Hacker News Reader

Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

I'm unsure about the German system...

I've been on welfare here in the USA. The way it works is dependant on your income. The more you make by hard work, the less assistance you receive.

That sounds fair... Until you realize that section 8 (housing) is the same way. Food stamps are the same way. At the time, there was a cutoff for the free clinic (which counted benefits as income).. I made $100 too much.

When doing work and getting paid $1 means taking $3 in losses from assistance programs, this grinds people further into poverty. The further I try to dig out, the deeper I get until I hit the point that I can start to survive without any assistance...

View on HN

This is clearly the worst aspect of our system and shows that it was designed by the mathematically uneducated.

It needs to be done in such a way that the total-income curve is monotonically increasing, so recipients never have a disincentive to make a little more money in their job. This should be fundamental and obvious, but because doing it requires just the tiniest bit of linear algebra, our elected representatives are not capable of it. Mind-blowing.

The system is this way by design. The people who drafted, voted on, and passed these programs did so with disincentivizing its recipients from making more money being one of the goals.

I disagree. I think it's more likely that we're still using programs designed for a different era.

For example, food stamps (SNAP) were made permanent in 1964 as one of the great society programs. WIC came a few years later. I suspect - but have not researched - that you will find this is true for a lot of current welfare programs.

There may be people in power making bad decisions about administering these programs, but I don't believe they were designed to ensnare.

> This is clearly the worst aspect of our system and shows that it was designed by the mathematically uneducated.

Actually, it mostly shows that the programs are not a system, and were designed separately from each other, with inadequate consideration of their interactions. The fact that they often have overlapping target populations and that benefit reductions due to means-testing are therefore sometimes much greater than 1:1 isn't due to problems with math, its due to the fact that the questions that were asked and which math was deployed to answer weren't even the right questions.

I don't think math has anything to do with it. I think the narrative of, "if you're poorer, you need more assistance" is all that happens. I think most politics is about winning an argument about what is "fair" and not actually analyzing consequences or incentives.

Really wish we'd focus less on what is fair and more on what brings the greatest outcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com