Accordingly, in the welfare state, decisions are made far from those seeking services and those providing them. Total funding is drawn from general government revenue and redistributed to those in need through direct government programs or government-funded programs. Very few programs are privately funded.
At this level in the system, the choices made impact the most number people but in the least visceral manner. Our decider is insulated completely from the consequences of her decision-making. Congressmen who enact laws mandating mental health parity affect the lives of millions of people just as congressmen who cut food stamps do. It seems inconceivable that a person at this level could viscerally understand the implementation of a program they cut or fund. Decisions here are not made from user feedback as that would be impossible. How can a person at this level incorporate the qualitative lived experience from millions of people affected by their decision? Decisions are subject to the influence of bias and ideology, special interest lobbying, and above all politics and self-interest.
Decisions at this level are a special product--one that reveals what the conventional wisdom is at a given time as seen by that individual. They are infected at this point with a seed of arbitrariness. Not just error but almost capricious error. Because the results of his error can never be known. Unless there truly are alternate realities in the universe, the unrealized possibilities from her alternative decisions will never come to be, are not definitely knowable, and can never be accurately measured.
From the highest level on down the line, each person who engages in budgeting and planning piles on another helping of arbitrariness. The HUD wonk who decides how many vouchers to give each state, each program, each group of those in need. The bureaucrat who determines eligibility criteria for each program and how to determine someone's true need. All of these people base their decisions on necessarily incomplete information. Government officials review data on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. A system that slow to respond is one that cannot adapt itself to the needs of its consumers in an efficient manner and mandates money to be spent inefficiently by providers.
That last part is what irks me the most because that's where I come in. I am left to coordinate in a system that is poorly planned (by design, not intention). At the level I work at, the qualitative experience of those served is most salient--second only to the individuals themselves. I seek out resources for individuals, but I am limited by the designs of those who make decisions above me.
Let's take the example of Kyle (pseudonym!), a client I work with. He stays with his mother, who lives in a two bedroom apartment in public housing. He is HIV-positive and is diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. He has a rather paranoid view of social interactions and systems. Kyle is also on parole for the next twenty years because he was caught distributing cocaine and was chased by the police across state lines.
In my assessment of Kyle, I see that he above all needs his own housing. Because his mother lives in public housing, he puts her at risk of becoming homeless, as she would be evicted from public housing if he were found by the police to be staying at her apartment because he is a felon. People who designed this policy were no doubt trying to weed out the criminal element that is prevalent in public housing. But he is no longer selling cocaine. He is simply homeless and relies on his trusted support network to provide him with a home.
In social work, we are taught to value the importance of a person's social safety net. Family, trusted friends are those who will provide the best environment, the most loving and understanding environment to those in need. In fact, I would wager that any social worker would be glad that he has a supportive, stable place to stay. They would in fact partner with him to buck the system and stay with his mother until other housing supports can be found.
The central planning of public housing necessitates that he must stay in a shelter or on the street because of the decisions of others. (Not that Kyle is beyond reproach.) From a top-down point of view, it makes sense that people with felony records are more likely to commit crimes and invite a "criminal element" into a community that should be sheltered from harm. That decision, however, cannot understand Kyle's life situation. In no way can it appreciate what harm he actually poses to the public housing community. So, he is left with the immoral choice of staying on the street/shelter or putting his mother at risk of losing her apartment.
Being a good social worker, I have worked with Kyle to get a voucher for independent housing. This is a tenant-based voucher which can follow him to any apartment which falls in the price range set by the government. He must, of course, qualify on their terms. He must prove his need. To that end, he must show how much money he draws from social security (SSI), prove that he does not have TB, explain how dire his housing situation is, and fill out a "housing plan" which will show his goals for housing and how he and I hope to achieve them.
I will submit these forms to a non-profit company who will use the money directed from the government to help him according to his means, as deemed by government requirements, and to a certain extent, the approximation of the person who reads his application. Kyle qualifies for many voucher programs because of his various conditions. He qualifies for a voucher based on his HIV status. He qualifies for a voucher based on his homelessness and coordination with a community support worker (me).
Both the HIV and homelessness voucher programs (HASTA and Shelter + Care, respectively) have waiting lists. He may be placed on the waiting list at various points based on the judgment of whoever is evaluating his application. He may be placed on the end of the line for HASTA but may be in the middle of the line for Shelter + Care. I can't tell him when he will qualify for a voucher for this reason. Here, we have multiple programs, each with their own funding sources and programmatic assessments of outputs. He will be judged not by his overall life circumstances, but how closely he fits with the missions and goals of each program.
Oddly enough, Kyle qualified for public housing (Section 8) himself many years ago, but was unable to attend his appointment because he was in a halfway house. Because he didnot attend, he was dropped from the list and was told to reapply. Again, the analysis holds that those who designed the Section 8 program wanted to weed out those who already gained housing or whose need was not great enough that they would miss their appointment. Calls to the agency to explain the situation are met with a combination of obfuscation and intentional ignorance. He is stuck with his reapplication date, many years subsequent from his first date of application, and will wait for many more years before his number comes due.
Returning to his voucher application, both programs have a limited amount of funds every year. The funding for each program is not determined by the need of the population served, but as explained earlier, is decided based on politics. Those politics, in turn, decide what determines a person's need. Since HIV in DC is on par with some African nations in terms of severity, a central planner has determined that housing for people with HIV should be a priority. In turn, he allocates some arbitrary amount of money to cover vouchers. People administering those vouchers determine what the market rent is in a given area of the city (there are many areas, each with their own valuation), and will cover up to a certain amount in each place. Unfortunately for Kyle, the number of people who are homeless and HIV-positive has exceeded the amount of vouchers and money allotted for that year. So, he must wait until a person loses their voucher by violating their lease or voucher terms.
Or, perhaps, until next year when more money may be budgeted for this group of HIV-positive individuals. All of these decisions are made far away from both Kyle, myself, and his future landlord. However, next year, there may be a new public health menace--IV drug users, transgendered youth--who require special assistance. The HASTA program will face cuts to provide for the new program for the new population. Perhaps, the councilman who chairs the committee overseeing these funds will lose his election and the person who replaces him will be one who is more sympathetic to those with Lupus, kidney failure, or other diseases. Maybe the schools will run over-budget and require a bailout, forcing agencies across the board to cut back. Whether Kyle gets an apartment or not is determined not by his actual need, but by considerations entirely alien to his circumstances.
Kyle is also faced with a pending court case for another, more recent, charge for distribution of cocaine. An undercover officer used a go-between to purchase cocaine from him. The go-between, in turn, rolled up on him, and he was arrested. Here again, a central planner dictated that drug use and abuse was a scourge on the country. He set up criminal justice interventions to root out this problem and rid the country of drugs. He could have been amassing money for a security deposit on an apartment, but it didn't matter. He ran afoul of a central plan.
Upon his arrest, Kyle relapsed for the first time in many years and turned in his first dirty urine to CSOSA. Accordingly, he was judged to need substance abuse treatment. Unfortunately, due to the allocation of resources in our local government, all male beds in substance abuse treatment facilities were full. He stopped using immediately, but waited for months to enter into a treatment program, so he could complete the requirements set by his pretrial officer. At this point, I can only think that if he needed treatment, how is getting into a treatment center 3 months later going to help him? He's still waiting to hear back regarding his placement. Again, central planning in the criminal justice system (a topic for a more elaborate post) shows how it is unsuited and cannot be tailored to an individual's needs.
You will notice that nowhere in the central planning system can Kyle's individual strengths and weaknesses be acknowledged. He is an input into the system, not a person. The treatment he receives is based on allocations that do not approximate the true aggregate need of his cohort, let alone his personal needs. He is deprived of agency. His natural resiliency discounted. He is subject to a system whose results are predetermined. Central planning leads to immoral outcomes. And that dirty feeling you can't wash off when you get home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes
ReplyDeleteZeno's paradoxes also had a great intuitive and rational appeal, until science showed their errors. Similarly, the mere existence of successful welfare states in tripartist (read: not socialist) countries such as Finland, Austria, and the Netherlands is evidence enough to show that societal coordination and planning are possible.
Here's the rub: you're arguing against a straw man if you assume that the northern European success stories do all of this through GOVERNMENT planning. Rather, they have employer, labor, and government coalitions all bargaining at the national level. It's less like Congress passing bills, and more like the Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, and Congress all sitting down together to flesh things out.
I only learned this last semester in a course called "Tripartism." Before that course, I made the similar error in calling those countries socialist or social-democratic. The way they run couldn't be further from socialism, in that the state has essentially ceded a bit of its power so that other organizations in the social interest can determine macroeconomic needs.
What gave rise to the academic literature on the topic was how successful these countries were at weathering the oil crisis in the 70s, and how fast they grew in spite of the boom/bust cycle. This macro coordination was surprisingly stable. Yes, taxation is high, but so is quality of life. And the countries have stable business climates that are high value-added.
I have an anarchocapitalist friend who outright refuses to argue on anything but a theoretical plane, because he thinks that empirical statistics are inherently biased. Please don't fall into that trap. If we're talking about how to set up a society, let's refer to concrete empirical examples of current and past societies. It doesn't take a radical progressive to admit that the best countries in the world right now are the most tripartist, not the most capitalist.
I wish you were a woman so I could be more intrigued by our debates. I've been watching too much Mad Men.
DeleteJosh, a few points to begin with. I think I understand why your friend would not argue on a non-philosophical plane, but that seems silly to exclude real-world data. I am a big fan of Maslow and though his theories have endless qualitative value, he always insisted on empirical validation. I also believe that libertarianism is the most humanist of philosophies, but that's another story.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to find it difficult to get a back-and-forth going when I feel out of my depth. I don't really know much about comparative government analysis. And I haven't read much about the economies you talk about. So, the only thing I really feel comfortable with doing is clarifying a few things.
Tripartist systems are in fact closer to socialism than not. (Again, I don't trot that out as a slander word but on the scale from anarchy to Orwell, it's not close to anarchy.) The collusion of three different stakeholders rather than one does not significantly change the relationship of the individual to the state. The state is still extremely powerful, but made slightly less so by the planning input of labor and business interests.
This does not seem so different, in effect not policy, to the American system. However, in our system labor and business interests use non-overt means of collusion. Large industries write regulations whose costs they can cover and rules they understand in order to reduce competition under the guise of saving industry or jobs. The Chamber of Commerce is an institution of DC and has a substantial impact on most legislation. Labor too holds an inordinate amount of interest in government policymaking. Public-sector unions in particular have a particularly pernicious and powerful affect on policy.
While the coordination might be more overt in these countries, I would like to hear from you (since you actually know about this stuff) if you could quantify to what degree that influence exists in the states versus the Tripartist systems. I'm making a public choice argument here. Since we pay lip-service to the free market here, coordination in policymaking is seen as unseemly. That does not stop it from happening.
As to whether those countries are the best, I can't really say. I'm fairly pessimistic in those terms about any country.
Finally, I find the comparative government issue to be particularly vexing because no government holds the system that I want. Not that I particularly know what I want (I have some ideas), but nowhere is near close. I can argue the merits of specific policies, but I will be able to provide no empirical examples of my ideal (or close relative.. or heck, anywhere that's trending my way). I realize that makes real-world comparison harder, especially since that means comparing other countries to the US doesn't really help. The US is pretty bad from where I sit, and if you use it as an example of a free market system, we will find it hard to get anywhere.
PS: I will post incomplete blog posts because there is no way to save drafts on this thing reliably. Posts with notes on the bottom are not finished.
If you feel this is out of your depth, then I won't belabor it much further.
ReplyDeleteOne clarifying point for myself. In the literature we read for the Tripartism class, the U.S., Canada, and Britain were referred to as "pluralist" and posed as a contrary model to the social partnership of tripartism. Whereas in tripartist states policymaking is directly done by the 3 major players, in pluralism you have tens of major or minor players all vying for power via the inefficient funnel of the state. This gives rise to a powerful and abominable industry of lobbying.
In the U.S. several of these players come to mind: Evangelicals, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, AARP, Greenpeace, etc. Rather than being able to use their own internal democratic (or not) procedures and their subject matter expertise to directly influence the country at the bargaining table, they must lobby politicians.