On legibility

There's an under-appreciated connection between two of this week's big political stories - Starmer's promise to "crack down hard" on benefit fraud; and the assisted dying bill.

The link is James C. Scott's concept (pdf) of legibility, which for my purposes we can understand to mean the degree to which the state can read, and thus control, society.

A big question with the assisted dying bill is: are there sufficient safeguards against people being influenced into taking their own lives? Formally, there seem to be: the bill provides prison sentences of up to 14 years for anyone who pressurises someone to have an assisted death.

But this raises the issue of legibility: can the state read the actions of a relative who puts such pressure onto someone? Of course, a court of law should be able to detect overt coercion. But the influence can be less than that. It can take the form of subtle displays of impatience: an eyeroll, a froideur, the occasional slightly harsh word. Even if there are witnesses to these (and there often won't be) they might not seem as strong to a jury in a decontextualized courtroom as they do to the individual thus pressured. And this is not to mention the extent to which the elderly and disabled might be influenced by the general culture in which they are considered a "burden on society".

What we might have here, therefore, is a lack of legibility: the state cannot fully read the pressures upon the vulnerable. To the extent that this is the case, the bill provides insufficient protections for such people.

A similar problem of legibility afflicts benefit reform*. Now, there is some fraud: the DWP estimates that it lost £5.7bn on Universal Credit fraud last year. But if the state were to try to prevent this by having tougher criteria for claiming, it would incur three costs: an administrative burden of having bureaucrats scrutinize each claim more thoroughly; a disincentive to the genuinely hard-up to make claims; and even more anxiety heaped upon claimants (who often have mental health problems to begin with) as they navigate the harsh bureaucracy.

Legibility - the ability to read "deserving" and "undeserving" cases and to distinguish between them - is difficult. Achieving it comes at a cost. Perhaps too high a cost.

Of course, these are not the only contexts in which the question arises of how legibile is society. It occurs in almost policy areas. Can central banks read the future of inflation and output and thus stabilize inflation? Can an organization as big as the NHS be read sufficiently well to be reformed for the better? Can governments read people's responses to tax changes and so design a tax system which provides incentives to work and invest rather than merely increase tax dodging? And so on.

In our context, however, we confront another problem. In a better world we'd not need the assisted dying bill. Instead, when people had helped loved ones to die out of despair at their suffering the police would simply turn a blind eye. Humanity and professional discretion can achieve what the law cannot. This world, however, does not exist - if it ever did. Like many professionals, the police do not have much discretion - and in their case, for good reason.

The issues here are genuinely tricky ones. And like many tricky issues, they don't get the attention they should. One reason for this is that our media (and in fairness much of the public) fails to apreciate the size of what Thomas Homer Dixon called the "ingenuity gap": the gulf between the complexity and unknowability of the world and our puny knowledge of it. Instead, they have an ideology of what I've called centrist utopianism - an unquestioned belief that society is perfectible if only we had wiser people in charge.

This error is magnified by the fact that politicians, like all professionals, have professional deformation; they see the world through a distorted lens. If they are well-motivated, people enter politics because they have an inflated idea of what policy can achieve. They are therefore selected to over-estimate the extent to which society can be read and controlled - an over-estimation compounded by the tendency for all of us to be over-confident about how much we can know.

The fact that politicians and the media cannot appreciate the problem here, however, does not mean that it doesn't exist. It does. If you think there are simple answers here, you are very likely wrong.

* In fairness to the government, much of its White Paper, Get Britain Working, talks about genuine support for the out-of-work and better opportunities for training and good jobs. Insofar as this is sincere, it is to be applauded.

Comments

[rsm]

《Can central banks read the future of inflation and output and thus stabilize inflation?》

Why not simply adapt to nominal inflation through indexation of income and savings, thus preserving real purchasing power no matter what nominal prices do?

Would inflation adaption contradict the control instinct which underlies current mainstream economic models? .

[Laban]

I'm sure it'll be really easy to detect coercion post-mortem ;-)

For many people there's a real tension between the value of a parent's property - wildly inflated over the last 30 years - and the very hefty cost of care home fees, which can swallow an inheritance at 70k+ a year.

Combine that with the increasing number of children who don't like their parents very much (see Guardian problem page comments for details) and you have a recipe for trouble.

[Blissex]

«are there sufficient safeguards against people being influenced into taking their own lives?»

The "libertarian" theory of "consent", abortion and of euthanasia is simply that of "freedom of contract" where in a free and competitive market individual market participants must have the freedom of entering into any contracts regarding their property which includes their bodies, so for example freedom of contracting about organ removal of body termination or sexual use.

My impression looking at those who support the "libertarian" theory of "freedom of contract" extending to the body is that it is meant as a subtle way to reintroduce "freedom of contract" where bodies or more technically "obligations of service and obedience", can again be used as collateral for debt, as it could for most of history.

[Blissex]

«tension between the value of a parent's property - wildly inflated over the last 30 years - and the very hefty cost of care home fees, which can swallow an inheritance [...] and you have a recipe for trouble.»

Euthanasia has become more salient because it has become the new frontier as to "freedom of contract" ideology after "consent", gay marriage, abortion, transitioning, but I suspect also for another reason.

Every time an affluent tory property owner passes on some new tory voters are created among the heirs: typically the property is sold and the heirs use their share of the estate for the deposit on another property each, because they have long learned that only property, and as much property as possible, is worth investing into.

Boris Johnson: «I think the vast majority will want to put their pots into the market with the greatest yield over the past 40 years – and that is property»

Chief Economist of the BoE: «Haldane believes that property is a better bet for retirement planning than a pension. “It ought to be pension but it’s almost certainly property,” he said. “As long as we continue not to build anything like as many houses in this country as we need to ... we will see what we’ve had for the better part of a generation, which is house prices relentlessly heading north.”»

[Laban]

Blissex - we build vast numbers of houses, we just import people at a faster rate than we build. Boris and Rishi - nearly a million a year before you count illegals.

[rsm]

Blissex, if my father purchased a house in 1980 for $100k and it is worth $2.1 million today, would he have been better of investing the $100k in an S&P 500 index, which (according to your favorite online S&P 500 total return calculator) would have turned into $5.2 million today (or $15.8 million with dividends reinvested)?

[Blissex]

«we build vast numbers of houses, we just import people at a faster rate than we build»

Consider how much prosperity that has brought: lower labor cost inflation and higher property incomes for many english citizens and higher wages and better housing for many immigrants. It is a win-win ;-).

«a house in 1980 for $100k and it is worth $2.1 million today, would he have been better of investing the $100k in an S&P 500 index, which (according to your favorite online S&P 500 total return calculator) would have turned into $5.2 million today (or $15.8 million with dividends reinvested)?»

I guess that works by disregarding taxes, rents and survivor bias in the S&P 500 and the comparison with the UK share index...

https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/nesscontent/dvc241/FTSE_Chart1/FTSE_Chart1.html

But the better insight is that when it comes to inflating asset prices the Fed can do more for the S&P than the BoE can do for UK property, even if both try very hard to achieve the "wealth effect" as it is non-inflationary :-).