KNNLTF

It's unfair both ways, like a group of death in soccer. Wichita State shouldn't have to play a 2 seed to get to the Sweet 16. Kentucky shouldn't have to play KenPom's #8 overall team in the second round.

Do you stop enough cases of public assistance fraud to justify the existence of your office financially? If possible, can you take into account the cost of ending public assistance, e.g. the associated paperwork and court costs? For example, if a person is fraudulently receiving $200/month in food stamps for the next year, and the cost (outside of your office) of ceasing their case is $1000, then you've saved the state $1400 (without adjusting for time value of money). So basically I'm asking you to add all these up, or provide your best estimate of them, and compare them to your salary and benefits and your job's share of administrative, clerical, and supply expenses.

Is there a way to tell how much you save the state via discouraging fraud, leading to fewer cases of fraud even if you don't catch very many fraudsters? Are there state-by-state comparisons, or before and after comparisons based on the existence and expenditure in jobs like yours? On the other hand, to what extent does your enforcement discourage people from seeking assistance for which they qualify?

If we took the message of Super Crunchers to heart, we would lose our respect for the common man and the politicians who pander to him.

One should distinguish between "the common man" as political agent and as economic agent. One of the thoughts underlying this sort of statement ("if you rely heavily on statistics, you will be forever double-checking whether the popular view is correct") is knowledge about issues like trade and immigration.

There is broad agreement, approaching consensus, among academic economists about the mutually positive nature of open trade and immigration. Nevertheless, free trade is an extremely anti-populist position -- but only in the political sphere. Hence, to accept statistics, one must reject political populism.

On the other hand, the common man loves free trade every time he goes to the super market. There's a minor consumer movement for "buying local" or "buying American", but "buy cheap" is outrageously more popular, if not as common of a slogan. When someone proposes trade restrictions or immigration restrictions, in an economic sense, they are being extremely anti-populist. Average consumers make poor choices, like buying stuff from China, when left to make their own decisions in a free market. So we have to implement top-down economic controls to save the common folk from their own poor decisions. That is a politically popular opinion, but if one were to aggregate economic action into a kind of vote or poll, it would be an extremely unpopular opinion.

So the difference between progressive and libertarian opinions on collective action vs. individual freedom is not one of populism vs. elitism, but of votism vs. consumerism. In what actions can the people be trusted to make informed and just decisions that lead to greater prosperity? Punching a card once per year to pick their leaders in a low-information, no-incentives corrupt political system, or buying and selling goods and services, at personal benefit or detriment, with the continuously adjusting information of prices? One is political populism, the other, economic populism. The trouble is that the same group of people, most people even, believe completely contradictory things in the voting booth and at the marketplace. Rather than libertarianism being incompatible with populism, saying that the people do not know what's best for them, it is incompatible with political populism -- the people make poor political decisions not because they're dumb, but because politics is a bad system for aggregated decision-making.