Haven - cutting welfare

Crown Loyalist wrote:Haven had a problem that was much, much bigger than a simple welfare spending problem. Haven had, in addition to creating massive welfare state, absolutely gutted its education system such that the children of the people who grew up on the Dole would be unable to support themselves unless they received serious adult education.

In other words, they had not only created an incredibly expensive welfare program, they'd also created people who literally did not have the ability to support themselves in a modern Honorverse economy. They lacked the basic technological skills that are taken for granted in both Manticore and the Solarian League. There was no way to get these people off welfare without MORE short-term spending to give them the job skills that would allow them to contribute to the economy and earn a wage... and Haven simply did not have the money for it.

Thus, in order to escape its welfare trap Haven needed to make massive investments in education - investments that it didn't have the money for.

It was the war with Manticore that forced Haven to start educating its population, because the education gap - and the resulting technology gap - was the only reason Manticore was able to hold its own. Under wartime conditions, Haven could cut welfare and invest in education under the guise of wartime necessity. Rob S. Pierre did this brilliantly, actually.

Crown Loyalist pretty much nails it on the head with this post. Haven's problem wasn't welfare; it was dependency on welfare to the exclusion of anything else by the vast majority of the population, with - and this is critical - no way to change that.

The Committee may have bathed Haven in blood in the doing, but they really did do - or at least begin to do - what they set out to accomplish. They revitalised Haven's economy, began educating massively more of the Dolist class than had been done previously, and gave the nation as a whole a standard to rally behind. With all the love and respect in the world to Theisman, Pritchart &co, if it weren't for the reforms Pierre, St-Just, etc. had already instituted, the Grand Alliance wouldn't have been possible. The first thing that needed to happen for Haven to survive was to change the status quo, and the Committee did that - rather brilliantly, albeit far too bloodily for my taste.

roseandheather wrote:
Crown Loyalist pretty much nails it on the head with this post. Haven's problem wasn't welfare; it was dependency on welfare to the exclusion of anything else by the vast majority of the population, with - and this is critical - no way to change that.

The Committee may have bathed Haven in blood in the doing, but they really did do - or at least begin to do - what they set out to accomplish. They revitalised Haven's economy, began educating massively more of the Dolist class than had been done previously, and gave the nation as a whole a standard to rally behind. With all the love and respect in the world to Theisman, Pritchart &co, if it weren't for the reforms Pierre, St-Just, etc. had already instituted, the Grand Alliance wouldn't have been possible. The first thing that needed to happen for Haven to survive was to change the status quo, and the Committee did that - rather brilliantly, albeit far too bloodily for my taste.

Most importantly, They made the Dolists WANT to get off the Dole. People with desire to better themselves and do something for their community and society stood up and changed things - and in the end they were rewarded for it. I don't know if Rob Pierre and St Just would have been able to reward them long term (dictatorships tend to not get along with free-thinkers), so the progress of events was probably optimally timed to revitalize the Republic, even if it was incidentally.

Jonathan_S wrote:...
But it obviously didn't help that trying to do so would have reduced the political power of the Dolist Managers; so there were powerful forces that would have acted against any attempt to lure significant numbers off the Dole.

We obviously do not have the complete picture of knowledge, but from what they still DID manage to do, as in finance a largescale war for even a week, shows that they must have had some margins to work with.

So i´m fairly sure that a good manager could have switched the economy onto a more successful/realistic track if given the chance, the problem would be both dolist managers and the Malign, maybe some extremeists as well.

Of course, even if completely successful, it would probably have taken much much longer time to achieve what the emergency measures did in very short time. With a continually poor national economy the whole time.

Tenshinai wrote: ="cthia" "]Many are lazy and just simply won't work. That's a fact."

No, that´s a popular but incorrect myth and prejudice. The fact that it DID work when tried didn´t make you think did it?

That´s also not the only time it has been tried.
Every time this method is tried, it works.

It´s only a matter of how well it works, and that usually depends mostly on how good or bad the economy is doing in total.

- - -

="cthia" "]Many lack the education for the most menial job or the skills needed to apply, or to research the jobs. Or lack the proper clothing or dress skills, or interview skills. "

Some things don't require much skill. Part of the way I worked my way through higher education was as a janitor, nothing better being found at that place and time. Not that I stopped looking

A youngster I know spent about two years as gas station clerk, two weeks ago moved up to clerk at a credit union. Getting skills needs practice, which is why entry level jobs are so important.

Also, in 'retirement', I'm doing gardening, improving my house DIY, getting fuel for the wood furnace, etc. not for interest, but because the minor improvement in finances lets me do more of what I want to do.

Tenshinai has good points here. And as pointed out elsewhere, the problem is not the welfare, it is the lack of a ramp out, instead of a giant step

Some people have life problems they can't handle. Many are being incentivized to not work. High minimum wages, unlike this method, tend to cut entry level jobs. Anyone else read about the company that raised minimum wage for their employees to U$70,000?


I'd still like to have read a story including a rabble orator pounding on the podium about how unfair it is to tax poor people at 100% by taking away as much as they earn

Tenshinai wrote:No, that´s a big bunch of prejudice that lacks grounding in facts.

Substance abuse is more common among the middleclass WITH jobs.

Most mental handicaps do not prevent people from working, even if it may slow them down, or at least slow down initial learning of the job.
(I live in a town with one of the oldest handicap schools in the world, so you see plenty of oddballs around, but a clear majority of them still have jobs. Of course, that has also resulted in me having 2 paralympics medalists on my facebook friend list.)

The last place I worked had an arrangement with a handicap group to bring in people part time for work they could handle. They were proud of being able to earn at least part of their income.

Tenshinai wrote:
Lack of education can be fixed, and any smart society would and should make education easy to aquire.

Interview skills likewise, except it can be improved far more easily.

Finding jobs, that´s either a matter of getting people into networks, or providing a search service, both works, and when both are used it tend to lead to a very high degree of people ending up in steady jobs.
This however nearly always needs to be done on public resources because private business doing it doesn´t really have a reason to be effective at it.

Unfortunately, too many bureaucrats don't do well either. Not many, too many.

Tenshinai wrote:Clothing and dress skills? Seriously...

If people don´t have clothing acceptable for a job, then whatever your welfare system is, it isn´t working.

And managers disregarding applicants ONLY because of "dress skills"? Lame. They deserve what they get, which almost certainly wont be the best applicants.

="cthia" "]Many have criminal records that prevent them from working because the government makes even a first time offender's mistake follow them and follow them and follow them..."

Not "many". "Too many". But not "many".

="cthia" "]There truly is joy in giving."


Yes, but not in receiving, because most people hate being in that situation. This is one of the reasons why welfare(on a basic level at least) should generally not be based on private involvement.

The best giving is of your own time and energy, providing training and encouragement to those who want to work. But we don't need the headwinds that come from welfare that provides perverse incentives. Likely never happen, but it would be nice to see welfare bureaucrats (& other bureaucrats) getting paid with a rate the depends largely on how well they eliminate the problem they are supposed to handle

Also, since new businesses tend to hire more:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249964

I will answer in two messages. Here is the first : what are those experiments about and what do they tell us ... and what do they tell us not.

So here is the typical setting : you have a population in which some have jobs and some do not and receive welfare payments. The hypotheses you want to test are things like :
1) Is there a disincentive to work due to the welfare payment being cut when they find jobs ?
2) Is it that they don't want to work or is it that they don't find a job ?
3) Is it that they don't find the right job or is it that the right job doesn't exist ?
4) What are the conditions that increase or decrease the chances they find a job ?
And so on, with the experimental setting being different in each case.

What you generally find is that :
1) there can be a disincentive to work if the welfare payments are higher than the wages they can command from a job. Which is another way of saying that the wages they can command for a job is lower than the welfare payment. Whether it's the welfare that is too high or the wages that are too low, you don't know. Anyway, the welfare payments act as a minimum wage.
2) When you make it so that there is no disincentive any more (by making it so that they retain part of the welfare benefits) they typically try to find work. Thus it is not that they are lazy or anything, it's the system that is organised so that they don't work. In other words, it's not a problem with people, it's a problem with the rules of the system.
3) and 4) When they meet the required basic criteria (such as appearances, as was noted above) they typically can find a job, so it is not a lack of skill problem but of employability ... even though, and that's the point to be aware of, it might be a macroeconomic skill mismatch problem (there might not be as many such jobs as candidates in the entire economy, and thus some are left out, which is different from some particular people not having any skills). To put it another way : the jobs they can do exist, it's just that they are not the ones doing them.

And that's where you see the flaw in the experiment (or rather the misunderstanding they create, because the people doing the experiment usually know what they are doing) : if the people you helped now have a job, but you didn't create jobs, then there is someone else who is worse off because he doesn't have a job any more. What you've done is make the people in the experiment more employable relative to other people. Which is just another way to say that you have made everyone else less employable relative to the people you helped. But your results don't show this : the people who are worse off are not part of your reporting system !
In other words, the experimental results cannot be generalised as they are : it doesn't tell you what would happen if you extended the system to everyone. It's a microeconomic experiment, and the results are not necessarily carried to the macroeconomic stage, because of composition fallacies.

Hopefully I have not been too obscure with this. Obviously it would be better if I had the exact references and the time to study them to be more accurate but that's the gist of the matter, I believe.

So now the second part : what about Haven ?
The short answer is : I don't know.

They are supposed to have high inflation, so there must be too much money chasing after too few goods. But why do they have high unemployment then ? All this Basic Stipend thing should have been continuously raising demand, to the point of overheating the economy, so how the hell did they end up with so much unemployment ?

The only explanation I can think of is that they have gutted the education system to the point where on-the-job training is basically impossible. Or maybe it's forbidden, or only allowed with lots of red tape everywhere ... Then they would have a tremendous skill gap. Anyway I don't see any answer that fits what we know by relying on fiscal and monetary policy only. They just have to have a big structural problem somewhere. Then fiddling with the welfare system alone will not work. You need to fix the structural flaw.

there have been comments throughout the books saying that haven gutted its Education standards. everyone passed because the teachers were not allowed to fail them. there was little real learning done.

have been in education myself, i know how hard some people take failure. also that sometimes no matter how much effort you and the student put in, there are limits they may not always be able to overcome.

there is a growing trend, as evidenced in sport, a lot of children's teams have take to given out to trophies to everyone who competed. I no more wish to dampen a children's enthusiasm for something as the next person , and a different reward for taking part then to the top 3, i.e. certificate or something similar as opposed to the trophy/ribbon given to the top 3/winner I can live with as a clear distinction is being made between those who won and those who didn't.

I hate to see anyone fail, but it must be recognised that there is a point at which you either pass or you don't. you win or you don't.

when that error is introduced to education you can very quickly go from a driven, focused population to a group of layabouts who KNOW they can get just as much if not more by doing nothing then if they work their tails off, and so will sit there doing nothing.

I'm starting to ramble to i'll leave that there.

The point is that gutting the education system is not sufficient. If you leave it at that and you have a shortage of workers, then sooner or later employers will find it more practical to train their own people themselves. So you should see the development of a system of apprenticeship. I don't think it's realistic to think that you can gut an education system to the point where such on-the-job training cannot happen.

In a prolong society, even slow training should lead to skill accumulation over time. Let's assume that the typical Dolist exits the education system with the average level of, say, an 8th grader. At a rate of, say 5 hours a week, it will take 24 years to complete the equivalent of a remaining 4 years/30 hours-per-week secondary education. But you will still get there. Even if the average exit level was that of a 5th grader, it would still take only a bit over 40 years. For a country that has had prolong for decades, it shouldn't be unworkable.

And add to that the fact that these apprentice positions should attract precisely the people among the Dolists who want to work the most. And those are probably the people who are above average in studying too. So it's probably going to take them less than that to be up to speed.

There has to be something which prevents employers to train their workers. Which is probably a combination of : (a) the BLS acting as a minimum wage to make training hours expensive, (b) prices being kept artificially low, and (c) regulations preventing employers to train workers outside 'government approved' programs.

niethil wrote:The point is that gutting the education system is not sufficient. If you leave it at that and you have a shortage of workers, then sooner or later employers will find it more practical to train their own people themselves. So you should see the development of a system of apprenticeship. I don't think it's realistic to think that you can gut an education system to the point where such on-the-job training cannot happen.

In a prolong society, even slow training should lead to skill accumulation over time. Let's assume that the typical Dolist exits the education system with the average level of, say, an 8th grader. At a rate of, say 5 hours a week, it will take 24 years to complete the equivalent of a remaining 4 years/30 hours-per-week secondary education. But you will still get there. Even if the average exit level was that of a 5th grader, it would still take only a bit over 40 years. For a country that has had prolong for decades, it shouldn't be unworkable.

And add to that the fact that these apprentice positions should attract precisely the people among the Dolists who want to work the most. And those are probably the people who are above average in studying too. So it's probably going to take them less than that to be up to speed.

There has to be something which prevents employers to train their workers. Which is probably a combination of : (a) the BLS acting as a minimum wage to make training hours expensive, (b) prices being kept artificially low, and (c) regulations preventing employers to train workers outside 'government approved' programs.

That on-the-job training almost certainly did happen. It is really the only way that Haven had any workers who could do anything. We actually have read of people who had been on the Dole and worked their way out of it.

But that doesn't help the Dolists who think they should get their Dole without doing anything for it.

You have to remember that this did not develop overnight. It took 400 years for the system to become as bad as it was by the time of On Basilisk Station. As early as 1771 P.D. there were predictions of total economic collapse under the Dolist system. But all they did was try to prop it up instead of fix the fundamental problem.

niethil wrote:The point is that gutting the education system is not sufficient. If you leave it at that and you have a shortage of workers, then sooner or later employers will find it more practical to train their own people themselves. So you should see the development of a system of apprenticeship. I don't think it's realistic to think that you can gut an education system to the point where such on-the-job training cannot happen.

In a prolong society, even slow training should lead to skill accumulation over time. Let's assume that the typical Dolist exits the education system with the average level of, say, an 8th grader. At a rate of, say 5 hours a week, it will take 24 years to complete the equivalent of a remaining 4 years/30 hours-per-week secondary education. But you will still get there. Even if the average exit level was that of a 5th grader, it would still take only a bit over 40 years. For a country that has had prolong for decades, it shouldn't be unworkable.

And add to that the fact that these apprentice positions should attract precisely the people among the Dolists who want to work the most. And those are probably the people who are above average in studying too. So it's probably going to take them less than that to be up to speed.

There has to be something which prevents employers to train their workers. Which is probably a combination of : (a) the BLS acting as a minimum wage to make training hours expensive, (b) prices being kept artificially low, and (c) regulations preventing employers to train workers outside 'government approved' programs.

I'm not certain, but given all the taxes on the wealthy, the BLS may be the actual earned wage was well as the minimum (The workforce may be taxed so that the remains of their pay is close to the BLS.) In such a case, there is no incentive to work, or to work better, beyond self - recognition. Given that, education is meaningless - an academic could choose at any time to live on the Dole and live a care-free life, reading and studying with no pressure to produce or succeed, and still get the same wage and living conditions.

In reality, such conditions lead to severe black market activities, and people with "useful" skills can trade those skills for goods either not available to the masses or in amounts greater than the masses are allowed. There is mention of this in someof the early books, but not as much as I would have expected.