“Operant conditioning (or instrumental conditioning) is a form of learning in which an individual’s behavior is modified by its consequences; the behavior may change in form, frequency, or strength.”
Virtually everyone knows a little about operant conditioning, generally thought of as a system of reward and punishment. Technically, the word “reinforcement” replaces the word “reward.” Reinforcement comes in two forms, positive and negative. Both types of reinforcement increase the likelihood of a behavior, positive by giving some sort of reward, and negative by removing some sort of aversive stimuli. Punishments fall into positive and negative also. Spanking serves as a positive punishment. (Obviously not in the common use of the word “positive.”) Taking away a toy or of privileges serves as an example of negative punishment.
Another term used is extinction. When a behavior no longer results in the desired response, a person, or dog, tends to do the behavior less and less until not at all. (Not nearly as easy as it sounds.)
For overall outcomes in human relationships, positive punishment must be used sparingly. Positive punishment tends to have the affect of the person being punished trying to avoid their punisher as much as possible, not a good outcome for parents and offspring. Extinction often poses a slow and painful process for a parent. Negative punishment must be applied consistently to be effective. Negative reinforcement requires the introduction of negative stimuli, not a good way to start off a relationship unless your a drill Sargent in the Marines.
Over time, positive reinforcement brings the best results. You sometimes find token economies designed to reward desired behaviors. While effective to a point in controlled conditions, such as a classroom, they often breakdown in the real world as so many rewards are available beyond the control of the person dispensing rewards. Common rewards for people are love, affection, attention, money, food, sex, new experiences (In one experiment,psychologists found looking through a window – i.e. new experience – was a rewarding experience for monkeys.) and such.
As a parent or teacher, one would apply these principles to increase desired behavior and minimize undesirable behavior. Applying these principles becomes quite tricky. Humans are very complex beings. Staying after school to help the teacher may be a punishment for one student and a reward for another. If you’re a gay man, going to bed with a hot woman ain’t so hot. Some are more driven by power than money. Others prefer to feel loved and wanted, or admired. And, of course, some want power and control.
The supposed primary intent of the welfare state is to help the poor and downtrodden. Those, who for whatever reason, don’t work, cant’ work, and can’t support themselves and their families, if any. A huge problem lies in that many people find it adequately rewarding to passively gather welfare checks, food stamps and other welfare benefits, than make the effort to work. When you consider that a single mother making $29,000 a year and getting welfare is better off than a single making $69,000 and not getting welfare, it’s easy to see much of the positive reinforcement of welfare.
Let’s take the example of a single mom with two kids, 1 and 4. She has a $29,000 a year job, putting the kids in daycare during the day while she works.
As the above chart – via Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s secretary of Public Welfare — shows, the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income and benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income & benefits of $57,045.
We also have the rewarding of being disabled. (I know a guy disabled because his knee bothers him too much to work in an auto parts store. And, a woman who gets stressed too easily.) During Obama’s reign people getting on disability has outpaced new job creation. Disability can be rewarding for the sympathy factor as well as money.
Welfare holds rewards other than easy money. Sleeping late, a more relaxed, easy paced lifestyle overall, more time to be with friends and family, etc.
For some of us, a sense of accomplishment or a sense of pride means something. If you grow up in a welfare setting where you rarely see accomplishment or pride in performance, these rewards are so foreign as to mean nothing. Plus, we now have a president saying that all those people didn’t really accomplish anything. They just think they did. Someone else really did it.
As time goes on, more and more people take the route of the easier rewards. Why work the dirty, hard, hot, cold construction job? Be disabled, don’t get properly trained, become a major slacker. Do just enough to satisfy the requirements and get your benefits. Unfortunately, there end up being fewer and fewer people performing the work, earning the money, paying the taxes to support this system. Eventually, it fails due to lack of funds. Then the politicians redouble their attacks on the rich, who aren’t paying their fair share.
It’s a relatively simple matter of science. I wonder how many of those who call others “deniers” will deny this science. It’s psych 101.
I don’t want to get into the “positive aspects” of welfare, but behaviorists tend not to realize that the first element of setting up a positive reinforcement system is teaching the subject what constitutes a reward. Many such systems working with children or with people who have mental handicaps use candy or other sweets as a reward. Once you teach a kid that candy=reward, you are setting him/her up for obesity. This is a serious problem for many people with mental retardation. And, as you point out, you may be able to teach a kid that staying after school is a reward, OR that staying after school is a punishment–but you’re going to have a real problem doing both simultaneously.
teaching the subject what constitutes a reward
This gets to be a greater problem as a person grows. More varying things suffice as rewards and/or punishments. Rather than teach an adult what is an award, often it is better to identify what a person considers rewarding and offer that, or more of that. of course, money, love, sex, and other certain things have a high probability of being rewarding.
The numbers are not working. I followed your links and looked online under Gary Alexander, and cannot figure out how he did this.
69k in salary and two dependents means, at least, 17k in personal exemptions and standard deductions. Next, add 3 k for the child care credit. That leaves an AGI of 49k. (If she itemizes, this likely gets lower as PA state tax is 3.8%.)
If we use the tax calculator, we see that she has take home pay of about 54k. http://us.thetaxcalculator.net/
Yet, he claims just 3k in benefits. How does he do that? If he wants to have apples to apples comparison, doesnt he have to have his worker have health insurance? Add in 10 k, at least. Retirement benefits? I think I am coming up with a 69k salary meaning about 67k in wages and benefits. (It helps to run a small corporation. You learn how much benefits cost.)
It is also good to look at the composition of benefits in the graph you cite. 15k of 28 k in benefits for the welfare mom is child care. (This largely goes away when the kids go to school, unlike the 69k job.) Most of the rest is for health insurance for the kids. It looks to be about 3k, my eyes have trouble with this, from the EITC. If you dont think we should pay for these benefits, then you need to state that you are ok with a mom at that level having take home pay of about 4 k, if she paid for child care and insurance at the same rate while working for 29 k.
I think the 69k job, using reasonable numbers, looks much better.
Steve
Gary Alexander included this chart in a presentation he made to the American Enterprise Institute. Here is the link to the pdf of the presentation with the chart in it:
http://www.aei.org/files/2012/07/11/-alexander-presentation_10063532278.pdf
(It was hard to find.)
The above example is specific to Pennsylvania, your home state. The calculator you use doesn’t appear to include state taxes. I paid $5,000 in state and local taxes last year in Ohio on slightly more than $69,000.
Plus my 1040 from last years says this at line 42, the line for exemptions: “Exemptions. Multiply $3,700 by the number on line 6d” Line 6d is the number of exemptions, 3. $3,700×3=$11,100 not $17k. I’m not going to add all the numbers up, but I feel fairly confident that the Secretary of the Department of Public Welfare for Pennsylvania would get his figures correct. I know a state treasurer quite well, and he’d sure as hell have his numbers right for a presentation.
Yes, it is my state. That is why the numbers do not make sense. PA has a 3.8% tax rate. That would make a bit less then 3k in taxes. Those would be deductible for AGI. That wold knock about 2k off, but knowing that, I assumed pretty sparse benefits at 3k.
“Multiply $3,700 by the number on line 6d” Line 6d is the number of exemptions, 3. $3,700×3=$11,100 not $17k.”
Oops, yes. The exemptions should total 11k. The standard deduction is still about 9k, I am assuming she is not itemizing even though she probably would at that salary. This actually makes the Secretary’s numbers look worse, except that the tax calculator probably caught it.
“Secretary of the Department of Public Welfare for Pennsylvania would get his figures correct”
I am pretty sure that a politician presenting at AEI would spin numbers to make his case, and get invited back. All you need to do is employ people and have basic tax code sense and his numbers dont quite add up.
Steve
Sure is easy to blow off any evidence contrary to what you want to think.
SUre is easy to blindly accept what you want to hear and avoid doing the hard work of going through the numbers yourself. Give it a try. Make it work.
Steve
If we could assume that our hypothetical mother worked for the one particular anesthesiology LLC our good Steve runs I believe we could have excellent confidence in the estimates he provides from his necessarily limited experience in running that one operation.
What we have instead of that happy coincidence, though, is Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare Gary D. Alexander’s complete presentation, from which original source the graph above is taken.
However if, as our good Steve insinuates above, it turns out that Steve’s own state’s Secretary of Public Welfare cannot be trusted to broker numbers at least as honest than those alternative ones Steve himself can provide here at the drop of a hat, then, frankly, we owe it to the good citizens of The Keystone State to place our good Author’s name on the ballot against Alexander in competition for that office. We used to have a number of Pennsylvanians here. Do we still?
In the meantime, a more in-depth offering of Gary Alexander’s “welfare cliffs” for all to peruse.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I had read that source before. It does not describe how we achieved his numbers. When I run them using PA numbers,and I have or have had employees in the described salary ranges, I cannot come close to his numbers. I think some level of trust in public officials is good, but blind trust in a politician making a presentation at AEI? I dont think so. Unless, ok let’s make a deal. You promise to believe anything I quote from a politician making a presentation to some leftist think tank. Better yet, just take a few minutes and work it out yourself. Not that hard to do. Just post your numbers and maybe I did something wrong.
Steve
My good Steve,
Aside from the fact that you are explicitly beginning from the standpoint of someone wanting to disprove a “politician spinning for the AES” – not exactly a neutral stance – here is the forest you are not seeing in your urge to let everyone know, primarily, overwhelmingly, and irrelevantly, that you run a business and, second, that you know what your particular benefits for your particular CRNA nurses and fellow anesthesiologists cost – let us be clear here: a number ( which is certainly not your officious sounding “PA numbers”) you may or may not have simply pulled out of your ass to make your criticism work – benefits it is at least reasonable to assume, though, of a level to attract and retain that specialized anesthesiology talent, not the average working woman with two kids.
Here is the problem, though which, deliberately or not, you are attempting to obfuscate by focusing on the one point of comparison in the Alexander chart where
that is, where the one lower salary plus welfare point yields a margin over the higher salary without welfare point of a net $282.00: there is not simply that one point of comparison in the Alexander comparison.
As page 7 of the complete Alexander presentation – “Earned income minus taxes” – the right side, blue graphics alone portrays an entire range of net earned income. Your burden at this point is to prove either a) why the one point you selected out of that whole range – but not all the rest – is bogus; or b) why all of Alexander’s blue figures are bogus.
At the same time, there is the left side of the graph. Are those welfare figures bogus, too? If you wish to maintain that they are – all of them – you need to get busy proving it.
Here though, finally, is the crux of the matter: the only important part of the entire graph is the relative relation between the left side of the graph – the lower gross incomes plus welfare – to the right side of the graph – the higher gross incomes without welfare.
It really doesn’t matter if the difference at one particular point is a net +$282.00 – the spread shown – or a net +$500.23, or a net $79.56, or even a net -$1376.87.
The only value of the graph is to show how massively current welfare benefits in general on top of much lower actual gross incomes come close to easily approximating much, much higher gross incomes without such lavishly cumulative layers of additional welfare income.
In the end, your mathematical squirreling on that one point, absent any external, objective basis for the figures you chose to use, is useful only to advertise to our readers that you can do math and like doing it. Good for you! Thanks for sharing,
Finally, let us remember this at least in taking what very well may be Gary Alexander’s opaque figures at face value. He is not entirely merely your “politician spinning before the AEI”.
In making this presentation he is exposing himself to a national and a global audience as the official representative of the State of Pennsylvania on these matters. If they are as bogus as your entirely unsubstantiated criticism wants to make them out to be, then he has just egregiously exposed himself to immediate political attack from any quarter on a national level.
You, by comparison, are a random passerby with nothing to lose who did some quick and dirty unsubstantiated estimations in a comment box – and estimations which are ultimately entirely irrelevant to the overall presentation made.
Because of that ultimate irrelevancy, because I have no reason on the surface to doubt the general relative veracity of Alexander’s numbers, and, most importantly, because over four and a half years now your own numbers have proved to be – oops! – mistaken or out right misleading as often as they have proved to be correct, I do not feel particularly compelled to run numbers myself on this particular presentation where they, too, would ultimately prove to be – did I already mention it? – entirely irrelevant to the point at hand.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
There is a final, simpler thing to consider before we lose ourselves in furnishing our right-side graph mom’s life with benefits and doll house back yard swingsets or begin irrefutable proofs of why the right-side graph mom’s doll house tea set couldn’t possibly be Ming china.
Ultimately, all the right side of the graph needs to offer is what it already does, a simple scale of dollar values, dollar values which need represent no more than the sum of dollar values on the left side of the graph.
It is the left side of the graph upon which the presentation is made, showing us the combined take of both personal earnings and welfare, and thus just how remunerative an alternate position a recipient would have to have to rationally abandon their dependency on that sum of minor personal earnings and generous public assistance – hence the ultimately insidious nature of that assistance as a trap.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
From Forbes on the costs of a typical benefits package. I think this is a bit high, but I have seen it quoted elsewhere.
“The ballpark cost for a decent benefits package, including health insurance, a retirement plan and a few extra perks: between 30% and 45% of total payroll expenses (including salaries and hourly wages).”
http://www.forbes.com/2006/10/06/aetna-unitedhealth-retirement-ent-hr-cx_mf_1006benefits.html
Steve
My good Steve,
This is now July, 2012. Your link, whatever value it might somehow have provided back in 2006 relative to the entire range of incomes currently graphed here in 2012 between $0.00 and $100,00.00 – quite a disparately wide range – is now laughably out of date and – did I mention it? – still entirely irrelevant.
You keep latching onto these random, singular forest-obscuring trees with an almost fetishistic obsession. Why? Did the point of the Alexander presentation as a whole simply elude you?
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Nope. Talk to someone running a business. Ask them what benefits cost them as a percentage of salary.
“. Why? Did the point of the Alexander presentation as a whole simply elude you?”
Because the numbers do not add up with my experience and those I know who run a business. You have to accept benefits running at about 10% of wages to make it work. What Alexander’s graph really shows, if we are to have a take home, is that child care and health insurance cost a lot. We can cut those benefits for lower income people (actually most people making 29k dont get those kinds of benefits and Alexander chose a high cost child care age that goes down a lot after a couple of years), but we then should not be surprised if people cannot afford to work.
Steve
My good Steve,
The problem seems to be that Alexander’s graph is too abstract for your mind to grasp, and so you are forcing yourself to convert it into something that it is not but which fits those things you are able to comprehend.
The problem that keeps defeating you is the sheer simplicity of the presentation itself.
All Alexander offers are three abstractions:
1) a range of earned incomes after taxes. Period.
2) a certain portion of that range of earned incomes after taxes with the welfare benefits that can be gotten at that certain portion of that range of earned incomes after taxes added to that certain portion of that range of earned incomes after taxes
3) the sum of
2a) that certain portion of that range of earned incomes after taxes at which welfare benefits can be received and
2b) those welfare benefits that can be gotten at that certain portion of that range of earned incomes after taxes compared to
1) a range of earned incomes after taxes. Period.
That’s it.
That’s all there is to see in the graph.
That’s all there is to see in the graph.
That’s all there is to see in the graph.
EVERYTHING ELSE IS OBJECTIVELY UNKNOWABLE BEFORE THE FACT, WHICH IS WHY IT IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE GRAPH
THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE NECESSITY THAT BENEFITS, OR CUPCAKES, OR ANYTHING ELSE BE OFFERED AT ANY GIVEN POINT IN THE GRAPH. NONE. THAT IS WHY THEY ARE NOT EVEN CONSIDERED AS A FACTOR TO BE ACCOUNTED FOR. BECAUSE, LIKE HEISENBERG’S ELECTRONS, THERE IS NO WAY TO OBJECTIVELY DETERMINE WHERE, IN WHICH REAL WORLD INSTANCES OF EARNED INCOME AFTER TAXES, THEY ACTUALLY EXIST.
Now if you want to fill private, subjective Steveland with whatever estimations of what you think should be at any one place in the graph you desire, or all of them – if you have any objective basis to make meaningful determinations for any one point on the graph, then you should be able to do it for all of them; otherwise your elections are simply subjective, personal, and arbitrary, not consistently objective – go right ahead.
Populate your inner world with whatever you think Alexander (who is smart enough to know what is determinable and what is not) should have built in the private inner world of Steveland, and then pat yourself on the back for recognizing the wonders of your creation. As a business owner. Good Steve! Here, here’s a pat from me, too: pat, pat.
But your failure to make the defective inner mathematics of Steveland match up with Alexander’s very very simple, objective graph is a failure of your own understanding of what you are looking at, not Alexander’s failure.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
BLS, March 2012. It is 4 months out of date.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm
“Employer costs for employee compensation averaged $30.69 per hour worked in March 2012, the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Wages and salaries averaged $21.27 per hour worked and
accounted for 69.3 percent of these costs, while benefits averaged $9.42 and accounted for the
remaining 30.7 percent.”
The Forbes estimate of 30%-40% is then technically correct, but as I noted, it seemed a bit high.
Remember that the title of the linked piece is……..
“Julia’s mother: Why a single mom is better off with a $29,000 job and welfare than taking a $69,000 job”
Steve
Pat, pat, pat!
Good for you, Steve!
Unfortunately, your BLS statistics are an abstract, summary, collective average of all benefits offered over all jobs, not anything which compels any actual benefits to exist or to be provided at any actual job offered at any specific level of earned income after taxes.
What exact benefits at what exact dollar amounts are offered at which different actual jobs at Alexander’s earned income after taxes levels of $31,500, $37,000, $46,750, $51,000, and $89,500, respectively? If you can’t tell us, you’re just blowing smoke.
Here’s just one example of how your stubborn obtuseness, derived from nothing more than your pathological need to impress others, keeps making you look spectacularly stupid:
Julia’s mother may in fact have to choose between a $29,000 job plus welfare and a $XX,000 job that in fact does offer benefits – except the benefits aren’t provided until after she successfully completes 90 to 120 days of probationary employment.
So what does she do? Does she quit her safe $29K plus welfare haven for a job she might succeed at for more than 90-120 days? Her new job doesn’t have benefits, but yet it does, but not if she’s fired or quits in month 5. But it might have benefits. Unless the company decides to drop them.
The owners of that business and I are jointly laughing at you for being the sort of retarded moron who suggests that, no, they don’t actually offer what they do actually offer, they instead must offer what the BLS says the average of all businesses offer.
There is simply no guarantee that any benefits at all will actually exist at any given hypothetical decision point where a Julia’s mother must choose between a low earned income after taxes plus welfare situation and a higher earned income after taxes without welfare situation.
Look, Steve, you’re a nice guy, but outside of your very narrow, specialized field of medical expertise you’re a little child lost in the wilderness, and no reading of blogs or BLS statistics will make up for that greater range of general, real world experience you can never now have.
Here, though, here’s another pat on the head to make you feel good about being an owner of one, single, highly specialized type of business. Pat.
And now, frankly, I’m a little tired of humoring your Walter Mitty fantasy life of being the universally intelligent master of any topic you choose to consider.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria