Read on Twitter
I send a lot of mail and phone calls to public benefit recipients (sorry!). I don’t have much experience signing up. So, when I got mail for a means-tested program yesterday, I signed up. Some reflections for economists and other researchers:
We got a Pandemic EBT card, an extension of SNAP. Kids get a debit card for the grocery store to replace free school lunch while e-learning. My kid is eligible for free lunch because of the “community eligibility provision” (most kids in his district qualify on income).
Probably worth mentioning the obvious: my lack of experience with public benefits reflects a privileged background. My experience doing this is not going to be representative at all. Research would be better if we had more people with direct experience, but we don't.
The program is run by the state. Indiana did a pretty good job setting this up. Most of the information I needed was on the form, and registering the card took me 5 minutes. But…
Economists assume people have much more information than they actually do. I didn’t know I was eligible. I didn’t know the benefit amount until *after* I registered. I still have no idea how long it will last. I even read the FAQ online. No idea how many months this is for.
Existing infrastructure is inflexible. The phone bank for registering the card was clearly setup to deal with an adult already in the system. It told me it was asking me about my child and then proceeded to use pre-recorded questions about me: “What is *your* date of birth?”
I had to read the materials really closely. The phone bank asked me to “enter the last 4 digits of my social security number.” Apparently, I was supposed to enter 0000 (??). I failed the first time and had to read the second page of the mail closely to figure that out
The point is not to dunk on the State of Indiana. I assume there's a reason for the clunky id code setup. I've run surveys, etc. that have the same problem. Often procurement rules and IT systems in government just do not allow for a customer-oriented solution.
All that to say, a non-trivial number of people are going to fail to get benefits because of all these small frictions. Designing forms and call centers matters a lot. Related: this paper from @ProfNoto https://economics.mit.edu/files/19060
Targeting extra benefits to kids on free and reduced lunch would seem to be ideal. But good targeting has exceptions, like an economics professor getting food stamps. The SNAP community eligibility provision is good but has tradeoffs. See link @ruffini https://drive.google.com/file/d/1boHTTD1UoiyhyeW9Q-Y7lBNrwaSOP_PS/view
And targeting comes at a cost. Wow this took a long time to get to me. This funding came from a bill passed by Congress in March. My son has been e-learning at this school since August. For all the targeting issues of the checks sent back in the summer, they were fast.
Similarly, there's a bunch of CARES money that is just getting to people now. Intellectually, I know about lags in public spending, but this made it really salient.
And for those wondering if I’m going to use the benefits, I’m torn between saving public funds and re-gifting it (using it for my groceries…and then donating an equal amount to something with a higher value than the marginal dollar of state of Indiana spending). No decision yet.
