Procedural requirements ration services by exploiting the poor’s lower opportunity costs
Evidence
Assessed time costs may also be experienced as inconvenience, although they are levied as procedure. For example, when an agency refuses to receive complaints over the telephone and requires that they be written, it may cut off complaints lodged frivolously or on impulse, but also discourages complainants who would protest if it were easier. Requirements to complete multiple forms and produce extensive documentation function similarly. It is possible to make an argument that since the real costs of delay and elaborate procedures are the activities foregone while waiting, that is, opportunity costs, it is justifiable that poor people wait longer than the more affluent, since the opportunities foregone are less valued by the society. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 663
Categorization
- QUESTION: The opportunity-cost argument — that the poor can ‘afford’ to wait longer — is an explicit elite rationale worth interrogating against the reader’s speed-of-institutionalization hypothesis.
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
- XREF: connects to: Price-like costs ration free public services by discouraging contact — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 655; Resource-advantaged groups coordinate to create institutions expropriating from the disadvantaged — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 667; Household economizing functions as a competitive game, not mere necessity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1240 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Resource-advantaged groups coordinate to create institutions expropriating from the disadvantaged
#expands(0.75) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 667 - Household economizing functions as a competitive game, not mere necessity
#qualifies(0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1240