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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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I think the use of "utility monster" should have instead been "inverse utility monster". A utility monster is someone who receives more utility per unit resource than anyone else, and thus via utilitarian calculation, should receive everything. An "inverse utility monster", for lack of a better term, is someone who receives almost no utility per unit resource, and thus via egalitarian calculation, should receive disproportionate resources to make up for this.

I previously used this to describe a case where local governments in Britain were paying £300k/yr on average, and up to £1m/yr in some cases, per child placed in social care. Insane spending per child, life-changing amounts of money for most. But still producing awful outcomes for the child who all this money is supposed to benefit. The consequence is a rapid collapse of local government's ability to fund anything beyond it's legal obligation to fund social care, shutting highly visible and cost-effective programmes like libraries in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable bankruptcy from the cost of comparatively useless social care.

It could also clearly apply to spending disproportionate resources keeping coffin-dodgers alive for another week, or like OP states, social spending on immigrants with barriers like language/culture that make spending on them less effective than spending on existing citizens.