Seán Keyes

Another way of looking at this is that the UK state hides charges and discounts in ways that would be illegal for a company to do because they would be widely perceived as dodgy. This is the granular stuff that undermines state capacity.

A lot of intellectual puzzles disappear if you model all 'endowments' – reliable incomes or wealth or property that people receive – as being possessions or rights in the eyes of the public. There is a tendency to see only classic common law property rights as actual, genuine property. In a sense, this is true. But I think to reify this distinction too much, we are applying our own moral distinctions to the situation artificially, in a way that doesn't predict people's behaviour. I think it's easier to understand people's behaviour if we see quite a few more things as morally like 'property' in the eyes of those affected: government payments – disability benefits, pensions, housing benefits, in-kind benefits like social housing, and valuable states of affairs that people have a stake in and care a lot about and have historically managed to keep fairly stable, like the character of their neighbourhood. All that's really going on here is the endowment effect. In general, people prefer to hold onto something versus getting a new thing of an equal value. My contention is that extent of the experienced endowment effect is largely driven by different dimensions of social trust. For example, developing countries find it very difficult to expropriate property in service of public goods, and they do it very seldom. The most developed countries can take property easily. (Compare building a metro in Delhi versus building it in France: in France the promoters will demolish freely; in Delhi they will build it over roads and rights of way they already own.) Drawing this out, an implication of my contention is that the paradigm feature of state & social development is being able to change endowments. The more people a government can, with public consent, make worse off, in service of a social end, the more developed it is. This is why I say that the recent inability of the Labour government to justify either raising taxes (making taxpayers worse off) or cutting benefits (making recipients worse off) in service of the nation's wellbeing (producing public goods), is an indicator of Britain's falling development level. Same for the US. xitter.twitterapi.xyz/bswud/status/204113912…