If you are interested at all in this blog, please stop reading this post and instead spend the next 30 minutes reading last month's Cato Unbound in which Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi bring their idea of Bleeding Heart Libertarianism to the libertarian body politic. The BHL project attempts to marry Rawlsian social justice with classical liberal and libertarian thought. The more I read Zwolinski and Tomasi (whose Free Market Fairness I am currently reading and loving), the more uncomfortable I become with the label libertarian versus "classical liberal."
Although one of the respondents to their Unbound essay quibbles with their version of libertarian history, it is personally convincing that libertarianism, to its detriment, elevates property rights above all other rights as a reaction against property rights being excerpted from modern or high liberal thought. The further this sinks in, the more skeptically I view hardcore libertarian arguments from those like Rothbard and Nozick. The reduction of all rights to property rights is absurd. The classical liberal emphasis on the material betterment of the poor (and society as a whole) rings far more true to me.
Perhaps this is why many libertarians refer to themselves as "small l" libertarians. They are oriented towards free minds and free markets (to quote Reason's tagline), but they do not subscribe to the abstract and extreme arguments of the libertarian tradition. So, I suppose I should choose between small l or classical liberal.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Incentives, Determinism, and Humnanism
I would like to start with a case vignette. I work with a man whose girlfriend is also a consumer at our agency. They are in a long-term relationship and share responsibility for their respective children. Each of them maintains their own residence and subsidy. Our housing department is seeking to join their households officially by providing them a better voucher in order to free up their slots in the current program. This transition would reduce their total amount of resources, but would provide the amount of resources deemed necessary for a household that size. What the incentives for my clients? And is my role to help my client maximize his total amount of resources and protect him from risk, or to help them transition to the lower level of resources that more accurately reflects their current arrangement?
The incentives for my client are to remain where he is and allow his girlfriend to take the voucher separately. His disincentives for joining households as follows:
The concept of incentives brings to mind a video from reason.tv where they interviewed Charles Murray, the author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve. In it, Ronald Bailey asks a very poignant question. The criticism Murray levels at the welfare state rests on the assumptions of economic determinism, and to a lesser extent, cultural determinism. Though Murray's thesis--given a set of incentives, people will behave in ways that make sense to them-- is humanist in origin, when taken to its extreme, it attempts in a very behaviorist way to explain choice as a function of its environment. While his explanatory valuables have validity, they are necessarily incomplete, as they cannot incorporate the panoply of variation in motivations for behavior. His explanatory valuables also harken back to old social conservative tropes, and though he walks a tight line, it is difficult to fully believe his faith in, for instance, the feminist revolution. When a social scientist examines behavior through a Functionalist lens, her data is necessarily biased by her own personal opinions.
I linked there to one of my favorite pieces of information I have ever come across. Burrell and Morgan's sociological paradigms fundamentally shifted the way I think about most things, and I cannot recommend it highly enough as a lens through which to view most of life. The reason I detest the methods of scholars like Charles Murray is that I find my natural place on the opposite end of the spectrum--the Radical Humanist side. (Hence the name for the damn blog.) How does an Interpretivist (in the social realm, at least) who focuses on radical change rather than regulation understand incentives? An appreciation for an individual's unique motivations and choices and antipathy towards environmental influences that suppress her self-actualization skews the perception incentives significantly. While the strictures of marriage or the conditional nature of privatized aid to the poor may be looked at as significant in shaping a person's behavior, he or she ultimately decides based on an infinite number of sociological, economic, and even biological factors too many to compute and whose precise balance and emotional valence can never be fully known.
Social workers, by training, largely trend towards the Interpretivist side of the Functionalist quadrant. We are trained to become empathy machines, keenly sensing and taking the perspective of our clients. Our solutions to social programs are necessarily Functionalist, but our micro-level concern is one of extreme subjectivism. It's a tenuous line to walk. Perhaps this is another source of the frustration with "the system." It seems foisted upon our clients. The chosen incentives put in place and their intended and unintended consequences are necessarily from without, subject to their own outcomes measures and necessarily incomplete pictures.
Perhaps that is because the system we have is just that: the system. Our nation has one way of dealing with social problems. The incentive structure, assumptions, bias, and everything else are applied to everyone. No personalization of resources. No customization of care. With problem cluster A, you provide B interventions, and expect C level of response. The diversity of motivation, thought, and choice plays only a limited role in what outcomes happen. Competition also plays a very structured, stunted role with outcome studies, evidence-based practice models, and best practices that reflect the results from a specific well-controlled group in a specific time at a specific place. Important thought they may be, they are lagging indicators of fact with limited explanatory power. They are not the real world. They are not what social workers and clients experience every day.
A good illustration of how social policy is unresponsive to results and evidence is harm reduction. Harm reduction is has a wide evidence base and is slowly gaining recognition in the helping professions, and to a lesser extent, in policy. This transition happened both in the professional literature and on the political level at a snail's pace. It's influence was first on the private level, then on the local level, and is currently impacting state policy. However, harm reduction has no bearing on federal policy. Macro-level change is only possible when obstacles to the results of social experiments can impact policy. To date, the federal government promotes almost no harm reduction policies, and more distressingly, enacts the majority of harm done to people with mental health and substance abuse issues.
Returning social support to state, local, and private entities may bring about better outcomes for individuals. My hope is that by bringing the planning and money closer to the helper and client, we can create better practices that are more responsive to consumer need and actually incentivize good decisions. Unfortunately, to do so would dismantle the entire welfare system as we know it.
The incentives for my client are to remain where he is and allow his girlfriend to take the voucher separately. His disincentives for joining households as follows:
- Their total food stamps would markedly decrease.
- Their TANF is unlikely to but may decrease.
- No one can authoritatively tell them how much money they will lose. The only person who could tell them is a government employee, whose incentives are to give as little as possible. If they were to ask one directly about what they should do, they would likely decrease their payments regardless given their knowledge of the household.
- The social support network is biased towards the mother. She would ultimately hold the voucher. If the relationship ends, he could become homeless. Though our organization would likely rehouse him, they may not have funds at the time.
My coworker lamented to me that the system is not set up to incentivize good decisions. It discriminates against marriage, work, and stability. It supports mothers to be child-raisers, but allows fathers to remain untethered to their children and families. A father who is involved with the family has no incentive but his own emotional investment.
Our clients are more than willing to give up a housing voucher. I'm sure they are happy that by joining their households, another person can get housed. That same logic, however, does not apply to government-administered financial supports. They do not know that their food stamps will go to another needy person--only that the government will save money. Their possibly reduced TANF funds may not go to another person. Finally, should the household comes apart, the system may be too slow to react or not care at all that they now require additional supports and help.
Perhaps my coworker and I will be lucky. Our clients may understand that society has deemed that a couple deserves X amount of support while a broken family deserves more. They may accede to this arrangement because their treatment provider told them to. But I can sympathize with not wanting your resources reduced and more risk and uncertainty in your life.
Perhaps my coworker and I will be lucky. Our clients may understand that society has deemed that a couple deserves X amount of support while a broken family deserves more. They may accede to this arrangement because their treatment provider told them to. But I can sympathize with not wanting your resources reduced and more risk and uncertainty in your life.
The concept of incentives brings to mind a video from reason.tv where they interviewed Charles Murray, the author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve. In it, Ronald Bailey asks a very poignant question. The criticism Murray levels at the welfare state rests on the assumptions of economic determinism, and to a lesser extent, cultural determinism. Though Murray's thesis--given a set of incentives, people will behave in ways that make sense to them-- is humanist in origin, when taken to its extreme, it attempts in a very behaviorist way to explain choice as a function of its environment. While his explanatory valuables have validity, they are necessarily incomplete, as they cannot incorporate the panoply of variation in motivations for behavior. His explanatory valuables also harken back to old social conservative tropes, and though he walks a tight line, it is difficult to fully believe his faith in, for instance, the feminist revolution. When a social scientist examines behavior through a Functionalist lens, her data is necessarily biased by her own personal opinions.
I linked there to one of my favorite pieces of information I have ever come across. Burrell and Morgan's sociological paradigms fundamentally shifted the way I think about most things, and I cannot recommend it highly enough as a lens through which to view most of life. The reason I detest the methods of scholars like Charles Murray is that I find my natural place on the opposite end of the spectrum--the Radical Humanist side. (Hence the name for the damn blog.) How does an Interpretivist (in the social realm, at least) who focuses on radical change rather than regulation understand incentives? An appreciation for an individual's unique motivations and choices and antipathy towards environmental influences that suppress her self-actualization skews the perception incentives significantly. While the strictures of marriage or the conditional nature of privatized aid to the poor may be looked at as significant in shaping a person's behavior, he or she ultimately decides based on an infinite number of sociological, economic, and even biological factors too many to compute and whose precise balance and emotional valence can never be fully known.
Social workers, by training, largely trend towards the Interpretivist side of the Functionalist quadrant. We are trained to become empathy machines, keenly sensing and taking the perspective of our clients. Our solutions to social programs are necessarily Functionalist, but our micro-level concern is one of extreme subjectivism. It's a tenuous line to walk. Perhaps this is another source of the frustration with "the system." It seems foisted upon our clients. The chosen incentives put in place and their intended and unintended consequences are necessarily from without, subject to their own outcomes measures and necessarily incomplete pictures.
Perhaps that is because the system we have is just that: the system. Our nation has one way of dealing with social problems. The incentive structure, assumptions, bias, and everything else are applied to everyone. No personalization of resources. No customization of care. With problem cluster A, you provide B interventions, and expect C level of response. The diversity of motivation, thought, and choice plays only a limited role in what outcomes happen. Competition also plays a very structured, stunted role with outcome studies, evidence-based practice models, and best practices that reflect the results from a specific well-controlled group in a specific time at a specific place. Important thought they may be, they are lagging indicators of fact with limited explanatory power. They are not the real world. They are not what social workers and clients experience every day.
A good illustration of how social policy is unresponsive to results and evidence is harm reduction. Harm reduction is has a wide evidence base and is slowly gaining recognition in the helping professions, and to a lesser extent, in policy. This transition happened both in the professional literature and on the political level at a snail's pace. It's influence was first on the private level, then on the local level, and is currently impacting state policy. However, harm reduction has no bearing on federal policy. Macro-level change is only possible when obstacles to the results of social experiments can impact policy. To date, the federal government promotes almost no harm reduction policies, and more distressingly, enacts the majority of harm done to people with mental health and substance abuse issues.
Returning social support to state, local, and private entities may bring about better outcomes for individuals. My hope is that by bringing the planning and money closer to the helper and client, we can create better practices that are more responsive to consumer need and actually incentivize good decisions. Unfortunately, to do so would dismantle the entire welfare system as we know it.
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