None of the major political ideologies are particularly consequentialist in the way they approach policy. Progressives by and large see the world through the following lens: There are some people who are oppressed and others who oppress them. Government policy ought to focus on emancipating the oppressed and punishing/overthrowing the oppressors. Criminal Justice: white people oppressing brown people. Abortion: Christian men oppressing women. Foreign policy: America oppressing the rest of the world (unless it's America saving some oppressed foreigners from an oppressor). Housing policy: landlords oppressing tenants. Labor: captital oppressing unions. Taxes: the one percent oppressing the 99%. Marriage equality: straight Christians oppressing LGBT people. Progressives aren't generally concerned about utility: they're concerned about justice. Even the Animal Rights movement, essentially founded by arch-Utilitarian Peter Singer is focused on the class relations between animals and the humans who oppress them.
In this case, the oppressors are wealthy business owners who are exploiting the labor of the poor and helpless AND exploiting the rest of us by placing the burden for care on taxp...
None of the major political ideologies are particularly consequentialist in the way they approach policy.
I like your whole comment, but disagree with the first sentence.
Apart from reading about it explicitly on LW, I was also able to approach politics as less of a mind-killer once I realized that different ideologies approach issues believing different outcomes would be ideal. But neither side realizes that (or how very different "ideal" is to each), so one just says, "ABC will work! XYZ is crazy!!" and the other says, "What?! ABC will never work! History shows XYZ is clearly the best policy!" Each side means something different by "work", and so spiralling mind-kill ensues...
Actually, I've found my best friends, with whom I end up discussing politics with, are very consequentalist, and care very much about what ends up "working best". Those who disagree with me simply don't define "working" or "best" in the same way I do, and so we really ending up talking past each other and giving each other funny, mind-killed looks.
For instance, as a liberal, I concede de-regulation is better for maximizing economic growth...
None of the major political ideologies are particularly consequentialist in the way they approach policy.
Political ideologies are big squishy categories that contain more consequentialist and less consequentialist strains. So I think that's the wrong way of looking at it.
E.g. amont libertarians, there are those who focus on supposed good consequences of libertarian policies, and those who focus on arguing coercion is always wrong even if it leads to good consequences. And among progressives there are people who are basically as you describe, and people like Matt Yglesias and myself and I think Yvain (I think it's fair to call Yvain progressive).
Political ideologies are big squishy categories that contain more consequentialist and less consequentialist strains.
I mentioned those strains. But they're a very small minority-- over-represented among wonks, bloggers and people smart enough to be in your social circles-- but still small. Yglesias drives people to his left nuts with his stuff. And you and Yvain are not representative progressives for what I think are obvious reasons, right?
You can put me in that category of progressive too (though I like left-libertarian or liberaltarian as well). We should also be skeptical that we are actually progressives for consequentialist reasons and not merely coming up with consequentialist rationalizations for our progressive intuitions. Disagreeing with non-consequentialist liberals seems like a nice start, though.
How small that group is, sort of isn't the point though. The point is that one dimension along which you differ from many other progressives is whether you look at policy chiefly through a lens of consequences or a lens of oppressor-oppressed. As such it is unsurprising that you find yourself disagreeing with progressive talking points from time to time.
Progressives by and large see the world through the following lens: There are some people who are oppressed and others who oppress them. Government policy ought to focus on emancipating the oppressed and punishing/overthrowing the oppressors. Criminal Justice: white people oppressing brown people. Abortion: Christian men oppressing women. Foreign policy: America oppressing the rest of the world (unless it's America saving some oppressed foreigners from an oppressor). Housing policy: landlords oppressing tenants. Labor: captital oppressing unions. Taxes: the one percent oppressing the 99%. Marriage equality: straight Christians oppressing LGBT people. Progressives aren't generally concerned about utility: they're concerned about justice.
I think you're rather generalizing Social Justice Movement mentality to progressives as a whole. They're a vocal subset, but I think a lot more people would identify as "progressive" given an explanation of the options than would ascribe to the oppressed/oppressor lens.
"Liberal" is a funny word, it had quite different meanings through the history and even now tends to mean different things on different sides of the Atlantic ocean.
Your analysis of the short-term effects is correct, but the long term effects depend on whether "low wage workers" are permanently so. Sometimes people condemn Walmart jobs as "dead-end" and that is getting at the right point.
I've heard the claim that Costo and Sam's Club (ie, Walmart) are very similar, but Costco is famous for paying its employees twice as much. But this doesn't come out of profits - Costco spends the same amount on labor, employing half as many people, twice as productive. If Walmart could make its employees twice as productive, that would be great for society, though in the short term it would lay off half of them.
If the productivity of people is unchangeable, then Walmart is doing society a valuable service by providing a niche to people capable of no more. But if Costco employees are more productive because Costco trains them, then Costco is doing a valuable service by improving their productivity. In the first case, we want Walmart to win because only a few companies like Walmart can make use of the least productive workers. But in the second case, we want Costco to win because it is making use of the same people, but making better use. Bu...
I worked at Walmart as a teenager. Walmart does a lot of training, but the simple fact is that they work with people who have a lot of attitude and discipline problems (like the teenage me) that would make them unemployable elsewhere.
This post is almost the epitome of what I don't want to see on LessWrong, Discussion or not.
EDIT: This post was moved to Main after I made this comment. This makes me like it even less.
It has a reasonable argument at its core: giving government benefits to low-income workers effectively means subsidizing the companies that pay low wages (and there are huge companies profiting from this). That's an irony, because even the voters who want to give money to low-income people usually don't want to support companies that profit by paying low wages. Giving money to low-income people regardless of their employment (via basic income or otherwise) would have a similar result, except for requiring people to work for companies that profit by paying low wages.
It has a mindkilling title: "evil" is a loaded word, and even if we insist on using it, why not use it instead on politicians and voters who enable this behavior? The problem is, each tribe has their preferences about who should be called evil, therefore the usage of the word necessarily follows the party line.
The mindkilling effect of politics is not just that it's difficult to write a reasonable article about politics... but that even if you succeed to write a moderately reasonable article on a political topic, it is still very likely to cause unreasonable comments in the discussion. -- This is why we need mo...
Note: I didn't mind it in Discussion at all and thought it was interesting. I am of the opinion that comments + discussion should not be heavily self-censored. However, I second the opinion that it shouldn't be in Main. I'm also a relatively new user (first handle was mid 2012) so you can take my opinions on what belongs in Main with that in mind.
I think the rule of thumb is, that a post should possess at least one of the following qualities:
1) About epistemic rationality (ontology, epistemics, ethics, AI, bias reduction, scientific method, semantics, etc)
2) About instrumental rationality (self improvement, happiness, willpower, organization, social behavior, etc)
3) Furthering the Reader's Interests (Effective Altruism, textbook recommendations, etc)
4) Meta, announcements, and notifications about things of interest to LW or closely affiliated with LW.
--
I think politics can fall into any of these. News (News! not opinions!) about some political activity or press release relating to the Singularity institute or other prominant figures on LW would fall into 4. An analysis about whether or not voting is rational would fall into 3. Descriptions of how political groups behave would fall...
I thought this was generally a good post, but I suggest linking to some serious research rather than a Krugman blog. In his article he links to a survey article, and there are many other good ones. These contain the same information, but lack the unnecessary partisan attacks - "Republican leaders clearly feel disdain for low-wage workers."
In state after state, the largest group of Medicaid recipients is Walmart employees
This isn't corporate welfare to Walmart or it's employees, it's corporate welfare to our regulatory protected medical industries and guilds.
The vast majority of the supposed "welfare" spending for health care is paid in rent seeking and tribute to the regulatory state and the vested interests they entitle.
Part of Sanders' argument relies on the belief that there is a possible free lunch, here : they believe WalMart could raise wages significantly without causing the company to explode, either not harming people in ways that count to the progressive movement (decreased profit to corporations) or by arguments of comparison to CostCo, Trader Joe's, or other stores that have different structures. I'm pretty sure the math doesn't work out that way, and the realistic event chain is likely to be drastically different, but it's a very common belief. From that per...
Whatever your moral position is, government benefits to low-income workers are a subsidy to their employers.
If the government awarded benefits only to the unemployed, many low-income workers would find preferable to quit their jobs if their employers didn't increase their wage. Since employers need employees, employers would find preferable to increase their employees' wages enough that they don't need government benefits.
The net effect would be a redistribution of wealth from employers (especially those who use lots of low wage labour, like Walmart) to th...
In terms of actually existing politics, which do you think people in general would dislike least: subsidizing would-be freeloaders with taxpayer money, or using that same taxpayer money to hire people (or subsidize hiring people) to do largely unproductive jobs that the market wouldn't pay them a living wage to do? There seems to be a general feeling that it's wrong to let people (figuratively) starve, but also that it's bad to give people things they don't deserve.
If the answer is "I think people in general would rather make people work for their mon...
Imagine that you are designing a Prisonner's Dilemma game. When all the numbers are ready, you have an additional option to increase the reward for defecting when the opponent cooperates. Would you do it?
If you expect that the player's future decisions are already fixed and your numbers will not change them, then increasing the reward adds more value to some players, while removing value from none. Thus it would be good to increase the reward.
But if you expect that people look at the payoff matrix and choose accordingly, increasing the reward for defecting will lead to less cooperation. By increasing the reward for defecting, you are reducing cooperation... and it's not obvious what will be the result.
Now let's add another complication. Let's assume that some players' voting mechanisms are broken, so they always vote to defect, and are unable to change that. It feels moral to punish those who defect voluntarily, but it feels immoral to punish those who merely randomly received a broken voting mechanism. -- I am speaking about people who are too stupid to do the kind of work that is important in a modern society. As opposed to people who could do the work, but are too lazy, if the s...
There seems to be some evidence that the article is at least describing a general case, and not the author's immediate experiences, or worse
I used to have rock-paper-scissor preferences for that kind of thing (if A = “John is paid to do nothing, i.e. basic income guarantee”, B = “John is paid to do something useless, e.g. digging ditches and filling them again”, and C = “John is not paid at all”, I preferred B to A to C to B). I realized that and forced myself to resolve this when reading this post and its comment thread.
The traditional argument for B over A (that is, make-work over basic income) used to be that idleness is a vice and industriousness a virtue; that it is better to work than to sit on your ass. This seems like a lost purpose, though — the reason that work is usually better than idleness is that work accomplishes something useful. Work without purpose features prominently in depictions of hell, from the myth of Sisyphus to The Far Side.
It's not that simple. There are people who just don't function without having to work for a living; give them lots of freedom and they simply use it to destroy themselves and others. Maybe they are consumed by superstimuli like World of Warcraft, or maybe they are the marginal case that is barely behaving in a civilized fashion because of the strong incentives associated with the work paradigm. You are probably thinking about the how the kinds of people who post on LessWrong would all have their lives improved with little to no downsides by such a scheme, but that's the typical mind fallacy at work.
give them lots of freedom and they simply use it to destroy themselves and others.
From that link:
Moreover, political authority in the countries in which I worked was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt. In Tanzania, for example, you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone. Tanzanians were thin, but party men were fat. The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man's wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.
Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.
I don't understand how one can say "The party representati...
What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man.
But that isn't a society in which "political authority ... was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt", or where "you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone", or where "the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers" - that is a society in which a vast majority of elites, not a tiny fraction, indulge themselves regularly in a wide range of transgressions against the common man. And that isn't merely a society in which one in a million people have to suffer their wife being raped; it's a society in which all but one in a million people have to suffer poverty and malnutrition, and arbitrary death due to poor conditions, poor safety regulation, and poor concern for welfare in general. I think that a slight risk of street crime from the underclasses pales in comparison to the kinds of organized depravations inflicted regularly on the populace in such places.
If we're still talking consequentially, that is.
And that isn't merely a society in which one in a million people have to suffer their wife being raped;
It's also a society in which an equivalent number have to suffer being raped.
I'm a little bit appalled to find a line of argument here that implies that only men are people!
Well done. This is one of those things I'd never thought of, but is obviously correct now that you point it out.
Comments on how to expand / rewrite this post would be appreciated, as I feel like I could move it to Main with a little work.
I don't think this needs expansion. Brevity is a virtue, and this does a good job of explaining the core idea quickly and accessibly. If you run it through a spellcheck and spend fifteen minutes making the prose flow more smoothly, I'd consider it ready for Main.
Good article. I think an important part of the idea behind the anti-Walmartism is the idea that Walmart is not only offering low paying jobs to people, but in doing so eliminating higher paying jobs that those people could otherwise take in the stores which a re driven out of business. They can do so because their business model is efficient, and people like their lower prices. But the anti-walmart crowd would argue that the low prices hide a negative externality for society at large, which reduces equity, and is a net utility loss.
It does seem possible that welfare changes workers' wage preferences and allows Walmart to attract laborers for less money though, doesn't it?
I get the impression that the real problem with health care specifically is that we are keeping sicker people alive longer with more effective (and expensive) treatments, and this increased cost is not being reimbursed by valuable work done by those sick people. In simplistic economic terms it is not cost-effective to keep a certain class of people alive or healthy. Is that analysis evil? I think so; automation will almost certainly put 99% of unmodified humans into that class at some point in the future. The practical effect is perhaps what we are see...
People are dying for economical reasons all the time.
In most cases, when a person dies, there was an option to save them. Killed by a disease? With enough money, best doctors and medicine could be bought to save them. If that is not realistic, with some money they could be at least cryopreserved and given some chance of living again. Killed by a murderer? With enough money, there could have been a policeman standing on that street to prevent the crime. Killed by a random falling object? With enough money, something could be there to prevent the object from falling on someone's head. Killed by an obesity caused by unhealthy life style? I am sure that with enough money, something could be done to prevent this, too.
Thus speaking about not allowing the economy to kill people is merely an applause light. People die for economical reasons today, and they will also die tomorrow. The only choice we have is to move more money to some area, by taking the money from another area, so we can save some people from dying by cause X at the expense of more people dying by cause Y; and we can hope that by doing some we have increased the total value (total quality-adjusted life years, or whatever is...
"What if we could create a world where we don't have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?". Because I'm pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
I have the opposite perception. For the near and medium term, resources are finite and that means we have to make allocation trade-offs. When we're talking about safety and health resources, those decisions are going to have consequences for who lives and who doesn't.
I can imagine a society without resource shortages. But I can't imagine building it even with universal agreement and cooperation. You don't get a technological singularity just by wanting it.
I've seen the more general claim that companies which can't afford to pay a living wage shouldn't exist. This would include not just companies like Walmart, but also small new companies and businesses with relatively poor owners.
Many of those businesses provide useful services, and I've wondered whether there's a public good argument to be made for subsidizing them rather than eliminating them.
I have no problem tabooing "living wage" in our discussion, but it is important to remember that the word has an actual definition in policy terms; if we talk about paying Walmart / Sam's Club employees a living wage that actually means one very specific thing in terms of how much money they are going to get, and it's not a particularly intuitive amount at that.
But that's a debate for the talking heads; if I understand you correctly, we just want to know if someone working at Walmart would starve without public assistance.
Let's assume for the moment that the Federal Poverty Line is the number we're trying to avoid here; above that you're still in a shitty position but you are not actually starving (technically you're probably not starving below it either, but I can't find good Cost of Basic Needs data for the first world). An average Walmart employee makes about $17,600 a year plus minimal benefits for 35 hours of work a week, which is piddling but also enough to support yourself and one other person by federal standards ($15,510 a year). With another 15 hours a week of work in a second job at the federal minimum wage (remember, most states have a higher minimum) a Walmar...
Are companies with employess on government benefits are evil?
You should fix the title. It doesn't parse in my head, and has a spelling error.
How about?
Are companies with employees on government benefits evil?
In keeping with Muphry's law, your comment about how such mistakes show lack of care contains a similar mistake of its own ("ones" -> "one's").
I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.
I don't understand why you are worried that the anti-wal-mart meme would cause anyone, let alone a leftist, to oppose GBI ... a GBI reduces the incentive to work for low wages. If it's true that welfare is benefiting Wal-Mart and other low-paying companies, then the reason is that in the current system you lose your benefits if you don't get a job. This is just the natural consequence...
I haven't scrolled through all the existing comments to see if someone else has already raised this point, but while, in general, I would agree that it's usually better for people to have poorly compensated employment that leaves them in need of some public support than to have no employment whatsoever and be even more heavily reliant on public support, I think this is not necessarily the most useful context in which to view institutions like Walmart.
In general, Walmart doesn't create jobs where, otherwise, no jobs would have existed. Instead, it usually ...
Sorry to make my first post on LW a political one, but I've been hearing too much about this discussion everywhere to stay out of it, here. I'll try to keep it short.
ChrisHallquist: I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.
Quite honestly, I think this is a confused concern, or at least a misplaced one.
I'm a philosopher by education (again, my apologies), but an urban economist/macroeconomist by trade and hobby. I don't think I'm...
moral sense that Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the general public.
Is that their true objection, really? I'm not from the US. and I've never seen this argument made to defend views against welfare. Then again, I don't follow politics much. I'd add to this that governments funding private companies, or at least some forms of it, distort competition. This is one of many arguments I see often. I'm not sure what it implies though.
I'm not sure about the title. Are governments that pay privately hired employees' salaries evil? Are privately hired employees who get partly payed by the government evil?
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state).
Funny. I think minimum wage is a terrible policy precisely because we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income. I think welfare is a terrible idea, for the same reason.
They all have the same intentions, but guaranteed basic income is the one the meshes the best with the invisible hand. Even if you have no idea if you should be helping the poor, minimum wage is the wrong way to help the poor, so clearly you shouldn't have minimum wage.
Instead of complaining, could this system be hacked to help the poor people? If you created a company for hiring currently unemployed unskilled people and providing them as good working conditions as possible, could you get the same subsidies Walmart does? Then those people would prefer working for you.
I imagine something similar to Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa, but focused on low-income people.
No need to hack anything, anyone who wants to can step in and create such a company.
I predict rapid learning about reasons why these people are unskilled and unemployed :-/
I have noticed a contrarian position on the whole minimum wage thing. One that advocates buying from sweatshops, because they say "at least those people working in the sweatshops aren't homeless".
Possible solution to the whole minimum wage thing: model the thing as a math problem where you minimize the cost to taxpayers? Like, if (current minimum wage current number of jobs) - (hypothetical minimum wage resulting number of jobs) < 0, then the taxpayers would want to switch to the hypothetical minimum wage.
And to keep experimentation in that ...
Chris, I agree with your observation that people don't think very consequentialist here. However, there is also something to be said for a solid application of common sense.
Yes, the obvious economic argument is that Walmart is under no obligation to hire employees, and any employee is free to leave whenever, so they should be allowed to treat them any way they want. The underlying assumptions here are that the (job) market is efficient so that no single company can influence it, people can get new jobs instantly, people can rationally decide whether to swi...
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
In state after state, the largest group of Medicaid recipients is Walmart employees. I'm sure that the same thing is true of food stamp recipients. Each Walmart "associate" costs the taxpayers an average of more than $1,000 in public assistance.
Or Bernie Sanders:
The Walmart family... here's an amazing story. The Walmart family is the wealthiest family in this country, worth about $100 billion. owning more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people, and yet here's the incredible fact.
Because their wages and benefits are so low, they are the major welfare recipients in America, because many, many of their workers depend on Medicaid, depend on food stamps, depend on government subsidies for housing. So, if the minimum wage went up for Walmart, would be a real cut in their profits, but it would be a real savings by the way for taxpayers, who would not having to subsidize Walmart employees because of their low wages.
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.