[Plura-list] Elizabeth Warren on weaponized budget models

[Cory Doctorow]

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/04/cbo-says-no/

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here's how you can: I'm kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called *Red Team Blues*. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

http://redteamblues.com

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_


Today's links

* Elizabeth Warren on weaponized budget models: We could have nice things, but computer says no.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🌽 Elizabeth Warren on weaponized budget models

In yesterday's essay, I broke down the new series from *The American Prospect* on the hidden ideology and power of budget models, these being complex statistical systems for weighing legislative proposals to determine if they are "economically sound." The assumptions baked into these models are intensely political, and, like all dirty political actors, the model-makers claim they are "empirical" while their adversaries are "doing politics":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

Today edition of the *Prospect* continues the series with an essay by Elizabeth Warren, describing how her proposal for universal child care was defeated by the incoherent, deeply political assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office's model, blocking an important and popular policy simply because "computer says no":

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-04-policymakers-fight-losing-battle-models/

When the Build Back Better bill was first mooted, it included a promise of universal, federally funded childcare. This was excised from the final language of the bill (renamed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill), because the CBO said it would cost too much: $381.5b over ten years.

This is a completely nonsensical number, and the way that CBO arrived at it is illuminating, throwing the ideology of CBO modeling into stark relief. You see, the price tag for universal childcare *did not include the benefits* of childcare!

As Warren points out, this is not how investment works. No business leader assesses their capital expenditures without thinking of the dividends from those investments. No firm decides whether to open a new store by estimating the rent and salaries and ignoring the sales it will generate. Any business that operates on that basis would never invest in *anything*.

Universal childcare produces *enormous* dividends. Kids who have access to high-quality childcare grow up to do better in school, have less trouble with the law, and earn more as adults. Mothers who can't afford childcare, meanwhile, absent themselves from the workforce during their prime earning years. Those mothers are less likely to advance professionally, have lower lifetime earnings, and a higher likelihood of retiring without adequate savings.

What's more, universal childcare is the *only* way to guarantee a living wage to childcare *workers*, who are disproportionately likely to rely on public assistance, including SNAP (AKA food stamps) to make ends meet. These stressors affect childcare workers' job performance, and also generate public expenditures to keep those workers fed and housed.

But the CBO model does not include *any* of those benefits. As Warren says, in a CBO assessment, giving every kid in America decent early childhood care and every childcare worker a living wage produces the same upside as putting $381.5 in a wheelbarrow and setting it on fire.

This is by design. Congress has decreed that CBO assessments *can't* factor in secondary or indirect benefits from public expenditure. This is *bonkers*. Public investment is *all* secondary and indirect benefits - from highways to broadband, from parks to training programs, from education to Medicare. Excluding indirect benefits from assessments of public investments is a literal, obvious, unavoidable recipe for ending the most productive and beneficial forms of public spending.

It means that - for example - a CBO score for Meals on Wheels for seniors is not permitted to factor in the Medicare savings from seniors who can age in their homes with dignity, rather than being warehoused at tremendous public expense in nursing homes.

It means that the salaries of additional IRS enforcers can only be counted as an expense - Congress isn't allowed to budget for the taxes that those enforcers will recover.

And, of course, it's why we can't have Medicare For All. Private health insurers treat care as an expense, with no upside. Denying you care and making you sicker isn't a bug as far as the health insurance industry is concerned - it's a feature. You bear the expense of the sickness, after all, and they realize the savings from denying you care.

But *public* health programs can factor in those health *benefits* and weigh them against health *costs* - in theory, at least. However, if the budgeting process refuses to factor in "indirect" benefits - like the fact that treating your chronic illness lets you continue to take care of your kids and frees your spouse from having to quit their job to look after you - then public health care costings become indistinguishable from the private sector's for-profit death panels.

Child care is an absolute *bargain*. The US ranks 33d out of 37 rich countries in terms of public child care spending, and in so doing, it kneecaps innumerable mothers' economic prospects. The upside of providing care is enormous, far outweighing the costs - so the CBO just doesn't weigh them.

Warren is clear that there's no way to make public child care compatible with CBO scoring. Even when she whittled away at her bill, excluding millions of families who would have benefited from the program, the CBO still flunked it.

The current budget-scoring system was designed for people who want to "shrink government until it fits in a bathtub, and then drown it." It is designed so that we can't have nice things. It is designed so that the computer *always* says no.

Warren calls for revisions to the CBO model, to factor in those indirect benefits that are central to public spending. She also calls for greater diversity in CBO oversight, currently managed by a board of 20 economists and only two non-economists - and the majority of the economists got their PhDs from the same program and all hew to the same orthodoxy.

For all its pretense of objectivity, modeling is a subjective, interpretive discipline. If all your modelers are steeped in a single school, they will incinerate the uncertainty and caveats that should be integrated into every modeler's conclusions, the humility that comes from working with irreducible uncertainty.

Finally, Warren reminds us that there are *values* that are worthy of consideration, beyond a dollars-and-cents assessment. Even though programs like child care pay for themselves, that's not the only reason to favor them - to *demand* them. Child care creates "an America in which everyone has opportunities - and 'everyone' includes mamas." Child care is "an investment in care workers, treating them with respect for the hard work they do."

The CBO's assassination of universal child care is exceptional only because it was a public knifing. As David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud wrote in their piece yesterday, nearly all of the CBO's dirty work is done in the dark, *before* a policy is floated to the public:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-03-hidden-in-plain-sight/

The entire constellation of political possibility has been blotted out by the CBO, so that when we gaze up at the sky, we can only see a few sickly stars - weak economic nudges like pricing pollution, and not the glittering possibilities of *banning* it. We see the faint hope of "bending the cost-curve" on health care, and not the fierce light of simply *providing care*.

We can do politics. We have done it before. Every park and every highway, our libraries and our schools, our ports and our public universities - these were created by people no smarter than us. They didn't rely on a lost art to do their work. We know how they did it. We know what's stopping us from doing it again. And we know what to do about it.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🌽 Hey look at this

* How We Think About Copyright and AI Art https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

* AI Art Generators and the Online Image Market https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🌽 This day in history

#20yrsago RIAA suing college kids for maintaining file-sharing networks https://web.archive.org/web/20030405092843/http://www.riaa.com/PR_story.cfm?id=629

#20yrsago Floppy-disc-a-gami Starship Enterprise https://www.asciipr0n.com/archive/0013/bonnie/craft/

#15yrsago University prof says students can’t sell notes from his classes because it violates his copyright https://www.wired.com/2008/04/prof-sues-note/

#10yrsago Montreal police arrest young woman for instagramming photo of anti-police mural https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/instagram-anti-police-pic-sharing-tied-to-montreal-arrest-1.1372383

#10yrsago Paying patent trolls off makes you complicit in the next round of extortion https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2013/04/02/the-patent-protection-racket/

#10yrsago What walled gardens do to the health of the Web, and what to do about it https://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2013/04/02/berkman-anil-dash-on-the-web-we-lost/

#5yrsago Scammy phone company Centurylink: “No one can sue us because we don’t have any customers” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/centurylink-fights-billing-fraud-lawsuit-by-claiming-that-it-has-no-customers/

#5yrsago Facebook: Actually, looks like Cambridge Analytica got 87 million user records https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/

#5yrsago Federal court will allow the ACLU to keep suing for the right to violate terms of service for legitimate purposes https://www.axios.com/2018/04/03/suit-to-let-researchers-break-website-rules-wins-a-round-1522766474

#5yrsago The .cm typosquatters accidentally exposed their logs, revealing the incredible scale of typojacking https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/dot-cm-typosquatting-sites-visited-12m-times-so-far-in-2018/

#5yrsago For a mere $105,000, John McAfee will tweet about your cryptocurrency https://www.marketwatch.com/story/john-mcafee-charges-105000-per-tweet-to-promote-your-ico-2018-04-03

#5yrsago Parkland student activists drive American right berzerk, supercharge attack on public education https://theintercept.com/2018/04/04/parkland-florida-shooting-survivor-activists/

#5yrsago 100,000 Americans wrote to Trump’s Park Service to protest national park service-fee hike, and the Park Service actually listened https://web.archive.org/web/20180404000503/https://grist.org/briefly/trump-admin-asked-for-public-comment-on-the-70-park-fee-the-people-responded/

#5yrsago Ifixit flunks Apple’s new educational Ipad as nearly un-repairable https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+6+Teardown/105416

#5yrsago Zuckerberg: Facebook will not stop spying on Americans to comply with EU privacy law https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ceo-privacy-exclusive/exclusive-facebook-ceo-stops-short-of-extending-european-privacy-globally-idUSKCN1HA2M1

#5yrsago Kickstarting a public radio-backed revival of Gothamist, a beloved site killed by an evil, union-hating Trumpist billionaire https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/675760894/bring-back-gothamist

#1yrago The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/04/attackers-advantage/#anti-oligarchic

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🌽 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

* The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION

* Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION

Latest podcast: Red Team Blues: Behind the Scenes with Wil Wheaton https://craphound.com/news/2023/04/02/red-team-blues-behind-the-scenes-with-wil-wheaton/

Upcoming appearances:

* Twiddling, Enshittification and the Latter-Day Robber Barons of the Web, Apr 6
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/session-73-conversation-with-cory-tickets-605117812667

* Antitrust and Competition Conference - Beyond the Consumer Welfare Standard (Chicago), Apr 20-21
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/events/2023-antitrust

* Red Team Blues at Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego), Apr 25
https://www.mystgalaxy.com/event/42523Doctorow

* Red Team Blues at Dark Delicacies (Burbank), Apr 26
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2873/Wed%2C_Apr_26th_6pm%3A_Red_Team_Blues%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#

* Bay Area Bookfest (Berkeley), May 6/7
https://www.baybookfest.org/session/cory-doctorow/

* Open Source Summit (Vancouver), May 10
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-north-america/

* Wordfest (Calgary), May 11
https://wordfest.com/2023/event/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow/

* Red Team Blues event with Tim Harford (Oxford), May 29
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-red-team-blues-with-tim-harford-tickets-574673793787

* Red Team Blues event with Ian Forrester (Manchester), May 31
https://www.waterstones.com/events/in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow/manchester-deansgate

* UCL Peter Kirstein Lecture, Jun 1 (London):
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/peter-kirstein-lecture-2023-featuring-cory-doctorow-registration-539205788027

Recent appearances:

* Loab your Enthusiasm (10,000 Posts)
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-jjba6-13d3e92

* Is Copyright Good For Authors? (This Week in Tech)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1sFi3LQQeQ

* Culture Journalist: What is chokepoint capitalism?
https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/chokepoint-capitalism-cory-doctorow-artists#details

Latest books:

* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books:

* Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023

* The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023

* The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🌽 How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

(Latest Medium column: "Commafuckers Versus The Commons: Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing https://doctorow.medium.com/commafuckers-versus-the-commons-4e8dcdcf7dee)

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla