Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Mark Kleiman follows up on my earlier post on charity by asking why we want to have engineers doing charity work -- isn't it more efficient to have such things done by professionals? It's a good question, but I think there are some problems with the "professional" model.

First of all, it assumes that professionals are competent, which is not necessarily the case. I invite anyone who doubts me to go work in the government office of their choosing and calculate the ratio of dedicated professionals to chair-warmers trying to rack up their 25 and get home to the barcalounger. Social workers can be talented dedicated professionals, but they can also be aimless 22-year olds who didn't know what they were getting into, or tired forty-five year olds who hate their clients but can't find anything that pays better.

Second of all, institutional services are very bad at doing a lot of the things that the clients we worked with seemed to need most. For example, a kid who has the potential to be an engineer needs someone to provide the roadmap to get there, constant feedback, encouragement when he encounters setbacks -- the things his parents can't provide because his Dad's not there and no one in his mother's family has held a long-term job in recent memory. The social worker has perhaps thirty families to work with, many of whom have active pathologies such as drug use, violence, etc. The gifted ones fall through the cracks (and yes, you could increase funding, but you're talking about an unrealistic increase in welfare spending, since to get more qualified caseworkers you'd have to drastically raise their salaries.) Also, the social worker doesn't really know how to get to be an engineer. The social worker has an entirely different life history and basket of skills. At best, she can refer him to someone who knows how to be an engineer -- who is not likely to be a professional social worker. Like, oh, say, you.

Private individuals are better at many kinds of charity for the same reason that individual parents, even no very good ones, are better than orphanages. People are very complicated, and they require a complicated response, not the kind of cookie-cutter programs that government, by its nature, churns out.

Now, there are some problems that the government can solve. If you're hungry it can buy you food. If you need clothes, it can buy them for you. If you have nowhere to stay, it can build you shelter. But I would argue that these are not, by and large, the problems of today's poor.

Today's poor are more likely to be overnourished than to go hungry (and the ones who are undernourished are the ones who do not or cannot apply for government assistance.)

Today's poor have somewhere to stay. Contrary to popular belief, there is almsot no such animal as the "homeless family" in the way advocates want you to picture it -- women and their children living on the streets. There are families who have no where of their own to live, but the government does not let them stay on the streets. They are put in various sorts of temporary living arrangements while the state seeks permanent shelter and a variety of complementary services for them. The people on the street are generally the severely dysfunctional: people who cannot or will not live by the rules of the shelters, either because they are violent, steal, or abuse drugs and alchohol. Or they are mentally ill, off their meds, and choosing, insofar as a delusional schizophrenic can be said to choose, to stay on the streets.

Today's poor have clothes. What they suffer is a lack of status clothes; their clothes are out of date, cheap, and serviceable. But you can buy the poor anything you want and those with a little more money will find a way to differentiate themselves. You can provide adequate covering to someone who is cold; you cannot eliminate the pecking order of the primate family.

What don't the poor have? They have no control over their lives; they exist at the sufferance of the government agencies who provide their support. They have horrible housing made horrible by other poor people, antisocial ones, who trash it, and who must be allowed to live there because the government is not a private landlord and cannot differentiate between tenants. They have no hope. Their schools suck, their job opportunities suck, and they don't know how to make better opportunities for themselves. They lack job skills. They have trouble reading. They lack the accumulated social capital that was transmitted to you by parents and peers, you lucky middle class dog, you. Institutions are just awful at remedying these deficits. Often they are the cause of them.

What volunteer work does, I think, is integrate into the web of prosperous middle class society the people who have fallen out of it. The government can't do that by giving money because, among other things, work is one of the core features of middle class American life; and also because it's trying to hit a moving target: as long as we maintain our primate heritage, and the ability to differentiate, there will be a bottom quintile as well as a top quintile, and raising up the bottom won't erase the distinction, which is really what most people want to get rid of. Perhaps it's good for the person doing the volunteering, but I don't really care; I think it's better for the needy to be treated like fellow human beings than cases to be "managed".

Posted by Jane Galt at December 30, 2002 12:05 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>