How far are Western welfare states from coddling the population into becoming useless?
post by StanislavKrym · 2025-04-13T17:08:01.834Z · LW · GW · 5 commentsThis is a question post.
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The existence of welfare states was motivated by helping people. Unfortunately, the correlation between social expenditure and economic performance is little, to say the least. For instance, California's struggle to deal with homelessness in 2022 cost about $42K per homeless while immigrants were actively hired for low-qualified jobs; in addition, in 2016 there seemed to exist many "young Muslim men who ... don’t want to work. Why would they, when welfare checks are normally 70% to 80% of their income?" Is it misinformation or a signal that welfare transformed into coddling?
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comment by Gyrodiot · 2025-04-13T20:47:08.978Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Hi! Nearly all the statements in your question would benefit from some unpacking. Could you expand on what would count as coddling? My intuition says you're gesturing at a whole heap of trade-offs, it might help to pick one in particular and study it further. Any proper answer to the question, as stated, is the stuff of entire books.
Replies from: StanislavKrym, StanislavKrym↑ comment by StanislavKrym · 2025-04-13T21:23:48.745Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The other article that I mentioned is explicitly called "Something is clearly off with California’s homelessness spending".
↑ comment by StanislavKrym · 2025-04-13T21:20:14.854Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Umm... What trade-offs? One of the articles to which I made a link contains the following paragraph: "Not having a job is a conscious decision. Many see it as their religious duty not to make any economic contribution to the “kaffir" state hosting them. By not holding regular jobs, they have time to make “hijrah” to Syria, where they can train for jihad and return with other "skills" like manufacturing nail bombs in safe houses unmolested by authorities (who agree not to make raids at night out of respect for Muslim neighborhoods).
Far from being mistreated, Belgian Muslims are one of the most pampered minorities in Western history."
And I did ask the readers whether it's just misinformation that I ended up erroneously spreading.
P.S. This comment is NOT an answer. Could a moderator fix it?
Replies from: papetoast, papetoast↑ comment by papetoast · 2025-04-14T02:21:42.596Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That article has no source, neither primary or secondary ones, it just made a lot of assertions. I wouldn't rely on it[1]. Because of how low quality it is, I find it even more annoying that you asked readers to fact check, rather than finding more information yourself.
Still, even assuming that there is indeed groups of people who are only relying on social welfare to survive and do nothing else, the trade-off is that cutting social expenditure would in fact harm the other groups of people who genuinely need it. What percentage of homeless in California are Muslims who also consciously decide to not work? Maybe you know about this number, but I don't and you didn't mention it so it seems to me that you are generalizing way too much. (A quick search tells me the base rate of Muslims in US is 1.1%). Welfare also consists of many policies, it is entirely possible that some policies are good while others are bad.
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In general Investor Business Daily also seem quite unreliable for non-investment news. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/investors-business-daily/
Overall, we would rate Investors Business Daily Right Biased based on right-leaning economic and market positions. We would also give them a High factual rating on strictly investing and market news. However, editorially IBT is clearly a Questionable source with the promotion of right-wing conspiracy theories and numerous failed fact checks. In sum, we rate them far-right Biased and Mixed for factual reporting.
