Framing and Progressivism

I just finished this interesting article by Russell Shorto about his previous eighteen months living in Amsterdam.  As one who prefers relative equality, universal access to quality healthcare, good education, and modern infrastructure, I enjoyed this article.  As Matt Yglesias points out, Shorto is already well-off by American standards, so his improved standard of living is much less than it would be for a poor American who would gain access to preventive healthcare, a quality education, childcare support, and accessible public transport.  There are two critiques to make about our society’s disdain for the social welfare model, and I want to focus here on how I think our hesitation derives more from poor framing on the part of liberals than any intrinsic adversion to the ends of social welfare states.

[As Yglesias also mentions, it's important to point out that there is a huge different between high-performing social welfare states such as the Netherlands and Scandinaiva on one hand and Italy/Portugal/France (to a lesser extent).]

As Shorto points out, a “Dutch person” will probably not hesitate to pay an extra $500 in taxes when s/he is told its purpose.  The same person’s reaction will be strongly negative if their taxes are cut $500 and they are told to spend that money on whatever service the government no longer provides.  Asking, “Do you want your taxes raised so an unemployed person can have a gastric bypass?” would elicit a “Yes” response of 5%.  Rewording the question as, “Do you worry about going into bankruptcy because of an unforseen medical procedure?” would elicit a “Yes” response of 95%.  Same if the question were, “Do you want to visit the doctor and receive the necessary medications without worrying about the cost?” My questions are biased, of course, but that’s exactly the point: I can think of few people who enjoy the high bills, stress, and uneven care that our system produces.  (Moreover, I would not be surprised if you counted the expected costs of health care for an individual in America over their lifetime and found that it significantly exceeds the cost of taxes a Dutch person pays for their health care.)

The same logic applies to education.  Few people would, without reflecting on the question, respond positively to, “Do you want higher taxes  to expand the government’s role in education our children?”  But few people would respond negatively to this: “Should your kid have access to a worse education than other Americans?  Should your kid learn in new or well-maintained schools from up to date textbooks?”  Of course, the latter would require higher taxes, but the key is to frame the positive effects of those taxes.

The issue of framing is a basic one in any political discourse and one which any student of Statistics 101 knows.  I have exaggerated the questions to make a basic point, which is that few people would disagree with the goals, and often the ends, of the social welfare state.  This is a strong claim, but I’ll go out on a limb that most people enjoy their health, want their children to live better lives than themselves, enjoy long vacations, and do not like potholed roads.  Of course Holland is not a utopia, but I believe they have reached a much more satisfying equilibrium than we have here.  Well, they have unless you are the top 1% here; the problem is that the other 99% have trouble exerting control over the oligarchy.

As an aside, it’s ironic that the C-suites at pharmaceutical companies decry greater regulation because it will kill their companies’ innovation, but these same captains of industry praise the inventiveness and agility of American capitalism.  There is logical tension between the claim that American capitalism is great and the fear that they cannot adapt.  Surely those executives are not saying they are incompetent.

Sometime soon, I will post my second critique.  The gist is that our government is not as small as we think, it’s resources are just devoted to the wrong areas.