14 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2024
  2. Jul 2024
    1. e eliminating marriage penaltiesin federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements forfood stamps.

      Huge deal

  3. Nov 2023
    1. In the West, social welfare guarantees everyone a place to sleep, food, and free education.
      • for: social welfare

      • comment

        • not universally true in the West.
  4. Sep 2022
    1. Unemployed workers are much more likelyto fall into poverty in countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan,compared with countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland.

      Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

      Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

      What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

    2. The cost of child poverty is not just borne by the poor. When the expenses related tolost productivity, crime, and poor health are added up, it is estimated that child povertycosts the nation between $800 billion and $1.1 trillion per year. This is vastly higherthan the estimated $90 to $111 billion per year it would take to implement a programpackage that would lift half of children out of poverty.

      The savings indicated here is almost a factor of 10! How can we not be doing this?

      Compare with statistics and descriptions from Why Fewer American Children Are Living in Poverty (New York Times, The Daily, 2022-09-26)

    3. Mark Robert Rank

      https://sociology.wustl.edu/people/mark-rank

      Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare Washington University in Saint Louis,

  5. Mar 2021
    1. In the Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber's article, it is mentioned that the setting closest in structure to the market experiments done would be underwriting, a task in which well-informed experts price goods that are sold to a less-informed public. Investment bankers value securities, experts taste cheese, store buyers observe jewelry being modeled, and theater owners see movies before they are released. They then sell those goods to a less-informed public. If they suffer from the curse of knowledge, high-quality goods will be overpriced and low-quality goods underpriced relative to optimal, profit-maximizing prices; prices will reflect characteristics (e.g., quality) that are unobservable to uninformed buyers ("you get what you pay for").[5] The curse of knowledge has a paradoxical effect in these settings. By making better-informed agents think that their knowledge is shared by others, the curse helps alleviate the inefficiencies that result from information asymmetries (a better informed party having an advantage in a bargaining situation), bringing outcomes closer to complete information. In such settings, the curse on individuals may actually improve social welfare.

      How might one exploit this effect to more proactively improve and promote social welfare?

  6. Feb 2021
  7. Oct 2020
  8. Sep 2020
  9. Aug 2020
  10. Jul 2020
  11. Apr 2016
    1. The Finnish government is currently drawing up plans to introduce a national basic income. A final proposal won’t be presented until November 2016, but if all goes to schedule, Finland will scrap all existing benefits and instead hand out €800 ($870) per month—to everyone.