Okay. After months and months of valiant, if somewhat curmudgeony, resistance, I gave in and joined a modest – but steadily growing! – circle of friends in the grand, utopian shared consciousness that is Facebook.
For me, the stages of FB Awareness have drifted, one into the next, with all the retrospective inevitability of overgrown sidewalks in August, as follows:
1) Denial: as in, I didn’t really even join Facebook, I just happened to stray into its gravitational field and got sucked in, like light and spacetime.
2) Acceptance: Look for my upcoming book, soon to be a major motion picture: Doctor Strangebook, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Third-Party Applications.
3) Repentance: aka, Kill ‘Em All and Let Bill Gates Sort ‘Em Out (or if you prefer, you can let Steve Jobs do the sorting). This is where I made a conscious decision to err on the side of paranoia and began ruthlessly blocking all applications.
I’ll have to get back to you, regarding steps 4-12 as they arrive. The first three steps, however, lead me to the precipice of the current reflection.
In accordance with the mandates of Step 3, I now eschew all Facebook quizzes, polls, pokes, prods, and provocations that meander across my homepage – no matter how tantalizing they may be.
Case in point: a recent FB poll asking whether drug testing should be mandatory for welfare recipients. This question is, of course, being debated not only on the web but in a number of state legislatures. Now, I haven’t seen the actual poll (see Step 3), but it got me wondering how/whether the poll-makers define welfare, how individual poll-takers define welfare, and how such definitions might affect one’s answer to such a question.
I’m interested in these matters less in political than in psychosociological terms, which is my rationale for opening this discussion in the setting of a scientific blog.
So how do you define welfare? Is the term pejorative in contemporary usage? If so, does it apply to the nearly 10% of the U.S. population who are currently unemployed? Do you consider Pell Grants – need-based federal grants for higher education – to be welfare? What about Stafford Loans – federally guaranteed but administered by private financial institutions, complete with capitalized interest?
How about corporate welfare? Should we mandate drug testing for every executive and middle-manager of every bank and investment house that has received federal bailout money? Every assembly line worker and salesperson employed by a car company that has imbibed at the communal trough? What if you bought a car from one of those companies? What if you paid for it with a loan from one of those banks? Should you be required to take a drug test as a recipient of trickle-down welfare?
Are the public schools a form of welfare? And if so, who should we consider the recipients? Just the students? Or also the parents, who are spared the exorbitant costs of sending their kids to private schools? Should we require drug-testing for all Americans with school-aged children?
Do you ever drive on interstate highways, publicly funded under the broad umbrella of “promot[ing] the general welfare”? County roads? City streets? Maybe we should require mandatory drug testing for all drivers. Really. Maybe we should. I have to confess, though, that I’m a lot more worried about whether the driver of the 18-wheeler that’s on my bumper at 70 miles an hour is texting while driving than about whether he smoked a joint a month ago. (Incidentally, I’m convinced that texting while driving is the most common, the most socially acceptable – and arguably the most dangerous – form of sociopathic behavior practiced in the U.S. today. I know, I know, I’m showing my age, but I can still remember the good old days when the worst we had to worry about was talking on the phone while driving – which, research shows, is not nearly so apathetically irresponsible as texting at the wheel.)
Do you consider Medicare to be welfare? Social Security? Have you ever carried a library card? Watched Sesame Street? Gone jogging in the park?
Maybe welfare should be defined as whatever money goes to somebody else. Tax cuts for the rich, anyone? Tax cuts for the poor? Tax cuts for the middle class?
I’m also curious about cost-benefit expectations associated with these debates. How likely is drug testing of welfare recipients (narrowly defined) to actually save money - given the estimated costs of administering such policies? How likely is it to decrease illegal drug use? Does it matter? If we expected it to accomplish neither of these ends, would the people who support it support it anyway?
This leads me to a broader question, often considered by economists in the context of game theory: how much is a person willing to pay to satisfy a personal sense of justice? How do we, as individuals and as a society, reconcile the frequent collision of moral/ethical and pragmatic interests?
A friend recently reminded me that some of the drugs that are the most harmful, the most dangerous, the most addictive, the most socially problematic in terms of associated criminal activity happen to be among the most metabolically fleeting - quickly leaving the user’s system, making them more difficult to detect. This same well-informed friend also reminded me of the disquietingly high false positive rates for some common drug testing techniques.
Returning to the psychology of public opinion, it seems to me that certain commonly held attitudes about welfare are infused with the misconception that welfare is altruistic, which it decidedly is not. The purpose of welfare (as popularly defined, i.e., handouts to the indigent) is to reduce social – as opposed to individual - problems associated with poverty: especially crime.
A neighbor once asked me why she should be expected to pay property taxes to support the public schools despite the fact that she had no school-aged children. The answer, of course, is obvious: you support the public schools because they decrease the probability that your home will be burglarized or that you will be stabbed in a parking lot for the twenty-dollar bill in your wallet.
The same can be said of other social investments. Maybe a minor decrease in welfare expenditures is worth a minor increase in crime. If so, how much? Politics is not particle physics: it’s more uncertain, subject to a more dubious calculus.
