I realise that much, but even with all that, I still think that realistically we’re vastly, vastly overcommitting resources and effort to preventing welfare fraud compared to the actual benefits. There’s a reason why some suggest that UBI might be not only a better, but a cheaper scheme, simply by virtue of removing all the bells and whistles of actually trying to double check who has the correct rights and who doesn’t. The kind of welfare fraud you’d need to worry about is “one guy pretends to be one million guys and then a lot other people imitate him”. Most benefits (I’m writing from the UK, personally, but I guess this probably applies elsewhere too) are so thin, even if everyone was a scammer (and that’s a vast overestimate no matter what), you wouldn’t lose much compared to the total size of the national budget. In practice, the mildest and most superficial of checks to root out the obvious problems would likely be all that’s needed. Instead we regularly err on the other side, with checks so expansive that they cause false negatives instead (and thus people who need the benefits go without) and also cost more than the benefit fraud they prevent.
It’s not a particularly rational system, not in a regime of fundamental abundance as we have. We could definitely afford a lot of slack before “lazy people who don’t want to work” actually became anything remotely close to a real economic problem. The reason is ideological, cultural and sometimes religious commitment to the idea that work is sacred and not working has to be discouraged and punished, not economic sense or decision theory. That still works, kinda, but in a post-AGI world people would have to either abandon those ideals really quickly or create an incredibly cruel and self-destructive system that would punish people for not doing what no one needs them to do anyway.
I realise that much, but even with all that, I still think that realistically we’re vastly, vastly overcommitting resources and effort to preventing welfare fraud compared to the actual benefits. There’s a reason why some suggest that UBI might be not only a better, but a cheaper scheme, simply by virtue of removing all the bells and whistles of actually trying to double check who has the correct rights and who doesn’t. The kind of welfare fraud you’d need to worry about is “one guy pretends to be one million guys and then a lot other people imitate him”. Most benefits (I’m writing from the UK, personally, but I guess this probably applies elsewhere too) are so thin, even if everyone was a scammer (and that’s a vast overestimate no matter what), you wouldn’t lose much compared to the total size of the national budget. In practice, the mildest and most superficial of checks to root out the obvious problems would likely be all that’s needed. Instead we regularly err on the other side, with checks so expansive that they cause false negatives instead (and thus people who need the benefits go without) and also cost more than the benefit fraud they prevent.
It’s not a particularly rational system, not in a regime of fundamental abundance as we have. We could definitely afford a lot of slack before “lazy people who don’t want to work” actually became anything remotely close to a real economic problem. The reason is ideological, cultural and sometimes religious commitment to the idea that work is sacred and not working has to be discouraged and punished, not economic sense or decision theory. That still works, kinda, but in a post-AGI world people would have to either abandon those ideals really quickly or create an incredibly cruel and self-destructive system that would punish people for not doing what no one needs them to do anyway.