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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

It's not "disability gaming" for the most part. These people have legitimate, serious health problems and, in this economy, no employer wants to accommodate them.

There are a lot of people who are capable of delivering economic value, but not on a typical employer's terms. The sad truth is that the demand for most labor is crashing.

The truth is that disability is a spectrum from 0 (no economic function) to 1 (full health). In 1950, there was high demand for labor and people at 0.7 could get full-time jobs with access to middle-class labor. Now, the 0.8's are unwanted and the 0.9's are trapped in secondary labor, unless they're extremely intelligent and can swing as free agents.

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How is this not gaming?

"Scott tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, "since I've had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won't have worry about this stuff anymore." It worked; Scott is now on disability."

> How is this not gaming?

It is "gaming", in the same sense that every decision you make to optimize toward a desirable outcome is "gaming".

40 years he had a choice; go work at the mill for $25/hr, and come home tired and dirty, or stay home and be unemployed, and face the scorn of his peers.

Now he has a choice, either go to "retraining" that is run by for-profit corporations hungry to suck up government funds, and whose "graduates" are still unemployable, or go on disability. Given the world he lives in, he made the best choice.

Now his choice involved some meaure of dishonesty. But while I'd love to live in a world that rewarded honesty and integrity, that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has no place for a unskilled but hard-working individual, so those people have to take welfare to survive, welfare that they would likely refuse if there were better options.

I don't know Scott's situation. Maybe there's a job for him that doesn't involve cardiac risk. Maybe there isn't. How the fuck am I going to know? Yes, some people abuse social welfare programs. In Williamsburg, there are goddamn middle-class hipsters who take food stamps and use their parents' money to buy drugs. It happens, but this idea that there's an epidemic of moochers or that most people on programs are degenerately gaming the system is off the mark.

What if there's no job period which is what the article seems to suggest (at least not without going back to school -- which he "hates")?

The disability program is supposed to be if you are medically unable to work, not if you can't find a job. Look at the charts in the article, there isn't an epidemic of disability in this country, disability is being used as a substitute for traditional welfare programs which have been eliminated.

It isn't that I have no sympathy for people caught in the cracks, but we shouldn't have government programs that are de facto open only to those willing to lie and cheat.

It isn't that I have no sympathy for people caught in the cracks, but we shouldn't have government programs that are de facto open only to those willing to lie and cheat.

I agree with you 100%. We shouldn't have a minimum wage, food stamps, disability funds, or even 90% of the termination laws. In their lieu, we should have basic income, universal healthcare, free higher education for people with the ability, and affordable housing for everyone. Then, companies can hire and fire whoever they want, and the much simpler (if more radical) system is harder to game. But... the latter is not the world we live in, and we're not likely to see it in the contemporary US.

How is that different from what the Soviet Union tried? How do you keep from falling in the same traps that doomed it? I fail to see how, once the state has that much economic control, it will be held in check from taking more.

That said, there is a real problem here with unemployable people and it's only going to get worse. It's no wonder no politicians want to talk about it. It can't be summed up in a ten-second blurb.

The Soviet Union has a "command economy". Industries and labor produced what the central agencies told them to, with very little feedback to adjust and no incentive at all to run R&D, QA, etc.

But what he's proposing isn't a command economy, it's a default economy. The government isn't telling Factory A to make widgets and it's not telling Person B to work as a basketweaver. Instead everyone gets some minimum amount of capital to use every month.

In fact it sounds more market-driven than what we have now with welfare and disability where, again, centrally-managed plans are laid out and imposed on employers and employees saying what requirements you have, what you can and can't use the money on, etc. And don't you dare get a job and start accidentally making too much money!

It might even be beneficial to employers looking for talented employees: If people are safe to shift around looking for jobs they should move away from poor managers and bad companies to good managers at good companies (and if you're a good manager you'd suddenly have a lot more talent to find the gems out of). This is one of the same resaons governments take such an interest in education, is to ensure a competitive workforce in relation to other nations in the global economy.

I'm sure there's more to work out with the proposal but I like the spirit of the idea.

The Soviet Union didn't fail because of the funding of social safety nets, it failed because it had a command economy where too few people made resource decisions and they made them poorly. It matters little wether that command concentration comes from government or private sources. If the distribution of wealth becomes too skewed, the same economic failure could happen in capitalist economies. It's possible we've already seen the early symptoms of that kind of failure in the economy now.

Indeed--the TARP bank bailouts (where the government decided in a top-down manner which banks deserved to "live") were much closer to standard Soviet Union practice than a guaranteed income would be.

I'm divided on the TARP bailouts. On one hand they bailout went parties professed to be the most cognizant of their actions, and who should have had the knowledge and resources to to avoid their problems. In those terms, the banks did not deserve bailouts. On the other hand, as a short term measure I feel like it was reasonable to prevent larger scale chaos.

Overall, the need for TARP was driven by the weak long term oversight allowing concentrated influence in overlarge companies. That's often viewed as a failure of government to remain independent from influence, but at the root of the problem I think it was a shift in economic philosophy across business schools and the business community. The long term fix in my view is putting new focus on defining what criteria lead to healthy, competitive markets. Businesses themselves should recognize that poor competitiveness, and short term focus in markets can lead to poor long term performance in the economy for everybody. Different mechanisms to discourage oversized companies should be introduced into legislation, but now I'm rambling....

Actually, the Soviet Union didn't even fail for its lack of markets. It failed because entry and exit to economic activity was restricted, so no new ideas ever really got tried.

Remember, command economies work so well when the leadership knows what they're doing that they make up the structure of every successful business in "market capitalist" countries.

I agree with your first ideas, but not the last. There are successful companies that have allowed significant independence to the lower levels of management and employees to a point where I wouldn't class all companies command economies in any strongly centralized sense.

Also, the failure to generate new economic activity (or supressing new activity) is a prevalent theme in failed companies. Furthermore, when you look at new innovative products coming out of large companies, you'll often spot a phase goes something like: "A small group of employees broke off and put together <widget> after hours or out of sight of the upper management, etc". The new activity or market areas often come in spite of the controls in big companies.

How is that in any way similar to what the Soviet Union tried? michaelochurch wasn't advocating a centrally planned economy.

That's not really much like the Soviet Union at all. It's much more akin to the kind of comprehensive social safety nets that European Social Democrats favor.

Scandinavian countries have put many of these ideas into place and they are hardly doomed. On the contrary they seem to be fairing pretty well.

I agree with you, as long as "free higher education" is delivered efficiently using the Internet, and affordable housing isn't in downtown San Francisco, but rather where it is inexpensive to provide.

A basic income guarantee is a far more important idea than free higher education or affordable housing. The argument for universal healthcare is that we're going to take care of the sick whether they purchased insurance or not. What argument do you have that the market is not a good mechanism for allocating funds to housing? Or education? I guess an argument can be made for subsidizing education on the grounds that an educated populace is good for society, but making it free doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

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