re: How do we change the culture of bad decision-making?

People learn from consequences. I learned not to dick around in school because when I did, I lost my scholarship. I was irresponsibile and made mistakes. However, those mistakes taught me a valuable lesson, and I had to work my arse off to get it back. If I ride a bike without a helmet, then I fall off my bike and hurt my head, maybe next time, I'll think to wear a helmet. If I don't, natural selection will select me as a loser in the game of life.

Our society has by and large insulated people from negative consequences of unproductive behavior by eliminating the pain. There is no one in this country who cannot stop working today, get on government assistance, and with that have an apartment, healthcare, and enough money and food to subsist off of. That means people don't work unless that job gets them significantly more than those combined benefits to account for the loss of free time. If those benefits didn't exist, they would work or die. They would budget or die. Believe it or not, the human spirit is very determined to not die, and gets pretty creative when faced with death as the alternative to bold action. Humans find a way. Our system gives them a way so they don't have to try to make good decisions.

If you have $20 and you need to buy toilet paper.. do you

1) buy a 4 pack for $2
2) buy a 32 pack for $12

This is what it boils down to more often than not. It makes economic sense to buy the 32 pack if you can absorb the short term inconvenience of increased price..

Some really poor people can't and thus spend more than people who are well off or can afford to wait on a sale, etc

quote:

---

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.

---

You know what I meant by nothing, and besides, I'm comparing that to a situation she is a mother and a provider.

quote:

---

The incentives are already overwhelmingly in favor of working instead of having kids they can't support,

---

When it essentially functions as a 100% marginal tax rate, it's not incentivizing people to work. I'm not blaming the mothers by any means, I'm blaming the system where dependency is competing with independency, rather than one that reinforces independency.

quote:

---

, but some people simply are not responding to those incentives.

---

Of course not; no incentive is 100% effective.

quote:

---

If they aren't going to respond to incentives, what good does it do to change them?

---

Because many are responding to it, understandably so. Again, this is one reason I found the conservative argument for a universal basic income compelling. It doesn't punish one for working, but it doesn't eliminate the supports that may be necessary as well. Furthermore, it eliminates the coercive relationship between citizens and the government.

quote:

---

conservative argument for a universal basic income

---

What conservative has ever argued for that?

I'm starting to like the idea of UBI. $10,000/person/year works out to $3 trillion. That's over 800/mo.

We could also reduce the UBI for kids under 18 who reside with parents.

We could also remove the UBI for others (military, incarcerated, highly compensated public sector employees, etc.)

quote:

---

Those people aren’t poor because the system is set up to make them buy expensive TP or because their car insurance is more than other people’s. There will be exceptions, of course, but in general people are poor because they make bad decisions

---

Slo, there are some 320,000,000 people living in the US.

Let's assume a normal distribution for intelligence:



Look at the 1st std. dev. on the left of the curve, it's at 85. How many people do you know with an IQ of 85? I would bet that most people posting on this board are above 85.

But look past the 1st std. dev., that's where 15.5% of the population resides.

Let's do the math...

320,000,000 x 0.155 = 49,600,000

That's nearly 50 million people that have an IQ below 85.

How many people do you know that even have an IQ below 100? There's 160 million people out there below 100 IQ.

What level IQ does it take to thrive in our system? Our system isn't designed for the lowest common denominator, indeed, it is designed in large part to take advantage of people with < 100 IQ.

I would conclude that our system depends on a culture of bad decision-making, it would crash without it. If other people's bad decisions are hurting your bottom line, you're doing it wrong.

It is next to Impossible to address bad decision making when there's an entire political arm that exist for the sole purpose of absolving people of responsibility for their bad decisions and telling them that the results of their bad decisions aren't really their fault. I really have no idea how you can address this problem from a policy standpoint because people will always prefer to hear excuses for their results rather than reasons

quote:

---

You know what I meant by nothing, and besides, I'm comparing that to a situation she is a mother and a provider.

---

Yes, by "nothing" you meant not having a paying job, but raising a kid is much more difficult, costs a lot and is nowhere close to being a good money-making alternative to having a paying job since it involves tons more work and expense than a job that would pay the same amount or more. Now, if you're talking about someone who is going to have the kids either way ("a situation she is a mother and a provider"), then that really doesn't have anything to do with this issue. The issue is women supposedly being incentivized to have children in order to get more money from the government, with the implication being that if they didn't get more, they wouldn't keep having them.

quote:

---

The incentives are already overwhelmingly in favor of working instead of having kids they can't support,

When it essentially functions as a 100% marginal tax rate, it's not incentivizing people to work

---

I'm not sure what you mean by a 100% tax rate, but I assume it boils down to the idea that they get as much from not working and collecting benefits as they would from working. I don't agree with that, but even if we accept it as true and the money is exactly the same, the incentive is still overwhelmingly in favor of working rather than having kids to get more benefits. They get the same money, but have less expenses, less work to do, less physical demands on the body and TONS more freedom and independence. There is no scenario in which having kids to get more money from the government is anywhere near as beneficial to the person in question as working for the same amount of money would be. Therefore, the incentive is always overwhelmingly in favor of working.

quote:

---

but some people simply are not responding to those incentives.
Of course not; no incentive is 100% effective.

---

No, which is why when dealing with a population that is already not responding to incentives, it makes no sense to try to influence their behavior with more incentives.

quote:

---

If they aren't going to respond to incentives, what good does it do to change them?
Because many are responding to it, understandably so.

---

Of course they are. The vast majority of people do act rationally and do respond to incentives. Those people are not the ones who are supposedly having children to get more money from the government. The ones who do are the population we're talking about, and we've already established that they don't respond to incentives. Trying more incentives is not going to get through to them.

quote:

---

I found the conservative argument for a universal basic income compelling. It doesn't punish one for working, but it doesn't eliminate the supports that may be necessary as well.

---

Oh I agree with that, but I've just never heard of a conservative who does.

quote:

---

Furthermore, it eliminates the coercive relationship between citizens and the government.

---

I'm not sure what you're referring to as the "coercive relationship". If you are referring to taxes, then how does it eliminate that? How can there be a universal income without taxes to fund it?

quote:

---

Reward your kids at the top of the class with small business loans, stop tying funding to how many "special" kids you have diagnosed.

---

I agree with this and it needs to be applied to every scenario.

We have a system that rewards laziness and stupidity more than hard work and intelligence. It's easier to be stupid and lazy. So most take that route unless they were raised right or born extremely gifted