This Bruenig follow up to his recent drubbing of Kelsey Piper was entertaining, but it got me thinking about just what she is now gesturing at.
She contends that cash welfare does not really help much. She presents a few recent studies showing null results for cognitive and health outcomes. She doesn’t present an explicit framework for evaluating whether a particular welfare policy is good, but implicitly adopts an evaluative framework that says welfare programs can be deemed good or bad by looking at the extent to which they promote human capital and related indicators.
I argue that we should look to the more traditional goals of the welfare state: eradicating class difference and social alienation, reducing inequality and leveling living standards, compressing and smoothing income and consumption, providing workers and individuals refuge and independence from coercion by reducing economic dependence on the labor market and the family, among other things.
Now the frame Piper used was relatively banal in the neoliberal era. Everything was about "equality of opportunity, not outcome." But wait a minute, isn't Piper in an IQ-obsessed cult? I thought genetic differences determine people's human capital, and that she was one of the good ones that says "yes and" we should throw a few bones at the dullards for their misfortune. She's also a market fundamentalist that presumably understands that her preferred political economic arrangements lead to ever greater pre-transfer inequality.
When you start with a left hereditarian and take away their commitment to welfare, because in certain RCTs it doesn't change people's human capital enough (a thing they believe is mostly immutable), what does that make her?