This is scary because of our current political situation. Even when nature is on our side we have mindless headstrong morons heading nuclear states and we seem to be in verge of war. People do not trust science and still believe in afterlife and heaven or hell rather than believing in our planet and its current problems. Amount of CO2 is definitely going to trigger extreme climate change and that is going to destabilize our geopolitics, and we simply are not ready for that change. We should start making life style changes for the sake of millions of species that are getting extinct and also to start a culture of responsible citizen of earth.
Everyone these days want to 'delegate' work to someone else if permissible by law, and sometimes even if they are not, I guess. I have a feeling the report would come out with, 'due to lack of funding and experts, some of the work had to be 'delegated' to Boeing' etc...
All types of social welfare spending have increased over the last 50 years, not just healthcare. A larger proportion of the population is dependent on the government now than 50 years ago.
Of course one thing not brought about social welfare is that isn't a choice of to pay or not but to pay now vs pay later no matter what you do - in addition to humanitarian and reputation impacts.
It is harder to calculate given hard numbers only exist if things go wrong.
Not paying for vaccination or hygenic programs leads to outbreaks which are expensive to contain and not containing leads to even more.
Even literally leaving people to die in the street still generates expenses
The evidence shows that social welfare spending can increase future costs. For example it increases the percentage of women who have children out of wedlock. The increase in social welfare spending is the primary reason why the percentage of children born to single parents rose from about 4% in 1948 to 40% today. That in turn increases nearly every type of socioeconomic problem.
Maybe people just don't put as much importance on weddings as they did when children out of wedlock had substantially reduced rights? I don't think the link to increased welfare spending is as clear as you make it. I for example only married for the tax benefits.
The evidence suggests that increases in the availability of social assistance cause an increase in the percentage of children born out of wedlock, so it's not merely an observation of a correlation.
There are undoubtedly other factors as well, but the expansion of social spending is one of the major ones.
>Public assistance also had large, statistically significant effects on all of the dependent variables. All else equal, higher levels of public assistance were associated with lower prevalence of marriage for black men and black women, lower prevalence of husband-wife families, lower percentage of marital births for black women, and lower percentage of black children living in husband-wife families. These results differed from those reported in some previous aggregate-level studies (e.g., Ellwood & Bane, 1985; Ellwood & Summers, 1986), but they were quite robust and were substantively as well as statistically significant. For example, the difference between $150 and $250 in average support per recipient child (a difference of 0.51 in the natural log version, which is only slightly larger than the sample standard deviation for the variable) translates into a 4.4-point difference in the expected percentage of marital births for black women aged 20-24, a difference of nearly 2.4 points in the expected percentage of black children residing in husband-wife families, and a 3.5 point difference in the expected percentage of married for women with children 0-5.
>These estimated impacts were then combined to measure "final" effects on the total illegitimacy rate - out-of-wedlock births per 1,000 women in the population. The outcome of this experiment was a hypothetical decrease in total illegitimacy rates - as of the end of the estimation period in 1992 - of about 15 percent for whites and slightly under 7 percent for blacks. The differential effects are almost entirely accounted for by the disparities in the determinants of marital status noted above.
>
>Narrowly defined, our goal in this study has been to test the linkage between welfare benefits and illegitimate births. The econometric evidence presented here has strongly supported this connection. More broadly, however, this study implicates the welfare system in the growth of illegitimacy
This move makes sense IMO. There are a lot of Hello world public repos out there which is actually crowding search results and inflating number of "open source projects" in Github.
As with any sales there could be that factor of China trying to sell more of their product/services(just like US does to sell weapons in various nations) but I find it strange that people are trying to politicize it being debt trap and trying to garner sympathy towards the defaulter than towards the victim who didn't get paid.
It's because it's very clear that China's intent with such loans is to create a casus belli for such seizures or create complete economic reliance. Nobody is going to sympathise with a predatory loanshark when they don't get paid and use it as an excuse to grab what they really wanted all along.
>>but I find it strange that people are trying to politicize it being debt trap and trying to garner sympathy towards the defaulter than towards the victim who didn't get paid.
I find it strange that new accounts are defending China using academic language that is not commonly used in HN discussions.
