People Respond to Incentives, Mental Health Edition

As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive. It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually ensures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid. According to MIT economics professor David Autor, “This has become the new welfare.” Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.

Growing numbers of for-profit firms specialize in helping poor families apply for SSI benefits. But to qualify nearly always requires that applicants, including children, be taking psychoactive drugs.

Marica Angell, "The Illusions of Psychiatry"

What Is Kindness?

In common use, whether you are kind or cruel is not about what happens to the person you are supposedly being kind or cruel to. It is about what your actions say about your psychology.

You can be perfectly kind while knowing strangers die far away for want of help. If strangers die in front of you without you responding, that’s much more of a problem because it says you have no strong emotional response to this. That’s a worrying characteristic in an ally, for whatever reason. You can be kind while you vote for policies that everyone knows will indirectly harm people, as long as you’re apparently motivated by the right feelings about the immediate, visible effects. Do the opposite, and you are a cold and heartless calculator. Not kind at all, even if your actions benefit abstract people somewhere.

Kind people respond to immediate, vivid things, but are less required to respond to more abstract ones, and should never do so at the expense of the vivid things.

Katja Grace, "How to Inflict Huge Costs Kindly"

Why Isn't Sociology Better?

After three days of observing academics, it is clear to me that the social sciences attract precisely the wrong kind of people. They are I-want-to-help-and-thus-look-good people. In terms of personality, they are like sheep. Social science needs curmudgeons, but it gets womanly men and ideological women.

Ron Guhname, "Social Science Academics"

Framing Inequalities

This is something Alan Taylor’s American Colonies is really good on. His point is that if you look at the European aristocrats who ran the governments that colonized America, none of them were big into racism. In their eyes an African slave, a (Native) American savage, and a European peasant are all about on a par — they’re the scum of the earth, to be exploited economically, and perhaps feared as a potential source of violence and disorder. European governments of the 16th and 17th centuries typically presided over multiple linguistic groups, and important aristocrats could have very diverse landholdings. This was a very class-bound society, and the division between the elite and commoners was much more important than any proto-national considerations.

Matthew Yglesias, "Dimensions of Inequality"

Success and Selection on the Dependent Variable, Again

There’s an obvious selection-effect problem here. Most book-writing advice is going to comes from people who are able to successfully apply standard book-writing advice. But I don’t need book-writing advice from those people. I need to know what works for people with a mind like mine. Maybe nothing works. Maybe the best advice for people like me is: don’t try to write a book, you flake.

Will Wilkinson, "Neurodiversity and Writing Advice"

The Songwriter's Disease

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning, and he'd managed to do that with just about everybody he'd ever met or married or fathered. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked, p. 244 (ch. 15)