George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan and UNC professor Karl Smith are debating the question: “How deserving are the poor?” Insofar as providing desert to the poor is a policy issue, Smith argues:
My thesis may be best understood this way:
There is no reason to view emotional or mental deficiencies as different in kind from physical ones. To put it in the harshest of terms, if you think someone who is born blind is deserving of sympathy and support then you should think someone who is born lazy and stupid is deserving of sympathy and support.
Further once you concede that the lazy and stupid are deserving of sympathy then its difficult to construct a set of poor people who are not, since these are among the least sympathetic qualities that could cause someone to be poor.
Thus virtually the vast majority of the poor are deserving of sympathy or support.
Smith and Caplan will do the debate squad thing while I will go in a slightly different direction. But the rejoinder I would make to Smith’s point – that the lazy are as deserving of sympathy and support as the blind – is that laziness can be incentivized or disincentivized whereas blindness can not. If someone is naturally lazy, we’d get more laziness by providing support for them. A blind person is just as blind regardless of our provision or our neglect.
But to my tangent, the problem, as I’ve laid out before, is that the federal government attenuates the magnanimity of the sympathetic impulse. To clean that statement up a bit: the feds steal the credit for sympathy granting and support provision, and they blur the entire exchange. This is the Costanzean “Big Salad” argument against federal government intervention in transfer payments, charity, or poverty relief. There is free-riding, misplaced thanks, and resentment all around.
What these middle men do, in effect, is set up a black box with inputting tax-payers on one side and output-receiving poor on the other. The machine through which sympathy i.e. money, is pushed jumbles up and strips both the sympathy and the humility from the entire transfer. The Feds are a Cyclops with horse blinders. They are devoid of judgment and classification, yet what is a more essential human tendency than judging and classifying? The people gaining on the other side of box are then viewed as unworthy of the sympathy portion of the act, and it becomes a case of “Show me the money” rather than “thank you”.
Along with this comes the debilitating “Can’t judge me” culture. If the government is handing out payments without judgment, and if no sympathy/humility is attached to the act, recipients are saved from their humility. Once that constraint is loosened, shamelessness and “can’t judge me” follows.
Contra Smith – whose forthright assessment of the cognitively or behaviorally deficient is refreshing in a liberal; he accepts the importance of IQ and heritability – who admits that the vectors of communication are flawed. With a blind person or a mentally retarded person, we can clearly observe the need for support. A poor person, not so much. As Smith lays out, a poor person can easily free ride on the poverty or the disability of others. If being poor literally provides a free lunch, a person can feign poverty, embrace the characteristics of the poor, or remain mired in poverty instead of seeking upward mobility. However, people are not willing to gouge out their eyeballs to achieve the same ends ‘enjoyed’ by the blind (though I have heard stories of gypsies who will maim themselves in order to increase the amount of sympathy i.e. money they receive. I saw an armless man outside of Notre Dame in Paris and was told that this was his strategy; I don’t know how much I believe that).
What has fallen away a la Charles Murray is the widespread aversion to shame. Part of “can’t judge me” is that people can do shameless things and don’t understand how wrong they are. Whereas people have always been shameless, there was never a cultural ethos which provided post hoc rationalizations for those shameless acts. Taking that governor away allows a feedback into the shameful act to the point that behaviors are stripped of all notions of shame. “It is what it is” once described outcomes; now it describes behaviors – as if both are outside of our control.
So for a conservative or a libertarian, it’s not about “hating the poor” or the disabled and not wanting to provide for them. It’s about not trusting those who might feign poverty or who are not trying as hard as they might. To bring up Murray again, we observe a lacks attitude towards industriousness and work. Comparing poverty today to poverty of bygone eras is not controlling for the quality of inputs. Are the so-called poor today trying nearly as hard as the poor of yesterday? By most accounts, the answer seems to be ‘no’.
The resistance on the part of the Right and net taxpayers stems from their inability to know who is actually poor or who is free-riding on the poor. The poor are probably happy to have more among their ranks. This improves their political power and exposes the issues that they deal with. But with that attention comes fraud. And when it becomes widely accepted that you can’t judge the actual intractable poor or cognitively/behaviorally deficient – well, that provides nice cover for those who don’t really want to push themselves too hard.
So to make a trite and probably difficult-to-implement suggestion, we need to resurrect the ability for benefactors to provide for the poor and actually feel good about doing so. Obligation must be taken away, as must free-riding on the “real” poor and truly debilitated.
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“since these are among the least sympathetic qualities that could cause someone to be poor.”
I don’t see why it is hard to feel sympathy for someone who is dumb.
Abagond has put the lynching picture up again.
My wife is Russian and I have been there numerous times. The only people you see begging there are old women (Babushkas). Generally, these are women who’s husbands & children have died and are living on a minimal Soviet era pension which is next to nothing. I really do feel sorry for these women and give out of charity.
You don’t really even see drunks lying around there, contrary to popular belief. They are rousted out quickly. The same goes for the obese. The society simply does not accomodate them. People are much more likely to not drive a car, most do some sort of physical labor, and do not have extensive rights to sue employers or the government for job / disability discrimination. It is not to say that you cannot be fat or drunk there but you will pay a much steeper price than here. In America, the people doing the begging tend to be men who at the least are capable of some sort of hard labor. Typically they are looking for drug money to make their lives more comfortable while they continue doing nothing of value.
“if you think someone who is born blind is deserving of sympathy and support then you should think someone who is born lazy and stupid is deserving of sympathy and support.”
This is the most ridiculous reasoning I have ever seem, and this guy is a Professor at Duke?
Nope, UNC.
Title: Asst. Prof of Public Economics & Gov
Department: School of Government (5401)
He’s not an economist, he’s a bureaucrat.
Lara – Abagond is a clown:
Negroes invented: civilization, writing, iron, geometry, or like even clothing.
Last I saw, negoes in Africa were still wearing loin clothes and chucking wooden spears if they weren’t living in a colonized area.
And I thought the negroes tried to claim the light bulb too?
This is the most ridiculous reasoning I have ever seem
What’s wrong with it?
I like this post, and I think there’s a really good point to be made here. A lot of conservative thought, economic and otherwise, is built around the idea that people have to take responsibility for their own success or failure. But a sizeable number of folks aren’t really responsible; they don’t have the ability to be. So what’s our obligation towards these people? Do we say “tough luck”, Darwinian-fashion? Or do we treat them somewhat like the way we would care for animals?
As blue-collar work evaporates (*if* it does; maybe that’s a big “if”), there just isn’t going to be anything for these people to do. In that case, I’m not sure I have a problem with caring for them – including the dreaded transfer of wealth the way we care for animals. Paying them to dig holes and then fill them in again would be better than leaving them to their own devices.
Laziness and stupidity can be self-corrected. A person born blind is plain-old fucked, and will need help.
@rjp: “And I thought the negroes tried to claim the light bulb too?”
Maybe George Jefferson Carter made a filament out of compressed peanut shells.
Samson:
“But a sizeable number of folks aren’t really responsible; they don’t have the ability to be. So what’s our obligation towards these people? Do we say “tough luck”, Darwinian-fashion? Or do we treat them somewhat like the way we would care for animals?”
That would be well and good, but when they are provided for the providers are not able to speak of the benefactors in such terms. If we accept that the unintelligent, lazy, or ineffectual are naturally that way and are pretty much like animals, we still have to speak of them as if they are adults, and we still have to treat them “humanely”.
So the liberal argument tries to have it both ways. They want the money *plus* the esteem of full humanity. I say they have to pick one or the other.
Abagond isn’t the enemy. I’ve become fond of his immense directness.
To play devil’s advocate, what’s the moral separator between humans and animals? Most people would say mentality and/or mental potential, not other physical traits like eyesight or physical strength. Start reducing mental ability/IQ and at what point does the individual start to be less human? Just saying …
If we accept that the unintelligent, lazy, or ineffectual are naturally that way and are pretty much like animals, we still have to speak of them as if they are adults, and we still have to treat them “humanely”.
Why do we have to speak to them as adults? I don’t talk to animals like adults, I do treat them humanely though.
“if you think someone who is born blind is deserving of sympathy and support then you should think someone who is born lazy and stupid is deserving of sympathy and support.”
Is no differnent than saying “You, who has no legs, here is a wheelchair so you maybe mobile. You, who is lazy, here is a wheelchair so you may be mobile”
Abagond is taking things White people invented and giving credit to negroes. Maybe us White people are all a bunch of idiots and at one point Africa was the Magic Fuckin Kingdom where the spear was treansformed into an ICBM and society and culture flourished, I think not, but that is what they would like to have us believe. — Watch,because of my last sentence some will say a negro invented the forerunner to the ICBM, the spearing stick.
George Jefferson Carter and compressed peanut shell filaments LMAO thanks nick diggler
Gorb,
You may like Abagond personally, but his views on race are very different from what you would read on Chuck’s site.
True, he’s the equivalent of a black racist, and deeply suspicious of white people. I’d be, too. His apprehensions are entirely rational. When I get on a subway and I’m apprehensive about the black kids horsing around, that’s rational, too.
I may be racist, but I appreciate a guy who won’t play mindgames. Compare, say, Abagond to Obsidian.
Blindness is rarely genetic. There is probably a significant genetic component to laziness. Also, it seems reasonable that blindness is much more strongly correlated, inversely, to obtaining sex than is laziness. Frankly, if you subsidize laziness the lazy are most likely to run around screwing all day. So, I work hard so other people get to have sex …
wait a second …
I’m lazy, too …
You get to work hard so I can run around screwing all day.
To abbreviate further discussion I propose we replace the phrase “lazy people” with “tribbles”.
To play devil’s advocate, what’s the moral separator between humans and animals? Most people would say mentality and/or mental potential
“Most people” would say that? Certainly not anyone who subscribes to the Christian teaching that humans are made in the image of God .
To abbreviate further discussion I propose we replace the phrase “lazy people” with “tribbles”.
I like it.
whatever we subsidize, we get more of.
If we subsidize laziness, we’ll generate more
If we subsidize stupidity, we’ll generate more
If we subsidize blindness, trust me, we’d see more of it.