Just letting alcoholics drink
“Wet houses”—subsidized housing for alcoholics (they need to get most of their own money for alcohol, but their other expenses are covered) might actually be a good idea. It’s cheaper than trying to get them to stop drinking, arguably kinder than trying to get people to take on a very hard task that they aren’t interested in, and leads to less collateral damage than having alcoholics couch-surfing or living on the street.
Utilitarians, what do you think?
You get more of the behavior you subsidize. Opposed.
Depends critically on how much more.
The key point here is that the lifestyle being subsidized, as awful as it may be, is still less awful than what anyone attracted to it would be doing otherwise. If true, and I find it plausible, this would invalidate your objection.
Really? You don’t think anyone would decide to go through the agony of detoxification and recovery because they have to endure more of the negative effects of their addiction? No one is at that marginal point of overcoming their addiction?
I think the idea is that you have to be beyond that point to go to wet houses. Of course, this just makes it so someone would make it look like they’re beyond that point. Instead of breaking their addiction they just have to last long enough to be accepted to a wet house.
Seeing your reply to FAWS (for which you forgot to credit Megan McArdle), I think you’re rushing too quickly to analogize a correct insight from one problem to a different one. It may be that unlike in the other case, the number of people on the relevant margin is far smaller here, possibly negligibly small, and this does sound plausible to me given the nature of the problem. You are of course welcome to disagree, but note that I merely said that I find this plausible, whereas you’re coming out with very confident assertions without evidence.
Moreover, with the example you cited (subsidizing illegitimacy through welfare), there is the additional problem that one of the main costs of the behavior in question used to be the strong social stigma attached to it. For this reason, subsidizing it caused a runaway feedback process in which the increased incidence of illegitimacy due to the subsidy increasingly eroded the stigma, thus further lowering the cost, until the situation settled in a wholly different equilibrium. I don’t think any such runaway feedback could occur in the wethouse case.
I can imagine wet-houses being overrun by frat boys who just want to drink all the time. This seems like a possible avenue for a runaway feedback loop.
Thanks, I edited to add.
It seems from the article that for the people in the wet house in question there is no marginal point of overcoming their addiction. They’ve decided that given a choice between continued sufferring on the street and an early death, or getting clean in a treatment program, they prefer continued alcoholism and death.
Take a look at this 5-minute clip of supper time at a wet house. They’re not getting clean, regardless of whether they’re in a wet house or not. They’ve chosen to die slowly, and they’ll do that whether they’re homeless or not.
What about the problem of getting more ineffective efforts at rehab if that’s what you subsidize?
When you assume rational actors. People who become alcoholics aren’t acting rationally to begin with so that doesn’t necessarily follow. It may still be the case, but I’d wait for actual evidence either way.
If you really need evidence, I think a great example is subsidizing single motherhood. In the US, back in the late 1950s a debate started about whether or not to extend needy family benefits to unwed mothers. Edit: from Megan McArdle (thanks Vladimir M.):
By the early 1960′s the black illegitimacy rate in the United States reached an unheard of 25%. By 1990, that rate was 70%. All this in spite of the development of the birth control pill, legalized abortion, improved contraception, etc.
Clearly, since it happened after, it MUST have been a causal relation.
Megan McArdle’s an intelligent woman, and she makes a good point about looking at effects on institutions at the margins; but in this case I’ve got to say she fails to come up with a complete and convincing mechanism for the changes in single motherhood. Essentially she points out a correlation (not even in the general population, but in a vulnerable subpopulation), points out some marginal effects at the outset, and asks us to fill in the rest of the causal chain ourselves. I’m pretty sure she’s not being intentionally deceptive. But a sufficiently clever activist or social critic can come up with a convincing story about marginal effects linking just about any two temporally close phenomena; if we’re really interested in this rationality business, we should remind ourselves of that especially when the story at hand is flattering to our preconceptions.
A simple counterexample: further down the article, McArdle draws similar conclusions regarding the divorce rate in the US. Her argument is essentially that making a divorce easier to formalize led to a cascade of marginal effects that badly weakened the institution. Note that she’s not talking about making divorce directly more socially or religiously acceptable, just legally easier.
It would be a convincing argument, if it generalized properly. But counterexamples aren’t hard to find, and one in particular comes from a surprising place: divorce is quite easy to formalize in classical sharia. It can be initiated unilaterally by either party, with varying but generally fairly relaxed rules, although the surrounding legal structures make it somewhat easier for men than for women. This has been true for about fifteen hundred years; yet we don’t see high divorce rates in Muslim countries. We could speculate endlessly about why, with varying degrees of cultural acumen, but I’d say that’s already fairly convincing evidence that there’s a more complicated story that needs to be told.
Shouldn’t we be looking at changes in divorce rates to provide counterexamples?
That’d provide a better means of comparison between culturally similar nations, but all I was trying to challenge was the assertion that low legal barriers to divorce set up an inevitable cascade of failures for reasons based mainly on economics rather than culture. One major barrier, as others have pointed out, is the difficulty of determining the direction of causation: statistics on non-divorce separations would help clear this up, but I haven’t been able to find any.
A glance over the statistics seems to reveal a correlation between divorce rates and low religiosity (the United States is an outlier on the high side), and another between divorce rates and the length of a mandatory trial separation. Probably neither one is much of a surprise.
But you have nothing to compare that rate to. The assertion was a connection between financially supporting people in certain situations and the rate at which those situations occur, and your counterexample doesn’t address that. A plausible mechanism seems pretty obvious—you’re making divorce easier, so a few borderline cases shift over the edge.
Well, that’s suggestive (and I updated my opinion), but perhaps not quite conclusive enough to make a study on the issue a foregone conclusion. Women might be more strongly influenced by fear of becoming pregnant when it comes to sex than drinkers by fear of becoming alcoholics.
And of course this had nothing to do with the war on drugs and the high incarceration rate of black males.
Funny you should mention that, since the incarceration rate started rising most dramatically about 20 years after the change in welfare laws.
Edit: fixed the link.
Perhaps they just really like alchohol. If people are happier while drunk, is wanting to always be drunk really that irrational?
That said, while even the best of people aren’t perfectly rational, even the worst aren’t perfectly irrational. People won’t respond right, but they will respond.
They might even respond too much. They might decide they don’t need to stop drinking because they can go to a wet house, even though they’re unlikely to be accepted.
Probably too simple when dealing with humans. Obvious counterexamples would be poverty-caused problems, but more important counterexamples would be cases where it’s complicated, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell’s article here.
It seems like if they do it a lot it would cause problems because it means there’s not as good a reason to stop drinking.
This raises the question: why limit it to alcoholics? Is there any advantage this has that’s limited to alcoholics? If not, that eliminates my first objection.
It’s clear that having a correlation between standard of living and production increases production so it’s a good thing. Exactly what the ideal correlation would be is unknown. The correlation that exists without government intervention is arbitrary, and unlikely to be right. I believe people tend to err on thinking it should be more spread out than it really should, but it should be more spread out than what it would be without government intervention.
I don’t understand. Most alcoholics have jobs, homes, and families. Do they need to leave home and family and quit their job to get this subsidy? In any case, I thought that disabled and unemployed people (including alcoholics) are eligible for food stamps, and (with luck) housing subsidies regardless.
Though I didn’t look up the legalities, I think the the difference is the housing subsidies is attached to trying to quit.
Sounds like a softer for of a death camp. Give people that are generally considered useless and who are into self destructing behavior the means to finish them self off.
Bad from a qualia oriented viewpoint, but surely nice for the appearance of the streets.
I wouldn’t have thought of this idea. Which, in itself, makes me like it, but only tentatively.
It seems like the rationalist thing to do would be to suspend judgment, and see how it works in the few areas where its being tried. Don’t forget to check the possible negative incentives noted already, but don’t prejudge the issue either.
Without prejudging the merits of the program itself, the best argument I can think of against it is that the economy is a wreck and there is no level of government that can afford to initiate new costly programs of any kind. For that reason alone, I as a voter would prefer not to start any programs like this in any jurisdiction in which I have to pay taxes until its value is demonstrated somewhere else.
The problem with this is that as long as it’s uncommon, people won’t rely on it. They’re unlikely to get accepted to a wet house. If it becomes standard, they will.
This seems like a good idea to me. It saves the state money, reduces the many problems due to homeless alcoholics, and it lets those are beyond hope live out their last few years with as little suffering as possible given their situations.
My only reservation is that if they became a lot more common, then some people might make less of an effort to recover, and some people who might have recovered after their sixth failed attempt to stop drinking might not succeed in quitting. That seems like a worthwhile risk though given the huge benefits, and perhaps there would be ways to decrease that risk.
Could create perverse incentives.