When some people decide that others should be helped at a third party's expense, the third party who pays is the one nobody considers.
William Graham Sumner put it in an 1883 lecture: when A and B decide what C shall do for D, C is the forgotten man, the ordinary taxpayer who is never consulted and whose loss is invisible. Franklin Roosevelt borrowed the phrase in 1932 for the opposite figure, the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid, so both sides have claimed it.
In practice
- A council votes a subsidy for a stadium, the club and the fans celebrate, and the residents whose taxes pay for it are not in the room.
- Two colleagues agree between themselves that a third will cover the extra shift.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is visibility: beneficiaries are concentrated and identifiable, while payers are dispersed. Another is political: those who propose a transfer and those who receive it are present when it is decided, and the payer is not.
- In its favour
- Anticipates the public choice analysis of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and names a real asymmetry in how policy debates are framed.
- Against it
- Critics note that the forgotten man can be anyone depending on the framing, as Roosevelt's reuse shows, and that taxpayers also benefit from many transfers. It identifies a cost without weighing it against the benefit.
- Standing
- Compare concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, and Bastiat's broken window.
- Subject
- Economics & Incentives
- Essay
- The theories behind every argument about money