The Misery Trade

(With this post, I'm doing some thinking "out loud," as it were. I'm likely going to have to revisit this topic to write something more coherent, but I'd like to put this out as an initial stab at it.)

Back in a past life, I worked with children in a residential treatment center. It was pretty much what it says on the tin - a therapeutic setting for children who had been taken out of their parents' (or other caregivers') homes for abuse or neglect that was also their full-time residence. Because of this, the facility needed to be staffed around the clock, every day.

When I started, one of the rules of scheduling was that no-one had a "regular" weekend. That is, it was not permissible to schedule someone so that they had both Saturday and Sunday off. After I'd been there a couple of years, there was talk of changing that policy. And one of the objections that was raised was that it wasn't going to be determined solely by seniority. Unit managers could chose which, if any, staff members would have normal weekends off. One of the senior staff who I happened to work with put it this way: "People shouldn't be able to have weekends off until they've paid their dues, just as we have."

I am reminded of this because I was hanging out with friends yesterday, and the subject of student loan forgiveness came up. And the objection that this penalizes people who did what it took to pay their loans off was noted.

This is a common thing in society. I had been thinking of a similar situation just the other day. That time, it had concerned job training and employment assistance for ex-convicts, and the similar objection: What about those people who played by the rules and didn't commit crimes? (Although this usually means "weren't caught at something that includes jail time" in practice.) Why should they be punished in favor of criminals?

American society has a problem in that the stereotypical American is neither poor enough to simply be happy that someone has attained something at a relatively low cost, nor wealthy enough to be dismissive of the costs that they themselves have paid. In other words, our stereotypical American has enough to be able to pay costs for things, while at the same time lacking enough that they are sensitive to those costs. And that, I think, lends itself to the creation a society that values punishments for "wrongdoing" as a means of balancing out the perceived costs of virtue.

The United States is a wealthy nation that is filled with people who are acutely aware of their own personal poverty. Or perhaps I should say misery, instead, since "misery loves company," and many Americans, it seems (and no, I am NOT referring simply to "Trump Voters"), resent it when other people suffer less misery than they themselves do. And this leads to a form of "misery hot potato," where the goal is to not wind up holding the misery ball when the music stops, rather than reducing the amount of misery to a point where no one has to deal much of it.

And this strikes me as a fundamental issue with the way in which the United States deals with capitalism. Capitalism, it is said, is the best way of dealing with the issue of allocating scarce resources. Which is fine and good, but what happens when a given resource is no longer scarce? In my opinion, American capitalism looks for a way to make it scarce again, rather than ceding that resource to another means of managing it. And resource scarcity breeds misery, as people are willing to suffer for access to things that they find to be more valuable than a certain amount of comfort. But not too willing. They feel that suffering acutely, and thus feel like chumps when someone else isn't required to suffer for that same level of access. This, I think, is going to be difficult to expunge from anyone, Americans or not. Even monkeys have been shown to actively dislike being taken for chumps, even when a calmer response is to their direct benefit.

And so now we come to what seems to be a heavier lift than it really should be. Lowering the costs of things people actually want. And I think, paradoxically, the trick here may lie in helping people to feel that the costs are already lower. To the degree that Americans are price sensitive, it's often because they are worried that they don't have enough resources. Addressing that worry would, I believe, make them less sensitive to taxes and other forms of funding the projects that would allow other people to be better off. But this tends to run afoul of political and ideological incentives, which often use stoking the fear of being a chump to fish for votes.

And perhaps in the end, this is the issue. The general public doesn't follow politics. And because they're not engaged, they only way their interests are really going to be looked after is if political figures place the public's interests first. But because the public is disengaged, political figures tend to place their own interests first, because there is little accountability. And because the system tends to be opaque, it's difficult to understand if policies that are described as being in the public's best interests genuinely are (although it sometimes less difficult to ascertain if a given policy makes logical sense, given its stated goals). The general disunity of the American public (the lack of homogeneity or shared goals) creates rifts between sizable groups within the populace that allow politicians to run for office on a platform of directly harming other segments of the electorate. And while those harms tend to come in form of raising costs for disfavored groups, the favored groups rarely see a direct benefit. Rather its the people who provide services that reap the excess costs, because even though voters may be hoping that service providers will cheat the disfavored and pass the benefits along to them, what tends to happen is that the disfavored are cheated and enough of the excess is kept that eventually, the resource imbalance allows for the wealthy to be able to walk away from deals that don't benefit them as much as they would like, and so other people are left to use their tolerance for risk as a bargaining chip. And once one in the business of trading a defined benefit for the chance to gamble, they are unlikely to be able to keep up.

And the only way to really combat this, is through unity. Partisans realize this, but, being partisans, they tend to demand unity on their terms. And so the divisions remain. And misery grows.