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Suspicious Discontinuities

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Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#121

Post by nitrogen »

umvi wrote: post #113
iron0013 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of children, that’s who’s gonna starve if you decide to let them suffer the consequences of their parents’ poor choices. I would have personally starved to death dozens of times over if not for food stamps.

You might have been more hungry, but death by starvation in the USA is nearly unheard of. I personally have never heard of anyone - homeless or otherwise - dying of starvation in the USA. The only people I've heard of dying of starvation were stranded on a mountain or on the ocean or something.

You won't see death by starvation. You'll see something like death by flu after malnutrition weakens immunity, or death by overdose after malnutrition weakens decisionmaking.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#122

Post by peteretep »

SilasX wrote: post #111
peteretep wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have misread or misunderstood this. Under the old system, it was possible to take a job, and then have less actual income than you did before. Under the new system, _every_ extra hour of work you do causes you to have more money in your pocket, and you are always incentivized to do more work, or start a job that pays less now but might pay more as your experience grows. I'm not sure how else you'd want th…

My point was that 63% is still very bad, and if it’s supposed to be an improvement, then the existing system is abysmal from an incentive perspective.

How else would you see this working, exactly? You've got to make sure people who need the benefits and can't work get supported, you need to not discourage people from working (and most people _do_ want to work), and you also can't just (afford to) unilaterally extend benefits to a whole bunch of people who don't currently get them.

So, concrete proposal on how you'd structure this?

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#123

Post by taneq »

nnx wrote: post #115
thrower123 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government paternalism is terrifying. People are going to screw up, and make bad choices, but having choices is better than being treated like a child your entire life.

As Andrew Yang rightly said "nobody has ever wondered if shareholders would screw up, make bad choices, when receiving their dividends".

And this is the right way to look at it. In addition to being a free agent, every citizen should be treated as a shareholder in the nation.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#124

Post by taneq »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #103
btilly wrote: post #74

The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay…

I'm not an expert on the system in Australia but how I think it works from what I have heard is there isn't a cut off point where if you make x you are eligible and if you make x+1 you aren't. Instead its a slope where if you make x+1 you lose a certain % of the payments until you eventually make enough to lose them all. But at all times its still better to take the job.

Most things here are arranged that way and it works pretty well for the most part. There are a few things that still have cliffs, though. One of my friends is on a disability pension but is still able to work part time. If he works too many hours then he's disqualified from the pension so he's had to cap his work hours. Another thing is the childcare subsidy for working households - the subsidy itself scales in a reasonable manner but there's also a hard cap on annual payments which applies above a given household income threshold. If you go slightly over the cap you can end up out of pocket by $10k or more.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#125

Post by lmm »

crooked-v wrote: post #117
lmm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

63% is not necessarily so bad. Income tax rates for the well off went as high as 95% at some points in UK history, and those do not seem to have been disastrous (indeed they seem to be some of the country's finest years). And beyond that you're letting perfect be the enemy of good here. Eliminating the cliffs and capping the marginal tax rate of the poor at 63% is valuable progress. If you want things to get better y…

As the reduction applies only to the benefits (not to your income), it's just a smooth reduction in benefits as you earn more money, not a tax.

Money is fungible. If a salary increase of $1 leaves you with 37c in your pocket that's a de facto 63% marginal tax rate, however it happens to be structured for accounting purposes.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#126

Post by taneq »

meristem wrote: post #59
lostmsu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it depressing? Biologically this must be tuned to the best age for having kids, and men's age hardly matters.

Quality of sperm decays with age. Just not in the same curve as egg reserves.

And resources (especially of single men) increase more than linearly with age, to make up for it.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#127

Post by taneq »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52
lostmsu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it depressing? Biologically this must be tuned to the best age for having kids, and men's age hardly matters.

This is depressing to people who expect the dating and sexual marketplace to be some sort of meritocracy, or equality to be exhibited. It's more of a free market than some care to admit. The gritty truth is: people are depreciating assets, and some lose their value (perceived or actual) faster than others. One of the founders of Okcupid (a data scientist) wrote a book, Dataclysm [1], using data from Okcupid's platfor…

> some sort of meritocracy

What definition of merit are you using that it's not?

> most people don't describe themselves as racist, but a surprisingly high number of people are

Calling people racist for preferring to date a particular race is just silly, you might as well call people sexist for preferring to date a particular gender.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#129

Post by Dylan16807 »

peteretep wrote: post #122
SilasX wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that 63% is still very bad, and if it’s supposed to be an improvement, then the existing system is abysmal from an incentive perspective.

How else would you see this working, exactly? You've got to make sure people who need the benefits and can't work get supported, you need to not discourage people from working (and most people _do_ want to work), and you also can't just (afford to) unilaterally extend benefits to a whole bunch of people who don't currently get them. So, concrete proposal on how you'd structure this?

The exact same way as the new system, except instead of 63% it's a much smaller number.

Edit: Why are people downvoting this?

I don't understand what's so confusing about SilasX's argument.

Removing cliffs and changing it to a smooth dropoff is good.

But that dropoff doesn't have to be £.63 in benefits per £1 earned. That's a pretty big effective marginal tax rate! Why not £.50 or £.30?

It should be extremely easy to understand how this proposal works, right?

It would technically bring more people into the system, but they'd be at the top end, and therefore only be receiving a small fraction of the current levels of benefits. It's totally doable.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#130

Post by [deleted] »

crooked-v wrote: post #116
SilasX wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that 63% is still very bad, and if it’s supposed to be an improvement, then the existing system is abysmal from an incentive perspective.

It's not 63%, it's a reduction of £0.63 in benefits (not in your total income) for each extra dollar you earn in income over the cutoff level. This prevents situations where it's better to stay under a cutoff of X in income until you can jump straight to an income of X income + Y in benefits, while staying on benefits until then.

[deleted]
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