Do Corporations 'Believe'?Follow

Ah yes, the conservative talking point that those poor people are just lazy!

If only they started looking for work, it would magically appear! The laws of supply and demand mean nothing at all! If those poor folks want jobs, they will appear!

Just how much cocaine do you have to snort to have your position make sense?

Nearly 50 years of social spending with no appreciable difference in economic condition for those who receive them which can even remotely be attributed to the spending itself?

The only improvement in the lives of the poor over the last 50 years has been the result of technology improvements (almost all free market driven) which have made available better products and services at a low price. A person on welfare today is no better off than a person in the same economic percentile bracket not receiving welfare 50 years ago (again, speaking purely economically speaking). We had poor back then, but they were working poor. Which meant that over time, many of them would improve their lives. Today, we still have poor. But they are largely unworking poor. A working poor person tends to not be poor 10 years later. A non-working poor person being provided with the same subsistence living will still be poor 10 years later.


This is not some crazy thing. It's basic economics. The only thing subsistence benefits do is allow people to remain poor indefinitely. That's it. I know that this is hard for those who've been told that this is utterly necessary and if we don't do it, people will die, but that is the true. In the absence of such programs people do find ways to provide for themselves. It may be hard at first, and some of them will never be able to provide for themselves fully, but that's a tiny tiny fraction of the number of people receiving public assistance today. Those who truly can't survive without assistance can easily be handled with private charitable organizations. The mere creation of government programs handing out free lunches ensures a long line of people who will all insist that they need that free lunch or they will starve. Take the free lunch away, and it's amazing how no one actually starves.

And the flip side is the massive economic boom that I mentioned. This is harder to measure concretely, but assuming that wages are always a subset of productive labor value (cause no one's going to pay you more than you generate in profits for them), you take a few hundred billion dollars a year less in transfer payments and shift that into productive employment and the positive economic effect could be pretty huge. It's something that I really think most people just don't get. Money earned is "free" from a macro economic standpoint. Every dollar you earn is matched by an equal or greater amount of increase in total economic production. Labor doesn't cost anything because it pays for itself. Paying for people who aren't working is a double cost, not only because you lose the money you're spending on them but they're also not generating any positive economic production. So shifting money from one to the other has a large effect on the economy.

We just don't notice it because it's a slow and gradual thing. We didn't one day go from no social spending to spending 15% of our GDP on it. But that spending is not only bad for the targets of the spending, but also acting as a boat anchor on our economy. We can't know how much faster, bigger, better we'd all be off if we weren't doing that. It's like a guy who's been running laps while wearing a 50 pound backpack. You take it off, and you'll be amazed how much faster you can run.

Is there some other data, and I mean data, not a story based on non-data, that you'd like to present?

In the absence of easily available assistance programs, more people will seek employment as a means to sustain themselves economically.

The actual data says otherwise. Countries with higher levels of social spending enjoy a much higher level of economic mobility, whether it's inter-generational or extra-generational. IGEM is one derived statistic that helps to derive the meritocratic nature of a country. The more having money tracks to previously having money (especially across lifespans boundaries) the less meritocratic (by definition) a country is. This same analysis can be run at more local levels, IE statewide, etc, and it follows the same policy-outcome trends. I could do a full breakdown on why, but as that can get exhaustive, I'd need assurances that you'd listen to reason. Is there some other data, and I mean data, not a story based on non-data, that you'd like to present?

We had poor back then, but they were working poor. Which meant that over time, many of them would improve their lives. Today, we still have poor. But they are largely unworking poor.

The actual data says otherwise. Countries with higher levels of social spending enjoy a much higher level of economic mobility, whether it's inter-generational or extra-generational.

What separates all of these places is more than just the strength of the local economy or the generosity of the tax benefits. As the authors write in the executive summary:

We do find higher rates of upward income mobility in areas with high rates of economic growth over the past decade, but the vast majority of the difference in mobility across areas is unrelated to economic growth.

So what is it related to? The researchers identify several factors with strong correlations: school quality, social capital and family structure (metros with more two-parent households seemed to have higher income mobility). They also found that low inequality and economic and racial segregation across metro areas were tied to higher income mobility, an idea we've written about before. Segregation hinders literal mobility – the ability of poor people to cross town to reach jobs and other opportunities.

but scientists thirst for knowledge and pursue it so that we may increase our understanding and improve our lives.

Well, he's not wrong... as long as you don't make a reasonable wage, safe working conditions, etc. a part of your definition of "job."

Keep cool.

Apparently the thousands of words already used as an euphemism for ***** weren't enough to fully capture it's intense and thought-provoking purpose.