There was a further series of more than 30 randomized experiments conducted around the time of the welfare debates of the 1990s. These tested many ideas for improving welfare. What emerged from them was a clear picture: work requirements, and only work requirements, could be shown experimentally to get people off welfare and into jobs in a humane fashion. These experiments were an important input into the decision to make work requirements a central tenet of the new welfare regime when the welfare system was converted from AFDC to TANF in 1996.
In spite of these studies, I suspect that the long-run response of work effort to incentives is high. Imagine two children, one growing up in a household where parents work at low-wage, low-status jobs, and the other growing up in a household that lives primarily on government support. Suppose that the consumption basket of the two households is approximately the same. Do we believe that the child of the parents who work will want to work when he or she grows up?
That said, I recommend the entire essay. Manzi also writes,
if part of the motivation for giving adults income is that they spend it supporting their children, would we really allow parents receiving taxpayer money to spend it any way they want with no requirements for child welfare beyond child abuse laws? And as another, a huge and growing portion of the cost of the welfare state is health care. Suppose we gave every adult in America an annual grant of $10,000, and some person who did not buy health insurance with it got sick with an acute, easily treatable condition. Would we really bar them from any urgent medical care and just say “Tough luck, but it’s time to die”?
I tend to agree that large cash transfers with zero paternalistic oversight is not a likely political outcome.
Charles Murray’s book In Our Hands describes a basic grant that requires the recipient to buy health insurance in order to avoid the problem Manzi describes.
The problem is all in their minds.
The folks are happy with their stogies and beer.
I might even be too. I seem to give insurance companies a lot of money and they have never saved my life.
Arnold,
I think you think this is a rhetorical question:
Do we believe that the child of the parents who work will want to work when he or she grows up?
But my answer is “yes.”
David,
The parental behavior will exert some influence on the child, but I think that peer behavior and rational calculation will kick in.
There seems to be something fundamentally unjust about giving a paraplegic and an able-bodied man the exact same basic income entitlement. Any equal entitlement would likely be too little for the former to live on, or too much for the latter to have any incentive to work.
There’s a reason the welfare state is complicated and messy. People’s needs are complicated and the trade-offs of the world are messy.
I think this argues for having two forms of assistance. One is a basic and crude cash or cash-like grant from the federal government. The other is targeted assistance provided by local government and/or charity.
and where does the “money” come from to do all this?
since governments produce no “money” how, and in what ways is it to be extracted (or re-directed) from (or within) the economy?
is it to be borrowed, as funds in excess of revenues?
From efficiencies of solutions to public goods coordination problems!
The money comes from tax revenues. That is the unspoken premise. This question concerns itself only with how to spend it. It is a political argument rather than moral.
I have seen twice now (but cannot find, sadly) papers that claim that a very important determinant of attitudes toward work were what percentage of the people in the neighborhood/community worked. That is, growing up in a community where “nobody works” was the thing that strongly caused youth to grow up thinking that “working” wasn’t normal, or that “not working” was the norm.
So we might ask a different version of the question – given a neighborhood where 90% of the adult population are visibly observed to be engaged in work, business, authorship, or the like, and a second where 90% are visibly observed to live off some kind of assistance, what will the employment rates of the children in those communities be when they are adults.
Assuming that long idea is somehow correct, the thing to support healthy (and thus sustainable) patterns of work and trade would be to minimize the percentage of the population in any one neighborhood living assistance.
Everybody dies.