Social Interactions through Cost Engineering

In recent memory, the debate in California (and much of the US) has been about the homelessness crisis, immigration, and the rising cost of housing. Driving forces, shocks to the economy, and a stagnant manufacturing base combined with global supply chains reducing efficiency in the US domestic market have created this social outcome -- the lack of a wealthy middle class. This problem has an urgency about it and our generation and cost engineering skills at General Physics can help. Let's do a back of the envelope calculation.

Let us assume that there are ten million refugees, homeless, and immigrant asylum seekers trying to find their way in the United States. Let's say it takes on average ten hours of work with a social worker to find adequate immigration services, housing, job placement, healthcare, and ancillary human welfare assistance. We are not talking about giving people handouts; entitlements are a serious concern with pay to play forces. We are talking about support and placement services. What this discussion also requires is a standardized minimum salary paid to citizens and asylum seekers so that they can get themselves on their feet and contributing. It is like ignition in an engine. There must be a spark or catalyst to start the employment, socialization, immigration, naturalization, and rehabilitation process. So we have ten million claimants and ten hours roughly per claimant. That amounts to approximately one hundred million hours of work. Assume we hire a set of ten thousand new social workers full time. They have roughly 300 hours of working time per month each. 10,000 times 300 is 3,000,000 hours per month. Social workers can then process in a little over roughly thirty three months, the total ten million people. Deficit spending and social programs that fund the assistance align with the social workers who connect housing, jobs, gyms, clinics, and medical programs. A social worker makes roughly $100,000 per year. Estimates are for roughly 3 years of $100,000 times 10,000 social workers which amounts to $1,000,000,000 over the course of the claimant program. This could solve a significant housing, immigration, and mental health crisis at a relatively low cost. One billion in social program funding could come from bonds, pollution taxes, gas taxes, interest rate modification yields, creative investments, and so forth.

The critical part of this is connecting the social worker to the housing, job, and medical outcome for the claimant. The country must agree to support the program so that the social workers have clout or resilience in their decisions and recommendations. Workers, immigrants, homeless, and the claimants in the program can garner assistance from the social workers, furthermore their benefits will then come from an income, wages, and prices board that sets six month limits on inflationary variables so that there is market stability. Motivating all this, is a deficit spending, pay to play welfare state democratic ideal to support the human condition. We have to provide a standard of living, a minimum wage paid to everyone, more citizenship, and more rights and privileges in the workplace. The system of rights and privileges again, does not extend to the social setting. We have an increasingly professional society where university, industry, and government partners are the players in a game to develop a workforce of comparative advantage. Education plays a critical role in the ancillary social outcome. The necessary factors in healthcare, job placement, management consulting, cost engineering, and housing allotments can be seen through a lens of pay to play attitudes. We have to catalyze the market forces through deficit spending; inflation is mitigated through a phased program of wage and price modification in critical sectors -- healthcare, energy, commodities, financials, marketing, etc. Budgets for corporations must adapt to lessen the excessive marketing and advertising costs, efficiently connecting to consumers in their respective fields through professional networking. Interworking in 5G and quantum 6G technology will lead to a revolution in cost effective and minimized advertising in the market. This is a little off the main point of social cost engineering, but the ideas are sound.

Social workers in a picture with hiring one hundred thousand instead of the ten thousand, could reduce the thirty three month one hundred million hour claimant time frame to three and one third months. Imagine serving ten million homeless, immigrant, and refugee status people (medical cases, poverty line cases, etc.) in less than four months. It might not be ideal but it is a start.

We are making assumptions. It could take more than ten hours of work per claimant. Families require reconnection and there are travel costs, secondary support teams, and an infrastructure that has to be built. There are office spaces that would be better used for social workers instead of ICE. We need to rethink the role of government, the necessity of vocational training and on the job training (paid) to get people up and running in a comparative advantage economy that has a minimum monthly salary paid out to everyone over 18 years.

Although these ideas are difficult, it is easier to enact than landing on Mars, building a fusion reactor, and producing peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. These things also have to be done; one does not negate the other. However, the critical social working must happen. One can also think about hiring more judges and having more immigration services to reduce processing time. These are small investments that increase the soft power global goodwill from the American brand which has suffered so much.