1 min readFeb 24, 2018
Public policy toward social safety nets are beyond my scope. But your specific question about whether great suffering is needed to provoke great change reminds me of Donald Knuth’s quote, “premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.” The corollary being that we should wait to see that we really have a problem before try to fix it. Of course, that’s just programming.