[wpietri]

Definitely. I can trivially design an unemployment system that has zero fraud: we just never give out any money at all. We have to balance fraudulent payments against deserving recipients who don't get the money.

I used to work with the people who made GetCalFresh: https://www.getcalfresh.org/

The basic problem they addressed was that a lot of people who qualified for food stamps didn't get them because it was too hard to apply. You either had to fill out an intimidating set of paper forms or a quirky and intimidating set of web versions of paper forms. GetCalFresh basically just applied the lean startup playbook: make something very simple, drive people to it with ads, and, as Paul Graham suggests, they did things that didn't scale. Initially, they filled out the paperwork by hand. Then they kept adding automation for filling out and faxing in PDFs. They talked with users, removing barriers and solving problems. Rolling out county by county, they've made a huge difference. Average online application time dropped from 45 minutes to 8. Last I checked, they were helping tens of thousands of people per month.

I think it's fantastic that all of these people previously going hungry are now getting fed. But for years they weren't, and there are still plenty of deserving recipients who aren't. A lot of what GCF is doing is taking information the government already has and giving it back to them. Why is that necessary at all?

I get why unemployment is still a mess. But given the power of networked computers, eventually I'd like to see all safety-net programs get rid of the need to apply at all. For a lot of pandemic layoffs, it would have been possible for state governments to contact people who were probably eligible, have them confirm a few details, and start sending them the money. And as a bonus, a proactive system like that would be much harder to scam.