Here’s another one of the ads (and this one blew me away):
[Image shows a subway ad, produced by the New York City government, which says “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% change of not being in poverty.”]First, it’s factually true. Surely that ought to count for something!
But it’s not factually true. It is wrong technically, and it is wrong on substance.
Technically, it’s untrue twice. The 98% statistic comes from the book Creating An Opportunity Society by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. Haskins and Sawhill listed three social norms as crucial for avoiding poverty: Graduating high school, having a full time job, and waiting until you’re 21 and married to have children. So in two ways – forgetting that the job has to be full-time, and forgetting that you have to wait until at least age 21 to have kids – the New York City ad misstated the statistic.
It should also be mentioned that the statistic only refers to your chances of being in poverty right now. If you currently have a full-time job, graduated high school, and waiting until 21 and married to have kids, then odds are 98% you aren’t in poverty right now. But there’s nothing in that 98% which promises that you won’t lose that job tomorrow and wind up in poverty. It’s a statement of present correlations, not a prediction of the future.
It’s substantially wrong, because it concentrates all its fire on individual responsibility – all you have to do is get a job, and you won’t be poor! – about matters that are frequently not subject to individual control. Many people cannot control for themselves whether or not they have a full-time job. They can apply for work, but that won’t guarantee that they will get a job. “In the fourth quarter of 2012, nationwide unemployment rates were 6.3 percent for whites, 9.8 percent for Hispanics, and 14.0 percent for blacks. These elevated rates are projected to remain essentially unchanged at the end of 2013.”
There is an implied social contract, I think, between ordinary workers and the government. Ordinary workers are required to make a good-faith effort to support themselves. But the government, in return, should do all it can to bring about a healthy job market so people can find reasonable work with reasonable wages.
The government has failed to hold up its end. Faced with a jobs crisis, the government hasn’t done nearly enough to fight unemployment. The initial stimulus bill was barely followed up on. In fact, the government is making things worse with austerity policies, such as raising the payroll tax and pursuing massive layouts of government workers at every level of government. These policies mean it will take longer for our employment numbers to recover.
In that context, telling people they can avoid poverty merely by finding a full-time job is – well, the nicest thing I can say is “clueless.”
Further reading:
Rick Santorum says stay in school, work hard, wait to have kids, and you’ll avoid poverty. It’s not that simple.
Marriage is not antidote to poverty
Contra Santorum: Most Adults in Poverty Marry and Have High School Diplomas
I’m not being a dick, but could you read the book and bullet point the actual clauses. There’s lots of stuff missed/mis-stated by both you and them.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uIVOYV5rkWkC&pg=PA70&lpg=PA71&ots=iGGxlhtJTW&dq=haskins+sawhill+three+norms&output=html_text
Granted, there are oversimplifications, and granted, a message of “it’s all on you, do these things and you’re guaranteed to make it baby!” is pernicious.
That said, what elements of the “Can Johnny Find Work” equation that aren’t filed under “personal responsibility”, can Johnny do anything about?
Johnny is not going to be deciding how the government makes policy. At best, time and energy Johnny devotes to politics might get him a job there, but probably not. Unless Johnny is one of the cohort of unemployed economics BAs, it is unlikely that he can even figure out which party has non-stupid economic policies (neither of them), so any time or effort he puts into that is (a) not going to do him any good personally and (b) isn’t going to get smarter policies put in place no matter what he does.
Finishing school, deferring reproduction, looking for work, building a stable familial network – these things are not going to guarantee anybody anything, and certainly not at a 98% level.
But they are the things that are under Johnny’s control, and if he gets the impression that he can just drop out of school, knock up seventeen gals, and skip that whole 9-5 family guy bum trip, he’s going to be a lot more fucked than he is with an excessively optimistic line of BS as the party line.
Given that I know multiple single childless college (and grad school!) degree holders who are dirt poor and jobless, the ad seems more than a little… off.
Oddly enough, although the ad itself isn’t especially accurate, the converse of the ad IS accurate: not having a job and not having a high school degree and having kids when a teenager WILL in most cases result in poverty.
They’re advertising “A” when they should have been advertising “not B”
Forget pointing out the actual places in the book with those stats, I’d like to see the actual published research article that the book gets it’s info from. Scientists don’t publish statistics and findings in a book first, they publish in peer-reviewed journal articles first. I’d like to see the findings there!
You do realize that’s not what the ad is saying, right?
It makes some dubious claims about poverty, but the thrust is teen parenting. And avoiding teen parenting IS related to more and better future options.
G&W, the thrust of the campaign was teen parenting, but this particular ad does list “get a job” as one of only three points. I don’t think it’s unfair to criticize it, therefore.
By the way, there’s plenty of evidence that teen parenting is mainly an effect of poverty, not a cause.
For example, sibling studies have shown that where one sister becomes a single mother young, and the other one either puts off motherhood or never becomes a mother, the two sisters will still have a virtually identical chance of being below the poverty line as adults.
I’m not being a dick, but everyone is talking crap because they can’t be bothered to read what the stat actually is in the source. Do you really need me to do this:
1. They don’t mean get married before having kids, they mean be married.
2. The clauses refer to the household head not the individual. So you can have a kid, drop out of school, and not work – but marry right and you’re still okay.
3. They don’t mean be employed full time, they mean have worked 35+ hrs / week for 40 weeks / year. So the fictional unemployed are certainly included and part-time workers arguably.
4. Everyone with a family head under 25 – i.e. pretty much all teens – are excluded.
That is the definition of full-time employment commonly used by social scientists and by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (See how the wage gap for “full-time” workers is calculated, for instance.)
Really? Do you think if you work for 40 weeks and are sacked, you are counted as employed. And if instead of 35 x 52 hrs full time you do 27 x 52 that’s part time, but if you instead cut it 35 x 40 with 12 weeks additional holiday your still full time.
My bad – I misread you as saying “50,” not “40.” The BLS defines it as working 35+ hours most weeks for 50 weeks of the year.
Didn’t we try the whole “poor people have chosen to be poor” routine about a century or so back? It was garbage then, and it’s garbage now.
Teen parenting is mainly an effect of having unprotected sex under the age of 19.25. Does that correlate with poverty? I imagine so. Is it caused by poverty? I’m thinking not.
The “not B” instead of “A” makes some sense. Does going to school, not having kids until you’re married, etc. give absolute proof against poverty? No. Does dropping out and having kids give you a likelihood of being poor? Yep.
All poor people are not poor because they didn’t properly exercise personal responsibility. But a lot of them are. Whether “a lot” is less than or greater than 50%, who knows? But the message “This kind of stuff will likely make SURE you end up poor, don’t do it” is reasonable and worth publicizing.
Let me put it another way, Ron: Do you know the economic concept of opportunity cost?
For the girls (and boys, actually) I went to high school with, the opportunity cost of early parenthood was very, very high. Nearly all of us were guaranteed to get into a reasonably good college (or better), and all of us had some means to pay for that college. None of us had any reason to doubt that a good career (maybe with grad school first) was likely to follow college.
So if we had become teenage parents, we would have been giving up a lot.
For teens who aren’t guaranteed college, however – who may not know many people who went to college, don’t know how they’d pay, and whether or not they’re going to college don’t see a plausible path to a good career – the opportunity cost of teenage parenthood is fairly low. Not much is given up.
If you believe in the idea of “opportunity cost,” then it seems undeniable that the opportunity cost of early parenthood is greater for well-off kids than for poor kids. Therefore, economics predicts that the poor kids will be more likely to become parents early.
In that sense, yes, poverty causes – leads to – greater rates of teen parenthood. It’s not just correlation. (Unless you don’t believe in economics.)
The price of pregnancy and childbirth are also different. If you’re middle class or higher then there’s a fairly good chance that any pregnancy has to be paid for in cash. If you’re very poor, you have an expectation that the public purse will cover it. Medicaid therefore contributes to teen pregnancy.
Unless you don’t believe in economics.
Heh.
Medicaid probably has a small effect on teen pregnancy, as opposed to pregnancy in general. Insofar as any teen is aware enough of Medicaid to know that it would cover some of her maternity expenses, she would also be aware that those same expenses would be just as covered by Medicaid if she got pregnant at age 20 instead (or 30, or 40…). Medicaid, therefore, provides no incentive regarding when to get pregnant.
(This is a big contrast to the opportunity costs for middle- and upper-class kids, which give them a large incentive to postpone parenthood).
(Since the exact income cut-off for Medicaid eligibility varies from state to state, it’s theoretically possible for some clever sociologist to compare women of the same age and income across states to see if there’s a measurable correlation between Medicaid eligibility and pregnancy rates.)
I assume Medicaid has some small effect on pregnancy rates among Medicaid-eligible women of any age. But I think that effect is probably swamped by a much larger factor, which is, a lot of people really, really, really want to have children, and find the idea of a life without ever becoming a parent unthinkable.
I would like some facts or a citation to back this up that is from a respectable source.
Aww, you took my tongue in cheek comment with good humor. No fair!
Though, in the iffy eventuality that the ACA is fully realized, that differential incentive will disappear.
Simple Truth, do you know any poor people? It’s a minority among the poor, but there’s definitely a group where the reasons for poverty are derp-obvious and self-generated. Poor people are usually the first to admit this, usually with chagrin since they reasonably worry about being tarred with the same brush. Do you ever read Cracked? Drift over there and search for “about being poor”; they have a whole series of folk (but well-argued) anthropology pieces about the subcultures of poverty, mostly written from a sympathetic perspective, trying to explain to the children of privilege that not everybody living down by the river is there because of crack…but they also definitively acknowledge that, yes, the crack has its role.
Though its more early childbearing without vocational attainment, these days.
Also: it is a mistake, really, to look for the causes of poverty. It’s like looking for the causes of fish being wet. Poverty is normal, the default. Seek rather for the causes of wealth.
Simple Truth, here’s an article (rather than a whole book) by the authors of the meme which Amp successfully debunks a distorted media-fied distortion of.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/testimony/2012/06/05-poverty-families-haskins
They are pretty fair about it, noting that bad economic times cause people to give up working for reasons other than laziness, etc. But the strong correlation between three largely voluntary behaviors (trying to work, getting married before making babies, taking all the free schooling they’ll give you) and not being economically dysfunctional seems likely to mean something. Amp is right that it isn’t a prospective magic bullet, but it’s sensible behavior. Behave insensibly and you’re more likely to be poor.
“derp-obvious”?
I’m not even sure what this means and it’s still my new favorite neologism.
Robert – the sort of people you’re talking about aren’t unemployed. People can only be unemployed if your in the labor market. People with serious disadvantages aren’t.
If seems fairly obvious to me that unemployment is macro-economic. Individuals can influence their own chances, but if the economy can only generate jobs for 95% of people 5% are going to be unemployed.
Nope. 5% will be unemployed, minus the fraction thereof who go out and make work for themselves.
Macroeconomic pressures are certainly real, and certainly it is a lot more understandable for someone to not be working, say, now than it would be if there was a labor shortage.
But there are people who are out of work for X years, who don’t do anything in particular to take ownership of the problem. Taking ownership feels unfair; it feels like a cruel burden thrust onto people who probably didn’t deserve it. But tough titty. Cancer is an unfair burden too, but if you have it, you have it, and I can’t take the chemo or the yoga classes or the positive energy visualization sessions for you. Own cancer, or die; even more unfairly, sometimes its own cancer AND die.
Not to valorize my own heroic tale – I was born lucky and in possession of a luck mine, so I had some (again, unfair) advantages – but when the tech crunch of 2000 wiped out a kazillion software jobs, I did not the wait for the economy to invent another $70k no-effort sinecure for me. I took a job mopping floors at a pizza place. Eventually I took other jobs, tried working up the pizza hierarchy, wound up going back to college to get knowledge instead of another useless credential, and invented my own job.
Is everyone capable of that? No. Again, luck played a big role. But most people are capable of finding something gainful to do with their four score and ten, even if its shit work. I know guys who refused anything that didn’t amount to a promotion from their eclipsed tech job, and a few – not all, or most, but some – have done nothing at all except wait for “the economy” to suddenly need worthless layabouts again. It’s not a solid strategy.
And mopping floors may not cover the bills. But it covers more than doing nothing does, and establishes that the mopper is not surrendering to the god of the trend line. It’s not easy, but humans have the ability to fuck with that particular deity.
Robert: No. Those who “make jobs for themselves” are in the 95%, not the 5%.
We have chosen, as a society, to discard around 5-10% of our labor force. That an individual is in that 5-10% is, of course, a factor of their own luck, effort, skill, connections, race, gender, etc. But that 5-10% of our labor force goes to waste? That’s not due to a “lack of hard work” on those 5-10%. It’s due to choices made by the state. Full employment will never occur due to unemployed people trying harder: all “trying harder” does is change which position in are on the ladder. Full employment can only occur if we change our economic policies at a federal level.
edited to add an example:
Let’s imagine that there was a golf club of 100 people who played a tournament every weekend. At the end of the tournament, by club rules, the 10 worst-scoring players were soundly beaten up by the rest of the team with golf clubs.
Now, in response to someone who says “this is a terrible practice” you could say “those people brought it on themselves by not playing well.” Which is, to some degree, true. But on the other hand, that doesn’t change the fact that, every week, 10 people are going to get beaten up. While any _individual player_ can improve their game and get out of the bottom 10, all that they manage by doing so is making the problem worse for guy #11.
yrs–
–Ben
Presuming that the five percent is able-bodied, of sound mind, etc. –
What is stopping them from gathering scrap metal and returnable bottles from the side of the road and claiming the deposits?
What is stopping them from holding up a sign that says ‘general labor’ at the side of the road?
What is stopping them from providing casual child care in their communities?
The state isn’t making definitive decisions. It’s deciding that the cost of bribing businesses to find busywork for the bottom dregs is too high. But it does not forbid the dregs from taking initiative. We do not have a state-planned economy, thank Odin, although our technocrats try mighty hard to give the impression that their reactions to events are actually causal.
If you disagree, which state initiative created the multi-billion dollar Harry Potter franchise? JK Rowling was essentially unemployable. If her success was a mere artefact of central planning, and not a uniquely heroic act of spontaneous economic creation of wealth, let’s do it again a thousand times and wipe out the debt.
The rule at your golf club is that everyone gets a beating. The club buys, from group funds, 90 sets of body armor and hands them to the best 90 players. So 10 people are left vulnerable to the beatings…but nobody is stopping them from buying their own body armor. Capitalism requires, and the state enforces, that people can lay claim to resources to the exclusion of others – but fact that creating new resources is hard does not mean that the state or the system is stopping such creation. Your view is rooted solidly in a Marxist take on economies as fixed and distributed ex post facto by the exercise of power. But in fact they are dynamic and contingent on actions and choice, and created by thought and ideation; power-based rearrangements of the resulting rewards is a hideous alien graft onto capitalism, not a design element.
TL; Dr version: get a job, hippie.
Rowling wasn’t on the dole? I’m not sure she has the time to write the first book if she’s not being supported by the government for 2 or 3 years (I’m having a hard time determining the length of time).
Speaking of Cracked’s economic analysis and the idea that trying harder results in a different person losing, rather than fewer people losing…
In this case, it’s about the conflation of “anybody can be rich” with “everybody can be rich”.
And now I have “cracked hobos fight over beer” in my Google search history.
Robert, while I think you’re right that in some cases unemployed people could be creating a job for themselves and aren’t, I suspect that unemployed people refusing to take a job that isn’t in their exact field are probably the minority–mainly limited to people who had been middle- or upper-class professionals. I think in many cases, people can, and do, create jobs of a sort for themselves, but do so under the table, both because it’s the sort of work that is normally done under the table and because it’s not enough to support themselves. (Casual child care and picking up scrap metal and bottles would probably fall into that category.) I’ve had neighbors who I think did have jobs at least some of the time who asked me about mowing my lawn, etc. For that matter, one summer in college I ended up helping my mom in the garden extensively instead of getting a “real” job. (I thought I was getting an internship and didn’t, and my last summer job had already hired someone, and I was rejected by other nearby places, including McDonald’s. Yes, really. Apparently getting good grades doesn’t mean you’re good at quickly and cheerfully assembling sandwiches while people nag you to do it faster.) I can’t say that helping my mom with her garden was my idea, so I can’t take credit for creativity at coming up with jobs, but I was happy for an opportunity to earn a bit of money, even if it wasn’t as much as with a “real” job.
I believe Rowling was on the dole for at least some of the time she was writing the books, yes. That’s my point; she was in the classification bin of ‘people we don’t expect can support themselves’ that some are positing as a definitive, inescapable reality rather than as a temporary and incomplete assignment by one party, who doesn’t even have the decisionmaking power in the final analysis.
Sorry about your besmirched search history. You should see the stuff that would be in mine, if I didn’t wisely purge it with the holy fire every three minutes.
I don’t want to give the impression that I believe Individual Heroic True Grit ™ is the one overriding factor that everything derives from and that if you are working only 39/week hours during the Depression, it’s because you love failure the way a communist spy loves blueberry PopTarts. The environmental factors are huge. What you can do is shaped enormously by the tools and conditions you have to hand; Rowling might not have made it in an era when she’d have had to work a 50-hour shift at Taco Bell, instead of devoting countless hours to the creation of a magical and mysterious world that’s almost reached the convenience and utility of an 18th century Mongolian village. Nor would she have made it if she’d been working right after LOTR was published, because people would have said “can’t we just read the good one?” Not that I’m bitter.
But there is a key word in the phrase “what can you do”: do. There are lots of parallel universes where Rowling worked hard, failed, and is now working in some degrading and dehumanizing profession, such as editorial cartooning. There are NO parallel universes where Rowling didn’t work hard at creating her hocus-pocus magnum opus, yet somehow still wrote it and now craps on golden toilets.
Robert – central banks are inflation targeting, so yes someone is preventing full employment.
Yes. I am related to several of them. I was on free lunch throughout school and wore mostly hand-me-down clothes. The fact that I am considered not-poor now mostly has to do with an ex-boyfriend who transplanted me from Texas to California, gave me the confidence to realize I could be successful, and gave me the tools to “fit in” with rich kids. I still get edgy in fancy restaurants, though.
I still want a respectable source for the fact RonF based his conclusion that most poor people are that way because of a lack of personal responsibility. I think this statement is at the absolute heart of where we disagree. I saw a lot of factors tied into being poor that had to do with circumstances, discrimination, opportunity costs, and psychological schema that I think are very persuading.
If you want sources from me, you’ll have to wait until after May when I graduate, but somehow I think this blog itself and the links it contains would get you pretty far.
ST – He said a lot, not most.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I see the merit in many of the arguments locating much of the responsibility away from the specific persons.
Alex – How does a central bank stop somebody from babysitting?
Robert, it is obvious that 1) the central bank’s actions will not stop any particular individual from landing any specific job (apart from jobs at the Fed itself), and 2) nonetheless the Fed’s actions do effect how many jobs are available in the economy, and thus how many people are employed. (In a economy featuring low unemployment, working parents can afford to go out more often and thus hire more babysitters.)
If you’re not willing to entertain the minimal amount of complexity required to understand that both those things can be true at the same time, then your contributions to this thread are not likely to be very good. Please do better.
I have made it extremely clear that I fully understand the impact of governmental and quasigovernmental bodies’ actions on the economy.
“How many jobs are available in the economy” is a sort-of-useful shorthand, used retrospectively, as a rough-and-ready guide to the overall economic picture. It goes to how many people and organizations were ready to hire, had work needing to be done, thought that the skills to handle the work existed out in the general populace, etc.
But if you actually think that there’s a quantity of jobs “available in the economy” as a meaningful reification of how things actually work, or as a useful prospective metric, I fear it’s your contributions that are going to muddy the waters.
Who did you check with, to find out if “graphic novelist” was one of the jobs “available in the economy”? Now, indirectly, you may have “checked” in the sense of talking to other people who made graphic novels, seeing what their earnings were, assessing the marketplace for graphic novels, and so forth. But nobody was holding open a spot on a list for you; nobody made your job, except you yourself. If you had decided it was unworkable, and went to work at Taco Bell instead, there’s still one employed (and hopefully fed) Amp out there – did the graphic novelist job turn into a taco wrangler job, or what?
The central bank’s role in that is-there-a-novelist-job equation, setting interest rates, may well factor into your decisions in large and small ways. If you were going to finance your development cycle with a mortgage, for example, or if you were carrying a bunch of consumer debt at market rates, then things that the Fed did or didn’t do would have different impacts on your decisionmaking. But those impacts would rarely be dispositive; they might be dispositive for a company that had to finance a $10 billion factory complex. They’re certainly strongly influential across the employment sector, as a whole.
But they don’t really stop individual people or organizations from making individual choices and pursuing those individual or group agendas. Looking backwards at large groups, we can ascertain the impacts quite well at times, and can say “this anti-inflation policy of the Federal Reserve had X impact on the job picture” – we’re deploying shorthand, but economists understand what’s being said.
Looking at Amp as he squats outside the Taco Bell and begs for chalupa fragments, however, when we’re deciding how much sympathy to have for his plight, what we really need to know is what he did on his own behalf. That won’t be the only factor in his story, and it might not even be the most important factor, but it’s the factor that he did have in his own power to modify.
You can’t decide what interest rate you’re going to pay on your HELOC to fund the writing of “Hereville 3: The Hereining”, but you can decide whether you’re going to write and ink 5 pages today, or smoke pot and play Call of Duty.
The funniest part of that whole post is the idea that I could write and ink five pages in a single day. :-p
I very much lucked into doing Hereville; I was literally sitting next to the right person at a comic book convention. He was the right person because he is a far more famous and successful cartoonist, and he has a great agent, who by a lucky coincidence was in Portland that weekend (although she lives in NYC), and came by to say hi to him, and thus ran into my work. Without that, I never would have come to Abrams attention, and I would probably still be working as a wedding coordinator today.
That’s not to say you’re wrong. As I say in my school talks, I did the work and put it where people could see it. If I hadn’t done those first two steps, then I would have guaranteed that I’d never get lucky. (Even if I hadn’t gotten my agent, I probably would have been able to place Hereville with a publisher with a much less deep wallet, and would have been able to get it published, albeit not as a full-time living.)
If I had followed the same career path fifteen years earlier, I probably would have wound up a political cartoonist. But as it happened, I came up at a time when there were fewer newspapers every year, and those that were left were less likely than ever to employ cartoonists. After seeing Ted Rall’s lecture on (as I recall it) “why the job market for political cartoonists sucks and is only going to get worse, much much worse,” I began looking for ways to do some other sort of cartooning.
So yeah, broader economic trends have a lot to do with these things. If you go to a full-time working political cartoonists meeting nowadays, Matt Bors will probably be the only person there under 35. I guess it’s a lot like going to a convention of typewriter repair technicians in the 1980s.
I’m not sure what my subject is… Oh, right. Matt Bors.
Matt (a friend of mine) is extremely talented, and very industrious – so much so that in a field that effectively has had only enough space for one full-time new worker to be added in the last decade, he beat out everyone else and became the one. Probably he’ll find a way to scrape by no matter what the economy is like.
I’m really much more concerned with what the less extraordinary people – the people who will never have Matt’s natural talent, drive or social skills – do. In the past, they got jobs at Subway. But now there are college graduates applying for those same jobs. New studies show that employers basically won’t consider anybody who has been unemployed for over six months – a group numbering millions of people.
To way oversimplify, if there’s an economy with 100 workers but only 85 jobs, looking at individual traits won’t get you very far. Sure, we can look at Matt Bors and say “no wonder he got a job, he rocks,” and we can look at Bob Hayes and say “no wonder he has no job, he doesn’t understand what soap is for.” But the fact is, in a better economy, there’d be 95 jobs, and even Stinky Bob would have a shot at finding a paying gig.
When giving advice to Stinky Bob, it makes sense to focus on what Bob, individually, can do. But when we’re talking about what policymakers can do, that’s not the part of the equation we should be focusing on.
“But when we’re talking about what policymakers can do, that’s not the part of the equation we should be focusing on.”
Absolutely. Were the posters you objected to put up in the Senate dining room or something? ;)
And hey, I bathe once a month whether I need to or not. I don’t know what this soh-ap stuff is you keep talking about; olive oil and a scraper was good enough for Alexander and it’s good enough for me.
I share the concern, by the way, for what millions of regular Joes and Janes are going to do, or not do, as the economy continues the century-long trend of devaluing unskilled labor. (Though I find it odd to hear that concern explicitly acknowledged by someone who, as far as I know, is super-keen on not limiting the number of immigrants with even fewer skills.) A rebirth of the personal-service culture might help, though I find the idea repugnant…and I have my suspicions that the robots are going to take most of those jobs, too. Surely, some fraction – possibly even a large fraction – of the people who today tend to be largely unskilled, actually have the potential to be super-high-skilled, and just haven’t had access to the education. But it looks to me like about 95% of that fruit already gets plucked; it’s true that bright kids of poverty don’t get sent to Harvard as often as they ought to be, but it’s also true that bright kids of poverty DO tend to get to State U these days…and people who are genuinely bright and go to State U tend to utilize at least a big chunk of their potential.
That seems to leave mass war and Thunderdome as our options. What with the Chinese going all squishy and the Russkies crapping out entirely, who the hell are we going to fight? Mexico? And I don’t WANT to watch Thunderdome on the holotv. The holotv is for porn, damn it.
Because having large-scale unemployment is not a given. If the economy is growing well (as it has done in our lifetime), unemployment can be much lower than it is now. And immigration – including immigration of low-skill immigrants – helps grow the economy.
I won’t be posting here again tonight, gotta concentrate on my real job. :-)
“If the economy is growing well (as it has done in our lifetime), unemployment can be much lower than it is now.”
Only if the growing economy needs the skills of the people who were unemployed. During our lifetime, the nature of employment and the nature of needed employees has shifted radically. Among the population that is currently unemployed, I see bright vocational futures…for all the ones that are really good at symbolic math, love computers, and have a tremendous work ethic. That’s like eight people. Another smallish group may make the transition to an entrepreneurial lifestyle. The rest? Coddled children of middle class helicopter parents, raised to believe in their bones that staying awake (mostly) through four years of cognition-free bullshit at EverybodyIsAboveAverageU is an accomplishment that provides a moral right to a lower-upper class lifestyle at minimum. They’ll go in turns at being surly and unemployed, and surly and “under”employed doing shit work (badly, with a crap attitude and the same lapidary attention to detail they brought to their undergraduate studies), until they “retire” and sponge-hearted rich liberal cartoonists like you will insist that the productive remnant tax ourselves into smithereens so that the useless eaters, can.
You can have whatever tax policies and government encouragement of industry that you like…if the hugely-growing industry needs 3000 robots and 25 robotics engineers, it will hire 25 robotics engineers. And nobody else.
Not that I’m cynical or bleak about things.
The bulk of the unemployed are not actually college educated, as much as you want to stereotype them as whiny college brats, you ungrateful condescending ass.
True. But the new unemployed very often are. The non-college-educated have been having increasingly severe structural unemployment problems for at least the last three or four decades. That’s old news.
Oh and while it is true, it’s becoming less true.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/for-the-1st-time-ever-a-majority-of-the-unemployed-have-attended-college/257490/
At the time of this little blurb, about a year ago, the unemployment rate for college graduates was 4%, versus hovering at about 8% for non-grads. I’m fairly comfortable, if not condescending and assish, in thinking that probably the bottom 4% of the college pool is a pretty unemployable lot, and mostly for good reasons that don’t have much to do with central bank preferences.
“that probably the bottom 4% of the college pool is a pretty unemployable lot…”
What makes you think the bottom percent of the college pool is the unemployed part of the college pool? One of the huge problems with the really bad economy is that your whole company can go under, leaving the deserving and undeserving both unemployed. This combines with another facet of the bad economy, which is that there are quite a few very capable people fighting over the same scarce jobs. This means that capable people might end up second choice for a few jobs in a row (sometimes because the employer judges them OVERqualified) and then they are in the post six months dead zone where people won’t even look at their résumé.
Because at bottom I believe Darwin was right, Sebastian. ;) Is it probable that there are some astonishingly great folks in the long-term unemployed, unjustly overlooked by fool after fool of an employer? Some non-zero number, I imagine. But some non-large number, too. Given a reasonable degree of freedom on the part of employees and a reasonable degree of self-interest on the part of employers, and you’re likely going to end up hiring, broadly, the better of the available candidates.
It’s worth noting that the unemployability of people past a certain date is a quite recent phenomenon; it didn’t use to be like that and seems to be an artifact of greater power on the employer’s side. IE, employers think there is something wrong with you if it’s been that long, have always wanted to have the luxury of writing you off without the expense of evaluating you, but only recently have had a sufficient pool of short-timers that they could realistically afford to ‘X’ out the whole long-term pool. They probably have a solid basis for wanting to do that. Sucking and duration of unemployment are, I suspect, fairly tightly coupled.
Hiring the one who interviews best is not the same as hiring the best of the available candidates.
True. No system of discernment and judgment will ever produce perfect results.
However, the system as deployed by most employers either produces a result better than chance, in which case its hiring decisions will tend towards a long-term unemployed pool of the bona fide worst candidates, or it does not.
If it does not, then the vast amounts spent on the discerning and judging process are entirely wasted, and any employer in any industry will gain a huge competitive advantage by jettisoning all that weary evaluation and interviewing and going to a system based on pulling names out of a hat. You, I believe, are an HR professional and thus uniquely suited to implementing such a low-cost system. If you believe that chance will produce as good as a result, then for the sake of the economy I beg you, waste no more time here arguing with me. Go, and evangelize the new randomocracy, and save us billions upon billions, and with those billions, America itself.
So you’re pretty much ignoring what I said about things like whole companies going under?
I think Robert is just completely ignoring anything connected to reality and is just seeing how long he can get people to respond to him spouting some fantastically stupid shit.
Please dial it down a notch or two. Thanks.
Sebastian – Whole companies have gone under since there have been companies. There have been multiple qualified people competing for the same open slot since there have been jobs. So what? There is now and always has been massive churn in the employment market. That doesn’t mean much in terms of, over the long term, who is working and who is not. It is not an absolute truth, but it is a definite overall trend, that the people who cannot find work tend to be the people whose work is least valuable to others.
And when the economy is seriously down, there are more companies going out if business and much less churn to sustain those whose companies go out of business. That is pretty much the definition of a serious recession, right? Further, there has been a dramatic upswing in clearly silly credentialism.
But you argue as if you are unaware of those facts. Are you unaware? If not, how do they impact your argument?
No, that is not the definition of a serious recession. A recession is a certain period of time (NBER says two quarters) with a rate of economic growth close to zero or negative.
There has been a modest uptick of closed businesses, but I am not aware of any analysis which indicates that this is a major contributor to stickiness in long-term employment. If anything, a business closure is the best reason for losing a job (not that any reasons are good) because there is a plausible story that doesn’t put the out-of-work person in the role of villain.
I am not unaware of your “facts”, to the degree that they are facts and not simply your opinions, but they are not particularly compelling as causal factors in the unemployment picture.
I hold no brief for credentialism as a strategy, but I think making the case that it is silly is difficult. You would need to show that companies that disregard credentials are getting better employees at the same cost, or the same level of employees at a cheaper cost, than those who are not adopting the practice. Similarly, if you want to show that policies of not hiring the long-term unemployed are irrational or unfair, you need to show that there is a significant pool of unaccessed talent among the long-term unemployed, sufficient that the risk of hiring someone dreadful from that pool is outweighed by the bargain-basement gems to be found.
People do make mistakes and large companies are no more immune from error than anybody else, but there are often pretty good reasons for employment practices that are denounced as unfair by people who aren’t paying the costs of alternative approaches. When everyone or nearly everyone adopts a practice, in an area where the actors on the stage have pretty good data to work with…that’s usually a sign either of a massive discriminatory problem, or that the practice is a good idea. The reasons why the long-term unemployed might suck as a rule are pretty obvious; “companies are failing” is extremely weak sauce as a counter-rationale.
The old “discrimination can’t persist because non-discriminators would get a huge advantage and win in the marketplace” libertarian argument has a lot of holes, mostly having to do with the pervasiveness of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, etc. But discrimination on the basis of “nobody else was willing to hire this guy for six months” isn’t the same type of discrimination, and advocates of a view that the long-term unemployed is a population just chock-full of vocational goodness need to explain the absence of people pirating all that HR quality and starting up new enterprises on the cheap. I don’t think it’s impossible that there are some good people unfairly stuck in that pool, but I think that the obvious high costs of finding them, are obvious.
” But discrimination on the basis of “nobody else was willing to hire this guy for six months”
Again you’re discounting the existence of the most serious recession since the 1930s, and you’re discounting it all the way to zero. Your statement might make sense in 1993-1999 during the tech bubble when the labor market was super tight. It doesn’t make sense in the 2007-2013 period when a company gets hundreds of applications for each opening.
You seem to be very demanding about data on my side but very anecdotal on yours: ie when you say things like “if anything, a business closure is the best reason for losing a job…” Really? Maybe if you can get an interview and explain it. But the DATA shows that after six months you aren’t going to be getting the interview. So you appear to be ok with a situation where the company goes under, the good employee comes in second out of hundreds of applicants at his next attempts to get a job, and then slips into essentially not even looked at again.
And by “ok with” I don’t mean you disagree with any particular policy response, I mean you don’t appear to think it is a problem worth even thinking about.
For what is worth, I have no idea what would be a good policy response, but I think it is a devastating problem that we should spend lots of time thinking about addressing.
Robert, it seems that you’re resorting to grouptalk when it comes to rebutting anecdotes, and resorting to individualtalk when it comes to rebutting discussin of group data. Please choose one or another, will ya? Preferably the group model, since we’re talking about policy on a national level.
On a group model, we don’t know precisely why some people are unemployed, but we do know that a substantial number of them appear to have some marketable skills and appear to be looking for some sort of work.
Does it mean that they should go mop floors in a McDs? Well, not necessarily. I’m glad it worked for you, but sometimes it’s better (and more productive overall) to be spending your time job searching or training or networking, than it is to be working. The larger the differential between your “real” profession and your “fill-in” profession, the more likely that is to be true.
If you’re looking for an investment banker and you have two people who’ve been out of work for 9 months, would you rather hire someone who has spent 20 hours/week at McD’s, or who had spent that same time learning a new tool and keeping up with the markets? Etc.
20/20 hindsight doesn’t work. Should a new middle-of-the-class law grad from a low tier law school start a solo practice–which in some cases will preclude later hiring elsewhere? Should they try to find a law job–which, in this economy, might take them well over a year if they do it at all? Should they work at a non-law job, which may devalue their degree in the eyes of later employers?
The simple answer is that they shouldn’t have gone to law school. But it’s too late for that now; it’s a sunk cost.
It seems to me that you’re viewing this in a True Scotsman kind of way. If that law grad finds a job you smugly note that jobs were available; the circumstances of society are therefore pro-employment. If they don’t find a job (or make the wrong career choice) then it’s all their fault as an individual. But that doesn’t make sense.
But in any case:
You seem to be assuming that the status quo was evolved efficiently. Actually, it’s a bit like an appendix, and it stinks.
As a general rule, companies suck at hiring. When we look at how to interview and how to hire, overall we find that people don’t really know what they’re doing. It’s apparently a very difficult job to do correctly. Most people DON’T do it correctly, and the few companies that do (from Zappos to Google) have great success.
The reason that folks use signalling isn’t because signalling works (at least not in the case of unemployment;) it’s because it is simple, and because people in large businesses tend to be risk-averse when it comes to changing established “we’ve always done that” sort of stuff.
But they’re not, actually–at least not as folks define “long term” these days.
The group that is most likely to suck are the folks who got fired. The next group, perhaps, is the REALLY long term unemployed, as in “years.” But these days, the length of time that it takes for most qualified people to find a reasonable job in-field (which is often, though not always, the rational choice) exceeds the cutoff. If they graduated, moved, got laid off, got hurt, got sick, had a kid, or whatever: they’re screwed. And because they’re now subject to the cutoff, it pushes them inexorably towards the REALLY screwed category, since it becomes even harder to get work.
“So you appear to be ok with a situation where the company goes under, the good employee comes in second out of hundreds of applicants at his next attempts to get a job, and then slips into essentially not even looked at again.”
In six months, he tried to get one job? Yeah, I’m OK with pretty much anything that happens to that guy, vocationally speaking.
I’m not discounting the impact of the recession, Sebastian. I’m pointing out that *whether the economy is in a boom, or in a bust*, there is going to be a bottom of the talent pool, and that if companies have any competence whatsoever, it is likely that they are mostly avoiding the bottom end. I’m not asking you to provide data to support some common-sense contention about there being untapped talent; I’m saying that if you want me to believe that every hiring person in every company in every industry is an idiot, and that they’re doing worse than chance in their hiring choices, and that therefore the long-term unemployed group is chock-full of great hires, you need something other than compassion for the unfairly fired to back that up.
You note, rightly, that it is a new phenomena that employers won’t look at the long-term unemployed. What you don’t appear to understand is why. My explanation, as laid out above, is that they have always wanted to avoid this pool (because it has a lot of very bad employees lurking in it) but until recently couldn’t, because they couldn’t fill their hiring needs without it. They CAN fill their hiring needs without it now, because – contra Amp, who thinks jobs just come naturally with economic growth regardless of the skillset of the workforce – companies need fewer people than previously, and those they do need have specific skills unlikely to be found down there.
That’s my working theory, anyway. What’s yours? Note that – while I’m perfectly open to the idea that there’s a better explanation – I’m almost certain that the explanation does not involve a change in the morality or greed of employers, who a year ago were willing to look at the long-term unemployed but today are not. A morality/greed explanation itself demands an explanation.
G&W, though I agree that there are times when it might make individual sense to not take a job outside your field lest it damage your credential or look bad, I think that in the new paradigm of employers not looking at the long-term unemployed, you’re a lot better off taking the crap job. I don’t blame someone who didn’t and who is now stuck (I am doing a lot less blaming than you guys are blaming me for) but prospectively, now that he knows, better pick up that mop.
Your investment banker question is one I don’t have a problem answering. I will ALWAYS hire the person who took honest work rather than buffing their skills, unless the buffer can demonstrate some truly impressive progress or growth during their pregnancy-length involuntary sabbatical. If they can’t, then I suspect that they have an exaggerated notion of the value of their precious investment-banking skills, and an impressive ability to repel two hundred and seventy days of consecutive “you’re mistaken” feedback from the real world, a combination of traits I don’t want managing the commodities desk. I already answered your assertions about employers being incompetent to tell a gem from a brick; go collect the billions lying thick on the ground for anyone brave enough to hire by chance, in that case.
20/20 hindsight doesn’t work.
Well, that depends on what you mean by ‘work’. If you mean ‘to accurately describe and predict the job market’, no, it doesn’t. If what you are trying to make ‘work’ is an unholy mashup of secular Calvinism and defensive attribution, it works just great.
I’m just going to highlight this. True, true and true.
Are they better or worse than chance?
Better, but not nearly as much better as they think they are. And the reasons that they are better aren’t necessarily for the reasons that the hiring folks think to be the case.
You’re probably in a minority. And you’re not considering the cost/benefit ratio.
I’m a lawyer. If I don’t have legal work I could do something else–I’ve got a lot of marketable skills from cooking to construction to tech. But if people associate me with those things then they won’t be as willing to pay my lawyer rate. Similarly, if people employ me then (because they’re often bad at hiring) they are likely to take my past salary into consideration and offer me less, since I’d have demonstrated my “willingness” to work for pennies.
Joe Worker makes 100k/year and is newly unemployed. Jow has a future career where he’ll work for 20 years at leat. joe knows that because employers are not always good at hiring, they’ll often pay people based on what they MADE rather than what they’re worth to the company–an early pay cut can last the rest of your life.
You want Joe to take a job working at McDs for $25k/year, 30 hours/week? If it only has a SMALL effect on Joe’s future earnings capacity, it’s not worth doing.
It’s not feedback if the jobs aren’t there, right?
If you apply to 20 jobs and each of them has 2 applicants and you never get hired, you’ve got feedback: chances are that you suck.
OTOH if you apply to 6 jobs (because there aren’t many jobs of your type) and each of them has 100 applicants and you never get hired, you have no feedback other than “you’re not in the top 6%” or, perhaps, “they were looking for someone who wasn’t you.”
For someone who talks econ, you don’t seem to grok this very well.
“If it only has a SMALL effect on Joe’s future earnings capacity, it’s not worth doing.”
Sound logic, two years ago. Now, apparently, if you are unemployed for six months at a stretch, you’ll never work (for someone else for wages) again. It seems to me that if you know this – I’ll admit that many people didn’t know it recently – that your agenda needs to shift.
“OTOH if you apply to 6 jobs (because there aren’t many jobs of your type) and each of them has 100 applicants and you never get hired, you have no feedback other than “you’re not in the top 6%” or, perhaps, “they were looking for someone who wasn’t you.””
If over the course of a half a year of searching you can find only 6 jobs to apply for, then you have an extremely entitled view of your role in the economy. If your field of interest is genuinely that tiny, economically speaking, then I am going to suggest you had damn well better be in the top few percentage points, or not expect to make a living doing it. There are jobs for the 50th percentile CPA or short-order cook. There may well not be jobs for the 90th percentile classical musician or maritime salvage lawyer.
Nobody is entitled to a particular job at a particular wage. Nobody is even entitled to a general job at any wage.
Given a hiring model that does even slightly better than chance, by the way, and the number of job changes a person goes through in their working life (BLS has 10.8 jobs for the middle-aged cohort it started tracking on in 1979), then a large majority of people are going to end up correctly assessed.
“So you appear to be ok with a situation where the company goes under, the good employee comes in second out of hundreds of applicants at his next attempts to get a job, and then slips into essentially not even looked at again.”
In six months, he tried to get one job? Yeah, I’m OK with pretty much anything that happens to that guy, vocationally speaking.
AttemptS, not attempt.
Curse my aging eyes. AttemptS indeed.
Well, assuming the S represents a significant number of efforts to find work, then my sympathy for the poor devil is restored. I cannot envision a policy response that would do less harm than good, however, so I do not think we need to spend “lots of time” worrying about the situation. Many problems are not remediable with policy. This seems very clearly to be one of them. Require the company to eventually not put him in second place? Screws over the person who was better than he was. Require the company to not use length of time unemployed as a metric? Replaces the judgment of a distant and uninformed government for the judgment of the person on the spot and, very often, spending their own money and time on the employment process.
There’s just no government role here. Even if the pool of long-term unemployed people is where all the smartest and best-qualified employees end up, there is no protected class and no prospect of one legitimately being extended from the areas where we have decided that government intervention into private decisions can be justified. Government does not have a mandate to override private preferences in areas where those preferences are not horrifically invidious; preferring the newly-graduated or the highly-seasoned or the hugely successful or the derelict remnant of Solyndra, don’t even come close.
You can make a good argument for why it’s unfair, inefficient, etc. but government does not have any kind of authority to make sure that things are fair or efficient, especially when that effort would end up unfairly burdening other people (such as the newly-unemployed, or those doing hiring) and just shuffling the unfairness around.
I’m not sure what a good policy response is/would look like. But just because you can’t easily think of one doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying to think of one. At least we are in agreement that it is a serious problem.
It stops being worth trying to think of one when you reach the realization that it isn’t a policy question. Life is short, thought is limited, time runs out.
Now there’s circular reasoning for you – “I can’t think of a good policy, therefore it’s not a policy question, therefore I shouldn’t try to think of a good policy”.
Are you seriously suggesting that things are only policy questions if it’s really easy to come up with a policy?
(By the way, a policy doesn’t have to be “restrict the options of employers”, it can also be “create tools to help employers better assess applicants”, for example)
Read what I wrote. Your circular argument is not what I wrote. I said why there wasn’t a policy response, in clear English: because there’s no legitimate government role.
Wow, we can create tools to better assess applicants! What a brilliant idea. What a shame that the people with literally billions of dollars to gain from a slight improvement in their assessment skills are too stupid to have thought of that.
You are assigning government magical powers that it simply does not possess. There is very little that government can do that private enterprises cannot, and that little focuses around the area of killing people, or forcing people to do things that they don’t want to do. When you give government the role of doing things that private enterprise COULD do but has chosen not to, or has found to be too expensive, or what have you, then you are back to substituting one judgment for another – and the source of the judgment is almost always farther from the problem and less aware of the facts of the situation.
I may have misunderstood your reasoning, but I should point out that despite what you may wish to be the case about governments, they possess all sorts of powers that have little to do with the military or law enforcement. The NIH and NSF, for example, exist to develop knowledge is all sorts of areas, and there’s nothing stopping private enterprise from existing in the same space. That’s not magic, that’s part of what government does. Funding and developing research in to improving employment practices would well be within the remit of actual existing governments, not just the magical governments of fairyland.
Once again – read. The things that government can do that private effort cannot, lie in the areas of violence. The things that both can do, substitutes one judgment for another. Sometimes there is a case to be made for this – as in the basic sciences, where nobody would gain profit from a new idea and so won’t fund the research. Let us then substitute a collective judgment for the narrow parochialisms.
In the topic under discussion, it is manifest that HUGE PROFITS will accrue to the person who solves the problem. There is therefore no case to be made for substituting the collective, disinterested judgment for the local one – the local one has all the incentive necessary to do what can be done. If it isn’t being done, it is highly likely that this is because it can’t be.
I’ve read, you said I was attributing magical powers to the government by arguing it can drive social research. I pointed out that this is not the case, this is the type of thing that is not that different from what even the US government already does. I should also point out to you that the government in the country I live in funds a lot more types of research than basic sciences.
You and I have rather different opinions about what governments *should* do, and that’s one thing – but when you say that I’m “assigning government magical powers that it simply does not possess”, that sounds like you’re making a point on what government *can* do, and that’s a totally different thing.
I have plenty of arguments on why there should be a publicly funded line of research into hiring practices *in parallel* to privately funded research in these issues. I believe that when it comes to research, the government must always compete with private enterprise, and never just passively sit out and wait for private enterprise to do its thing. But that’s a rather different debate.
You’re missing one of the main roles of government, you know.
Government can act to get people do things that they DO want to do…. but only if everyone else does them. Or, government can act to get people to do things which will benefit them in the long run on average, but which are unlikely to happen based on short term costs.
Of the two categories you present, one falls directly into the category of forcing people to do things that they don’t want to do.
“I want to but only if everyone else does” = “I don’t want to”; if you doubt this, then apply the government force to everyone else but specifically exempt Mr. If Only Everyone Was Doing It, and see if they volunteer. They won’t. Now that everyone else is forced to do it, but I have a privilege, I’m even BETTER OFF continuing to not do it.
Forcing people to do things that are long-term smart but short-term stupid is less direct, but is still forcing people to do things they don’t want to do. Choosing long-term behavior, even in the face of costs, is a perfectly achievable choice; it just sucks.
Note that there is no moral condemnation involved in me saying that government makes people do things they don’t want to do; often, this is good behavior. There are people who don’t want to feed their children, or refrain from crapping in the street, or respect the property rights of others; that government forces them to do these things, or beats them (us) up for failing to do them, is fine by me.
Oh, sorry to come back to this (threadcromancy!) but the article in the Atlantic about how nobody will hire you if you’re out of work for six months or more? I just got around to reading it.
It’s wrong. Furthermore, it is stupidly wrong. I have left a comment there, with my usual grace and diplomacy, so if you’d like to read it or argue with me there, let’s do it there and not further muck up this thread, which was not about that article after all.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/terrifying-reality-long-term-unemployment-154818305.html
Of course government, and the law too, force people to do things they don’t want to do (or, in the alternative, not do things they do want to do. This is too obvious to bear much discussion.
If everyone sincerely wanted to adhere to the speed limits all the time even when they are in a hurry, keep the terms of a contract which has become, with hindsight, disadvantageous, keep their hands off other people’s stuff…the examples are too numerous to list…we wouldn’t need laws, the police, the courts, or maybe government at all. Everyone would do the right and upright and foresightful thing all the time. And on those occasions when I, as a driver, have my act together and sincerely desire to drive at a safe rate of speed, the Highway Patrol is wasting its time on me. And if everyone really saw and believed that it is right to contribute a fair share to fund the common good, we would not need taxes.
And pigs would fly.
In fact, isn’t that the whole idea of government? (Which is backed up by armed force, I remind you.) To force people to do things they may not at that moment, or at all, want to do?
As Robert points out, saying that government forces people to do things they don’t want to do sounds pejorative, but really, it is mere description.
Sure, part of what the government does is force people to do things. It’s a really important part of what the government does. But that’s just *part* of what a government does, and just part of what it should do. Claiming that that’s the main reason we have governments is entirely bizarre.
In addition to forcing people to do things they don’t want, governments can – and do – also encourage people to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t want or be able to, for example by providing funding and subsidies. Governments can also provide services that people want and need.
No one was arguing with Robert’s claim that governments force people to do things. The arguments was with the very myopic view of government that says that that is the only thing they are for.
You’re kidding, right? Wow, funding and subsidies! I take it those funds and resources are materialized at Hogswarts by elves, and distributed to the grateful subsidees?
What’s that you say? You say that the resources that the government is handing out were in fact taxed away from individuals who did not want to pay for the subsidized activity (as demonstrated by the fact that they weren’t doing it when they were free to do so)? How cruel, that this beautiful vision of a government funding and subsidizing blissfully all around the palatial national gardens should turn out to be another quite straightforward instance of government forcing people to do something that they didn’t want to do.
Government can indeed provide services. So can most other entities in a society, from individuals up through multinationals.
Why do you think that it is bizarre to say that (shorthanding it here) “government is the legitimate entity that can force people” is the main reason for having government? I have to say, it’s rather more like a fundamental axiom. It is the unique properties of an entity that produce its most fundamental reason for being; if two types of entity each have the exact same capabilities, then somewhere in the model we’re making distinctions without a difference. If IBM can do everything that the city of Seattle can, and vice-versa, then we can do without one of them.
But in point of fact the city can deploy lethality and coercion in a way that most would shudder from granting license to IBM to do, without disaster or police state or riots (most of the time). Seattle is a legitimate user of force; it’s a government. That’s what those are for.
I don’t think that conflating “unique properties” and “fundamental reason for being” makes sense (and it’s certainly not what Weber intended). My most unique properties are my name and history – these are the things that distinguish me from all the other humans – but my name and history are not my fundamental reason for being.
To say “the modern state is a community successfully claiming a monopoly on legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” is an observation, based in fact.
Saying it is the purpose of a state to be a community successfully claiming a monopoly on legitimate use of physical force within a given territory seems much weaker. What is purpose? Where does it come from? If “purpose” and “defining trait” are the same thing, as you seem to claim, then why do we bother having two different terms for it?
I think a state’s “purpose” – at least in democracies – is something that exists within the rough consensus of a community. If we mostly agree that the government has purposes other than using force, than it does.
Indeed. The purpose of the government is whatever the people want. But when what the people want are things that governments or unions or companies or guilds or radioactive monkey tribes are all able to do, then government has to pass some fairly stringent tests to be the sensible entity to provide the thing. The government can build cars and distribute them to people; if it does this worse and more expensively than Ford would do it, it’s a bad idea. Governments gets its revenue from forcing people to contribute, whereas most private entities are based more on voluntary transactions, so there’s a bit more scrutiny to “let’s tax everyone to buy everyone cars” than there would be for “let’s allow people to spend their own money on their own cars, or not, as they wish.”
People who like to think of government as a warm fuzzy group hug – as Eytan above, to the point of failing to recognize that subsidy money is first extracted from someone who does not wish to provide it voluntarily – always seem gunshy on this point. But it’s not like this is a radical new sentiment.
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” – George Washington
OK, it is *radical*. But it’s not new.
So government can have all kinds of purposes; it can set up gentle breezes to cool the elderly. But I think that I and many others are going to continue to think of its core functions as being the things that only it can do.
1.
I agree, but the same thing applies in reverse; before leaving something to the market to provide, we should ask if the market is the sensible entity to provide the thing. The market can distribute health care to people; but since ti does this worse and more expensively than the government would do it, it’s a bad idea.
2. Nothing in Eytan’s post can reasonably be taken to indicate that he fails to recognize that subsidies are paid for with taxes; that’s a ridiculous strawman.
3.
But many private entities rely on not fully voluntary transactions. People have to work in order to pay for the shelter they need to live, not to mention water, food, heat, and so on.
Sure, they could choose to live in a cardboard box under a bridge instead, so in that sense the transactions are “voluntary.” But you could also avoid paying taxes in the same manner.
Robert – I’m sort of used to your over-dramatic writing style, and I’m not taking it personally when you put words into my mouth, but I’ve never said that the government is our warm, fuzzy friend.
I am well aware that the method in which the government gets funded is inherently coercive. But what it chooses to do with that funding is not, at least not for the most part. And the core difference between government and private enterprise is, in my view, a simple one – private enterprise is driven by self-interest. You may choose to participate or not, but if you give money to a private enterprise, what it does with that money has nothing to do with your interests, only its own (this is not a criticism, by the way, it’s how it’s meant to be, and with the proper checks and balances, the self-interest of enterprise is a very positive force). Government, at least in theory, is not – in a properly functioning democracy, a government serves the interests of the same people who pay it. You and I may be forced into paying taxes (and that is my not-so-dirty little no-so-secret – as much as I believe that taxation is a positive thing, I don’t love paying it), but when we do, the government is supposed to take our interests into account as its primary motivation.
Now, we may all get cynical about governments, with good reason. And I’m just as well aware as you that most governments are not actually doing their job very well. But as long as we’re talking about what governments can and should do, rather than on what they actually do, then governments are supposed to play a role that is much more than just coercion.
(I also believe that the fiction that you are buying into about how governments are about forcing people to do things as their primary function is both a symptom and a further cause of the dysfunction actually found in governments these days, but that’s a slightly different topic and one that I don’t have the time to articulate properly at the moment)
Eytan characterized subsidy/funding as being something different than forcing action; that was the basis of my (ok, overly) snarky rhetoric. But subsidy/funding, despite the niceness perceived by the recipients, is purely and 100% forcing action. I did not want to to give the Ralph Nader Home For Wayward Pintos any money, so I didn’t; the government decided I was wrong and took $5 from me to give to them. Where in this, anywhere, is something non-coercive? Hell, they’re going to tell the RNHFWP how to spend the $5, too.
“in a properly functioning democracy, a government serves the interests of the same people who pay it”
So the proper role of the US government is to provide lavish services for the wealthy, pretty decent services for the middle classes, and crap on a stick for the poor? (Hmm, we appear to have hit the target in many ways.) That’s pretty much how the taxes shake out; if you take out the taxation and spending that’s supposedly going right back to the individual, i.e., medicaid, Social Security, etc., then it’s exactly how taxes shake out.
That’s OK with me and the other plutocrats chewing stogies in the secret underground bunker and making wagers on which homeless people will fall over dead next, but I would think it anathema for a progressive.
The “we’re driving our governments to madness with this crazy libertarian rhetoric about force” theory is quasi-plausible, as long as you don’t look at Europe, where the governments are a couple generations closer to total ramshackle failure-lock, and where a libertarian is someone who thinks that maybe we only need three railway inspecting directorates instead of five. The rot is worst, in other words, where the supposed causative agent is least to be found. No, service-oriented governments tend rust out because they can’t stop peeing on themselves for the lovely warm feeling it gives them, or so it would seem.
The number of agreements which can be reached by unanimity are, as the population grows, increasingly small.
The number of things which the citizenry “needs” to make things work are, as the population grows, increasingly large.
Similarly, the problems caused by free riders and poor sharing of the commons also scale with population size.
The end result is that you need government to have the power to act even if some people don’t want it. Otherwise it doesn’t work.
Amp:
I disagree. Having the market provide a given good should be the default. No barrier should have to be met for a given good or service for the market to be considered as the right mechanism to provide it. A barrier should be set and met only if we are considering moving from the market to the government in order to provide that good or service.
Not a very big one, I think. After all, from a market perspective you should understand that we can only GUESS at the real costs and benefits from a government program. If it seems like a good idea, it’s reasonable to test it.
That said, we also need to have some reasonably efficient way of testing, and discarding, things that don’t work out as planned. We don’t have that yet…
Robert writes:
Taxing people is coercive; giving them money, by and large, is not. These are different actions by the government, done at different times and (usually) by different agencies.
You realize this, which is why you included the final line quoted above. But I doubt you’d consider expecting a specific return in exchange for payment “coercive” in a market transaction; if I give a store owner five bucks and tell him I’d like the Spider-Man Annual in return, would you call that coercive? The store owner is free to refuse my money, and so is the RNHFWP.
Plus, there’s the example of someone receiving Social Security. You aren’t forced to cash the check, and if you do, no one is going to tell you what to spend it on.
“no one is going to tell you what to spend it on.”
I take it you’ve never been married…and that you live in a country not subject to the ACA. ;)
Amp:
Perhaps this is to your point: I think it was Sowell who said (and I paraphrase, poorly, perhaps), “in a truly voluntary exchange, both parties are happier after the transaction than they were before.” If you value the Spider-Man Annual more than you do $5.00, and Comic Book Guy values $5.00 more than the Spider-Man Annual, you will both be happier after you make the exchange.
Yeah, he could refuse to take your money (for whatever reason), but the exchange will only happen if both of you want what the other has more than you want what you have.
And, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.
-Jut
According to Wikiquote, this quote is misstated – and disputed.
I wouldn’t have guessed RonF was such a fan of crack, shoulder-launched missiles, and prostitution. :-)
“Robert is totally wrong about government in this internet argument.” — George Washington.
Checkmate.
I reel back, near crushing defeat! But wait…
“100% of quotes attributed to George Washington on the Internet are fabricated.” – Abraham Lincoln
A narrow escape, but I live to fight another day.