Cleaning House

Last Christmas, my wife booked a cleaner for the first time ever on the 23rd of December, for pre-Christmas cleaning.

The person didn't turn up.

When the company was called, we were told that the person had quit three weeks earlier* and since they didn't have any records of the bookings, they couldn't contact anyone.

Good business practices.

But for Christmas, my wife also got as a gift from her work a couple hours of cleaning from another company to be used in 2022 - and she finally booked it - for 8am on the Monday morning I happen to have a day off.

Good job.

Supposedly, it was the only day available and it was a cancellation of another appointment that had opened up.

A likely story.

So yesterday, in preparation for having a cleaner come to do the cleaning, my wife...

did the cleaning.

In Finland, it is possible to get tax back on the work of various services, so that things like cleaning and home repair are a little cheaper. It can be up to 60% of the work component, so for example, if a plumber is needed and the bill is 1000€ and the work portion is 200€, it can be possible to get a tax reduction of 120€ from earnings. This is good, though I am not sure if it is a benefit that really benefits everyone, or is one of those things that benefits the higher earners more. At the end of the day though, it does seem to mean that people are more willing to pay for something like cleaning, where it is considered all work and I assume, cleaners aren't in the highest tax brackets of society here.

Or anywhere.

However, I was reading an article on smoking rates in Australia this morning and it was interesting and expected, to see that the groups that were most likely to smoke, were still the financially poorest in the community. This is despite the phenomenal increase in the prices of cigarettes over the last two decades in Australia.

Tobacco taxes in Australia rose by 25 per cent in 2010 and 12.5 per cent annually between 2013 and 2020

Yet, while that rise has decreased the amount of smokers, it hasn't proportionally decreased them, meaning that there is an increasing burden on smokers who choose (are addicted) to keep smoking. It does seem like a pretty cruel way to reduce smokers through tax increases, when they could do it far more effectively through just banning people who are born after a certain year from being able to buy tobacco products instead.

It is a tax grab.

Not that I am fighting for the smokers, but it does seem to be one of those things that is clearly to earn tax revenue, rather than in the interest of public health. It is much like the obesity epidemic that is sweeping across the world, with millions of people globally dying from obesity related illness each year, but no government actually doing anything to stop it.

There could be many reasons for this, but perhaps it is partly due to who is obese in various countries, with for example, poor people being far more likely to be overweight than wealthy.

Health is wealth.

But it is more than just not eating well enough, it is also that poor people are more likely to live a sedentary lifestyle also. And perhaps, while people might be dying, a lot of people are living with obesity and they tend to rely more heavily on healthcare services and pharmaceutical products than the healthy - which is a massive money spinner. Unhealthy people generate more wealth than healthy people,

just not for themselves.

I wonder if there were tax benefits for "proof of health" if it would affect people's behaviors. I suspect that it would in the higher tax brackets, but at the lower ends, it would have the same effect, where people seem to feel they do not get enough incentive to actually change their habits.

General "health" is not a large enough outcome for most people to actually do something about their condition, which is why there are still a lot of smokers and obese people willing to keep consuming. Perhaps it isn't tangible enough for most, where there is no clear guidelines. And of course, the waters are being muddied by the social movements that say to love yourself no matter what you do, even if it is going to kill you.

Any mention of weight being an issue is considered body-shaming or discrimination, but what would be interesting is if rather than trying to affect it socially, it was instead approached economically. Assuming that taxes aren't going away any time soon, if there were tax incentives and disincentives that targeted improving health, would it change behavior significantly and if so, in what groups would there be the biggest movement?

And this is the problem, because of course, tax incentives are going to benefit those who pay the most tax the most, while disincentives are going to punish those who pay the least. This means that at the end of the day, the poorer will get less benefit than the richer, as is the normal case of things.

As someone that is in the middle of the average though, I wonder if on average, people would change their health behavior if there was financial reason to do so. There is incentive already, but that is not that clear and it is hard to track, even personally. How to measure the "wealth of health" is a problem, so what most people will do is compare themselves against what they see in others. Going by that standard, I am pretty healthy, because while a little pudgy, in comparison to others in my age group, I look to be in pretty good condition.

False sense of security?

And perhaps this is one f the biggest problems when 70% of a population is overweight and 45% are considered obese, as we are a social species that tends to rolemodel ourselves against our peer group. On average, our peers are in worse condition than us, so we are able to move slowly toward the mean, without feeling that we have a problem, or are part of the problem - pushing the mean weight up again.

Maybe this is also affected buy our physical disconnection from each other too, where we are spending more time alone or in virtual spaces where our bodies "don't matter" as much as they once did. This might feel like a levelling of opportunity and a way to avoid discrimination in some form, but like it or not, our physical condition also affects our mental and emotional states, whether people see us or not.

This means that even if we are hidden away from judging eyes, our condition still affects our outcomes.

We are all driven by incentives of some kind and we are all looking for a return on our investment. My wife spent hours yesterday (I was forced to help) making sure that the already relatively clean house was presentable for the cleaner, who is going to reclean those same things anyway. Why would my wife do this? Well, because she cares about the judgement of others, where she wants the cleaner, a person she doesn't know at all, to have the belief that our home is normally neat and tidy - which it is. But, what does it matter?

I am yet to meet anyone on earth that doesn't care what others think of them, no matter how many times they protest. Sure, some people might not care what others think of them in some contexts that might diverge from the average, but all care in some way.

As said, we are social animals and we learn from each other because we judge each other, for better and worse. It is part of being human. As is the economic side of the equation, where there is always a trade of some sort being made, which incentivizes behavior. If we surround ourselves with people who are worse off than us in the ways we care about, is that going to help us be better, or will we slowly regress to that mean also? If we surround ourselves by people who are better than us in things we care about, will we improve or get worse?

I guess the question of incentives and what works is going to also come down to the question of...

What we care about.

So, if health is so important, why don't we care more about it?

Yet spend so much time making sure the house is clean for the cleaner.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]