as defined by the government.

If someone came to me with some charts and graphs showing "people require X, Y, and Z to reach goal A, which is what we've established as the minimum a human being should live at. X + Y + Z cost $n, we should make sure everyone has at least $n", I could probably be talked into it. I could definitely be talked into it if A was defined as "the threshold at which hard work and other virtues are rewarded" a.k.a. the amount necessary to keep people out of a sick system. $n would still move around, because new things (like cars or computers) become necessary (raising n), but then get cheaper (lowering n). Although this still wouldn't change the measured poverty rate, because that does not count government benefits as income, which means at every government program to decrease poverty by dispensing money fails by definition (same source as above).

Things like the 99%/quintiles/etc are ordinal rankings: they use the same math as the median. Average wealth/income uses the mean. When you have a distribution that has a hard stop on one end (due to both practical limits and bankruptcy), and no cap on the other end, you get what's called a long tail. So naturally the absolute gap between the top quintile and the second quintile is greater than that between any other quintile.

Additionally, the top quintile is the only one you can't leave by earning more money. Mathematically, the most you can ever raise the mean of a quntile is by ((income of lowest earner in the next highest quintile) - (income of lowest earner in quintile of interest))/(number of people in quintile), because once someone in the quintile earns enough to move into the next quintile, they stop contributing to that number. On the other hand, if someone in the top quintile earns more money, that's reflected in the numbers the way our intuition says it should. So comparing mean income between quintiles is only slightly more meaningful than saying "the average income of people earning $100,000-$110,000/year is more than twice that of people earning $40,000-$50,000/year."

I will listen to arguments that certain people are too poor and we need to address it, or that certain people are crooks and we need to address it. I believe that taxes should be progressive, although I don't think that automatically means no new taxes for people earning <$250,000/year. And as a libertarian, I am all about the argument that people above a certain threshold are using their money to buy power to buy more money without contributing anything to society, although my solution is probably not what the Occupy people want. But the only way to address the complaint that "the top quintile makes too much" (be it absolutely or proportionally) is to ban people from having too much money, even if it was acquired in fair exchanges from which both parties benefited. And I'm never going to agree with that.

Everyone but the people involved have noticed that homophobia, or at least vehemence of homophobia, is correlated with the number of things you do that the bible tells you not to. It's like they think you can make up for lust in your heart, or you know, killing people, by making life miserable for some other sinners.

One of the tragedies in Angela's Ashes is the father's pride. I put his pride in three categories:

• Pure bullshit. Example: forcing his pregnant wife to carry packages because it's undignified for a man to do so.
  
• Even if you spot him the principle, bullshit in application. Example: telling his wife she needs to wait at home for him to bring the money, because it's shameful for her to go to his job/welfare office and take it from him. Even if you think that's shameful, he should have thought of that the first ten times he drank his entire paycheck while their children went hungry.
  
• Sort of noble principle, still bullshit in application. Example: wanting to refuse charity and make do with what they have. There's some nobility here. But if it's so important to you that your children not accept boots from the church, don't drink the money you could use to buy them boots. Being generous with other people's suffering is not virtuous. Keep in mind that at this point in the story three of his five children have died, with malnutrition as at least a secondary cause, and he still views any money he earns as his to drink.
  
  
  This strikes me as a lot like the Christian right and homosexuality: a strong desire to be virtuous, but an unwillingness to give up anything they actually want. That's why having a gay relative works so well on them: suddenly their homophobia has a genuine cost.