@djc ethically, or really practically, it’s just that price discrimination is problematic. we pay people for the goods they provide, not for an interaction of the goods they provide and how easy or hard it is for them to provide it. it’s not a good idea to arrange society around charging or paying people different prices for goods based on capacity to pay or deliver. they are providing the goods, we should pay them the price. 1/

@djc (“sliding scale” payment sounds progressive, but it’s mostly bad way to arrange things, outside of some very special cases where it’s used for goods that essentially everyone purchases. college tuition on a sliding scale, for example, sounds good, but why should rich parents of college students fund the education of poorer college kids more than members of the general piblic should?) 2/

@djc just like we would and should object to Amazon following around our web activity and deciding we can afford it so offering us worse prices for exactly the same good (“so we can charge less to others!” they would say), we should object to the state deciding some families are rich enough so we should pay them less for the good of quality childrearing. 3/

@djc at a practical level, deciding who will deliver quality child rearing without the state buying it is informationally and bureaucratically hard. you have all the usual baggage of application processes that often exclude the people you most want to target, because application requires social resources the rich more easily hold. you have the deadweight costs of the bureaucracy you stand up and other people must lose time to. 4/

@djc and you still won’t do a great job. states can’t do a great job. adjudicating tradeoffs based on fine-grained very local information is precisely what states are bad at, the sphere where we want to minimize the degree of state involvement. an application form can force you to guesstimate your forward income (creating deadweight potential perjury risks if you misestimate too badly). it will never know that your father-in-law is ill and you send thousands of dollars to help. 5/

@djc means tests are very costly ways of generating very low quality information even on their own terms of burden measurement. on purely practical grounds, they aren’t worth the trouble. when we impose a progressive income tax, we don’t and don’t have to pretend we are taking holistic circumstance into acount like benefits means tests do. the tax is a blunt imposition, sure maybe based around ethical conjectures like “equivalent sacrifice” but not expected to be just in a fine-grained way. 6/

@djc means tests are expected to be just in a fine-grained way, but cannot succeed. or if they are not, they cannot justify the costs — to the state and to applicants — of a standalone test when a crude means test already exists in the tax system. /fin

@djc sure we should ask. generally we provide benefits to fund positive externalities (eg schooling), and as social insurance against hardship (eg health benefits). child benefits are a bit of both, quality childrearing has positive externalities we want to finance and childrearing imposes costs we want to mitigate. 1/

@djc when mitigating costs, we have to worry about moral hazard, we can’t just say the benefit should scale with the costs to the degree people might cause the costs in undesirable ways (so we don’t provide a cash benefit for heroin users, even though the habit is burdensome and costly, while we should pay for opiates for cancer patients). 2/

@djc with positive externalities, it’s not problematic to scale the benefit with the value. (although of course the public wants some surplus too, we shouldn’t pass as benefits the full value of the positive externalities if the provider of the externalities doesn’t require that. parents often do enjoy their kids!) so all else equal, the generosity of the maximum benefit we should be willing to provide (though again, we might provide less) should depend on the net value of the externality. 3/

@djc how much with child-rearing that depends on housing scarcity i think is arguable. regardless of how expensively and unpleasantly we are housed (when we ought to have abundant housing), we will need people to provide goods and services when living generations are old. and much (most i think) of the externalities we pay for with a child benefit has to do with quality of upbringing rather than quantity of kids. 4/

@djc there’s some relationship between natality and benefits generosity, but it’s not super strong. countries that want to increase their birth rates have to offer very, very generous benefits to make a small dent, is my understanding. but given whatever number of kids will come to exist, having them being raised with good nutrition and stable shelter etc, rendering them capable of interacting well with education benefits we also fund, has strong positive externalities for the rest of society.5/

@djc we need capable, responsible, healthy, not embittered cocitizens and future producers regardless of how many they are. so i don’t think the case for a generous child benefit interacts so strongly with housing, even though in principle it could (if the quantity dimension were more important than quality, and the external benefit net of costs imposed of additional humans is very sensitive to housing arrangements). /fin

@djc everything does, i guess, but i’d argue that from most values perspective, the universal benefit baseline makes more sense. the idea is that benefits cover some socially desirable cost or finance some socially useful activity. universality is then just straightforward accounting: who bears the cost or performs the activity? to her we pay the benefit. how/fron whom do we finance it becomes a separate question? 1/

@djc i guess the value substrate to means testing is “none of my business unless absolutely unavoidable”, including ignoring all positive externalities. we don’t think of financing socially desirable costs or activities. people make their own choices, and some of them lead to destitution. then, whether out of pity or concern about negative externalities, we decide whether a destitute class is virtuous enough to receive support. 2/

@djc that is to say, the values consistent with means testing are both very unusually libertarian — most people wouldn’t describe them as their own — and I think technocratically pretty indefensible. positive externalities are as real as negative externalities, a regime thay fails to subsidize the positive, just clips the worst negative will be an objectively poorer regime than that finances the positive and avoids the negative… 3/

@djc unless (like many libertarians) you see informational, bureaucratic, and/or tax driven deadweight costs that make inaction preferable to action despite much good that could in theory be done. universal benefits also minimize informational and bureaucratic costs (by taxing broadly through the existing tax system, sending benefits to whole crude classes rather than trying to make fine, detailed distinctions)… 4/

@djc so technocratically the only thing thay can really redeem means testing is a claim that taxation imposes very large deadweight costs that eg the burdens of child-rearing itself do not. which, for a parental benefit, would rely upon some notion that since parents choose to have kids, the welfare cost of financing them is much lower than other people paying the same money because they are meeting their own preference. 5/

@djc that’s not as much a value as an axiom, but it’s what you need to justify means testing. the affected class chose to be the affected class, their preferences are satisfied, they do not just bear the costs of the choice but its benefits, so covering the costs from others who do not enjoy its benefits would be unjust. /fin

@djc (i lied with “/fin”!) again, this implies positive externalities are ignored, the fact that other people’s kids will deliver the goods and services the childless will require in retirement never figures in. /reallyfin

@djc it depends on your baseline. but if you consider relative to the counterfactual of a universal benefit, a means test finances the benefit in large part by imposing a high tax on near-beneficiaries rather than a broad tax on everyone. and a broad tax on everyone makes more sense. 1/

@djc relative to a baseline of no benefit, sure, everyone is financing only-not-rich parents. but near-beneficiaries (eg just rich enough parents) parents bear the cost of being part of the transferee class AND the cost of financing the benefit. they are not treated “just like everyone else”, since they still have to bear costs nonparents of the same wealth level do not have to bear. /fin