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re: How do we change the culture of bad decision-making?
Posted on 2/13/17 at 2:53 pm to CoachChappy
Posted on 2/13/17 at 2:53 pm to CoachChappy
quote:
Stop rewarding it
ETA example: If you have 1 baby, we (the government/American people) will help you out. When you have your 2nd-10th, you are on your own.
This approach may sound good, but doesn't bear close scrutiny. Trying to teach a lesson to the mother by punishing the child who had nothing to do with the bad decision doesn't seem like a good idea.
But even aside from that it doesn't make much sense.
The additional amount of benefits a woman gets from having a 2nd or subsequent child is ridiculously inadequate to cover the cost of raising the child, let alone to provide enough extra to be an incentive to spend nine months carrying a child and ~18 years raising it. A woman could work a few hours a month at minimum wage, make more money and have less expenses and more free time. If you're going to assume she's acting in response to an incentive, as your "stop rewarding it" comment suggests, I'd say there's a far greater incentive to work a few hours a month than to burden her body for nine months and her lifestyle for ~18 years for the same amount of money or less.
Most likely, the woman who is continuing to have children she can't support isn't acting rationally in response to an incentive, but simply either doesn't know or doesn't care that she is making her life and her children's lives worse with her decisions. If that's the case, then changing the incentives doesn't change anything except the conditions in which the innocent child will live.
3
Posted on 2/13/17 at 2:59 pm to Nuts4LSU
quote:
Most likely, the woman who is continuing to have children she can't support isn't acting rationally in response to an incentive, but simply either doesn't know or doesn't care that she is making her life and her children's lives worse with her decisions. If that's the case, then changing the incentives doesn't change anything except the conditions in which the innocent child will live.
OK. So why is my responsibility to pay for her stupidity?
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:02 pm to Nuts4LSU
The issue is that the mother percieves it as more money, not that it is actually lucrative.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:05 pm to kingbob
quote:And I can't blame them really. The system presents it that way, and as Friedman argued, the entitlements make it so that work has essentially a 100% marginal tax rate. So they get as much for doing nothing as they would for working, and if they want more, then more children is more reasonable than working.
The issue is that the mother percieves it as more money, not that it is actually lucrative.
This post was edited on 2/13/17 at 3:08 pm
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:09 pm to Nuts4LSU
The answer is what then?
Just keep doing the same old? Nah.
We need to try different and more extreme tactics.
There's a welfare culture out there and some take pride in it. You can't fix that without a lottery sized carrot. Frick that too. That equates to the bully getting paid for not beating up the nerd.
Frick that.
Hunger is a great motivator.
Is it time to try sterilzation? I'd like to see that paid for over abortions.
Just keep doing the same old? Nah.
We need to try different and more extreme tactics.
There's a welfare culture out there and some take pride in it. You can't fix that without a lottery sized carrot. Frick that too. That equates to the bully getting paid for not beating up the nerd.
Frick that.
Hunger is a great motivator.
Is it time to try sterilzation? I'd like to see that paid for over abortions.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:12 pm to Zach
quote:
So why is my responsibility to pay for her stupidity?
It's not, but we decide to do this because we are going to pay for her stupidity one way or the other. If we don't provide food, medical care, etc. for the children, they are going to have to eat some way, so how will they? She and, when they get old enough, her children are going to do things to get food that may be worse than collecting benefits. We also choose to do this because we realize that the children are not responsible for what she has done and leaving them to starve or do whatever desperate acts are needed not to starve is harsh treatment for someone who did nothing to deserve it.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:19 pm to kingbob
quote:
The issue is that the mother percieves it as more money, not that it is actually lucrative.
If it's already not actually lucrative but she doesn't perceive that, then how would making it less lucrative change her behavior? She would have to understand that it's not lucrative for her behavior to change. If she's willing and able to do that, then she would already have changed it because it's already not lucrative.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:22 pm to Nuts4LSU
Think about this: if she knows that she has to split the exact same reaources between 2 kids, she's going to think twice about having a second one. If she knows she's getting more for the second kid, she's going to be that much less cautious, even if it doesn't represent a net profit. Her brain is good ing to see "more kid = more money".
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:26 pm to roadGator
quote:
The answer is what then?
If anybody knew that, we wouldn't be having the discussion.
quote:
Hunger is a great motivator.
Yes. It can motivate people to kill, steal, deal drugs, engage in prostitution and a lot of other things. It can also motivate people to go out and get a job. But there is already way more incentive to do that than to have kids to get extra benefits, so it's unlikely that changing the incentives is going to motivate her to do that. If she's not acting rationally in response to the incentives that are already there, she's not suddenly going to start doing so just because we change them a little bit. She's hurting herself and her children and either doesn't know it or doesn't care. That's the problem, not the incentive framework.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:26 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
How do we change the culture of bad decision-making?
Unfortunately you can't fix stupid. I think I heard that somewhere.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:31 pm to kingbob
quote:
Think about this: if she knows that she has to split the exact same reaources between 2 kids, she's going to think twice about having a second one.
No, she's not. She's not thinking even once, and sure as hell won't twice. If she were thinking in a rational manner like that, she would spend a few hours a month working at a minimum wage job instead of God-knows how many hours taking care of a kid, and make more money, have less expenses and a lot more free time than she will ever get by having kids. Clearly, she's not thinking about the consequences of her actions and doesn't care about them.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:36 pm to Nuts4LSU
She's not thinking because she knows the state will bail her out. If there is no state to bail her out, she'll find a way to manage the first kid, but she'll be damned before she has another one. If there is one thing that motivates someone to grow up and be an adult, it is having a starving child and no help available to raise it.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:38 pm to SlowFlowPro
For one start letting your kids make their own decisions. Let them get out and explore. Stop being so overprotective. Let them make mistakes and learn from them. That's how you refine your decision making and your ability to reason.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:39 pm to Nuts4LSU
What solution do you present then?
It sounds like you are fine paying the bully to leave the nerd alone. I'm for beating the shite out of the bully instead of paying him.
It sounds like you are fine paying the bully to leave the nerd alone. I'm for beating the shite out of the bully instead of paying him.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:39 pm to buckeye_vol
quote:
The system presents it that way, and as Friedman argued, the entitlements make it so that work has essentially a 100% marginal tax rate. So they get as much for doing nothing as they would for working, and if they want more, then more children is more reasonable than working.
Not true at all. First of all, she's not "doing nothing". She's doing whatever raising a child involves, which takes a hell of a lot of time and energy, certainly more than working a few hours a month at a minimum wage job. Even if she only got exactly the same amount from working that she gets in entitlements from having kids, she'd be way better off working a small fraction of the time it takes to take care of a kid and having way less expenses and less burden on her body. The entire premise that people in this situation are acting rationally in response to incentives is flawed. The incentives are already overwhelmingly in favor of working instead of having kids they can't support, but some people simply are not responding to those incentives. If they aren't going to respond to incentives, what good does it do to change them?
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:40 pm to TimeOutdoors
We free our children from possible bad decisions. We helicopter in to protect them from bad decisions. We shield them from pain, failure, bullies, controversy, etc, and then we wonder why they grow up to be adults who cannot seem to handle any of the above.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:40 pm to Nuts4LSU
quote:
She's doing whatever raising a child involves, which takes a hell of a lot of time and energy, certainly more than working a few hours a month at a minimum wage job.
She's not always doing whatever raising a child involves. You don't believe that do you?
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:48 pm to kingbob
quote:
She's not thinking because she knows the state will bail her out. If there is no state to bail her out, she'll find a way to manage the first kid, but she'll be damned before she has another one
If she was reasoning that rationally, she wouldn't be in the situation to begin with.
quote:
If there is one thing that motivates someone to grow up and be an adult, it is having a starving child and no help available to raise it.
If that were enough to motivate her, she'd already be doing it. The benefits she gets aren't even close to enough to take care of a child to any reasonable degree. Additionally, even if she were suddenly motivated, there's no reason to think she'd be any more likely to be motivated to "grow up and be an adult" than to "grow up" and be a violent criminal, drug dealer, prostitute, etc.
The fundamental problem most people have in understanding this issue is that they start from the false assumption that people who already make bad decisions that hurt themselves will somehow magically stop if we make a comparatively minor change in how badly their decisions hurt them. They won't. People who hurt themselves (and their kids) with bad decisions are not rational and don't respond rationally to incentives.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:49 pm to kingbob
quote:
Think about this: if she knows that she has to split the exact same reaources between 2 kids, she's going to think twice about having a second one. If she knows she's getting more for the second kid, she's going to be that much less cautious, even if it doesn't represent a net profit. Her brain is good ing to see "more kid = more money".
I'm not saying that no one ever has kids to get more money but I think it's really more of a cultural thing. Having kids at a young age is part of life in certain communities. It happens in Mexico and other parts of the world where benefits aren't available.
I think it's a leftover from the days when more nuclear families existed, women didn't work, and low skilled men had better blue collar opportunities. Going further back, kids were needed by the working class to "work in the fields."
Basically, the lower classes just don't fully comprehend the financial burden of raising children today. It's just an inevitable part of life to them.
Posted on 2/13/17 at 3:50 pm to cahoots
quote:
Basically, the lower classes just don't fully comprehend the financial burden of raising children today
low expecations?
They 100% should know if they have ever been to the grocery store.
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