THE DECIDER CLASS: Gatekeepers in the System

by Guest Contributor | Sep 28, 2015 | Opinion

by Karen Christine Patrick.

DECIDER from the Urban Dictionary:
“A person who decides what is best.”

Twenty plus years dealing with “the system” in being the caregiver for my disabled daughter, then injury and being disabled myself, I have run the gauntlet of the “deciders” too many times to count. People who tell me that the Basic Income Guarantee is “socialist” have no idea what they are talking about if they are worried about “big government” or “the nanny state” because it’s here already in the United States, alive, but not well. Instead of taking the cue from Martin Luther King Jr. and others, way back in the day, we went the way of the deciders. I learned this term recently, “deciders” from the Urban Dictionary online. Sometimes “slang” words pin it just right. Instead of self-empowered individuals making their own decisions as to provisioning their daily life, we have an army, many battalions of deciders who decide FOR grown adults what they should eat, what they should wear, where they should live… if they “deserve” anything they things they are asking for. In a recession, where one cannot just simply go and fill out a resume or application, and show up to the job, to get the money to buy what is needed, this is enforced “learned helplessness.” The deciders have decided that we need them, and it’s enforced.

I can attest to “angels in the system” so for people in the social work class who are not only doing their job well, but still care deeply for people… this is not about you. This is about your co-workers who’s body shows up to shuffle the paperwork, but their mind and heart are absent, who stick by the rules even if the “rules” are just guidelines, are badly trained or misinformed. These are the deciders who make of the system a labyrinth of despair. There are also the devils of the system, the ones for whom my mother said, “would break the wings off of butterflies.” Our bureaucratic system acts as a dank, dark cellar system that warehouses human “resources” made from our most vulnerable citizens, the “precariat” with no other door to walk through. The potential for predation is truly there. Our “nanny state’ is just the kind of hunting grounds for that darker type, a natural habitat for psychopaths and sociopathic behavior that uses the rules as a ruler to whack you on the knuckles with if you get it “wrong” with a larger authority and less advocacy. The ability to decide the fates of people everyday, when one is frustrated and angry, to have a ready whipping post of authority of some kind, is too much of a temptation for some to resist, unfortunately.

Our system of “benefits” is at the mercy of the deciders. Deciders decide at every step of any process. Deciders methodologies are a product of a system that provisions “departments with budgets’ instead of “dividends for citizens”, thus paying the deciders and the “clients” out of the same pool of funds. This creates a natural competition for resources, a contrived animosity, a power play-between “deserving” clients and the ones who decide who is deserving. There are always plenty of deserving clients, especially in a scarcity economy. This is problematic for deciders, because they are outnumbered. However, they are in the system and of it, and know what the clients do not know, know how to make sure that they are provisioned first, and the clients after. They are playing the insider game, knowing they must pay out something to be seen as productive and deserving of budgets, but also knowing the strategies to maintain the superior position and creating a system-within-the-system hierarchy that gives them maximum decider leverage.

It’s human nature, so they say, to take care of number one. No matter how many times the “non-discrimination” policies are printed on forms, documents and other paperwork, humans discriminate. Training for FBI agents include the idea of the power of “mirroring,” a technique relying on the fact that we are most favorably drawn to, supportive of, those almost exactly like we are, with whom we identify. It would be the first tenet of decidership, if they are to decide, the are doing so on the basis of alike-ness subconsciously. Second, decidership is motivated by the tyranny of the urgent. Which is decided first, the client’s paperwork on the desk, or the demand of a superior in the system? The third tenet of decidership is the fear paradigm. The overt and covert threats of loss of status, loss of the comfort zone, loss of job security, the more motivating it is to make decisions based on how the decisions affect them personally, rather than with any concern about any part of any particular case. I’ve observed personally that you are in peril if your case is being heard just after a budget meeting threatening cuts or benefits loss for the employees of the department. Or just before or just after lunch. It’s a key point to ask the question, if you are in the system, are you a person, or a case?

I didn’t know the term for the procedure, but I invented one, “Case Stacking” what I saw watching what was going on in state government while living in a state capital city. I knew some of the state employees and heard them talk among themselves or complain about the way state business was handled. There was so much competition between departments, all requesting money from the state legislature that I saw this game that goes like this… human services departments are designed to process in as many cases as they can so they can show to the legislature during appropriations, “See, we have ALL these CASES. It’s soooo overwhelming” and then when they get their budget amount assigned which of course will NEVER provision the entire case load, especially here now in the age of American Austerity. The game continues to the next level. What happens is then, the first provisioning out of the budget is to pay the employees of the department. In recent years, budget cuts were ordered on the backs of the state employees resulting in job cuts, furloughs, reduction of benefits, and workers having to help codify their jobs technically so that automation, phone bots, and websites can replace functions, or eliminate their jobs. Now you have pissed-off and insecure, defensive deciders even before any funds are then assigned to the clients.

The constant drumbeat of how we need to save money and eliminate fraud, which is always pinned on the client population, never the decider population, is ringing in the ears as provider deciders meet with clients on the front line of the austerity war. The word “handicapped” was created from the idea of a disabled person having their cap in their hand, begging. We do have beggars on the street of our cities, but most of the cap-in-hand begging goes on in whitewash wall offices where it’s hidden away. The deciders are in cramped state offices, with piled up in-boxes, on phones, on computers, having to make so many decisions on so many things that deciding isn’t even personal so much anymore, it’s a machine growing larger every day with a reduction in human components. The client is faced with navigating a system that is just like the classical labyrinth, running blind, basic human needs in peril, waiting for decider action for food, shelter, money for bills, healthcare. And there is a monster in that labyrinth, the “minotaur of minutiae”, cowed by “the code” the decider’s rulebook which shifts and changes often, like sliding panels in this labyrinth. It is fiddled with all the time by deciders at the upper echelons, elected deciders who have promised to “do something” about poverty, homelessness, starvation. They do almost anything but give money, the lifeblood, the first choice of trade, directly to people as a Basic Guaranteed Income, but would rather maintain the decider class.

The decider class transcends all levels of society. The upper echelon decider class also presides over the activities of the middle class, deciders who decide things in your governments of all level, the cost of utilities to homes, deciders in financial institutions and banking, deciders in healthcare, education, professional licensing, taxes, getting permits, etc etc. These deciders are gremlins of another sort altogether who need appeasing with the paperwork having to be “right” and all fees paid, leaving the middle tiers also competing for that rubber-stamp, “Approved.” The palpable fear of becoming poor, of falling into the ranks of the ‘precariat” drives the compliance of the working classes.

It is from the middle class where the recruits to the ranks of the decider class come from. I would wager most deciders don’t like their jobs, especially any deciders with true human value and feelings left, the empathetic and kind, and knowing the deprivations of the system as they do, if they were not under threat themselves. Especially this would be true these days, in the scarcity economy of the “good job” that actually still, “pays the bills.” Watching the grotesque show from behind the curtains has to be frightening and heartbreaking. Those “angels in the system” are trying to save who they can, like rescuers on a sinking ship, as a triage team made by political necessity.

What drives it all now, this scarcity-driven human-provisioning machine, is no longer basic “making a living” issues but a clear and present fear. Nobody wants to end up in the precariat class where the next level down is completely down and out, irretrievably lost. It’s around us all the time, it is ourselves, friends, or family members falling into the pit, or just experiencing a failure to thrive, or not being able to be independent or able to formulate/maintain households. Our consensus reality show, political polemic, suggests it’s some defect in the people themselves, but in reality it is the failure of human leadership pointing the finger at those who cannot fight back.

We have an exciting idea to change the whole paradigm, to implement that we want people to be re-empowered to decide for themselves. We have a way to disband the decider class, reversing the learned helplessness that permeates the economic outlook in this state of global austerity. Those those about to lose their decider jobs, we say, “It’s nothing personal, we just don’t want to need you anymore.” The current system, having been given a large amount of resources is just not doing the job to rid of poverty, is not distributing resources fairly, nor is it fitting our notion that an economy is based on people making personal decisions. Not only do we need a Basic Income Guarantee, but, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, it should not be too low or it relegates a large group of people to being locked into poverty. This Basic Income Guarantee “floor” for people to stand on, we will completely change this decider/client paradigm.

It becomes obvious that a lot of current members of the decider class, who have been dependent on a poverty class as a reason to exist, will lose their jobs. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Those who work at processing poverty, who currently benefit by poverty because it has become an industry will be without a job when we eradicate poverty for real. But they will be provisioned by a Basic Income Guarantee until they transition to doing whatever comes next. Many social workers got into the field “to help people.” They would be free to really help people in a hands-on way instead of a paper-pushing way. This might be a very satisfying thing in the long-run, especially for those who really, deeply want to make a difference in the lives of people.

The day after a Basic Income Guarantee goes into effect, that does not mean people are not going to need each other, or that we won’t need some deciders for people who truly are disabled or incapacitated, it’s just that the process of helping or being helped won’t have a huge complexity to it that creates false hope and false work. For the precariat, from peril-to-provision will be a welcome change. I think the Basic Income Guarantee is a good, humane decision, even for the people currently in the decider class ultimately.

For more from Karen Christine Patrick, visit her blog

Short Answers to BIG FAQs (Part 2 of 3)

by Timothy Roscoe Carter | Sep 22, 2015 | Opinion

[The following is an excerpt from a book in progress, The Poverty Abolitionist’s Handbook.]

Q: But who will clean the toilets? If everyone has an income sufficient to meet their basic needs, even if the vast majority of people want to do some productive work, what incentive will there be for anyone to do all the dirty and dangerous jobs that need to be done for society to function?

Image via FMDam.org.

A: That is an evil and aristocratic question. How will we find cheap labor to do the nasty jobs we want done, but don’t want to do ourselves, if we don’t starve some unimportant people who refuse to do them for us? This question is the labor equivalent of the question a Democratic California State Senator in the 1970s asked a group of feminists who were petitioning for the removal of the marital rape exemption: “But if you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?” Or the plantation owners at the end of the Civil War who demanded to know who was going to pick their cotton.
You want to know where the incentive to do dirty jobs will come from? How about the free market? If you offered enough money you could probably get Warren Buffet to clean your toilet. You want your toilet cleaned? You do not want to do it yourself? Then just pay someone else who is not afraid of starving whatever it will cause them to clean it for you. You don’t have enough money? So sad. You probably do not have enough money to buy your own private jet, do you? That’s life. Though, you can look at the private jet rental cost instead in the meantime, so it isn’t all bad, right?

Note: This answer is a rant, but the question deserves it. Admittedly the *questioner* probably does not deserve the rant. There was a time only a half-century ago when the idea of prosecuting a man for raping his own wife seemed absurd. It seemed absurd to a man raised to believe it was his wife’s duty to cook, clean, and to give sex to her husband, and he did not think about the unfairness to the wife any more than most of us think about the unfairness to the chickens we eat. If you had a visceral defensive reaction to the idea that there is something unfair about eating chickens, then you can at least have some sympathy for the man who thinks it is his right to rape his wife. If you object that there is a huge degree of difference between the unfairness of eating chickens and the unfairness of raping wives, well, I would agree with you. (Full disclosure: I eat chickens.) Of course, the person who wants to force others to clean his toilet cheaply or starve would also see a huge difference between that and rape. And note that prosecuting men for raping their wives also seemed absurd to a lot of women who believed they were being good wives by submitting to their husbands, and saw – probably unconsciously – removal of the marital rape exemption as an attack on an identity that they based their self-worth on. And many people asking who will clean the toilets will actually be people who have themselves worked demeaning jobs at exploitative wages to provide food for their families and take pride that they did what they had to do to survive. Such people may see a basic income as an attack on their self-worth and personal identity in a manner similar to the good wife who finds it absurd to prosecute a man for “raping” his wife. So calling out such questions as evil probably does real harm to people who do not really deserve it. But to treat such questions as reasonable does the harm of conveying the idea that they are in fact reasonable questions. The only way to teach the wider public, and most importantly rising generations, that it is contemptible to ask who will pick your cotton if not slaves, or who a man can rape if not his wife, or who will clean the toilets if not people who would otherwise starve, is to treat the question with the contempt it deserves. If you absolutely must answer the “But who will clean the toilets?” question in a diplomatic way, you can substitute the answer to the next question about the effect of a basic income on wages. I still do not recommend it, because I believe it to be more important to call out the assumption that it is acceptable to force some people to do dirty jobs for others cheaply under threat of starvation.

Q: What would be the effect of a basic income on wages?
A: Overall there would likely be a moderate upward pressure on wages and possibly a slight leveling effect. The “permanent strike fund” aspect of a basic income would give most workers more bargaining power and cause wages in general to rise modestly. The wages of workers doing unpleasant and unskilled work would likely rise dramatically as no one will be forced into doing those jobs. The wages of skilled professionals such as doctors, accountants, plumbers, and electricians would likely fall as more people could take the time necessary to qualify for those positions. If the basic income was at a level sufficient to abolish poverty, the wages for pleasant unskilled work might fall, as it might be reasonable to rethink the need for a minimum wage. The leveling effect of a basic income is unlikely to reach a point where it will make financial sense for a law firm to require attorneys to take turns cleaning the office bathrooms, because then fewer people would likely become attorneys. But if it does, so be it. This makes it even more difficult when looking towards retirement, with many looking to work straight into retirement to help themselves financially. Others find that they are looking towards their equity for any help with retirement finances with some using something like this equity release calculator to find out how much they have and will be able to live on during their retirement.

Q: How will a basic income affect economic growth?
A: There will likely be overall positive economic growth resulting from a basic income, as it would end up as a net transfer of money from people who either hoard or invest most of their wealth to people who spend most of their wealth. Hoarding wealth is always bad for the economy, while investing wealth is a gamble that could grow the economy if there is demand for the investment, or squander wealth if there is not. If people have a guaranteed monthly income then they will be more likely to invest in local businesses, look at motley fool reviews and invest in the market, and put the money back into the economy. Spending money manifests demand, and so always helps the economy. Of course, the basic income does have to paid for, and so the economic effects of whatever tax scheme is proposed to pay for must be taken into account. Taxes on both income and consumption discourage economic activity and could counter the increased demand generated by the basic income. However, taxes on land, natural resources, and wealth capture rent, discourage hoarding, and encourage economic activity by forcing those who hold wealth to either use it or lose it.

Note: Philippe Van Parijs, one of the top living figures in the basic income movement, says that when we are asked this question, we should not answer it. There has been no way to empirically test the general question, there have been apparently contradictory results from empirical studies of the effects of a basic income on labor force participation, and economic growth is not the main point of a basic income. Even if it were good for overall economic growth to force 5% of the population to starve, this is not a world we want to live in. However, I believe that reasonable speculation can provide us with a plausible, positive, and useful answer, so I have provided one. But remember, you take my advice over his at your own risk.

Q: Isn’t the claim of technological unemployment just the Ludite fallacy?
A: Well, it is until it isn’t. It is not hard to imagine a society where the vast majority of jobs can be done more efficiently by machines, and the the few jobs that require humans are made so efficient by machines that only a minutely small number of humans are needed to do them. Eventually, this seems inevitable. The only question is whether it will come 20 years from now or 200 years from now. Evidence that it is coming sooner rather than later can be seen in the breakdown of the arguments against technological unemployment. Traditionally, economists have said technology creates more jobs than it eliminates via two primary mechanisms. First, jobs move from one sector to another. Second, higher skilled jobs are created to oversee the machines. So, a thousand years ago, most people worked in agriculture growing food. As technology made it possible for a few people to produce enough food for the many, people moved to factories. By 150 years ago, most people were working in manufacturing making goods. As manufacturing became more efficient, people moved into the service industry. But now, we are running out of sectors. And the jobs currently being threatened by technology include not just low-end work like cashiers and laborers, but highly educated work like accountants and pilots. The rate at which technology eliminates jobs may have already surpassed the rate at which it creates jobs.

Q: Are there other ways to deal with technological unemployment besides a basic income?
A: Yes. There are six.
1. We could allow massive numbers of people to starve.
2. We could guarantee jobs that do nothing useful for society and just waste the time of the employee, such as digging holes and filling them back up again.
3. We could institute a 15-hour work week and a $25-per-hour minimum wage.
4. We could start banning new technologies.
5. We could force everyone to become a cyborg. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
6. We could give everyone computers and robots to rent out, making everyone a capitalist. Of course, their machines would need to be constantly upgraded to prevent obsolescence, some people would make bad choices, and some people would have their business go under through no fault of their own. Which means we would then need to accept mass starvation or strictly regulate how people run their robot rental rental businesses or give people new machines on a regular, periodic schedule.
Or we could just give everyone a basic income.

Q: Isn’t this just communism?
A: Actually, Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, two of the three most important libertarian economists in history, supported a basic income. Meanwhile, the most famous person to declare that those who don’t work don’t eat was Vladimir Lenin. So in this discussion, I am the one supporting the policies of Milton Friedman, and you are the one supporting the policies of Vladimir Lenin. But please, go back to calling me a communist.

Note: This answer is snark, but the question is not serious. The serious answer is that forms of a basic income guarantee are compatible with both capitalism and socialism/communism, and that fact helps to demonstrate that “capitalism ” and “socialism” are both incoherent terms. But over usually when you hear this question, it is not a serious inquiry but an ad hominin attack. The point of the answer is simply to injure the attacker’s credibility with onlookers by demonstrating that they simply do not know what they are talking about. Bonus points if they have to ask you who Hayek, Friedman, or Lenin is.

Q: Why should working middle class people support a basic income?
A: The first reason is money. Due to extreme rates of income and especially wealth inequality that exist today, under nearly all proposed tax schemes to pay for a basic income, the vast majority of working middle class people will be net beneficiaries. But even if you are near the break even point in the upper middle class, you should support a basic income for the same reason that healthy people should support universal health insurance: You are not invulnerable. You could lose your income and all the wealth you have spent years building up through your own bad decisions, the bad decisions of the C.E.O. of the company you work for, the bad decisions of a politician, a natural disaster, an economic recession, or getting hit by truck and left with back pain that leaves you in bed five hours a day but is invisible to a disability judge. And even if disaster never strikes you, the knowledge that it could strike you constrains your freedom. When you plan for the care of an aging parent, you know how precarious your finances are. When you dream of starting your own business, you know how precarious your finances are. When you consider taking time off for a vacation or to go back to school or to finish an art project, you know how precarious your finances are. When you ask your boss for a raise, *he* knows how precarious your finances are. Now imagine making all of those choices if you knew you had a basic income.

Social Rights and Human Welfare, by Hartley Dean, a review

by Citizens' Income Trust | Sep 17, 2015 | Opinion

Hartley Dean, Social Rights and Human Welfare, Routledge, 2015, xiv + 194 pp, 1 138 01310 0, hbk, £95, 1 138 01312 4, pbk, £32.99

Hartley Dean will soon be starting the process of retiring as Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, and this book is a worthy summary of his lifelong involvement in social rights and human welfare, first as a welfare rights adviser in Brixton, and then as an academic.

The first chapter discusses the evolution and characteristics of social rights. The second summarizes much of the material in Dean’s 2010 Understanding Human Need, and, in the context of a discussion of inequality and poverty, understands social rights as the articulation of human need. The broad range of Dean’s treatment is particularly visible in chapter 3 on ethics and social rights, where he discusses a variety of ethical theories, categorizes rights-based perspectives, and asks that ‘welfare’ should again mean wellbeing. The fourth chapter deals with a variety of challenges to the idea of social rights, and particularly the neoliberal challenge, that social rights compromise property, civil, and political rights, and the post-structuralist challenge, that social rights imply state control.

The book turns from a more theoretical to a more practical treatment of social rights at chapter 5, on the meaning of, and prospect for, global social rights. Here the broad canvas reveals even more clearly the tension between rights founded on universal principles (‘doctrinal’ rights) and rights based on experienced and expressed needs (‘claimed’ rights). Chapter 6 examines rights to work and to subsistence, and some possible relationships between them: and in this context Dean discusses arguments both for and against universal benefits. Earlier in the book he had constructed a typology of competing perspectives – liberal, moral authoritarian, communitarian, and social democratic/democratic socialist – and probably rightly sees universal benefits as fitting most easily into the liberal and social democratic/democratic socialist understandings of social rights.

Chapter 7 tackles rights to shelter, education, health, and social care. Throughout the chapter we discover conflicting rights – for instance, between the rights of parents and/or children in relation to education), and also throughout this chapter we encounter the complex relationship between the right to satisfy needs (for health, knowledge, shelter, etc.) and the right to government services designed to satisfy those needs (healthcare, education, social housing, etc.). Chapter 8 discusses rights of redress – a civil right that assumes such social rights as legal aid.

The final part of the book is titled ‘rethinking social rights’. In the cause of alleviating global poverty, chapter 9 explores the complex relationship between social rights and social development; and chapter 10 returns to the understanding of social rights as the articulation of human need and as the social means for satisfying it. Dean challenges T. H. Marshall’s construction of history, in which civil and political rights preceded social rights, by suggesting that we were social beings before we were political or civic beings, so in practical terms there were social rights before there were ever civil or political rights; and he goes on to show how, in the future, social rights will be as much a global phenomenon as a national and local one, and that the international human rights framework will be a significant factor.

Writing an index is not an easy task, and no index is perfect: but perhaps one word that ought to have been in this index is ‘contested’. It is a major theme of the book that ideas are contested: that is, that different interest groups in society will create their own definitions, ideas and processes, in order to satisfy their own needs, and that these definitions, ideas and processes might severely compromise other groups’ abilities to meet their needs.

The concept of contestation is just one example of the breadth and the depth of the discussion. The depth of the treatment as a whole suggests that the book would serve well as the textbook for a module on social rights and human welfare, and its breadth suggests that it would be a useful resource for an entire master’s degree on the subject. A complex agenda is well handled, and it is impressive how both depth and breadth are achieved without loss to either.

While Hartley Dean will soon be retiring from his full-time post at the LSE, we hope that he will not be retiring from the kind of thoughtful engagement with the theory and practice of social rights and human welfare of which this book is persuasive evidence.

[This review was first published in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, 2015, issue 3.]