Hard problems

By W.W. | CHATTANOOGA

NICHOLAS KRISTOF last weekend wrote a touching remembrance of a recently deceased school friend, Kevin Green, a kind, hard-working man whose economic struggles took a toll on his health. "The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple organ failure," Mr Kristof writes, "but in a deeper sense he died of inequality and a lack of good jobs". He goes on:

Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin—obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps—as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?

That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap. It reflects the delusion on the part of many affluent Americans that those like Kevin are lazy or living cushy lives. A poll released this month by the Pew Research Center found that wealthy Americans mostly agree that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

Mr Kristof (pictured) seems most concerned to make the case that his friend didn't "have it easy" scraping by on public assistance. He makes this case most persuasively. But this point gets muddled up in two rather less conclusive ones. Mr Kristof also wants to say that good people like Mr Green are dying prematurely due to a lack of decent-paying work, and that this amounts to death by inequality. Additionally, he suggests that his friend might not have suffered so much were it not for the so-called "empathy gap". Let me take these points in order.

Gainful employment is without a doubt crucial in keeping people happy and healthy. And there is no question that high levels of unemployment and stagnant wages for low-skilled jobs have contributed to economic inequality. But people don't die of inequality; they die of poverty. Inequality is the measure of a difference, and the size of this gap between rich and poor can widen even when the poor are doing increasingly well, and it can can narrow even when conditions for the poor deteriorate, as it ususally does during recessions. Inequality can be reduced by increasing transfers from rich to poor, but it is the money, not the reduction in the income gap that helps. It's unclear what is to be gained by confusing inequality and poverty in this way.

In any event, Mr Kristof seems to believe the real culprit here is paucity of desirable employment. "I have trouble diagnosing just what went wrong in [Mr Green's] odyssey from sleek distance runner to his death at 54", Mr Kristof writes toward the end of the column, "but the lack of good jobs was central to it". Mr Kristof explains that Mr Green's illiterate father had a stable union job in their little Oregon town, but Mr Green never had such luck. Jobs at a glove factory, feed store and construction company dried up in turn. He worked as a manager at a company that manufactures trailer homes, but then hurt is back and got laid off. He eventually received disability benefits, which, in addition to a large vegetable garden and the sale of home-grown marijuana, allowed him to squeak by.

Recall that Mr Kristof's diagnosis is that Mr Green suffered so because he did not have access to a good job, not that his disability checks were too small. Was Mr Green physically able to work or not? "Disability helped Kevin by providing a monthly check that he desperately needed", Mr Kristof writes, "but it also hurt him because he might have looked harder for a job if he hadn’t been getting those checks, [his brother] Clayton says". One assumes Mr Kristof agrees with Clayton Green. If he believed that Kevin Green was really unable to work due to an injured back, would he have said that it was a lack of good jobs that did him in? Yet if Mr Green could have been looking for a job, but elected not to, at least in part to keep the disability benefits coming, what are we to make of that?

Let's talk about empathy now. Designing a safety net is hard, and empathy does not much help in telling us how to do it. People living off public assistance certainly don't have it easy. If we recognise that, as we must, we may wish to make it somewhat easier by increasing the size of transfer payments. At the same time, we will recognise that this increases the incentive to remain eligible for payments by not looking for work. Mr Kristof is correct to identify work as a linchpin not only of material but also emotional well-being, and he's right to recognise, if only allusively, that the disability insurance system can hurt people, such as Mr Green, by making it harder for them to feel the impetus to find work. It is not a failure of empathy to say so. Indeed, if Americans were maximally empathetic, and had full information about the texture of life on public assistance, as well as all the relevant facts about the incentives and disincentives inherent in the system, we might choose to make it harder to qualify for disability, and to push recipients to find work compatible with their remaining capabilities. It's also possible, of course, that such angelic, all-knowing American voters, who have closed the empathy gap, would wish to raise payroll taxes and make benefits more generous. The demands of ideal empathy are inconclusive and depend on facts about the world that empathy itself cannot begin to supply.

Here's one such fact. As we reported in the newspaper this past week, the Social Security disability insurance system is tottering. The system has been paying out more in benefits than it takes in through payroll taxes for some time, and its trust fund will be out of money by the end of next year. Part of the problem is that the share of the working age population going on disability has been increasing. This is to a great extent the consequence of lousy opportunities for workers who lack a college education. Jobs are out there, however, just not desirable ones where one happens to live. For many of us, a strong, rooted family and community network is the safety net beneath the safety net, and leaving it behind in search of work can seem terrifying and risky. Disability has become a de facto guaranteed minimum-income programme for many who would rather remain rooted in places where there are few opportunities. I suspect something like this describes Mr Green's case.

We ought to feel for those stuck in this sort of terrible quandary. Yet empathy can't change the fact that when people need jobs, they have to go to where the jobs are. Nor can empathy keep the overstretched disability system from falling apart. What we need are sustainable policies that provide the relief people need when they cannot work, but which do not create too much disincentive to re-enter the labour market when they can. This is, in my opinion, the hardest problem of public policy. Empathy can do nothing for us but to underscore the urgency of solving it.