Then again, if they didn't subsidize disability, who would risk playing Human Tetris?

Noah has a post up on disability policies in the US and Japan:

. . . In Japan, the government mandates that each employer hire a certain portion of disabled workers and then fines those who do not. The government recognizes that firms where this is actually an undue hardship will pay the fine rather than hire disabled workers and the fines are set accordingly. The revenue from those fines is used to pay firms who do hire disabled workers the difference between the going wage rate and the productivity of the disabled workers, so they suffer no costs.

From a pure efficiency standpoint, Japan wins hands down. There is far higher employment and lower poverty rates among Japan's disabled workers than among America's (holding all else constant, however economists do such things). In fact, passing the ADA actually did nothing to help the average disabled person economically.

Both of these policies also have significant effects on the social standing of disabled persons. The ADA is basically an anti-discrimination law. It says "Look, these people aren't very good at working, but don't make fun of them because of it. If it'll hurt your business, you don't have to hire them, but if it won't, put in a ramp and some Braille." The state tells us that it is alright to judge people based on their disabilities, but not their status as disabled persons.

. . . Helen criticizes the Left for wanting to "make disability essentially invisible." Well, yes and no. Insofar as disabilities generally do exclude the 2% of Americans disabled enough that the market will employ them from almost every other sphere of society, that's bad. That exclusion is the reason deaf activists are so insistent on the preservation of deaf culture - you really do become an outcast from most of American society, not just aural life. Treating people with disabilities as people requires doing everything possible to get society to recognize their basic personhood. If that doesn't mean making disability invisible, it at least means making it irrelevant.

I'm still chewing on this one (go, RTWT), but one thing that jumps out at me is that making disability "irrelevant" isn't much better than making it invisible. There are certain spheres in which class (or race or sexual orientation) should be irrelevant, but if class became completely irrelevant it would cease to exist, or become entirely parodic, i.e. instead of upper class, working class, and middle class cultures, we have one big blah culture and the upper classes take long weekends playing redneck or co-op farmer, depending on their politics. In the case of class, sexual orientation, and race, we've managed to make them irrelevant in some areas without making them irrelevant in all areas.

Gender, on the other hand, affects practically every aspect of a person's life, and so any attempt to make it irrelevant in one sphere has more wide-ranging effects than an analogous attempt for some less pervasive kind of identity, because the threads are more tangled. Just look at the trajectory of American feminism.

Put another way: Should someone's ethnicity be irrelevant to whether they get hired for a given job? Yes. Should it be completely irrelevant to that person? No; there lies alienation. Can I compartmentalize my life such that I can basically forget about my ethnicity when I'm at work but have it remain an important part of other areas of my life? Basically, yeah.

The aftermath of feminism has shown us that if you replace "ethnicity" with "gender" in the above three sentences, the answers go from Yes-No-Yes to Yes-No-Definitely Not. The question, then, is whether disability is more like gender or more like ethnicity. The answer might be different for different kinds of disability, and there almost certainly are contexts in which disability should be visible-but-irrelevant, but, like gender, I'd prefer to err on the side of keeping it relevant, and not just because it's awfully hard to turn back the clock on that kind of thing.

Having said all of this, I'm not sure if I find anything especially wrong with the Japanese system; I certainly like it far better than America's anti-discrimination law model. I did forget to take my libertarianism pills this morning, though; check back with me tomorrow.

UPDATE: A correspondent asks, basically, "Assume that we do make disability irrelevant at work and then this sense of irrelevance spreads: what's the worst that could happen?" I'm not sure that the Japanese system tries to make disability irrelevant or even seem to be so (which might be one of the reasons I want to like it?), but to answer the question: career women who abandon femininity lock, stock, and barrell become alienated from their bodies and themselves—I tend to think that sexual promiscuity is a woman's attempt to resolve this alienation in the same way that Fight Club is a man's, but that's another post—and I think the same kind of alienation and disembodiment would start afflicting the handicapped if society tried to pretend that disabilities don't/shouldn't ever really matter.