Arthur Brooks argues that conservatives have Faulty Moral Arithmetic. He is complaining about Republicans and conservatives, though perhaps more about the perception about Republicans and conservatives than about their essence. There have been many reports and studies over the years about the charitable giving of conservatives. Are our politics not really influenced by our charity? Here is the gist of Brooks’ argument:
Conservatives are fighting a losing battle of moral arithmetic. They hand an argument with virtually 100% public support—care for the vulnerable—to progressives, and focus instead on materialistic concerns and minority moral viewpoints.
The irony is maddening. America’s poor people have been saddled with generations of disastrous progressive policy results, from welfare-induced dependency to failing schools that continue to trap millions of children.
Meanwhile, the record of free enterprise in improving the lives of the poor both here and abroad is spectacular. According to Columbia University economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the percentage of people in the world living on a dollar a day or less—a traditional poverty measure—has fallen by 80% since 1970. This is the greatest antipoverty achievement in world history. That achievement is not the result of philanthropy or foreign aid. It occurred because billions of souls have been able to pull themselves out of poverty thanks to global free trade, property rights, the rule of law and entrepreneurship.
The basic point, about the moral value and superior practical benefit of economic liberty seems inescapable. That conservatives do not care about the poor? I’d have to argue about that; how they care might matter. The poor as a problem for society is not the same thing compassion for poor people.
With this moral touchstone, conservative leaders will be able to stand before Americans who are struggling and feel marginalized and say, “We will fight for you and your family, whether you vote for us or not”—and truly mean it. In the end that approach will win. But more important, it is the right thing to do.
One of the appalling things about “social conservatism” was that it was no less set on expanding government programs for the poor than the welfarist’s agenda. That kind of thing is just what hurts the poor most in the long run. Free enterprise is “the greatest antipoverty achievement in world history”. Blaming the poor for their poverty is counter-productive; effectively arguing for the best way out of poverty is a winning argument with plenty of empirical evidence from developing nations around the world. What we have been doing in America has exacerbated the gap between the wealthy and the poor, as noted by Charles Murray and also in this video, which probably comes from a very different assumption about the causes of the fact. I see that video as an argument against government anti-poverty policies of the last sixty years and more, as we seem to be losing the “War on Poverty”.
Do the wealthy have a moral right to their wealth? Maybe, but even if they do, but who cares? Apparently, even in a a couple generations of “war” they can take care of themselves.
March 4th, 2013 | 10:13 am
[...] and conservatives than about their essence. There have been many reports and studies over …read more Source: Postmodern [...]
March 4th, 2013 | 10:24 am
SO I agree that the Brooks article is a big step in the right direction. There’s a lot more to say on the causes of “increasingly vulnerability” though.
March 4th, 2013 | 10:28 am
Yes, and I think we have discussed those. Maybe my rhetoric is too emphatic about the benefits of capitalism in making a good society. Still, among good things, it is a pretty important good thing.
March 4th, 2013 | 11:12 am
This is what blue-state Dem governance has been reduced to in 2013: “My plan is upstate casinos are the best economic development opportunity for upstate.” That’s the “plan” from the guy who is the leading candidate for the Dems in 2016 if Bill’s wife decides not to run. Yeah, he sure cares about the little guy.
Conservatives have never come up with an effective response to “Don’t just stand there, DO SOMETHING!” style governing that makes clear that there are already far too many “SOMETHINGS” being done that are not just unhelpful but actively harmful. A major part of the problem, of course, is the openly hostile MSM, but too few conservatives really even try.
Thus when high taxes and oppressive regulation destroy a region/state, the taxes and regulations that are the problem are never lifted, but rather increased spending on welfare-related programs is enacted. Which requires even higher taxes to pay for. Rinse, lather, repeat.
March 4th, 2013 | 11:16 am
Someone should account for the government’s “finger on the scale” in the form of laws about capital formation, shelter from personal liability, tax exemptions and deductions, expensing and depreciation rules, corporate legal fictions, etc. Perhaps government anti-poverty programs are a distraction and a sideshow. The real action that distorts property distribution are sly legal impediments and an unimaginative legal establishment.
March 4th, 2013 | 11:56 am
When I first read the Brooks piece I was nodding my head in agreement, and then I did a 180 regarding this:
No. The core problem with entitlements is that they allow us to push off on to others what is our own responsibility, viz. to reach into our own pocket and care for the poor.
Perhaps Arthus Brooks think my reasoning wrong because he doesn’t believe there will be enough Americans reaching into their pocket (even though we have no basis to say that’s so). If that’s true, then THAT is the core problem, and entitlements would then only make the core problem worse.
March 4th, 2013 | 12:50 pm
The video presupposes one can Devine the appropriate distribution of wealth & furthermore it is proper to divide up the wealth thru a vote- both fallacies & dangerous. They are a recipe for demagogues & conservatives will lose the argument since the left dominates the media. Conservatives have to be very careful with such arguments- while I agree the left’s policies have exacerbated the problem(& their solution is always more government-gotta have more cowbell!) the shrillness of Hollywood & the msm will drown out any cogent ideas from the right.
March 4th, 2013 | 6:43 pm
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March 4th, 2013 | 10:51 pm
[...] is right that the Arthur Brooks article is interesting, but I would come at it from a different direction. I [...]
March 5th, 2013 | 10:41 pm
Arthus Brooks think my reasoning wrong because he doesn’t believe there will be enough Americans reaching into their pocket (even though we have no basis to say that’s so). If that’s true, then THAT is the core problem, and entitlements would then only make the core problem worse.
You are not going to be able to replace Social Security and Medicare with volunary donations to the Salvation Army. Better come up with a plan.
March 6th, 2013 | 8:17 am
Art Deco,
I’d really like to shake you of that thinking. First, I realize that you can’t be politically viable without having a plan to preserve SS and Medicare. But if these are bad things, then another way of saying that is that you can’t be politically viable right now unless you are willing to preserve bad things, so we have to preserve bad things. It’s a little like saying you couldn’t be politically viable in the late 80′s USSR if you were an anti-communist. That’s true, but I want to put viability aside for the moment.
How truly awful was it in this country before Medicare, that is, before 1965? Did older people just walk around with broken limbs and die horribly premature deaths before Medicare? No. They got medical treatment. How? They paid for it. What if they were poor? Then other people paid for it. And then some who needed care just didn’t get it. Just like today.
In 1965 almost no one had medical insurance either. How could they possibly afford medical care? Easy. In those days hospitals could only charge what people could afford to pay. Today hospitals charge what virtually no one can afford to pay. How did that happen?
March 6th, 2013 | 9:52 am
In 1965 almost no one had medical insurance either. How could they possibly afford medical care? Easy. In those days hospitals could only charge what people could afford to pay. Today hospitals charge what virtually no one can afford to pay. How did that happen?
Before you talk about ‘shaking me’, get your history straight. Prior to 1930, there were social practices which performed some of the functions of insurance. Fraternal lodges often had a lodge doctor on retainer who would be compensated for house calls with a fee resembling a contemporary co-pay. Medical insurance was an innovation that got to be prevalent during the 1930s. There was household insurance and there was union insurance. Roughly 12% of the population were insured by 1940.
The practice of offering insurance as a condition of employment got to be common during the 2d World War, in part because fringe benefits were not regulated by wage and price controls and you could use them to recruit. That aside, though, there are advantages to making use of company employees as an actuarial pool. The pools are viable. They come together for extraneous reasons, so the pool is not ruined by adverse selection, and the status of members as working adults does exclude the infirm. However, the use of fringes as compensation does introduce certain rigidities into the labor market. Also, the way 3d party payment came to be practiced tended to make costs opaque to the patient (and later to everyone else). Still, this did not cause a revolution in costs or consumption patterns. Historically, the ratio of gross output of medical and nursing services to domestic product was about .045. By 1960, it had risen to .052.
What changed in 1965 was the advent of public insurance for the elderly and the impecunious. Most others had medical insurance by that date. Medicare’s re-imbursement practices generated a subsidy driven revolution in costs for 20 years. Re-imbursement practices were changed around about 1984 and it brought annual increases toward the Earth.
Several other things were going on there. One is that the cost of personal services tends to increase in step with nominal incomes; another is that as the society grows more affluent, the balance of effective demand between various goods and services changes: households spend less on groceries and more on new and more sophisticated products; a third is that the content and contextual utility of medical care has changed. Each of these had an effect on household expenditures on medical care. (There has also been a revolution in what people spend on veterinary care – without any third party payment). Proportionate expenditures on medical care in 1925 were a good deal lower than they are today. The thing is, in 1925 there was surgery and there was palliative care and not much else. The effect of the technics of medical care (as opposed to public health and sanitation) on people’s life expectancy was modest. Ivan Ilich (admittedly a man with a mission) contended that through 1965 about 90% of the historically recorded improvement in life expectancy was attributable to improvements in public health and sanitation.
That aside, you still had considerable public investment in custodial and nursing care. The census of those in state asylums in 1955 was about 850,000. Had this population grown proportionately, there would 1.5 million in such institutions today, when there actually are fewer than 100,000. A generation earlier, you had state sanitoriums for tuberculosis, institutions which have disappeared.
Medical care and custodial nursing care have unpredictable and ruinous spikes in expenditure, which is why the use of insurance – i.e. risk pooling – is attractive and desirable. You can certainly take care of banal medical expenses out of pocket, but in any given year about 10% of individuals in the population are slapped with medical expenses 5x the national mean and 1% are hit with expenses in excess of 20x the national mean. The thing is, in contrast to the situation with property-casualty insurance, it is generally not a question of whether an event will occur, but when. That complicates the task of relying on private markets for risk pooling of medical expenses.
By the way, the elderly in 1965 were disproportionately poor. Now they are not.
People talk about ‘poverty’ as if it were some sort of illness to be addressed with therapy. There are certainly social pathologies. The thing is, you have a labor market and it distributes benefits according to the utility of your skill set to someone else. Nothing particularly just or unjust about the distribution. As the output of the economy improves, the affluence of all strata tends to improve (if not at equal rates), and certain phenomena in the economy which have biological metrics (e.g. malnutrition) fall by the way side. You are still left with some systemic problems because of the cost disease of personal services and because effective demand and technological developments render simpler and cruder versions of goods and services unavailable on the market.
IIRC, philanthropic donations amount to about 2.5% of collective personal income; only a subset of these are properly deemed charitable. Art museum and business schools have donors too. Now, that is a good chunk of change for certain purposes. If you discontinued income transfers, people would likely give more, and would give more to their impecunious relations. Medical care, custodial and nursing care, and schooling – the three major services subject to common provision for which there there has not at any recent time been much of a truly commercial sector – currently account for about 18% of gross domestic product (the ratio of gross output to collective personal income being even higher. If you fancy you can from the square we currently occupy construct a purely philanthropic system that does not have catastrophic transition costs, let’s hear it.
There are people who find homilies like this:
http://www.fee.org/library/detail/not-your-to-give-2#axzz2MlqnRb3j
appealing, but the rest of us have to live in the world we live in where you can address the unpleasant aspects of a society without institutions of systemic common provision or you can write it off as part of the fallen quality of the world we have.
We hear a certain amount (from Charles Murray, among others) about solutions that are not scalable. Murray is invariably referring to the special projects of committed teachers and social workers. There are things that require motivation, ingenuity, and adaptability – the work of philanthropies. There are things that require stereotyped practice and mandatory participation – the work of the civil service. Have the Salvation Army address the problems they address – a bed for the night, a meal for the night, ministry for the alcoholic – and have public agencies address in their impersonal fashion systemic problems in aggregate consumption patterns and income distribution.
March 6th, 2013 | 9:57 am
Ivan Ilich (admittedly a man with a mission) contended that through 1965 about 90% of the historically recorded improvement in life expectancy was attributable to improvements in public health and sanitation.
That aside, you still had considerable public investment in custodial and nursing care. The census of those in state asylums in 1955 was about 850,000. Had this population grown proportionately, there would 1.5 million in such institutions today, when there actually are fewer than 100,000. A generation earlier, you had state sanitoriums for tuberculosis, institutions which have disappeared.
Medical care and custodial nursing care have unpredictable and ruinous spikes in expenditure, which is why the use of insurance – i.e. risk pooling – is attractive and desirable. You can certainly take care of banal medical expenses out of pocket, but in any given year about 10% of individuals in the population are slapped with medical expenses 5x the national mean and 1% are hit with expenses in excess of 20x the national mean. The thing is, in contrast to the situation with property-casualty insurance, it is generally not a question of whether an event will occur, but when. That complicates the task of relying on private markets for risk pooling of medical expenses.
By the way, the elderly in 1965 were disproportionately poor. Now they are not.
People talk about ‘poverty’ as if it were some sort of illness to be addressed with therapy. There are certainly social pathologies. The thing is, you have a labor market and it distributes benefits according to the utility of your skill set to someone else. Nothing particularly just or unjust about the distribution. As the output of the economy improves, the affluence of all strata tends to improve (if not at equal rates), and certain phenomena in the economy which have biological metrics (e.g. malnutrition) fall by the way side. You are still left with some systemic problems because of the cost disease of personal services and because effective demand and technological developments render simpler and cruder versions of goods and services unavailable on the market.
March 6th, 2013 | 11:37 am
Art Deco,
I am not sure if all those were directed to me, but I only had time to read the first one.
We had a family reunion about fifteen years ago with a couple hundred people in attendance and I went to one gathering of the older folks there and they were talking about what going to the doctor was like when they were young. Perhaps my family’s experience isn’t typical (we ranged from poor-to-middle class over the years), but they said none of them had insurance in the 40′s, 50′s, and 60′s. If you broke an arm you paid out of your own pocket, or else you had someone help you pay, or in the case of some the doctors’ would charge them little or nothing.
My understanding is that once employers got a tax benefit for providing medical insurance, nearly every company started providing full medical coverage.
I had dinner with a liberal doctor recently who said to me “I don’t care how much money you make, you could never afford dialysis.” I assume he’s right about that. But why is that? I asked. Is it because of the cost of the materials to make the machine? If suddenly there was no insurance, no medicare, would the companies that make the machines simply go into another line of work? No. They and everyone else would likely go on making money in the health care business, but they would adjust their prices to the market.
Another example. When Obamacare passed I dropped my insurance. I joined something called Samaritan Ministries, which has an exemption from Obamacare. I have to tell every doctor that I have no insurance and I pay cash (which to my surprise goes over very well). Every month I send a check directly to a person in Samaritan to help pay their bills. Providers lower their fees to us substantially because we pay cash out of pocket, typically lowering large bills by about 30%. A thirty-percent reduction in our health care bills without one iota of reform! Imagine what could happen if the rest of the country moved in this direction.
Real insurance is like fire insurance–you pay a little bit of money for a huge amount of coverage for an eventuality that is likely to never happen in your life. Full medical coverage isn’t insurance at all really because you can’t insure against an inevitability. Ultimately, there is no risk pool for an occurrence that has a 100% likelihood of happening–i.e. that you will get sick and die.
Covering all our medical care makes about as much sense as food insurance. Let’s say we instead of laying out a dollar for 3 lemons, you just showed them your insurance card. Every month your employer sent a check to your food insurance company to cover your premium. And Congress forced the insurance companies to cover more and more types of food every year, and they also passed laws requiring employers to provide more and more food coverage. What would happen? Something very similar to what has happened with the cost of health care. A lemon would be $30 a piece. As my doctor said with regard to dialysis, he could then say “Look, I don’t care how much money you make, you could never afford to pay for a Christmas dinner yourself.” And he’d be right.
Everybody always tells me, “yes, you make a fair point, but it’s too late, we already do things this way.” We didn’t do things this way before. And if it’s turned out to be a bad way to do things, then why should we keep doing it that way?
March 6th, 2013 | 3:46 pm
There is no need to cover all medical care. Cover the peaks with insurance, cover the mundane out of pocket.
March 6th, 2013 | 9:03 pm
A.D., then it is acceptable if I remove the latter three?
By the way, I love the arguments you guys built out from my post.
March 7th, 2013 | 10:34 am
I happened across an old Mary Tyler Moore show last night where Mary is in the hospital to receive some kind of surgery. In one comedy scene, the anesthesiologist comes into Mary’s room and introduces himself. He says he’s introducing himself because his patients are always asleep when he is doing his work and so half of them don’t even know he exists. As a result, he said, everyone forgets to pay him. Big laughs. Mary spends the reset of the scene assuring the anesthesiologist that she will not forget to pay him. Again big laughs all around.
Mary Tyler Moore was filmed in front of a live audience and did not use laugh tracks. It ran from 1970-1977. The only reason that scene got laughs was because everyone from the writers to the actors to the audience lived in a world where patients paid these things out of pocket.
How dramatically and how quickly things change. No one could even imagine writing such a scene today because the audience wouldn’t know what anyone was talking about. Why would a doctor ask a patient to pay him? What does Mary mean when she says she’ll pay him? Everybody knows she’s not going to write the doctor a check. It would simply make no sense today.
And this was about 1975. I think most of us can remember 1975, when the average person could actually go to the hospital for a couple nights and pay for surgery out of pocket. Oh, and by the way, the total out of pocket costs, even if you had a year when you needed surgery, were less than they are today if you never go to the doctor at all.
So what’s the great gain since 1975 in healthcare? Was that system so miserable that it had to end? The idea that we would only insure for catastrophic medical costs (say over $10,000 for a single incident) would be like a revolution in this country. And yet, we’ve had a revolution since 1975 (a very bad one) and it’s as if no one even noticed. It’s almost hard to remember things were like this once, and yet it was only 38 years ago.
March 7th, 2013 | 11:58 am
I want to bring my last comment back around to the Arthur Brooks piece and poverty programs. Compared to today, how horrible, how less compassionate were things before Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, and Social Security?
No doubt things were rough. Hell’s Kitchen for the Jews and German and Irish that lived in that hell hole probably couldn’t find conditions that bad today. But as bad as the worst of the worst was, who among us would want a time machine to go back and put our grandparents in public housing (say in Chicago’s public housing near where I live), give them a weekly welfare check, and have all their medical needs tended to by the county hospital?
Or, if your grandparents did not come from that kind of poverty, who would want to relieve your middle-class grandparents from the burden of having the responsibility of caring for the poor? Is it better that your grandparents had to reach into their own pockets, even when they could barely afford it, or would it have been a better thing for them to form a voting block and have such needs taken care of by someone wealthier than themselves; someone they didn’t know?
Never mind that all these programs are collapsing. As Charles Murray said in a talk I attended some years ago, “the problem with the welfare state is not that it harms the outcomes that it tries to effect–though it clearly does–but that it competes with what individuals want to achieve for themselves.”
Arthur Brooks says the flaw is that these programs have gotten so large and unviable that they threaten the safety net for the truly needy. That’s not the flaw. The flaw occurred very, very recently when the nation decided that it would stop caring for the poor and instead vote for someone else to do it.
March 7th, 2013 | 3:23 pm
I would not take a joke on the Mary Tyler Moore show as probative about how people lived in 1975. The uninsured share of the population was not much larger than today. Indemnity plans of a sort that disappeared around about 1995 were the norm then and I think it was still common to process your own claims: pay the anaesthesiologist and then apply to Blue Shield for re-imbursement. If the fictional Mary Richards was having elective surgery, she likely was not covered. Then as now, you could only be admitted to the hospital by a doctor on their attending list. They would have been more circumspect than they are today about shoveling you out the door after 48 hours.
You keep conflating two issues: one concerns the regime for financing medical care and the benefits and drawbacks of various ways of doing this. This is simply always going to be a challenge because of the nature of the service and common opinion about what is right and what is not. The other concerns social obligation over the life-cycle and between different social strata.
For starters, the problem of sustainability with regard to certain programs can be addressed with restructurings. Politicians are usually to craven or irresponsible to suggest it, but this is not that difficult. Simply putting the retirement age on an escalator which maintains a fixed ratio of the retired to the working population would repair Social Security. Repairing public medical insurance and long term care insurance would be more complicated because you first have to attack the social expectation of first-dollar coverage. As long as you can fix the dimension of the public committment and allow transparent pricing under a deductible to contain cost escalation, you can render these programs sustainable. Persuading people to retire at 69 and pay for their coumadin out of pocket is going to be a simpler task than persuading them to work into their 80s, move in with their resentful daughter-in-law, and liquidate their savings on cancer surgery (or ask their friends to organize a raffle).
Your thinking about what it means to ‘care for the poor’ seems to revolve around episodic problems in living people have, which might conceivably be addressed through charitable donations. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and even unemployment compensation are not meant to address episodic problems, but abiding and systemic ones.
March 7th, 2013 | 3:28 pm
“the problem with the welfare state is not that it harms the outcomes that it tries to effect–though it clearly does–but that it competes with what individuals want to achieve for themselves”
Murray’s most salient and influential work concerned open-ended subsidies for working-aged people. He explicitly declined to address any problems derived from old-age benefits or temporary benefits like unemployment compensation.
March 7th, 2013 | 3:39 pm
With regard to the experience of immigrant grandparents: my grandparents were at the midpoint of their lives around about 1930. The following services, commonly purchasable on the open market, were subject to common provision (usually through the conduit of public agency):
1. Custodial care for children (orphanages, &c.)
2. Primary and Secondary Schooling (through public schools)
3. Custodial care for the insane, the demented and the senile (state asylums)
4. Custodial care for a selection of indigents (state poorhouses)
5. Custodial care for a selection of the ill (e.g. tuberculosis patients in state sanitoriums).
6. Legal counsel for the indigent (usually through assigned counsel plans).
7. Custodial care and rehabilitation for veterans (veterans’ hospitals).
March 7th, 2013 | 4:57 pm
Art Deco,
Re: Murray. So what?
Well I don’t know, but I’m going to make a wild speculation that the show’s writers didn’t have Mary in the hospital for a face lift or some other kind of elective surgery. I’m sorry, but I thought your line was funny. (Why waste time trying to win an argument at any costs? I wasn’t even trying to have an argument with you.)
I’ll let you have the last word on the rest. There is little I can say to clauses like the following:
Perhaps it is as you say, but you do just say things without making a case. Granted my evidence is little more than your as it is only the lived experience of my family and their friends. And perhaps it is as you say, that the MTM scene got laughs despite it having nothing to do with the reality of lives of the writers or the audience. But that seems unlikely.
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