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Today, let's talk about the impact of algorithms for social benefits. In France, an unemployment advisor has been fired because he was helping unemployed people bypass the algorithm to get the benefits they had the right to. Source : https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/160720/le-conseiller-pole-emploi-qui-aidait-les-allocataires-vient-d-etre-licencie.
Here is how it goes. The French social benefits system is very complex, as the result of decades of accumulated legislation combined with the need to account for the situations of workers in all sectors. A Social Security agency, Pôle Emploi (PE) manages unemployment benefits.
PE advisors help unemployed people file for benefits. The filing process asks a lot information about the unemployed people's situation : where did they work before, how much did they earn, under which type of contract, etc. Depending on this information, they access benefits.
The unemployment benefits they can access are very numerous and diverse. The base consists in a monthly stipend related to the salary they previously earned, but there are a lot of sector-specific recurring or one-time benefits.
That's why correctly collecting and classifying the unemployed person's information is very important in the first place. And PE advisors are here for this reason, among other things. But of course, the final decision-maker for who gets what benefit is the Algorithm.
The Algorithm is a legal expert system operated centrally by PE. The programmers of the algorithm are not PE advisors in contact with unemployed but report to the central direction, and their code is supposedly reviewed by legal experts who check that it complies with the law.
And this is where we get to this fired PE advisor. Yann Gaudin took his job at heart and decided to systematically check the legislative texts to know which benefits the people he was advising had the right to. And he actively told them to ask for it.
Because he was going back to the legislative source, Yann was right. But he constantly had to fight with the Algorithm. Indeed, the Algorithm was sometimes denying people from their rightful benefits, or hiding information that could have helped the people to get them.
Because he was the only one to fight the Algorithm, he was overwhelmed by hundreds of requests from unemployed people all across France, all of them asking him for advice about how to game the computer system and get the benefits they were entitled to.
Soon, PE management noticed that Yann's productivity on the tasks he was officially assigned to was declining. And this is where this story goes bad. Indeed, in a ideal world, management should have asked Yann about all the flaws in the Algorithm.
PE management should have promoted Yann to the bureau responsible for coding and reviewing the Algorithm. The Algorithm should have been fixed and the unemployed should have automatically had access to their benefits. Then, the code of the algorithm could have been open-sourced.
Later, many other tech-savvy PE advisors could have looked at the code and found many other flaws. Those PE advisors could have filed pull requests to fix them. The system could have gotten better and better, and the unemployed could have felt that their rights were respected.
But this is not what happened. PE management decided to fire Yann. Nobody knows whether the Algorithm has been fixed. Unemployed people still struggle to get the benefits they are entitled to. They fear the Algorithm and its mysterious ways.
This story is important because it features all the protagonists of society in the digital age. The mighty Algorithm. The people that fear it. The hero that wages the good fight. The bitter ending. But is it what we want?
Is it right that obscure computer systems control the access to rights and provisions that were democratically debated and enacted into laws? Nobody is suggesting that we come back to computing everything by hand (although it would create jobs and increase the GDP?).
But I think we can demystify the Algorithm. This is the social aspect of https://catala-lang.org/ . Because every tech has a social aspect, that complements its raw usefulness.
Because we're always standing on the shoulder of giants, thanks to all the French people waging this good fight, including from inside the government : @maukoquiroga, @maeool, @1h0ma5, @matti_sg, @soizicpenicaud and many others :)
