This Bruenig follow up to his recent drubbing of Kelsey Piper was entertaining, but it got me thinking about just what she is now gesturing at.
She contends that cash welfare does not really help much. She presents a few recent studies showing null results for cognitive and health outcomes. She doesn’t present an explicit framework for evaluating whether a particular welfare policy is good, but implicitly adopts an evaluative framework that says welfare programs can be deemed good or bad by looking at the extent to which they promote human capital and related indicators.
I argue that we should look to the more traditional goals of the welfare state: eradicating class difference and social alienation, reducing inequality and leveling living standards, compressing and smoothing income and consumption, providing workers and individuals refuge and independence from coercion by reducing economic dependence on the labor market and the family, among other things.
Now the frame Piper used was relatively banal in the neoliberal era. Everything was about “equality of opportunity, not outcome.” But wait a minute, isn’t Piper in an IQ-obsessed cult? I thought genetic differences determine people’s human capital, and that she was one of the good ones that says “yes and” we should throw a few bones at the dullards for their misfortune. She’s also a market fundamentalist that presumably understands that her preferred political economic arrangements lead to ever greater pre-transfer inequality.
When you start with a left hereditarian and take away their commitment to welfare, because in certain RCTs it doesn’t change people’s human capital enough (a thing they believe is mostly immutable), what does that make her?
I wonder if Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans, has figured out that some of his co-authors think the USA has too many useless eaters already? I can’t tell you which they are, but when an organization has Effective Altruism money and a lead author who is close friends with Scott Alexander and Yud, it will have people ready to sterilize and deport poor brown people.
Brunig’s argument that Piper is ignorant of the founding arguments for the welfare state and just knows a neoliberal argument for something kind of like a welfare state reminds me of an exchange with someone of her class where I tried a basic Green argument and they fell into it like I was the first guy trying a Judo throw on an American in 1940something. They flailed wildly as if they had never encountered that move and did not have a response ready.
My rule for understanding somebody like Piper is that they will endorse whatever they think will keep Starbucks open, ubiquitous, and relatively inexpensive
Communism is when no Venti latte
Someone I know once pointed out that the kind of people who become fascists tend to be 100% about vibes, and I think this is a case of that.
I’m just spitballing here, but I’d bet that she doesn’t like the aesthetics of being a right-wing shithead; she wants to be seen as a kind and empathetic person. Since she’s completely incapable of introspection, she’ll never take the actions that would make that true, so she’s stuck pretending to be something she’s not. A tragic case of misalignment.
Doing that in public is making her an easy target for rotten vegetables.
her favourite online handle is “the unit of caring” (or TUOC), which is an Eliezerism for money.
I thought she had stolen a vaguely Asian sounding last name for some reason. Same with Richard Ngo
Holy shit, articles like this are why I don’t tend to go directly to lesswrong anymore. If anyone started talking to me about a common currency of expected utilons I’d strangle them.
really? Beyond parody.
Though, Yud sourcing that trash from an Omohundro did give me a particularly Nashville-coded chuckle
