Social Safety Net

If the market is given as much latitude as possible, experience has shown that some people will need help at least for some periods in their life. So a social safety net is needed. It should be provided as fairly and efficiently as possible, while not creating excessive dependency.

There are various arguments against providing a social safety net. The first is the "survival of the fittest". It is not natural to intervene. We need to encourage and reward those who are best able to survive. By needing help, the poor have shown that they are not fit.

This argument takes ideas that really apply to whole species and tries to apply them within social groups at the individual level. We as a species have been able to survive because of our social organization. We survive as a group, not as individuals. Now it is true that mutations are selected for their survival value, but the poor are not genetically different, they just occupy a different social position and they may occupy it only temporarily due to circumstances beyond their control.

A variation on this is the "thinning the herd" argument. In order to keep the herd strong the weak members need to be thinned out by predators.

Again this does not apply. We were able to fight off predators precisely because of working together. Even if the idea of a predator is expanded to mean anything that threatens individual survival, such as scarcity of food, it still does not apply because we are not talking about the extreme and heart breaking case where some must starve so that a few can survive. We are talking about allocating the resources of a wealthy society that can feed all of its members.

The last biological argument is the "natural hierarchy" argument. Social animals such as wolves and apes organize themselves into hierarchies. But there is no evidence that members of the group starve because of their low station. It is more of an organizational issue.

In any case, all of these biological arguments miss the main point that we are social and moral. Our social organization is not biologically determined. We have quite a few degrees of freedom. Now it is true that there are social organizations that reduce the chances for survival of the whole group, but there is no evidence that helping the poor will cause a society to crumble.

Now let's go on to some social arguments. The first is to "give resources to those who can make the best use of them". According to this argument, the poor by being poor have shown that they cannot make good use of their opportunities, so why shift even more resources there where they will not be productively used?

If helping the poor means just paying them enough to survive in return for their compliance, then it may be true that this is not as productive as it could be. On the other hand, resources can be used to help the poor become more productive. If they are given a chance most of them can be very productive.

The next set of arguments are different variations of "blame the victim". Why should we help them when they are to blame for where they are? If they would just work harder, they would be fine. We cannot subsidize laziness and lack of ambition. How can we pay people to just have more babies that we in turn need to feed?

Before making claims like this we need to find out as best we can what the real causes of poverty are. It could be built into the social and economic structure. It could be because of past injustices that are perpetuated to future generations. The children may have been trained to be dependent. And are there really opportunities available that are better? Are there jobs? Is there transportation to those jobs? Is there job training? Do those jobs provide health benefits and childcare? There may be some lazy people, but does that account for more than a fraction of the cases?

An underlying assumption in the discussions so far is that there is a permanent class of poor people. But there is also a group of people that cycle in and out of poverty, and there are people who were fairly well off who have fallen into poverty because of divorce or disability or loosing a job. Many families are one or two paychecks from the streets. So if people cannot have simple compassion, they may want to consider that it could happen to them.

Another argument is "there are too many of them and too little of me." That is, we simply cannot afford to take care of the poor. This is applied to the poor within wealthy countries. It is even more of an argument when we consider the poor in other countries. It is true that we need to look at how much of social resources should be dedicated to the social safety net. There are practical limitations, but especially in wealthy countries there should be enough for a social safety net plus some foreign aid for poor countries. There is no danger that it will cause us all to be uniformly poor. We are not talking about making everyone the same, just providing the basics and helping people help themselves.

Now to some arguments for a social safety net. Starting with the most cynical, it is argued that "we need to contain them where they are or they may come to where we are". This is the fear of the rich that a mass of poor people with nothing to loose will storm their comfortable neighborhoods looking for food and revenge. Applying this to countries, they may swarm over our borders. There is only so much you can do with gated communities and border guards.

It is tempting to see this as the main reason there is any sort of social safety net. If the poor would just quietly die, how many people would be overly concerned, especially if they would die quietly somewhere where we can't see them?

But what if someone we know becomes poor or someone in our own family. Can we still turn a blind eye?

This brings us to a fundamental desire. I do not want to see other people suffer and die. If there is something we can do, I want us to do it. This desire comes from just basic feelings of sympathy. It is independent of the more pragmatic reasons related to maintaining social order, but I also want to maintain social order.

While many people may be upset with the current way the social safety net is organized, most would hopefully agree, especially after considering this discussion, that we need something. The main issue is how to provide it most effectively. Then it becomes a matter for empirical study.

There will still be various arguments about what basic needs should be met, how to provide incentives for people to become self-supporting again, how to prevent fraud, and various other practical issues. All of these need to be worked. The system needs to be constantly monitored and improved. But we should never get to the point where we argue for abandoning the poor to their fate because of problems with the current system. The arguments should be about how to improve the system.