I'm not done writing the article this point is in, but I want to stress it now. The reason full universality is so important goes beyond never excluding anyone in need. It's also about trust. What policymakers don't realize is that the lines they insist on drawing erodes trust.
This is not a small effect either. It's quite large actually. A very cleverly designed experiment out of Pakistan found that feeling poor, no matter your actual income, leads to a very large decrease in government support among those who don't get help.
The effect is so large that when we draw a line between the "deserving" and "undeserving," those who get help gain a 0.6 percentage point increase in government satisfaction while among those who don't get help, their approval with government plummets by 10.5 percentage points.
That means that in a situation like this, when our goal is to help people in need, and we draw a line, we actually serve to massively erode people's faith in government because the negative impact on trust of not getting help is 17.5x stronger than the positive impact on trust.
Full universality means we avoid any decreases in government satisfaction, and instead all we see is positive increases. The lesson here should be simple. DON'T EXCLUDE ANYONE. If you insist that those earning over $___ shouldn't get $1k, just add $1k to their tax bill next time.
Oops. Embedded the wrong tweet above. Here's the correct one.
