Skip to content

Comment on No Money, No Time

Comments

I wrote about this in more detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive... , but one underappreciated facet of this dynamic is the extent to which the infrastructure we've collectively put in place to help people financially and otherwise has an enormous time cost of its own.

I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. Virtually all federal, state, and local programs either mandate or imply that case managers must be hired or deployed. Each one of those people, and each one of their interactions, carries a cost. The situation is different from but still analogous to the one pg describes in "Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html .

The time cost of welfare a big part of why I think an unconditional direct cash subsidy is a better plan than our current welfare system. The bureaucratic efficiency losses for both welfare recipients and grantors is more than enough to pay for expanding the recipient pool.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.