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Copying over a post from the ssc subreddit because I found it interesting. (Hope this is allowed.)
In the mid 2010s there was a crisis around social security disability. Things were so dire that estimates placed the DI reserves to run out by 2016.
And yet as we know, this didn't happen. Part of it was thanks to the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, which temporarily reallocated payroll tax revenues from the OAS fund to the DI trust fund but that was temporary and ran out in 2022. And as far as I can tell (and as far as my double checks with the chatbots can find), it wasn't extended.
And now with the upcoming social security crisis the DI reserves are the only part to not be facing any expected issues.
Another piece of the disability crisis, 14 million people were on disability in 2013 and the number was expected to keep rising and rising. And yet it didn't happen, the trend reversed and as of 2024, only around 7 million are on disability It was halved! Substantial drop! We're back to levels from two decades ago.
Why? How did things change so radically so fast?
Covid. I don't know how much of an impact Covid had, but it was disproportionately impacting the disabled both directly and indirectly (by using up hospital resources) and that likely lead to some deaths but it doesn't seem to be that much, we were already trending downwards before the pandemic. [Edit: See edit below, it's quite possible that Covid had a greater impact than I thought]
The social security admin changed up their policies a bit and got more pressure on appeal judges to make denials. This had an impact, but the changes to denial rates don't seem to be that drastic to explain a 50% drop. And since then that small trend downwards has actually reversed too, the overall final award rate of 2024 applications seems to be higher than the mid 2010s average.
I don't think those are the main reasons why it changed.
What do I propose was the main reason? The economy got stronger and the disabled got older.
You can see for yourself how disability applications correspond pretty heavily with the unemployment rate.
Unemployment has a selection bias, it mostly impacts the older, sicker and less educated. Those are people who in a good economy with low unemployment might be able to get jobs, but in a weaker economy they are too old and disabled to find something compared to their healthier younger peers.
You can see a huge surge in disability applications around the time of the great recession. These people were largely in their late 50s and early 60s, too young for early retirement but too old in the recession environment to compete well.
An NPR article from the time reveals this in an example of [in 2009] 56 year old Scott Birdsall and what an employee at a retraining center told him after a local mill closed down and the aging workers were left finding other jobs
A 56 year old in 2009 is what age in 2024? 71. They are past retirement age, and would have transitioned off of disability and onto normal retirement pay.
This is what I think solved a significant portion of the disability crisis. Overall disability in the late aughts and early 2010s was being used as a makeshift early retirement program for uneducated middle aged and senior workers who didn't yet quality for their benefits, but were functionally unemployable already in the post recession economy.
And while I came up with this idea for myself, during research I stumbled onto an analysis that suggests the same thing. Their analysis ended at 2019, where there was still roughly 9.8 million on the rolls, and found that about half the explanation is the business cycle/aging and half is ALJ retraining. The trend from 2019-2024 is likely explained in a similar way, and given the increased final award rates we've tended back towards, this is likely explained even more heavily by the aging explanation.
There are some factors that help support this explanation more. SSDI in general tends to go to older, poorer, more rural and sicker (at least given death rates are 2-6x higher than peers) individuals.
While this does not explain why the 2010s surge itself happened since those factors are relatively stable, it does explain why the surge was so temporary.
This also leads to an interesting question, what happens in the next period of high unemployment? How do we plan to address mass AI based layoffs if they occur?
Many people may be able to find a new job, but many won't and we will likely be facing a new disability crisis if it is forced to served as a early retirement program again.
Edit:
Thinking about it, one weirdness here is Covid unemployment which didn't seem to increase disability rates and in fact the trend downwards continued despite that. But we did see a huge surge in early retirement with about 2.6 million excess retirees. So maybe something changed in how early retirement works since? Or maybe Covid era unemployment mostly impacted younger healthier people or the jobs market for furloughed workers wasn't as bad. Or heck, maybe it's just coincidence that the downward trend was already happening and Covid really did have a major impact on the total number of beneficiaries.
My guess would be in the recovery, Covid unemployment surged higher but recovered really fast so we probably just didn't see as many Scott Birdsall situations.
Back to my thoughts, I'm extremely skeptical that the disability numbers could halve over such a relatively short period without some sort of accounting trickery. I could definitely see Covid having an impact, especially since the vast majority are older people. But the drop in numbers is just too great for me to take them at face value.
We've seen it before with disability, social security, etc, but often times the medicalized benefits system will just shuffle large amounts of people from one category to another once political pressure comes to bear on a label like "disability."
This also reminds me of the old post by Alone on how SSI is basically medicalizing political problems - can't seem to find it but if anyone knows what I'm talking about and has the link that would be great.
I happen to rather like that Alone post.
I think the original poster has it right, even by the lights of shuffling people from one program to another. What is SSDI to SSI if not a recategorizing of benefits?
The concept of "SSDI is just SSI, but targeted at a slightly younger and more blue-collar workforce" seems to be borne out by the second chart here (look at the small, pale blue bars). The numbers keep going up the closer you get to retirement age. In a somewhat more proper sense, this could be explained as: this is quite specifically the cohort you expect to get disabled, as they're manual workers who get old enough for all their little injuries to come back and bite them. Either way, not nearly as knee-jerk offensive as Alone's example, except in the sense that no matter how you decide who gets what, you're still creating a large class of people who are drawing on entitlements from the labor of unrelated others. But that's a far deeper topic.
The race-based charts just line up in the traditional poverty order. I dunno if there was ever any possibility of it being otherwise.
Thank you so much for finding the link, favorited! Man, I know Alone is super cynical (maybe from all the rum) but I can't help but love his devastating writing style:
He’s not cynical, not exactly, or possibly just in a more original sense of the word. Obviously he’s got a biting tongue, and is quite funny and engaging, but his style goes further than that. He smoothly switches registers from that sharp humor to dispassionate but engaged explanation to quiet compassion to thundering moral imperatives. And at the heart of it, the beating heart that gives the writing meaning and purchase, is a sincere and rich if off-beat and cantankerous sense of what it means to be human, and a good one at that. He believes, and believes so strongly that those who read him often can’t help but to believe as well. It is, in my opinion, the core characteristic of the best artists (whatever the medium). Weak artists communicate their raw skill, or the popular views of the day, or self-interested navel-gazing, or shallow platitudes (sometimes positive, often negative). Great artists have a perception of the world, an almost indescribable richness of essence, which they strive to share. They see the clean and the corrupt, the fractures in the simple and uncomplicated views, and try to communicate what they see. And especially they love the goodness of it, which impels them to expression, however imperfect. I find that this imperfection is actually the hallmark of great art, a certain roughness around the edges, a strange and stilted section here or there, the part of a novel or movie that drags on a little long, a corner of a painting that is not perfectly lovely, an awkward sidebar in a thesis: this is the uncomfortable, indescribable real poking through. It is not necessarily in full contribution to “the point” or what have you, but it is necessary nonetheless. And Alone, for my money, is one of these serious artists, probably the only real and powerful thinker I’ve read in the 21st century. There are some pretty acceptable second-rate writers, who are quite good for the time, and perhaps Alone will wind up being too focused on contemporary issues to be particularly worth remembering in a historical sense. But my sense is that he stands with the best.
I don’t see nihilism in what he’s talking about. What he’s talking about is how the systems in the modern West actually work, and exactly how they’re pretty much the same as the structures that have always existed and probably always will. SSDI like almost all welfare has never been aimed at tge comfort or betterment of tge people that receive it. It’s a pass through so they can afford to buy consumer goods. Which is why they have to use them to buy things or pay rent to a private individual. Government cheese and public housing and public clinics staffed by government hired doctors don’t get the money to the producers as fast. And most welfare systems cut people off the minute they have any assets. If you have money in the bank, you’re going to lose benefits rather quickly. It’s meant as pacification of the poor and a pass-through handout to business interests.
I see the same in his talking about the 2008 shutdown. He’s talking about the news and how it’s designed to tell you what you already believe, to create drama instead of solutions, and to basically prevent you from thinking about the issues. And the entire point is that it keeps you from understanding what is going on. Which is control. It wants you to feel involved and feel like you’re important enough to be in the seat of power. It’s sophisticated ego-stroking, and TBH it’s very seductive as ego-stroking to pretend that it’s of earth-shaking importance that you, personally are informed by the best sources, are engaged at all times, and that it’s urgent that you, yes, you are intimately and personally involved. TBH, I think in general the reverse is true, and that most of the problems in America would be solved if fewer people cared about politics, especially since the vast majority (on both sides BTW) are using politics as a substitute for religion and in some cases personality.
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Yes absolutely! It's not pure cynical nihilism, he pairs a lot of intelligence with someone who clearly cares about society and wants the best for us. I love the way you put this, he definitely has a strong belief in what he's writing about.
Have you read Sadly, Porn? Haven't been able to start given what I've heard myself ahaha.
It’s his best work.
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I have read Sadly, Porn. The book is composed of meandering parables. They revolve around a central argument reiterated repeatedly in riddle form but never stated explicitly. Footnotes make up 50% of the book's total word count. Each footnote is an essay, mostly book reviews and movie reviews. I would maybe recommend reading the footnote essays for starters and circling back to reading main text of the book afterwards.
What is the main argument?
It's less about an argument in the logos sense than it is about the experience of reading it. It's a unique exercise in rhetoric.
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The general thrust is similar to his blog but with a focus on relationships. It centers around themes of self-deception, narcissism, performative virtue, revealed preference, cowardice, selfishness, and ultimately, dereliction of duty and the failure to be a good person. A book of cynicism in diametric opposition to nihilism.
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