This speaks to a larger problem: The world simply doesn't need many of the people born into it. Parents in the US have children for recreational purposes - child birth rates do not fluctuate with the demand for labor. These kids grow up, and many of them wind up sleeping on the streets of their chosen city or more commonly just barely living paycheck-to-paycheck, because there is no societal need for them. This bears itself out in statistics: 25% of households have a net worth of zero or less (negative net worth). 22% of children in the US live in homes below the poverty line.
In our world, the needs of many can be met by the work of a few. Only those few will prosper, while the rest languish. The harsh reality is that prospective parents that don't have anything to pass onto their children need to take a hard look at whether they should be having children, given that going forward there may very well be no way for those children to earn a living.
You need a great number of many to create a pool large enough to get those precious few that can advance humanity enough to do all of that providing by the few.
Humanity could be two people living in a grass hut finding just enough berries to eat each day, but it wouldn't be much fun.
FYI whomever is downvoting this - you can downvote it all you want. It doesn't make it any less true. I'll take the hit on my karma points on the off chance it makes someone think, even for a second, about not perpetrating the selfish act of cruelty that is bringing a child into an impoverished existence.
Coincidentally, many of the twenty and thirty somethings in Japan who didn't manage to score a stable, well paying corporate job (due to the economic downturns of the 90s and 2008-current period) -- which is at times said to be upwards of 30% of the male population in said age group [1] -- have been expressing their despair at their financial situation and grim economic outlook for their country and collapsing social security systems and have exclaimed, "Why would I want to have my hypothetical child suffer an even more grim fate than I have?"
A tragic mixture of having perspective, intelligence, and (relative) poverty.
[1] I say "male", because even in this day and age, female unemployment is much more socially acceptable than its male counterpart.
The U.S. has the same problem. Now that people have lost faith in the "middle class society" and we realize that 99% of us are poors at the mercy of bosses and health insurance, the IQ 120+ set is deferring childcare until they "make it", the odds of which are very low and most people won't because even at 140+ most people get screwed. So smart people are self-selecting out of the gene pool, not with that intention but by deferral. It's a nasty boiled-frog problem. One day we will wake up and the world will be terminally stupid.
Now that the individual's economic future is so uncertain, and it's that way for everyone, people who don't think about the future are breeding at a much faster rate than people who do, and it's terrifying.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why healthcare (which has long-term effects on peoples' intelligence levels, since a lot of that's not genetic) isn't a no-brainer, but also education. Free higher education is the absolute best eugenic program ever devised-- if your kids are smart, society will invest limitless resources in making them succeed-- because it hurts absolutely no one; it's pure carrot. Instead of getting soaked on tuition, parents whose kids get into top schools should get paid.
also education. Free higher education is the absolute best eugenic program ever devised-- if your kids are smart, society will invest limitless resources in making them succeed-- because it hurts absolutely no one; it's pure carrot. Instead of getting soaked on tuition, parents whose kids get into top schools should get paid.
The only countries whose education systems I'm familiar with are the US, Japan, and England. In Japan, public universities are of higher quality than their private counterparts, and their tuition is much cheaper. You do get the effect of smart kids studying their butts off to get into a public (national) university like Tokyo U. or Kyoto U. because they can't afford a private college tuition (though annual rates are in the range of $10-15k, much more reasonable than the US). Iirc England is somewhat similar, with reasonable rates for the best universities (Oxbridge, for instance)
The question is how we want to shape our societies and reality. Is it acceptable to have few lucky ones with huge incomes that are far beyond the necassary amount for living a fullfilled live and have the rest die on the streets?
Or would it be more beneficial for the society at large if all have the possibility to live free from existential dangers such as homelessness, disease and hunger.
Robots, computers and automatisation are great tools. At the moment the profit that these tools generate is not shared among all people. It's time to socialise the profits that are gained through automatisation in order to be able to live in peaceful societies.
If you discard huge parts of the population as worthless you'll have to invest even more in your security. You will have slums, riots, terrorism and violence and walled gardens.
If you discard huge parts of the population as worthless you'll have to invest even more in your security. You will have slums, riots, terrorism and violence and walled gardens.
OP is offering a possible partial solution to exactly the problem you present here. With fewer children born into poverty, some degree of abatement is likely. I'm not sure why you dismiss the notion out of hand, refuse to engage the actual idea, and then immediately mischaracterize the original position to be some absurd straw-man in which the OP is adjudicating the "worthless[ness]" of various people.
It's almost as if people on the internet don't know how to properly argue the actual ideas presented, and instead prefer to just make shit up.
How is he being barbaric by proposing that prospective parents should reconsider having children if they don't think their children will be able to have a happy life?
I've saw the post in the context of homelessness that is discussed in the article. I also don't share his woldview maybe I understood it in a wrong way but "The world simply doesn't need many of the people born into it." came across as justification for letting these people living miserable lives and deny them basic rights, like shelter and health care.
The problem with such thinking is that it's often not up to us to decide if we are needed in this world or not. And it is also more often than not up to us if we have the energy and power to earn a wage that allows us sustaining our existence.
My impression is that there is a general consensus that every human beeing has some basic rights (U.N. Declaration of Human Rights) and that we as a society should work to provide these rights for everyone even if we have to sacrify some personal profit for it. Because it can also happen to us.
Op's post came across as If he does not share this views. I'd say if you deny basic human rights I can call you barbaric.
There is a difference between saying it's not a good idea to get children if you are in a bad economic situation or saying that it's correct that these children suffer homelessness because their parents made a bad decision or are somehow not fit enough to procreate. If you start to talk about fitness (here indirectly measured as ability to earn money) as an indication who should procreate you have a form of social darwinism. And there are a lot of problems with such a thinking.
For the record, I was not justifying the miserable lives of many people. To the extent that society has the will and the means to provide basic "rights" as you describe, I have no objection to participating in that. But society's means and will to provide these things also seem to be running very thin. That leads to miserable lives for children that did not ask to be here in the first place.
Take a peek at the meaning of "the Plague", something which happened in Europe way long ago. Those people were much worse than any of us and any homeless you can think of. They are quite probably ancestors of yours if you are a "standard" American.
"Parents in the US have children for recreational purposes"
Really?!? I don't know a single parent who would list or even hint that they needed "recreation" when deciding to have a child. Let's assume you were half-joking, I still don't see having kids as something anyone takes lightly no matter what country you are born in.
"child birth rates do not fluctuate with the demand for labor"
Another horrible reason to have kids. I hope this isn't your metric for deciding upon your prior statement about recreation. Just because the US doesn't need the labor, does not mean parents are having kids "recreational". Kids are not a tool of society that should be effected by labor output.
Also the numbers on net worth most likely take into account home values that have recently fallen off a cliff. While it's still accurate to say that most people have a zero or negative net worth you can't assume the value of the home/amount owed on the mortgage will always be static.
When I say "recreational" I mean that there is no need for parents to have children, other than the fact that they are biologically motivated to. We have more people than resources in this world. That is a problem, and the only way to fix it is to encourage people to be realistic about the potential for their children to have happy, productive lives in a society that almost certainly has no use for them.
Overpopulation is a myth. Actually in the first world underpopulation is greater risk, most European countries have a lower fertility rate than the 2.1 children replacement rate. Even at a global level the world population will reach a plateau somewhere around the middle of the century.
You are probably right that impoverished parents are going to have a hard time raising children, but you are also advocating a form of social Darwinism.
I agree that fewer people should procreate but disagree with measuring the necessity of a person by net worth. The vast majority of wealth being accumulated by a few persons surely skews the demand for labor as we have many Fords but not many laborers paid enough to buy Ford's cars.
I said I think fewer children would be good, I just don't know which group of people should stop having children. I guess all of them should tone it down.
People like me who have no desire to have them perhaps? I think that's the best place to start. Also more people will probably choose not to have kids when there is more social acceptance of the choice and we are honest with ourselves about the realities of bringing more human life into this world. I like kids and want every measure of support we can provide to people who have chosen to have them - we just need to be clear on the realities and I think much of the rest will take care of itself.
It is not a given that "the rest" need to languish. If survival was not based on winning the metaphoric lottery, the rest could engage in creative work and experimentation, leading to a renaissance in entrepreneurship and the arts. Everyone could have more luxury time; perhaps eventually 15 hours a week of paid work will be sufficient.
To instead overwork those who are employed and leave the rest to language is a conscious decision.
Places with good weather have huge visible homeless populations. (I have traveled all over the United States, and have been to all fifty states. AFTER EDIT: I have been in, and have lived in, gritty "skid row" neighborhoods of large United States cities, and have lived in Los Angeles.) Places with lousy weather, like the place where I grew up and now live, certainly have people who are "homeless" in the sense of not having a secure legal right to occupy a particular place at their own discretion, but most people with that lack of legal right to choose their living circumstances are indoors during cold winter nights. There is much provision of emergency shelter in the United States, by both governmental organizations and private charities. There are also both federal and state programs for providing free or heavily subsidized leaseholds for housing to poor families, and private charities that build single-family homes for poor families. People are more visibly out on the street in the United States mostly on a regional or seasonal basis.
Since quite a few of the comments here mention Europe, my question (as someone who has never been to any part of Europe) is where do people live in Europe if they have no personal funds to buy or rent housing? Do they live in housing operated by some unit of government, or where?
All of the above said, yes, I am not sure that United States social policy is a model for anywhere, and perhaps hackers working on social policy here would be helpful. There are already enough empty housing units in the United States to house everyone who needs a house. The tough policy issues are in allocating people to houses (or houses to people) and looking out for other aspects of everyone's welfare.
Having moved from the U.S. to northern Germany, I have to say: the difference is shocking. Here, mentally unstable homeless people are not a daily sight on the city streets. In fact, I have seen only one San Francisco-style lunatic: and he was, indeed, raving in English. Saying that "United States social policy is [not] a model for anywhere" must be an understatement. I would ask: what social policy? Any aid from the government ("welfare") is heavily stigmatized, except perhaps for retirees. From homelessness to health care to public transportation to to education to racial tension to gun violence, the U.S. appears a mockery of itself.
Regarding the homelessness situation in California, I learned in school that it had something to do with Governor Ronald Reagan dismantling the state's mental health system.
Have you seen skid row in Los Angeles? I can't imagine that such a scene exists anywhere in western Europe.
I'd really love to learn about what is actually done in Europe. Where is a "mentally unstable" person to be found in Germany? If a "San Francisco-style lunatic" (like the one you saw in public in Germany) is encountered out in public in Germany, where is he put?
P.S. I have adequate reading knowledge of German to be able to read German-language links about what is done for such people in Germany, if anyone here has any such links to share.
England: If you're a danger to yourself or to other people there are various powers to detain you under section of the Mental Health Act.
If you're in public a police officer will use a section 136 - that's to take you to a place of safety and have you assessed by doctors.
If you're in a hospital nurses and doctors have powers to detain you for short times for you to be assessed.
If you're in your home your "nearest relative" (that person is defined in law) can ask the community mental health to consider assessing you. They must consider your request, but they don't have to do an assessment.
Or you can ask for an assessment. Or you could ask for a visit from your crisis[1] team, and they'll suggest an assessment.
In general it is much better to be an informal patient (someone who goes into hospital voluntarily) rather than someone detained under section.
In theory there should be a bunch of checks and measures. But, well, it's an imperfect world.
If you are ever detained you should ask for the Code of Practice (they have to have a copy available for patients. They have to help you read it if you're having trouble reading) and for an advocate. (They must make advocacy available for you.) make a record of everything that is said to you.
This is a state-sponsored program that provides housing and work for people with disabilities (I believe this includes or perhaps even mostly refers to mild mental disabilities, but I'm not sure). They operate a restaurant, a hotel, a bicycle workshop, landscaping service, mail delivery, and a bunch of other things.
Mission statement (translated): "Our central task is to create opportunities so that people with disabilities can develop personally and professionally. We ensure this through individually tailored offers in the areas of employment, housing and food. For people - by people!"
>I'd really love to learn about what is actually done in Europe. Where is a "mentally unstable" person to be found in Germany? If a "San Francisco-style lunatic" (like the one you saw in public in Germany) is encountered out in public in Germany, where is he put?
Some notes about the Finnish system:
There are plenty of psychiatric hospitals where most mentally ill people are (those who are not cared by their parents or relatives). There are some alcoholics/"crazy people" on the streets, but most of them have housing that they pay for themselves (through social security) or they live in special apartments for homeless people.
The whole country has about 1000 homeless people (for 5 million citizens). They could pay for their rent since they're entitled to "toimeentulotuki", a sum of about 700-1000 euros per month, but they probably spend it on alcohol or are unable to fill in the papers correctly (not an expert on homeless people here).
There's no official minimum wage, but "general employement contracts" make the minimum wage about 7-10€ depending on the job. There's some regulation on rents too.
I'd guess that easy access to health care plays a big role. Regarding the raving lunatic: presumably it's not a matter of "where to put" him, but that, with access to care, fewer people end up in that situation.
In that particular case, everyone just kind of steered clear of the guy and let him go about his (crazy) business. Bystanders appeared shocked and fearful of his behavior, which in San Francisco would have been completely mundane.
It seems to me that the difference is not so much 'where those people are put' but rather that there are support mechanisms that help the majority of at-risk people before they deteriorate to the level of homelessness or mental disability that you commonly see in US city streets.
EDIT: While there are obviously outlier cases where treatment is difficult, the majority of mental illness and homelessness is circumstantial and preventable.
There is no Europe. I can only speak for my country, the Netherlands, and there is no such thing as people not having the personal funds to buy or rent housing. That's why we have minimum wages, social security, rent subsidies and regulated rent.
The homeless here are people mostly people with mental health issues that reject or don't respond to treatment.
It's by far not a perfect utopian system, but to have people being homeless just because they can't afford it would be considered an unacceptable failure of a civilized society. Decent housing, like healthcare, is considered a human right, not something people have to be able to "afford".
I originally come from Spain, where the weather is nicer than in the Netherlands, and there certainly are homeless people living and sleeping in the streets, or in cold occasions during winter, they can also be seen under the roof provided by an atm / bank branch.
However, having been in SFO multiple times, the number of poor/homeless people with no resources is much more evident there. My take is that generally the unemployment, healtchare, etc. benefits offered in most European countries do play a significant role in reducing the number of cases.
From what I understand, SFO has a bit of an epidemic because of their policies. The city is extremely supporting of the homeless compared to other cities in the USA, so the nation's homeless tend to migrate to SFO.
Also, weather in California is pretty nice year-round. I know I'd prefer California to Arizona or Michigan if I was homeless.
When I was in Gibraltar (a tiny tip of land at the south end of Spain under part British rule) there were no homeless people to be seen, despite some of the nicest weather in Europe.
The lack of universal health care probably exacerbates the homelessness situation in the U.S.
With that said, what you see in San Francisco is largely a product of the combination of homeless friendly policies and tolerable weather. Many of the 'homeless' you see during the day don't actually sleep on the street (although a decent number do) and actually reside in SRO's, subsidized housing, and shelters (One complaint I have heard about SF, you can only afford to live here if you are really rich, or if you are really poor).
Fact is the homeless situation may be a bit ugly, but it exists everywhere, it just may not be as visible. At least in SF, it's harder to ignore.
European nations would not be able to afford universal healthcare and all the welfare if they had to pay for their security. US bases in Europe are great financial aid.
I never hear discussions about Iran or Russia being a possible threat in Europe. I do in the US. Which is funny because it really is much bigger problem for Europeans to have guys like Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at their door steps. Never happens. The US bases and military spending is taken for granted. They prefer to talk about universal healthcare and help for the poor instead. As security is non-issue with the US soldiers deployed to this continent.
The thing that really gets on my nerves is that some politicians even want the US bases to be moved out from Europe. They simply don't understand the world in which they are living. Talking distances Syria is closer to Greece than Greece to Germany. Nobody thinks about it that way though.
The US pays the military bills for the whole of Europe and this amounts to money that can and is spent on social services.
> European nations would not be able to afford universal healthcare and all the welfare if they had to pay for their security.
European nations that provide universal healthcare spend less (as a share of GDP and per capita) on healthcare than the US does. So, while they may get a "security subsidy" from the US, it doesn't make sense to say they wouldn't be able to afford universal healthcare without it, since the universal healthcare they have is less expensive, as a share of GDP, than the non-universal healthcare the US pays for while providing the security subsidy.
Bullshit. Finland doesn't have US bases on it's territory and all it's security is paid by the country itself. Plus, it always is under direct threat from Russia. Despite of that (or maybe because of that?) it does have a decent universal healthcare system.
Besides, having US base on your territory is not a guaranty of security - South Vietnam had a lot of them and it didn't help them.
Yeah, that's why socialism is exported by Russia. You see: normally people would vote for security/military spending and not social care. But that's exactly what Russians, i.e. KGB do. They export socialism to the elites of countries they want to weaken.
If you study Russian expansionism since its inception hundreds of years ago, their strategy has always been the same. Russia strategy for centuries has been always the same: start weakening countries you want to invade decades before military action by the means of exporting intellectual fashions that will destroy country's defense system. They use spies and agents heavily for that. Polish kings used to be Russian agents way before Russia invaded Poland. Isn't that genius? Sponsor some crazy parties that want to cut military spending or some other that will introduce social chaos and not talk about real issues (i.e. "rights" of different groups of people, introduce heavy political correctness to avoid important topics), all the stuff to rotten country from inside first. In XX/XXI century this means helping create in targeted country via KGB socialistic elites, socialistic media, education creating weak confused people. So they will never vote for parties advocating strong military and patriotism.
So, this much better for Russia, this much worse for Finland. First thing KGB does is to make sure you (as a country) loose your common sense. Military spending when neighboring Russia? What for, right? No, we'll spend it all on help for the poor. Well, what I can say: Good Luck!
Man, you really are confused! If a country is serious about national defence then it really needs universal health care, because it needs lots of healthy soldiers. Soviet Russia did a lot to make sure there was at least basic medical care available to everyone for exactly this reason - they needed millions of soldiers!
Finland is doing the right thing when it takes care for it's citizens.
Also, news flash for you: socialism in Russia ended some 20 years ago. Now they have a pretty ruthless form of capitalism in there.
When I read what you have to say about Poland I start to think you are from some kind of alternative universe. It's just bizarre.
I'd guess the Polish rant is based on that Soviet really did support the anti-nuclear weapon movement, and so on.
Seing conspiracy theories like those, I am strengthened in the belief that the US extreme left and right are equally crazy. In Europe we mostly see the Chomsky brigade, some variation would make it less irritating.
That rant also ignores the fact that after the 1930s (and particularly after the Spanish Civil War) it was clear that the Soviets regarded any "socialists" who weren't under their direct control as more of a threat than their apparent enemies. Most socialists in Western Europe (e.g. the UK Labour Party) were more afraid of the Soviets than those on the political right.
In e.g. Sweden, the communists stooped being Stalinists when Moscow told them that Stalin was bad... They did start to critizise the Eastern block dictators early... about 1990!
(There were also anarchists etc, but in general the non-communist extreme left-wingers were few before ~1968, when they got more numerous and varied).
Also, I remember reading surprise after 1989 on how much control Soviet had over the West European communist parties. E.g. that the Italian communist party had such an accomodating attitude by order (Soviet wanted to get a de facto split in Western/Eastern Europe.)
I don't know about anywhere else but in the UK there was a very large "socialist" party in Labour and tiny "communist" parties that never really had much power.
I guess it depends what you mean by "socialist" - Labour created the NHS and nationalised some of the key heavy industries of the time (coal, steel, electricity):
Turns out that the NHS was a good idea and the nationalising of industries was a bad idea!
Of course, when Labour re-invented itself in the 1990s as "New Labour" they pretty much became "Conservative-Lite" - I'm still not sure what values they actually have.
For once, the Swedish politics is more interesting! Well, at least if you enjoy sick humor.
The Swedish (ex-)communists became feminists and anti-racists (they argue for something called "structural racism" that native Swedes are guilty of to immigrants -- never with references to non-extremist sources).
In short, just the normal marxism, but another group than "workers" to create conflicts around.
This wouldn't be more than a detail, but the left wing extremists has a big, big representation in the journalist profession since the early 70s. You find lots of left wing academics saying weird stuff in the media, without being identified as e.g. extremist ex-mental patients (Hübinette) or anarchists which wrote admiringly about Ghadaffi (Gardell), etc.
so, watching a lot of KGB-TV, ops sorry RussiaTV lately? I know plenty of Americans watch only this for news.
Don't tell me it's not genius, please. Russia banned recently all outside world financed NWOs from their country, but they air their propaganda in the US day and night. You don't see that? First divide the country. Find original dividing factor. Whatever it is as long as ti exists. I.e. Tea Party in the US which in fact has been a genuine effort to make the Republic better. Then invest millions, hundreds of millions in them. In their NWOs, show them on your TV, support their papers, bloggers, activists. See how much trouble you're creating in the country without even firing a single bullet? They can and do pull it off all the time.
You think Finland is any different? The whole of Russia belongs to KGB and is governed by it. And don't take my word for this, these are almost exact words of the US Ambassador in Moscow that leaked via wikileaks.
Western Europeans are somehow always so naive in the face of threat. Whether it was Hitler or Stalin, they voted, they believed in it. Stop being so blatantly naive, ok?
EU countries spend roughly half the amount on defence that the US does. Given that the US spends an insane amount on its military that seems plenty enough to me.
Possibly also worth mentioning the tens of billions of dollars (and many hundreds of lives) that countries like the UK have spent in fighting mainly US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The USA spends around 18% of its GDP on healthcare already, which larger than any other big country, the Netherlands is next on 12%.
Given the military spend is 4.7% of US GDP it is patently untrue that military spending means that more couldn't be spent on healthcare. You could have a healthcare system that is 50% better than any other Western country, for everyone, just by reallocating the money already spent on healthcare.
Yes, money != outcomes, but it works roughly. Especially as there is so much low hanging fruit in the USA due to the shocking state of healthcare provision for the poor.
> European nations would not be able to afford universal healthcare and all the welfare if they had to pay for their security. US bases in Europe are great financial aid.
Bullshit. Not only are there examples of military independent countries (ever heard of France?) with better healthcare systems, but your whole theory about military expenses being the root cause for USA's less than ideal healthcare system is far too simplistic.
Ask yourself: If X invaded France, would the US spend more than France's military budget defending France? Would US-designed hardware and military R&D products be used? Would the US intelligence network be used to maintain situational awareness?
While Americans certainly tend to overstate the case, I've seen a lot of very proud Europeans claiming the US has had no stake in defending them, after half a century of Cold War left the US the sole standing military hegemon, maintaining an extraordinarily expensive reserve capacity to wage warfare on behalf of the West when it's not directly against their interests.
Universal healthcare is preferable because it's cheaper. The rest of the European-model social welfare state would be possible in the US if we didn't blow so much more than putatively 'military independent' allies on our military, and if we hadn't developed the popular culture we needed to justify that spending in opposition to "Communism". Guess what? We're kind of broke. Europe is going to need to buck up and raise its military spending as a proportion of GDP if it wants to remain in its comfortable non-tenuous position for the rest of the 21st century.
> I've seen a lot of very proud Europeans claiming the US has had no stake in defending them
And I see a lot of proud Americans who state that they save the world out of pure altruism.
I have breaking news for you: the "extraordinarily expensive reserve capacity to wage warfare" is here because it serves USA's interests, and no one else. I highly doubt that the military policies of your government are conceived with the interests of us Europeans in mind (although there is overlap between ours and yours). I'm pretty sure that, except for a few mistakes, it has been immensely economically profitable for the USA overall, allowing you to influence or overthrow governments, ensure a hand on strategic resources as well as allow you to export your goods and culture pretty much everywhere through strategic alliances (I'm thinking especially about Japan and South Korea). That's the reason why there are USA bases in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and everywhere else.
By the way, as a whole Europe is the 2nd military spender, with France and UK matching Russia's spendings, and when added together also matching China's spendings (despite having less than 200 times the population).
>European nations would not be able to afford universal healthcare and all the welfare if they had to pay for their security. US bases in Europe are great financial aid.
This is the kind of statement that only an American, and a very naive and ignorant of world matters at that, would ever make. US bases in Europe are no security at all.
They are a pest, relics of the cold war and unwelcome by the people of Western Europe. The US took advantage of the battered post-WWII European states and the (then real) threat of USSR, to promote NATO and establish army bases in Europe.
>I never hear discussions about Iran or Russia being a possible threat in Europe.
That's because a lot of Europeans actually follow world news and foreign policy and are not spoon fed the latest "enemies" by their media. Oh, and they travel to those "enemy" places and have been dealing with them, culturally, diplomatically and otherwise, for a millennium of so, instead of just hearing about them whenever their media gets its war mood on.
People in America can think that Iran or Russia are "a possible treat" because they rarely follow what's happening outside their hometown, and because all those ludicrous hollywood movies (I've seen tiny nations in Eastern Europe that their military couldn't hurt a fly even if they tried being portrayed as epicenters of plans to attack the US).
Discussing Iran as a (non terrorist) threat to Europe or the US is the kind of thing that only people needing advice from their Media to not conflate Chechnya and the Czech republic would consider.
>The thing that really gets on my nerves is that some politicians even want the US bases to be moved out from Europe. They simply don't understand the world in which they are living.
Your argumentation is pathetic and typical of many Europeans. Americans are stupid. That's the beginning, middle and end of your idea about the country and your only argument in the discussion.
You are the one who should learn more about Iran or Russia. You are the one naive like a child who thinks everybody's nice, while they are playing you. It was the same with Hitler (who some of you still claim was a great leader). It was the same with Stalin (who many of you still love in Europe). It's the same with Iran now. Seeing world in white & black only isn't good, but going deep into color spectrum so much that you don't see obvious is not too smart neither. Especially given your history of ignorance in the face of threats.
EDIT: "argument" instead of "voice" from here: "country and your only argument"
>Your argumentation is pathetic and typical of many Europeans. Americans are stupid. That's the beginning, middle and end of your idea about the country and your only argument in the discussion.
No. In fact it never shows up in any part of my argumentation that "Americans are stupid".
What I wrote is that Americans are just ignorant. I follow US discussions in tons of places, US media, and have been all over the US. You could not find a people more ignorant of world affairs if you try. The little they know is what they are being spoon fed by tightly controlled media, all "patriotic" and all collaborating on the official country line.
>You are the one who should learn more about Iran or Russia. You are the one naive like a child who thinks everybody's nice, while they are playing you.
Actually, it's us that have direct contact and centuries (actually millennia in some cases) of political experience dealing with Russia and Iran, including at the very direct level, and for which world news and world history are as important as our country's news and history. It's also us that we travel frequently outside our own country (something most of Americans do not do. Heck, only 30% even have passports) and that we speak at least 2 languages (e.g english is my second -- and I have more). Heck, Americans do not even watch foreign movies, much less read foreign books (with the exception of a few classics, that again are only read by a tiny minority).
And you, who, in a house in rural Idaho, some trailer in Georgia or some loft in NY etc, by which I mean, half a world away from both Russia and Iran and in a totally provincial environment, form bizarro ideas on them and their intentions, based on what the absolutely crap your media coverage tells you, mostly based (often copied verbatim) on US government targeting.
>It was the same with Hitler (who some of you still claim was a great leader). It was the same with Stalin (who many of you still love in Europe).
Which is beside the point anyway. The point being the accurate assessment of foreign countries role, intents and power in the global scene.
People who "still claim Hitler was a great leader", did not do it because they miscalculated some world player's strength. They do it because they agree ideologically with him, whoever perverse that might be. That said, those are an irrelevant minority in Europe, on par with those who support things like the KKK in the US (oh, and there are Hitler supporters in the US too).
To continue this off-track theme, lots of people in the US approved of Bush and his policies, they voted Nixon into office, they approved slavery, racism and segregation, approved McCarthyism, approved Truman dropping nuclear bombs on civilians, etc etc. Oh, and this Hitler guy? He had much support in the US too, before the US entered into WWII. Here's a quick insight: https://www.google.com/search?q=hilter+support+in+the+US&...
Never heard that there are for example over 50,000 US soldiers in Germany operating military equipment worth billions of USD courtesy of the US tax-payer?
So, any attack on the German soil must result in dead American soldiers. Now, who sane would risk doing so?
Yeah, very convenient preaching universal healthcare and welfare for the poor when somebody else pays your security bill while you are sitting between Arab Spring and Russian Autocracy.
I don't know what the situation is in Europe but Japan pays a substantial sum to America every year and even had to fund the move of some bases to Guam [1]. Also, American's may run the risk of dying defending a foreign country but in the mean time Japanese are living the risk of rape and murder [2] although the stats are probably on an even keel with the normal murder and rape rate of Japan.
Russia has other reasons not to attack Germany - it makes money by exporting oil and natural gas. Germany is a prime consumer.
What does Arab Spring have to do with it? It is dangerous mostly to some of African dictators and European armed forces in fact supported insurgents in Libya...
Besides, you never addressed my earlier argument that healthy population is vital for national defence.
Russia doesn't use too much logic, their history is all about power not wealth.
Arab Spring beneficiaries are Muslim extremists like Muslim Brotherhood. You know, usual pattern, women are treated like slaves, kids at school study Koran and Koran only, etc. They hate, they loathe, Europe as much as the USA. No, it turns out, they don't like your idea of freedom. They want you to be a Muslim or die. As simple as that.
So, in your comments above you claim that Russia has masterminded a plan to divide and conquer USA using clever propaganda tactics. Here you say Russia doesn't use logic.
So which way do you think it is? Russia is governed by highly intelligent leaders or stupid brutes?
Good point. Highly intelligent brutes who are not interested in their country development. Which probably sounds crazy in civilized ears but is akin to saying that in feudal times aristocracy wasn't interested in living conditions of lower classes.
You see, they are still feudal, you need to account for that when analyzing the country.
So, as feudal masters in the past, the KGB/mafia that currently runs Russia understands politics very well. They are extremely skilled at political strategy and know and understand how to gain advantage. They will read Dostoyevsky and listen to Bach. At the same time they don't really care or/and understand economy as this is not really needed for them as long as they sit on the vast natural resources reserves. Something like Saudis.
heh, "courtesy of the US taxpayer". What you mean is "put there by the US taxpayer". Germany didn't ask for the US to put military bases everywhere, that just grew out of the victory conditions enforced on it from the loss of the war. It very much serves US interests to have those bases in Germany - the idea that it's all a unicorns-and-rainbows gift from the US is nonsense.
The US with no projected power in Europe? Perhaps go write to your congressperson on that one and see how they respond.
>Never heard that there are for example over 50,000 US soldiers in Germany operating military equipment worth billions of USD courtesy of the US tax-payer?
The US, acting as a post-colonial superpower, took advantage of the collapsed post-WWII Germany, to setup a protectorate in the heart of Europe. The country was divided in two, and the Eastern side was given to USSR to play with, whereas the west was the US/NATO frontier to eastern Europe.
The "US bases in Germany" are a relic of this past. And they were meant to establish a stronghold on Europe, and keep the USSR at check. Now they also serve as operations base for missions to further pursue US interests (i.e exploit local people) in Middle East and Africa.
Despite what BS you have been fed, no Iran, no Iraq, no Syria and nobody bloody else, including Putin's Russia, would ever attempt to
To understand how inane your beliefs are to actually foreign affairs savvy Europeans, non fed with Fox News and Glen Beck and non provincial, it would be like South Dakota attacking Texas. Nay, it would be like Fargo attacking Texas.
> You really the NHS costs less per-capita in tax than US healthcare?
I think you left out a "think" between "really" and "the NHS" there. And, yes, the UK's public expenditures per capita on healthcare are less than the US's. In fact, the UKs public and private expenditures on healthcare combined are, per capita, less than the US's public expenditures (which, in turn, are less than the US's private expenditures). The UK's public expenditures on health care are also less than the US's public expenditures on health care as a share of GDP.
I'm also from the Netherlands and working with homeless people in my spare time.
"The homeless here are people mostly people with mental health issues that reject or don't respond to treatment." Well in most cases it's the other way around. They become mentally ill because of being homeless (and lonely, and drugs all around to 'ease' the pain).
Did you know there are homeless people in the Netherlands that have a job? Divorced, have to pay child alimony so they don't have enough money to pay the rent. There are children that have a home but can't call it home, so they prefer to live in the streets.
And there are a lot of people with a home but without gas and/or electricity because they can't afford it. They aren't homeless but imagine living in a house when it's -7 degrees outside (most of the time they can add like 3 degrees to the outside temperature).
What I'm trying to say is that a lot of the failure of civilized society is hidden.
Not discussing whether it's right or wrong to think this way, but "decent housing" is certainly not remotely considered as a human right. This may be what most people think nowadays, but it's certainly not written anywhere in most constitutions. This is just your interpretation.
Now, not being able to afford housing depends on many factors, it's not just about how much you earn, it's also about the artifical bubbles created on property values by the actors in place...
So some documents do treat housing as a human right: (UN declaration of human rights) Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
- https://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
UN declaration is just a statement of "wishes". Almost no country reflects it in their actual regulations or constitutions. And let's not forget that many dictatorships signed that declaration and respect none of its principles, so this is, unfortunately, worthless.
Constitutions for the most part are not about describing human rights. They are about describing the method of governments - who is elected where and how, what authorities they have and so forth. There's usually some flowery preamble at the start about how awesome we all are in country -foo-, but the role of a constitution is generally to describe the structure of government.
I kind of agree with you but that is not really true. The American constitution clearly makes the case for fundamental rights such as Freedom of Expression, among others.
Sadly, there are always those who fall between the cracks who have neither mental health or drug addictions. All we can ever do is try though, because not everyone asks for help.
> is where do people live in Europe if they have no personal funds to buy or rent housing? Do they live in housing operated by some unit of government, or where?
The English benefit system is complex. Here's an attempt to describe some of it.
We pay a national insurance. Some of our benefits are based on contributions you make. Other benefits are income related (means-tested.)
If you have a mortgage and lose your job you get the interest on the mortgage paid, but not the capital.
If you're renting there's something called the Local Housing Allowance - that's a list of property types (one room; one bed; two bed; etc) and maximum prices for those properties. You get all your rent if you're under the limit, but you have to pay anything over the limit yourself. Actually, it's a lot more complicated than that. You cannot be "over accommodated" (more on this later, with the 'bedroom tax'). You cannot have savings over a certain amount (£16,000?). It has to be a real rental situation; renting off family becomes tricky. There are rules about living with people as if you're married, etc.
Housing benefit is paid by the local council, using money they get from central government. It's a horrifically inefficient system, and has a lot of fraud.
Then there's "social housing". This is provided by companies providing it, or by local councils. Council houses tend to be high quality buildings in not-good areas. Rents are very cheap. There are very long waiting lists. Recently there's something people are calling the bedroom tax - if you're in a house that has extra bedrooms the rent for those rooms is not paid. This has always been the case with private renting. There's a bunch of reasons why this is horrible, and those exceptions should be baked into the new law.
Some people need emergency accommodation. Local authorities should provide bread and breakfast accommodation, or hostel accommodation. There are pretty strict rules about what counts as "homeless". And if you're found to be 'intentionally homeless' it's going to be very hard to get help.
Apologies for the garbled text. It is a complex, large, bit of law with many overlapping bits of legislation.
Thanks, that's the clearest explanation I've seen of our system. And what a mess it is!
I am personally in favour of the bedroom tax, so it'd be good to hear why this is horrible (I'm sure there are edge cases I've not thought of).
Completely agree about housing benefit being a horrifically inefficient system. I was talking to a person who deals with people on housing benefit yesterday, about the number who lie about not cohabiting (so they get higher payments for being 'single'). Not sure any way round that.
You're right, it's just a few edge cases that make the bedroom tax horrible.
The theory is that people are over accommodated, and should move to more appropriate housing. But moving home is expensive, and these people by definition don't have much money.
I haven't seen evidence that moving these people around will make any difference to the housing shortage.
But yes, it's a good idea.
Housing benefits for cohabiting / single people is weird. Ann and Bob live in separate flats and get full benefits each. They move into a flat together, and as a couple they get less than either of them was getting singly. That system is wrong, I think.
In the U.K. you get various benefits if you are unemployed and that includes accommodation normally - though there is a waiting list (and people with children are top of the list) and job seekers allowance.
Health is free (NHS) for everyone it doesn't matter if you have a job are rich/poor, have a job etc.
There are some people who are homeless - though it's not particularly common due to government support.
[However, I don't claim to be an expert on benefits system here, as I've never used them - fortunately]
I think a few things mainly answer your question about Europe:
- More social housing than the US
- Higher minimum wages (so fewer homeless)
- This is just a personal impression but Europeans are less mobile than Americans. Therefore there is more likely to be the family / friends safety net to catch you.
The guy's Scottish, he thinks it's about San Fran specifically, it's really about AMERICA. Maybe San Fran puts it even more in your face. But compared to most any other country even half as rich as America, the lack of social safety net in the U.S. is kind of shocking. People in Europe don't really realize the extent of it.
I'm French living in Jersey. I have been to San Francisco, even though it's blatant when you walk here, everywhere in the US I have that feeling that the poor are really forgotten. And they live in third-world country conditions. In France, the average rich is not as rich, and it's probably a lot harder to become successful and wealthy than here; but the poor are not left behind as much. It feels more like a society where you take a significant chunk from the rich to make sure the poor can get by. Sure there are abuses, high taxes and whatnot, but the old and the poor can afford to go to the dentist, and retire when the time comes.
The way I see it, European countries have a kind of nation-wide health insurance, vs individual insurance here. We have a nation-wide student loan, versus individual student loans. That helps controlling the costs and profits, and helps making sure that everybody who needs care or education can get it.
But whether it is related or not, America is more daring, more exciting, and there are more opportunities when you have the right cards to do something. But if you had a bad hand to start with, then you're royally screwed.
Put simply, it's better to be born poor in Europe than in the US, and better to be born rich in the US than in Europe.
> America is more daring, more exciting, and there are more opportunities when you have the right cards to do something. But if you had a bad hand to start with, then you're royally screwed.
This seems a little contradictory. Being daring and exciting as a country and an economy would be more like how America used to be, where the upside of having people dying in the street was that if you came here and you had drive and talent, you were much more likely to become wealthy and successful. This is in contrast to the way much of Europe functioned at the time, where a more entrenched and institutionalized class system meant that your position in life (by and large) was set at birth.
As it stands now (I believe over the last couple of decades), America performs _worse_ than every comparable developed country but Great Britain when it comes to income mobility[1].
Even a porta potty cleaned infrequently is more sanitary than the conditions in the third world. There won't be a cholera outbreak. Food is available and nobody is going to starve to death.
Heck, a simple clean water fountain in some third world countries can improve the lives of an entire village. Even in the most horrible cities in america there are dozens of sources of free water.
> There won't be a cholera outbreak. Food is available and nobody is going to starve to death.
None of these really reflect how poor communities in the US are. Food insecurity is a real thing that affects a good number of households and individuals. Access to adequate medical care, including vaccinations, is difficult. Health and water conditions can vary greatly and may be unsanitary.
I agree that saying the US is like a third world is overblown, but we aren't exactly a shining beacon of care for all of the people that exist in our society.
There certainly is a very real cholera risk in the poorest communities in the US.
Take, for example, the colonias in southwestern Texas, where ~400k people live in informal housing without access to basic infrastructure or services, and where diseases like cholera and dengue fever have far higher rates of incidence. These aren't all illegal immigrants or anything, either -- the Texas secretary of state reports 64.4% of Texan colonias residents are US citizens[1].
It's easy to assume there's no poverty that deep in this country when, by and large, our standard of living is better than most of the world, but unfortunately there really are places in the US to which the descriptor "third world" is applicable.
"it's probably a lot harder to become successful and wealthy than here"
One thing that is often forgotten is that in Europe it's generally much easier (or less burdening) to become successful in something that doesn't necessarily make a lot of money in the beginning or ever. It can also be a lot easier to feel rich. If you make three times the average income on consulting, you can pretty much take half the year of and still increase your living standard quite a bit if you wanted to.
I tend to think a lot of the social programs that do exist in this city (and there are many – healthy san francisco, housing subsidies, dozens of shelters, and even more food programs) don't really address the root problem that causes such a disparity. For instance, I've a number of friends who work in the tenderloin with some of those same social programs, and they're perspective is that the housing subsidies that bring people to the tenderloin only exacerbate the issues that plague it.
It's not just warm weather that draws people to SF, but a plethora of social programs that are often poorly executed, underfunded, and addressed at superficial issues and not their core causes (education, for example).
I live 4 blocks from Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, and I feel exactly the same way. US-style homeless shelters just seem to concentrate the homeless in a geographic area, without providing them with anything they need (what most of them seem to need is access to mental health services and medications). I've heard multiple formerly incarcerated people say that staying in homeless shelters is worse than prison.
The end result seems to be a sort of outdoor insane asylum, with a bunch of privileged hipsters like me and my friends wandering from our high-end loft conversions to the latest trendy bars and restaurants.
I also feel that in many ways the property development companies are drawn to these dilapidated downtown areas with large homeless populations because it's "edgy" and the developments themselves are high-margin.
The wealth disparity is probably more evident in SF.
For example, Honolulu has a huge homeless population despite the huge tourism industry. The city just pushes homeless towards parts of the island where tourists don't visit and thus aren't aware of the problem.
We're very well aware of the extent of the situation in the US. It's been a long time since Europeans lined up to emigrate to America.
Also, ironically enough, most Northern Europeans would already consider the circumstances of the underprivileged in Scotland unacceptable... The bad parts of Glasgow are considered the most horrible places in Western Europe. And the people there have housing, healthcare and access to education.
I dunno. Feel like that's not the case for a lot of very talented Europeans, many of whom I've met in my multiple trips there and unanimously want to emigrate to the US. They certainly aren't the "give us your tired, your poor" immigrants anymore, but I get the sense there's a real sense of economic stagnation there. I've only been to Europe about 25 times, but you get a sense of it pretty well. But you seem to be European, what do you think?
I'm Scottish and while I've not quite experienced it myself, I'm happy living in Europe where m taxes are spent on health care as opposed to bombs. It's not so much shocking as it is just really sad. :(
True. Not only does the US as a nation spend more on healthcare than almost anyone else, US citizens also spend more on healthcare than citizens of almost any other country. So the govt. and the citizens are paying boat-loads--that's inefficiency.
And, it doesn't help anything that we're one of the most unhealthy nations.
It's almost all the result of the extra administrative overhead from our fragmented insurance market, profits to the for-profit hospitals and insurance companies and the extremely expensive ineffective end-of-life care that is incentivized by that incredibly messed up system.
Yeah but that'd all seem to be from private individuals, which seems to fit with my idea of a US that is more than happy to collectivly suffer, as long as folks don't feel anyone is getting a free ride.
It's a stupidly short sighted game of russian roulette but nowhere near as hilarious as if the Government itself really does pay out more per capitita than anywhere else in the world.
And the rest of the Western world, like it or not, is able to spend less on defense precisely because -- thanks to some unique events in the 20th century -- the US is effectively providing a defense subsidy for all of its allies.
I'm not advocating, just saying. Perhaps European countries would have to spend more if the US did not concern itself with the rest of the world? Food for thought.
The US is in fact providing a defense subsidy to it's allies AND to it's enemies.
EVERYONE gets their weaponry from the US (they bought it back when they were allies, now their enemies), and/or gets weaponry developed with US military R&D.
It's certainly good for the US defense industry. You've got to buy more better weapons cause your enemy has bought more better weapons, and both sides buy em from the US defense industry.
When the US gives another country military aid (or actually most any kind of aid), 100% of the funds 'donated' need to be used buying military goods from US companies. So military aid goes right to US defense companies too. (I think Israel is the one special exception, who for some reason only have to spend 50% of their military aid on US goods, and can spend the other half on Israeli-made goods).
The US spends more on the military than every other country _combined_.
So, yeah, I'm not sure this state of affairs could really be described as the US keeping the planet _safe_ by spending so much on military. But it is true that the US equips the entire rest of the world militarily.
You're mistaking what I mean by subsidy. I'm talking game theory, not short term shuffling of monies.
You are correct in that there are transfers of money and arms, the individual value and long term wisdom of which are always debatable. What I am talking about is a de facto subsidy, based on the fact that many other countries have in effect outsourced much of their security apparatus to the United States because they know that the US would step in for any existential crisis caused by mutual enemies.
Think of it this way. It costs billions to construct a single aircraft carrier. Many seafaring nations currently build smaller navies than they would if the United States were not filling a large portion of this role for them. When buying aircraft, ships, tanks, missiles, etc, an allied country only has to build those assets marginally necessary to create a comfortable excess over and above the security already seen as inevitably provided by the US. That constitutes an indirect subsidy.
> many other countries have in effect outsourced much of their security apparatus to the United States
If any country had defense centered on such silly premise I think it migrated away from this since release of US cables that clearly show that US only cares about US and treats other countries not as venerable allies but as monkeys in their circus.
This may have been true in the Cold War, but that war has long been over. To say that US defense spending now is benefiting anyone in any way now is laughable, except for maybe South Korea and Taiwan. If anything, our meddling has raised security concerns for all our European allies due to the displacement and disruption of life by our actions in the Middle East.
US is not doing any defense charity. It's present in Europe only because US commanders think it's in the best interest of US. Europe spends on its military half of what US does.
I don't believe that Europe would spend significantly more on military. Europeans after carrying two world wars on their soil seem little bit resilient to threats of war and to actual violence. When it comes to Americans it seems that goat fart spontaneously combusting on the other side of the planet constitutes experimental discharge of pyrochemical weapon potentially of mass destruction that ought to be carefully monitored by swiftly dispatched fleet of surveillance drones.
> Obviously. Every country in the world spend money in defense, the difference is the percentage of the GDP spent.
Kind of like healthcare.
Where, germane to other arguments made in the thread, the US also spends a larger share of its GDP than other developed countries, so, no, other developed countries aren't able to provide universal healthcare through public spending because of a "security subsidy" from the US; there able to do so because their mostly-public healthcare systems are more efficient than the US system which splits costs between public and private systems nearly evenly (with a slight private bias.)
Toronto has way more of a handle on homelessness than other parts of Canada in my experience. It's much worse in the neighbouring provincial capitals, Montreal and Winnipeg.
I've always been somewhat confused by the homeless out in the street in Canada. I thought we had a social safety net, shelters, etc. Everyone of these people can't be drug users and people with severe mental health issues, right?
I live in San Diego now, but I just moved back here from San Francisco. I've lived elsewhere in America. I never felt the disparity as much as I did in SF. I walked around being intensely aware of my privilege and it was uncomfortable.
San Fran's housing policy and strict land-use regulations have prevented the creation of large-scale housing units (both public and private) that address this problem elsewhere. The homeless population isn't an accident; it's the creation of government regulation and middle-class fear of high-density housing.
San Francisco homelessness is not a question about rich vs. poor. It's a question about what to do with people who are mentally handicapped and/or drug abusers. This is partially a money problem, but it's largely a social problem. A lot of other countries deal with this better because they have stronger family support structures. Programming can help, but this isn't a programming problem. And there's no money in it, so anybody who's trying to solve this problem can't afford to live in San Francisco.
Stepping over homeless people on my way to a cushy tech job has given me loads of cognitive dissonance. I have a really hard time with this, and I think about it every single day on my way to work. Frankly, I'm not sure what to do about it, and I'd love to have an open discussion instead of an anti-american one. Everyone here who's arguing about their superior European social programs are really preaching to the quire, because most Americans on Hacker News would kill to have these social programs.
Indeed. We (the folks on HN) are mostly the good guys in this fight. We'd like to help, and I'd like to think we support the right political causes in the ways that we can. But there comes a point where you're doing what you can given your role in society, and you still have to go past homeless people on your way to work. It doesn't make you any less compassionate than the people in any other country.
I work in the Downtown Crossing section of Boston, which has the one of the highest visible homeless populations in the Boston area. I was also consistently troubled by the number of homeless people I encountered to and from work.
It really helped to volunteer at a nearby homeless shelter (Pine Street Inn). I was comforted to see some of worst cases (including people I encountered daily) have access to meals, a clinic, a shelter, and treated with courtesy.
I was also struck by how many people seemed normal - not someone who was mentally ill or spent time on the street.
In general America fulfills a lot of need with private charity - which can occasionally be really impressive. When I worked at a large financial institution there were lots of opportunities for matched giving and volunteering opportunities. I wish tech companies would do this more.
Matched giving seems to be one of those benefits that is more common at the larger employers (e.g. Microsoft employees broke the 1 billion dollar mark last year) and doesn't appear on the smaller tech companies benefits sheets
What programmers can do about homelessness(and poverty):
Simple. Work for places(or build startups) that:
1. Help develop better and cheaper healthcare systems, products and processes.
2. Help develop technology that reduces the price of construction and in general the cost of living.
3. Help non profits and social entrepreneurs.
4. Help political change through technology.
And yes, doing some of this things might mean less wages , and not living in San Francisco.
> San Francisco homelessness is not a question about rich vs. poor.
Yes, it is.
> It's a question about what to do with people who are mentally handicapped and/or drug abusers.
Drug addicts and the mentally ill and/or handicapped who are not also poor have support systems and treatment options available, and are not part of the homelessness problem. So, yes, its about mental illness and drug addiction -- but also very much about rich vs. poor.
> This is partially a money problem, but it's largely a social problem.
Its a resource distribution problem; its not "partially a money problem" or "largely a social problem", its is completely both (money problems are equivalent to resource distribution problems and are a subset of social problems.)
> A lot of other countries deal with this better because they have stronger family support structures.
There may be some cases where countries do this better because of family support structures, but I can't think of any clear examples -- perhaps you could provide some. Most modern developed nations do it better because they have stronger public social support structures.
> Programming can help, but this isn't a programming problem.
This much is true. Its a policy (and, at a more fundamental level, values) problem, not a technical problem.
> Everyone here who's arguing about their superior European social programs are really preaching to the quire,
"Choir" is probably the word you are looking for; preaching to sheets of paper isn't exactly a sensible metaphor.
> because most Americans on Hacker News would kill to have these social programs.
I don't see much evidence for that "most Americans on Hacker news" would be willing to give up America's bias toward largely privatized health care financing, and income tax system that's heavily favorable to capital, and policy of financing a major part of the existing social support system via additional taxes that fall exclusively on labor for a stronger social support systems, much less that they would be willing to "kill" for such systems.
As a matter of fact, many Europeans I've met in the US have moved here to get away from "these social programs" which are strangling their economies and destroying opportunity. Come to think of it, most Europeans I've met in Europe are trying to leave, also.
You probably are strongly opinionated and people you meet are strongly biased subset of Europeans. I personally know no one that would want to live in US. Even the entrepreneurial types. They are aware about rampant litigation, exorbitant costs of even simplest medical procedures that is reflected in costs of health insurance and sheer volume of US tax code. I knew one person though, who went to US to buy some goods and smuggle them back without paying customs and VAT.
Actually, most of my European friends are socialists, but that's not the point. We live in a global economy, and people want to go where the opportunities are, and there are still a lot of opportunities here, especially for upwardly mobile young Europeans who are having trouble finding employment what with a near 50% youth unemployment rate in some countries.
With the exception of a very small sub group of people with serious mental issues, it's not a hard problem.
Most of it has been solved already. It's just a matter of having the will to do it. That will is absent.
Most developers in SF laugh at the amount of money their European counterparts get paid after taxes. The don't consider not having to step over homeless people a "benefit". That attitude is your problem right there.
> The don't consider not having to step over homeless people a "benefit".
My daughter really tries to stop us from visiting San Francisco, because there is nothing that she can do to help the homeless. So even though I like the city, I don't get to make much use of it (plus, on an not-unrelated note, the city is child unfriendly).
Making matters even more surreal, the Willows Market in Menlo Park now sells caviar at the checkout counter, nestled amongst the chocolate and other things targeted for impulse buys.
I'm quite amazed how nasty living environments rich people can bear. If I were to bet I'd swore that rich would do something about the poor before it gets anywhere near as bad as in US. But then again there's India. So I stand corrected.
I don't know if its hard or not, but the difficulty to monetary reward is certainly extremely unfavorable, and that is a pretty big governing factor in where most startups dedicate their efforts.
i worked at uber and twilio in the city. I was so bothered by the homeless people I saw everyday that it seriously impeded my work performance. i'd walk by them and feel terrible for not being able to help, for having an easy time making money, and feel afraid that my bipolar disorder would get worse and i'd end up like them. it was hard to function properly at work when I'd start my day feeling guilty, powerless and afraid.
How old are you? I used to have the same existential feelings as well when I moved in SF, but over time you just get used to it and don't care anymore. It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally.
One thing you realize is that a lot of the people on the streets have major mental conditions (usually schizophrenia, and major drug addictions or chronic alcoholism), and there is almost no way to just rehab them, and put them in a place that they can take care of themselves. Some of them are beyond the point of return and some need so much care, then only loving family can provide. Externally, you can't do much.
Other countries have both better mental care provided from the state, and especially a social net. Usually family will take care of their ill.
Be happy with what you got, do a good job, and make sure to be close to your family and have close friends. You will realize that is part of life, and once and a while you will have a need for support from closed ones, but as long as you an handle yourself well most of the time and try to live a good life you wont have to worry.
"It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally."
I think the point of the article is that that's fucked up, and not how the world should be. And what I suspect the author realized is that it isn't the way he or she wants to be.
> I think the point of the article is that that's fucked up, and not how the world should be.
That's the maturation process though: understanding that the world has been that way for all time. Look at nature, around you, some animals within any given group always do better than others. It's fine to be bothered by it, and want to do something to change it, but it's naive to think that a) you are the first person to notice and b) you can fix it completely.
One calls it maturation, another calls it desensitization. I think it's same thing because what people call maturation is just nervous system getting more numb as it gets older and worn out.
The point is it's not better to accept it. It's not more grown up and responsive to stop caring about this. World is not the same as it used to be. It constantly get's more and more humane. I recomend watching http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
If you accept homeless population in SF you are just closing your eyes to places that are much better to live than SF even with much less money in circulation.
(I'm not an expert on this, but as far as I know) many traditional/"primitive" societies have much less problems with homelessness and mental disorders because of stronger family support. (Of course, they have other problems that we don't have.)
You've mistaken cynicism and a lack of empathy for maturity.
Not everyone has a family, and even if they do we should be pushing for institutional changes so that the family isn't forced to make a choice between eventual bankruptcy or turning their family out on the street.
How old are you? I used to have the same existential feelings as well when I moved in SF, but over time you just get used to it and don't care anymore. It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally.
I am appalled that you actually believe this. I mean, ok, the world is not by default a fair place, but the notion of simply ignoring the moral duty to make it so... Ick.
I found his post interesting, because I have found that as I have matured I find myself much more in tune with exactly how unfair the world really is.
And, to put a point on it, how unfair it is to people who are unlike me. Some members of my family express confusion as to why I find this troubling--after all, "I've got mine."
> It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally
That realization is indeed part of the maturation process.
What you are talking about is both this and desensitization. The former is unquestionably necessary and a "good thing", the latter is a self defence mechanism humans have to being exposed to emotionally troubling things.
You/we could absolutely do a lot to alleviate this, it would just be a lot of work. You couldn't single-handedly solve the problem obviously, but that's a different question. I'm not even saying people have a moral obligation to act, but if you are going to decide not to then at least be honest about the reasons. It avoids a lot of painful cognitive dissonance at the very least.
It's definitely emotionally helpful to believe you can't do anything about it, but it's pretty definitively not true. Seems especially weird to suggest that here, in a community of self described "disruptors".
"but over time you just get used to it and don't care anymore. It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally."
This is depressing.
"This is part of life." feels like a common cop-out and downplays the fact that, if some of us put our minds to it, we could successfully make it not so much a part of life (I'm not saying we'd have some utopian equality, but it could be so much better).
I love the optimism inherent in this reply. But when you read about this type of behavior http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary , you realize that the tech world has a long way to go. I've seen too many people who just don't seem to care about, well, other people. We have become a selfish, entitled lot, and these kinds of developments tend to result in people going to the barricades.
Twitter negotiated to pay less than its share of the employee tax in SF. More and more startups are doing the same. Yet those shuttle buses run on city streets, park at city bus stops, and pay no additional fees to do so.
Many people here won't stay, won't volunteer in the community, won't get involved with the city and fight for better Muni and safer streets. Donations at charities are way down. Newly minted millionaires aren't donating to the arts or to charity, they're throwing lavish parties and buying over priced real estate. With people like Peter Thiel insisting that Libertarianism is the way all tech people should believe, precious few actually seem to get that we are all interconnected, and that a social safety net makes the world a better, safer place.
When I made my first money in this town, and it wasn't a lot, but it was enough to change my life, I wept, because I knew at its heart it was violently unfair that I should be safe and the people on the street not. I haven't stopped feeling that way. I hope you don't, either. It was nice to see someone actually care.
I hope that everyone here can show as much faith and heart as you do and insist on voting for taxes, policies, and politicians who will work to change things, for real.
i'm 27 now - this was when i was 25. i've since moved to the south bay to work at google, and things have improved significantly after a lot of meditation. i honestly have a more 'adversarial' mindset towards the homeless - i think a lot of the people in sf begging for change simply don't want to work, and because they can make a living preying on the guilt of people like me, they do so.
as for the schizophrenics out there, i am honestly still a little afraid of being one of them, but i'm lucky enough to have a huge support network.
The kids on Haight street just want to bum around – there was that article* that found they could make almost as much money begging as they could at a minimum wage job.
Other parts of the city I think have more people that really are drug-addicted or borderline insane
One of the reasons things are probably better for you is that you take a shuttle no doubt, and are isolated from the day to day reality of life here. True? http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary
What do you mean by not being able to help? I really encourage you to volunteer at a shelter if you haven't. Not only will you feel amazing by doing it, but you'll also hear so many good life stories, which I think will help you get over your phobias of the homeless. We tend to make up stories in our head to prop up our own just-world hypotheses, but the reality is that there are a lot reasons why people are homeless.
Sure, you'll hear from the guy who got hooked on drugs and pissed away his money, but you'll also hear about people who had work in construction and industry whose jobs dried up during one of many economic downturns while at the same time dealing with rising rent costs. Getting back into the game isn't easy either without clean clothes, a place to shower, or even a phone to be reached at for an interview. A lot of what we take for granted (like wearing $300-1500 outfits for interviews) simply isn't available to homeless people.
One thing that I think is missing from these discussions about the homeless in SF is: many of these people do not want to be rent-paying members of society and even if there was housing for them, some might still prefer their current lifestyle. Many people still view that lifestyle choice as unacceptable because it challenges the typical goals of someone working hard for a 'better' life. I don't think the question should be 'how do we get these people to participate in society?' but 'why don't they want to participate and how can we accommodate these alternative life choices?' Otherwise any progress made would benefit those who want to see the streets cleaned up and not necessarily those living out there.
I don't think anyone actually PREFERS to be homeless, except for a few exotics. Most of the homeless in America are that way due to either a: unfortunate economic circumstances, or b: mental illness that precludes normal social functioning.
About 20 years ago I ran across a study of homeless people in NYC. It turned out that a lot had lead comfortable middle class lives, and like most of us with the resources to handle one economic setback. Then two things went wrong. The first drained their reserves, the second put them on the street.
A particularly common combination was a health problem followed by foreclosure.
It has been 20 years, but I have seen no reason to doubt that the same pattern would be largely true today.
I think many people choose being homeless over giving into the pressures of our society like having to sustain a job in order to pay rent and go out for dinner etc... and all that stuff that 'normal' people desire. I've met homeless people that split their time between SF and some hills near Santa Cruz and only come into the city to sell some hash or hang out ith friends for a couple of days... but yes there are also many people on the streets who don't want to be there too.
Are you aware that we live in a period of peak unemployment?
There are literally millions of people who want jobs. The jobs were all made obsolete by Silicon Valley. The safety net was shredded by Silicon Valley-style neoliberal ethics based on Ayn Rand.
Yeah I am aware of that, but that doesn't mean that there aren't also people who don't want to work. I would love to not work and just enjoy life while I can, but I can't because I have bought into this idea that having extra money for shelter, food and other junk makes life more enjoyable... some people haven't bought into this that are struggling to enjoy their lives outside of the crazy whirlwind of packaged desires.
If someone offered them a rat race job and they had the appropriate education, cultural norms, social skills, and were mentally healthy, they would take it.
People don't choose to be homeless. It may be the best option available to them, but that doens't mean they chose it, it means they have very very few options. Their opportunity is limited by the rich people pushing austerity and gutting basic humanitarian services.
This is a very reasonable and logical arguments over this sensitive issue.
It's not about if someone wants to be homeless, if there is a simple choice between shelter and homeless, people will always prefer shelter. But if the choice is between working hard with a shelter, and live carefree and homeless, the answer will not be so clear.
I make a point of maintaining a clean separation between my work and my social life for exactly the reasons this author describes. The biggest problem San Francisco has right now is a bunch of people who came here for money, with no interest in being part of its social fabric. Many of whom loudly complain about how much San Francisco sucks, and how it should change to meet their needs.
You either need to start actually being a part of this city, or move your ass down the peninsula. Or better yet, move your company somewhere else. I hear they've got lower taxes and cheaper engineers pretty much everywhere else.
Same here. I've been in SF for 20 years, during most of which I have worked for my own companies.
My routine: wake up around 8, or whenever I wake up (no alarm clock), work straight through until about 6pm. Walk downhill to the neighborhood/sports bar to grab dinner, watch the ballgame (no discussion of work as none of the people there do tech work). Get a pleasant buzz on, hang out with friends. Go home, sleep, rinse, repeat. Works well for me.
Every city is the way it is because of the people that come into it. Now different people are coming in and things are changing.
San Francisco is a place that people historically migrate to when looking for gold. The aspects of the culture that creates, the ones you like, anyway, are unpredictable and subject to change.
You could also say that "San Francisco is a place that people historically migrate to to subjugate native populations and force them to adopt a new culture and religion". Does that make it ethically defensible? Or did we not learn anything from the last few hundred years?
I should also point out that the reason companies started coming to San Francisco in the first place was because of the culture that is currently being displaced, largely by people who don't care about the culture at all.
I think you're smearing missionaries a bit - they haven't ALL engaged in forcible conversion of natives. Quite often it is a voluntary decision.
But anyway, my point is that culture changes, and you can't stop it. Think of it as a culture free market. You can try to put up protectionist barriers to stop it, but you won't succeed. Not even the Amish are totally successful at it.
I grew up in Redmond, WA in the 70s and I don't recognize the place anymore when I visit. It makes me a bit sad, but that's life. Someday miles-high glaciers will form and scrub the Rocky Mountains away, too.
>I think you're smearing missionaries a bit - they haven't ALL engaged in forcible conversion of natives. Quite often it is a voluntary decision.
I would disagree on this point, Sure not all were "forced." There are invisible points that cause native nations to collapse. The missionaries didn't have to force them to come, there presence alone had enough effect on the region to force them to move to the missions. Especially in the Bay Area: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Little-Choice-Disintegration-Anth...
Not too far north along the west coast, the homelessness situation is mirrored in Vancouver, Canada. I have friends who have volunteered with non-for-profit agencies that support homeless people in identifying their needs and allocating resources to them if possible, such as social housing. My friends have told me that the people she has interviewed from the streets nearly 75% are mentally or physically handicapped or have fell into drug abuse and would never be able to function as a normal tax paying citizen again. There are cases where she has met people who where once normal people with normal jobs but because of a couple bad choices or traumatic situations, have gone into debt or turned to drugs and alcohol. One man was once a lawyer who lost his family over night and couldn't handle the stress and turned to gambling, drugs, and alcohol and probably suffered from PTSD and then sooner or later ended up on the streets.
In Canada, homeless/unemployed receive around $300/month from the government and if you have a psychical or mental disability, I believe you receive a little more financial assistance. Some homeless people just stay on the assistance instead of trying to get employment.
However, there is hope but we cannot rely on the government to sort it out. There is a privately funded organization called UGM that has a men's shelter and rehab program in the core of the homelessness district (equivalent to Tenderloin here) and are working on opening a women's and children's rehabilitation program. I volunteered there once and was taken aback on how well put together the program is. It's costly though, to build the building and support the program costs millions. They take in about 40 homeless people and puts them through a 6 month program. There are strict rules and guidelines in the program but in return they receive bedding, food, clean clothes and clean environment to live in, classes to help you finish your high school diploma, computer lessons, emotional and spiritual support, and career counselling, etc. It's still a newer program but they've seen a pretty high success rate, with many graduates becoming outreach works in the community.
> However, there is hope but we cannot rely on the government to sort it out.
Indeed:
"A change in public policy saw the mass discharge of Riverview Hospital's patients as an effort to integrate them into the community while the province considered the land for development. However, this caused a large influx of mentally ill into the DTES as poor follow-up support failed to reach a majority of these individuals."
The government may have good intentions but are too short-term in thinking. Homelessness, particularly mentally disabled homeless persons are costing the government a lot more in the long run than putting in rehabilitation infrastructure for homeless people. I strongly believe that in markets like US/Canada, privately funded projects is the way to go in order to make any real change. It's also disturbing when the city takes the piss at homeless people by fining them http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/16/vancouver-homeless-f...
I think one aspect of this is that San Francisco is somewhat of a safe-haven for the homeless and transient. While they do provide some context for the economic disparity between the poor and the rich, most of my homeless/transient buddies prefer living homeless/transient lifestyles in San Francisco to living homeless/transient lifestyles anywhere else.
> Thing is, those in poorer situations flock here, because they can get healthcare, support, and help, but other times it just feels like a passive aggressive fuck-you-got-mine. if you don’t tip, it isn’t so much a snub, it’s saying “i don’t think you deserve healthcare”. Alternatively for those with healthcare provided, it locks them into their job.
I think that when people say "hard problems" they mean "problems that almost certainly have solutions if you are willing to put in the effort". Poverty on the other hand is a much, much harder problem than that. In fact, no one quite knows how to solve it in a general way (there are things that seem to work in certain contexts but not in others, many special case half-solutions). And on top of that, there probably isn't a clear path between solving the poverty problem and wealth the way there is between solving the {photo sharing, social media, web search, ...} problem and wealth.
The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM! No more poverty, except in self-inflicted cases (drug addiction, for example), or things like severe and very expensive illness (which are covered by other means). This can be paid for in large part by the abolition of welfare systems, unemployment, Social Security, etc.
The stock criticism is that people wouldn't work, because they wouldn't have to. Frankly, I don't want such poorly motivated people working anyway, because they're not productive. And anyone who wants more than barely-poverty will get a job or start a business.
Another nice feature is that this supports people who want to do something productive but not financially valuable - charity work, ministry, art.
While I like the idea of a Basic Income, and have actually come to support it heartily, (if you don't, take a look at some of the economists who have, and why they do) you are being naive to think that "self-inflicted cases" are somehow anything other than a vast majority.
Almost all homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues. That's why they are unable to act on one of the endless options that exist at the moment that can get them even the most basic of accommodations and employment. The people your solution truly helps are the non-homeless poor. To be honest this is a much easier issue to address given some willpower. Then again, as a Canadian, I find basic medical care to be a no brainier as well, which seems to be something the US struggles with quite a bit.
You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
41% of the population will experience a diagnosable mental illness, and 26% have one in any given year. Clearly there is more to the issue than just blaming mental illness or there would be far more homeless people than there are right now.
Discovering what support structures work and making those more easily accessible seems like a great place for a disruptive start up, except that health care is so incredibly messed up no one wants to touch it with a ten foot poll.
You need to be careful when talking about the demographics of mental illness. Much mental illness leaves you still able to function and contribute socially to a fair degree.
> You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
Not true. You know how you can solve homelessness without solving mental illness and addiction EVEN IF (let's accept for the sake of argument) most homelessness is caused by mental illness and addiction?
It's really quite simple. You just give housing to mentally ill and addicted people. They are still mentally ill and/or addicted, but now they're not homeless, because you gave them a place to live.
correction: Nearly all chronic homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse; the chronic homeless make up only about 1/8 of the homeless at any given time.
Unless you have a citation that says otherwise, anything I've seen seems to suggest that there is little difference in the high percentage of mentally ill/substance abusers between chronic/non-chronic homeless.
Just about every article I can find talking about substance abuse and mental illness in homeless specifically focuses on the chronic homeless so I inferred from that. A bit of googling turned up this non-scholarly article though that compares the overall rate of mental illness among homeless to that of the chronically homeless and found ~3x difference
The Job Guarantee or Employer of Last Resort (JG or ELR) program is a better solution.
1) Immediately moves the economy to full employment. All but eliminates social ills associated with unemployment.
2) Puts a floor on labor standards. That is in order to hire somebody out of labor pool, private business has to offer a better package. Health insurance should be automatic. (My Gosh prisoners get free health care!)
3) Counter-cyclical/Auto-Stabilizer/Buffer stock effect on macro economy. As economy improves people leave the JG program. As economy weakens, people shift into JG.
4) JG labor force can be put to work at local government levels to boost services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
> The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM!
You left out the part where the money comes from. Your idea is fine and dandy, but I doubt you are currently implementing it yourself by spending your own money. The idea depends on everybody being forced to pay.
Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort. I disagree with your premise that people who work for rewards are unmotivated.
Those who think this is a good idea can go ahead and spread their wealth as they see fit, but I do have a problem with forcing others to do the same.
>Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort.
This is a poor understanding of the concept. The idea behind a Basic Income Guarantee is that it is received equally by every citizen in the country. It's an idea linked to Negative Income Tax and other like proposals, and shares support of many with a more libertarian/economically conservative bent.
In most areas of North America where Basic Income experiments have occurred, the overall workforce does decline, but in very specific ways: mainly with single mothers and teenagers. Mothers choosing to stay at home with their children, and teenagers graduating high school are more positive impacts on the society at large than the greater retention of wealth by the highly motivated.
Wealth can only be created in societies, and therefore the overall health of a society should be of paramount concern to those interested in creating wealth. While I do not advocate for many socialist principles, a certain baseline ensures the society remains sustainable in the long term, thus allowing its members to grow wealth.
Both too much (Communism, socialist Europe) and too little (Argentina, Venezuala, the US) will lead to inevitable social collapse and the reduction of wealth (or the ability to create more) for all.
I apologise if a simple search should find this and I just such at searching, but I'm intrigued after your comment. There seems to be little information about the Manitoba experiment and what Alaska calls "Basic Income" doesn't seem consistent with what is being discussed. Where else in North America have people experimented with this?
run4yourlives: Well stated. Warren Buffet, I believe, has often emphasized the fact that the growing wealth disparity is not good for long-term economic growth in U.S.
So why should I want to subsidize single mothers? Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?
I agree that there are some people who deserve financial support, but it should be up to the individual to decide who that is and how much they should receive.
This sort of economic blind spot is shockingly common, and presumably stems from the belief that economics is zero-sum. The idea behind subsidizing single mothers and keeping teens in school (which is the case that your parent comment was describing) is that the cost of this subsidy is theoretically lower than the expected cost of losing productive members of society or even worse, losing them to gang activity, which has further costs (single-parent households and high school dropouts are both _strongly_ linked to gang activity).
You may as well be saying "Why should I be paying taxes to put out a fire at the house down the street"? Well, if/when the fire spreads, you're going to be paying for it like it or not, so it seems like common sense to address the problem before the total cost is far higher.
The relationship between gang activity and dropout rates is something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but given that "stopping gang activity" is damn near impossible through enforcement alone (this is basically the tactic we've been trying), it's strange that our culture is such that attacking the problem from the other side is anathema.
Don't forget the moral hazard. Women could choose to get a child instead of working. I personally don't think that it is a good idea to grow up in a family where no adult is gainfully employed.
These are complex issues and should be evaluated by each individual. You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy. If I was interested in reducing US crime and poverty, I'd donate to http://www.projectprevention.org/
>Women could choose to get a child instead of working.
This is a fallacy. A woman working is not going to "choose" this any more than you are going to go from being gainfully employed to sitting on your ass all day playing video games. Setting the right thresholds on both the income and the reductions removes any incentive to become a non-working drag on society. If however, you did make that choice, a basic income allows you to realize quickly how crap life is and then correct yourself, rather than slide further down the have not scale.
What's more, even if you did choose to sit around playing video games on $10K a year or whatever, you are fed and likely housed, and therefore not stealing from me, getting arrested and now costing me $75K a year in prison expenses.
> You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy
Taxation is not fucking charity. We do have every right to choose where our taxes go. They're called elections. However, considering (as I stated and you conveniently ignored) that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large, the sustainable maintenance of said society is in your utmost interest, whether you think so or not. I have more interests than I can possibly afford to donate to. That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.
>So why should I want to subsidize single mothers?
You aren't subsidizing anything. You are allowing the mother to raise their child with more options available to them. At the very least, it increases the chances of the child's success, and overall the chances that you are not paying for programs, prisons, social services in the future.
> Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?
Because they are "gaining that experience" instead of completing their schooling in many occurrences. I don't need to explain why it's a good idea to have as many people as possible stay in school, do I?
You need to educate yourself on the monetary system. Taxes do not necessarily fund government at the local level. Non-convertable floating fx monetary regimes are self-funding. Its kind of like saying where does the score-keeper at the basketball game get points to put on the score board ? Can he run out ?
Inflation is the constraint, not solvency. We need to find the right number between 0 and 10^10 but we are not trying to do that and so we're becoming like Japan.
Those same arguments could be made against welfare to an extent. The advantage of this system is that it would be simpler and therefor cheaper to administer and possibly harder to game.
Yes, but I also figure that anyone smart enough to effectively game the welfare system is smart enough to do substantially better than what even gamed welfare can provide.
Trust me, in the UK at least, you really don't need much to game the welfare system.
While the government is making gradual changes the requirements and checks for UK citizens to claim job seekers allowance week after week are laughable low compared to the rhetoric thrown around.
The other side of the coin is what do you do when there actually aren't jobs available in the region and there are too many people to effectively set up in self-employment? Making people jump through hoops and then frowning at their failings is fine when isolated to an individual, but at a demographic level it breaks down.
I recently spend five months out of work and unable to find a job and received welfare. I saw others like me playing the system. I saw others like me struggling to satisfy the system and more, applying for everything and getting rejections similarly. The system doesn't differentiate between the two.
To some degree it's the old 'where do you draw the line' - do you prefer to see the innocent suffer or the guilty go free?
The fundamental problem is separating the cheaters from those who really deserve help.
In a system where the individual can decide where to put the money, everybody can decide who is deserving of help.
If you mandate wealth redistribution, you need to create a complex ruleset that decides who is eligible. The rules are established by the ineffective and opaque processes of politics and government.
The resulting system is more complex, more expensive and easier to game.
With a basic income guarantee everyone would get money, and the same amount. There is no need to divine who needs it because everyone does. No matter the income.
What we are talking about are the basic necessities to a life in dignity. A roof over your head and enough to eat and clothe yourself, as well as enough to at least participate in society in some way (e.g. enough money to afford some sort of information gathering thingie, be it a newspaper subscription, TV or phone). The bare minimum.
I happen to believe that no one has the right to deny that anyone. It’s a basic human right. Every human deserves a life in dignity and there is no way to lose that. (And, I know, implementing that world wide right now is practically impossible. That, just like, e.g. any sort of restrictions of freedom of movement, labor, capital and goods, is a travesty but for the near future I’m hopeless about anything changing in that regard. It’s sad and unacceptable.)
Within that understanding of the world (and also the understanding that we won’t have work for everyone as time goes on) something like a guaranteed basic income seems at least like something worth trying out to me. (Many of the current welfare schemes seems broken to me, too focused on tight paranoid control and stigmatizing people.)
But then again, I’m European. (Also, not the person you were originally responding to.)
> There is no redistribution. Everyone is entitled to the same benefit, just like they are entitled to fire protection.
This type of thing (even when it involves fire protection) is redistribution. One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit -- even if it is the same set of people the distribution of the tax and the benefit aren't the same, and the difference is redistribution.
Note that I am not saying this is undesirable, merely that it clearly is redistribution.
>One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit
Ah, no. ALL people pay for things. How that payment occurs is a product of a progressive tax system in most cases, but there is no requirement that such a system exists to run service.
You wouldn't call a private security service employed by a gated community "wealth redistribution", would you? Although if they had an income driven progressive fee structure it would be.
But then wouldn't businesses who sell a lot of goods to people on the minimum income just put their prices up to force the gov to increase the minimum income at above inflation rates every year?
You also still have the problem of people like drug addicts who spend all of their minimum income on drugs/drink/gambling and are still left homeless.
I would imagine the smartest way to implement such a thing would be to index the amount of money to a basket of goods, much like the way in which inflation is calculated.
I think the problem would be with relatively inelastic things like housing. A landlord could easily just set their rates to 70% of minimum income and as other properties would be out of reach to those on minimum income there would be little competition. At that point you would get strong pressure to increase the minimum income or implement price controls.
We have had similar problems in the UK with private landlords renting out very poor quality housing at high prices to those on welfare. In the past we solving this by building lots of social housing.
I think a more sustainable way, if you want to implement a basic income, would be to have a low flat tax (say 10%) on all types of income, than divide the tax revenue across all citizens. That way everybody will cheer on the capitalists.
Wouldn't this cause inflation? The price of food, shelter, and basic needs is determined by peoples' ability to pay. I'd expect the price to rise until a percentage of people were unable to pay, again.
It would only cause monetary inflation if an equal amount of currency were not removed at the same time (through e.g. progressive taxation). Even if it did cause monetary inflation, that wouldn't necessarily lead to price inflation (depending e.g. on the slack in the economy). Even if there was price inflation it would likely not be uniform across goods and services.
In short, while it would be possible to design a self defeating basic income program it is not inevitable. That said, I prefer the employer of last resort scheme being pushed by the Australian MMT crowd.
Poverty on the other hand is a much, much harder problem than that. In fact, no one quite knows how to solve it in a general way (there are things that seem to work in certain contexts but not in others, many special case half-solutions).
Everyone keeps saying that, as if there were only two alternatives: 1) completely fix poverty in a general way or 2) keep the status quo (and allow it to get worse).
There has to be some way to get from the current wealth inequality [1] to something more humane.
There is nothing intrinsically morally wrong with high levels of wealth inequality. If wealth distribution were to stay as unequal as they are now, but total per-capita wealth increased at a steady rate, that would be a wonderful outcome for everyone.
The issue is that the high levels of wealth inequality are used to capture nearly all of the wealth that is created, thus increasing the wealth inequality even more. That is a clearly unsustainable system.
Only if 'relativism' is reduced to 'different relative to my own' due to solipsism. There remains the possibility that there's an absolute morality intrinsic to the universe that your own personal models fail to describe accurately.
i.e. just because you cover up your eyes doesn't mean that I can't see you.
You said it depended on "your" (which I took to mean "ones own" rather than specifically referring to "me") ethical system. If there is an absolute morality, then the morality of any given action is not dependent upon the morality subscribed to by the actor.
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Furthermore any statement about an action being moral or immoral that doesn't explicitly reference a moral system is implicitly assuming a moral system. I find "It is my belief that X is moral" to be stylistically inferior to "X is moral" and clearly the former is a factual statement, while the later is a statement of opinion. HN is a discussion forum in which stating opinions is acceptable, so I use the terser, stronger statement of opinion preferably to the more verbose factual statement.
I was commenting on your assertion that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with high levels of wealth equality. The degree to which that is true, assuming an intrinsic morality, is the degree to which "your" (which I intend to mean you, the person posting as aidenn0) moral system corresponds to that intrinsic morality.
As there was no argument pertaining to the actual existence of an absolute morality, all we are discussing is your model. All that we can gleam from that model is that steady per-capita income increases imply a good outcome for everyone, and that a good outcome for everyone implies that economic disparities that exist along with that outcome are not morally wrong. Therefore, there's no need to assume that moral relativism is a valid outlook, only that there's no proffered evidence that your assertion represents an aspect of that hypothetical intrinsic morality.
If there were one, evidence that a particular condition compels a particular conclusion in one's model would only imply a particular condition within a moral universe would depend on the correspondence of one's model to the reality of that universe.
Can you provide citations that aren't garbage linkbait that pops up with a passive-aggressive "I believe in equality blah blah blah" that you have to click through before seeing nothing but a six minute flash video with no other useful content? Because I'm not going to watch it. I can read, thanks. I'm literate. Please don't insult my intelligence.
Homelessness isn't primarily (if at all) a (financial) poverty problem. Mental disorders and drug addiction are large factors, and neither are fixable with cash.
Of course they are. Mental disorders can be fixed by paying for the treatment of people with mental disorders, and drug addiction can be fixed by paying for the treatment (rather than the imprisonment) of people who are addicted to drugs.
There's nothing making drug addicts homeless other than the fact that we drive up a thousandfold the prices of substances that cost pennies to produce.
Well, duh. More importantly is whether you see that as morally fair or as stealing. Usually when people say this line, they're implying that the rich will have all their money stolen until they have the same amount of money as everyone else - and of course this isn't actually advocated anywhere outside of communist societies.
That particular quoted line reminds me of a friend, who when she got a $10k raise, could do nothing but bitch about how 'half of it was going straight to the government' (despite it actually being only about 30%). If you define how wealthy you are by how much is taken from you, you should probably re-examine your priorities.
I strongly disagree with his apparent assumption that you can't "push down on the top" without wrecking things up. Sweden and Finland are proof that this isn't true, both have competitive economies that outscore the US in many important metrics for success (among these is general happiness).
You can let people become wealthy, and therefore give people incentive to invest and create, without creating the kind of insane inequality we currently have in the US.
His rant gets ridiculous, though, when he starts talking about doing away with the link between money and power... "We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power." That might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen a smart person say. Money is power. pg probably has someone mow his lawn. I can't do that. Why? Because pg is rich and can pay someone to do it, I am not, therefore I can't.
But that's not Power with a capital "P", you say. But it is. That's what power is, the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. If you have money, in a capitalist society, you have power, by definition. Whether you abuse that power, or use it for things that people consider to be bad (like buying off members of Congress) is a totally different story.
What implications does this have? Well, one of them is that money is, to many, a worthless thing to have if you strip away the power that comes along with it. Severing the connection between money and power would demotivate people the same way taxes do because, ultimately, they are the same thing: you used to have X, now you have X-Z.
In an ideal society, it would not be illegal to be rich. It would be illegal to buy off members of Congress, pay people to vote for you or your cronies, own media outlets and using them to get (and keep) yourself elected into office, or in any way use that wealth to subvert the democratic process. We don't have ideal societies, but that's obviously a direction worth going.
That doesn't mean you totally eliminate any power or privilege that wealth brings. Trying to eradicate malaria using your billions of dollars is an exercise in power, albeit not one that subverts the democratic process.
If I understand you, you're saying that wealth brings broad powers, and it's only a small subset of those (like political corruption) that are bad.
The rest, which are essentially power over the natural world (curing diseases, sending people to Mars, protecting ancient forests, resurrecting extinct animals) are good.
> Stepping over the homeless, weaving between the street corner schizophrenics
Imagine having a chronic disease simultaneously with an absolutely intolerable fear of doctors, hospitals, institutions and the social safety net. That's a hard problem.
I can't tell exactly the point you're trying to make. Obviously there are specific cases ("schizophrenics" here, I guess) who are going to be very hard to treat in any safety net, and the US has no monopoly on them.
But the point was broader, that relative to the rest of the industrial world the US has far more people at the "bottom" , falling out of the net. Walking around cities in Europe, you generally don't find people sleeping on park benches or camping under highway interchanges, etc... In most US cities, that's fairly routine. And many of us consider that a bad thing.
Note that none of that excuses the poorly informed and counterproductive moralizing in the linked article. The author is a jerk. But the problem is real.
Now, I'm sure this is a difficult thing to measure, and there's lots of room for legitimate argument. Nonetheless Wikipedia tells me that 248 Londoners "sleep rough each night", where 3-5000 of San Francisco's homeless population "refuse shelter". That's a full order of magnitude difference even ignoring the fact that London's population is several times that of SF.
And again, it gets to the safety net argument. It's not that the english are accepting shelter where the americans are not, it's that the english don't need to "accept" the homeless shelters in the first place because they are sleeping at home.
"A mixture of street counts and estimates indicated 557 people slept rough on any one night in London
5,678 different people slept rough over a year in London (April 1 2011-March 31 2012)"
"According to SFGov, the total number of homeless individuals and families in San Francisco for 2011 was 6,455."
There are definitely more homeless as percentage of population in San Francisco though.
248? In Helsinki I think I saw more than that passed out on a single tram ride. Helsinki had far more homeless than any big US city I've ever been to(at the very least they were far more visible). I also had more negative experiences with aggressive homeless there than I have had here. I forget the tram line, but it was the one that goes from University of Helsinki to Tooloo.
I've never been to Helsinki. But perhaps the lesson there is that Finland too has much to learn from the UK safety net, and not that the US doesn't have a problem.
But in any case, my point is about the chronic homeless and http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mentall... suggests that most chronically homeless are mentally ill in some fashion. How society should properly care for its mentally ill is an extremely hard problem. Strait jackets and padded cells? Forced drug treatments? Or let them camp under bridge overpasses?
This article leaves out an important point: Most, if not all, programmers I know do care about these issues, but we can't solve them. We would if we could, but it's not what our profession is good at.
The title of the article, "come here and work on hard problems – except the ones on our doorstep," speaks to this. We programmers have the tools to solve many interesting and important problems, but certainly not all. Deeply rooted social problems such as homelessness cannot be solved with a mobile app or data analysis.
So programmers see homeless people on the way to work, and we feel bad, but what can we do? Maybe the author wants us to feel guilty about the gap between rich and poor. But bear in mind most of us are not the rich of America. We're in the middle. Yes, it's much, much more comfortable in the middle than at the bottom, and I think most of us are grateful to be where we are. But most of us aren't aristocrats; we work for a living. And we're also not the ones who want to further widen the income gap. Rather, we tend to vote for progressive candidates and policies.
Is there more we could do? I'm not sure what it would be. Charitable donations help a little, but won't solve the problem. Volunteering helps a little, but again, it's marginal. It's the people who actually work in advocacy, politics, and homeless services that are really in a position to help solve these problems. Programmers just aren't the ones to do it.
Coincidentally, I actually do have some experience in the homeless services world. And from what I have seen, the solution is basically money.
Much of the homeless population cannot be permanently cured. There is no homelessness reboot, where you go in for rehab, mental health treatment, etc., and you come out ready to face the world as a gainfully employed, self-sufficient person. Even with treatment, relapses are the norm, rather than the exception.
Consequently, the realistic and humane solution is to put up the money for a basic safety net. Considering the number of homeless in our country and the rather modest price of providing basic food and shelter, it would not really be a noticeable drain on our society. And just to head off criticism: We're not talking about putting lazy people in the Hilton and feeding them caviar. Even spartan, barracks-style homeless shelters, such as the ones where I've worked, are a whole lot better than leaving people on the street. So-called lazy people (i.e. those who can work but don't want to) will not take advantage of this, because it's not an attractive option. No matter how lazy you are, you will choose to work over living in a homeless shelter if you can.
I think being a programmer does help the situation in one respect: by having a large salary, you also pay commensurately more in taxes, which could be used to pay for social services.
One reason the quality of life is so high in Germany is that it is, as far as I can tell, a nation of engineers. With an economy based on high value products for export, Germany can afford one of the shortest work-weeks in the world and some of the best social services.
That's very true. And it's kind of comforting, because you know that by earning well, you're creating positive externalities. This is why I'm happy to pay my taxes. (I don't necessarily support everything they're spent on, but everyone has to compromise on that, no matter what they support.)
If more programmers did volunteer (or their employers encouraged volunteering), even for a little bit, by being exposed to the problem and having an opportunity to interact with the homeless, some new solutions might arise.
It's not about charity. There are plenty of businesses to be built that help improve education, income inequality and social services, or steer politics to do the same.
I don't mean to be harsh, but that sounds a little hand-wavy. Could you elaborate on what types of businesses you have in mind?
I don't think education and income inequality are the real issue here. For the long-term homeless, it's not that they lack job skills. Nor is it that the poor make too little (which they do). Rather, most of these people are disabled, and that is the root cause of their homelessness. In fact, a lot of them do have good educations and once held well-paying jobs. But then something happened: A traumatic head injury, the onset of serious mental illness, an addiction.
Also, note that I explicitly rejected charity as the primary solution to the problem. So yeah, I agree with you that it's not about charity. What I'm suggesting is that governments provide even a minimal safety net. (In some places they do. I don't know what the situation is in SF.)
I've tried to figure out a way to say what you've said in this post since I've gotten here, and every time, it's sounded like an indictment on the poor.
Brilliant post, and it's criminal that an area so full of brilliant people can be so detached from the most actual problems facing the world, when they're right on the proverbial doorstep.
Yeah, housing. It's the big issue of the day here, and you can see how much it affects our culture.
Basically we created a mortgage system that only works as long as property values continue to rise, which created a lot of political will behind "improvement" measures like eliminating public housing, like we did in the early 80s.
I'm doing some experiments with cooperative housing and income-sharing right now, which slightly mitigates my contribution to gentrification, but something else is needed, and I'm not sure what.
If you're interested in cooperative housing and income sharing, you might be interested in this idea - raising money from well-paid engineers for the San Francisco Public Land Trust, in order to create permanent affordable housing (with the added bonus of not depending on the government to manage it) and home-ownership options for low-income families.
I actually think we created a mortgage system that will keep most people working (income earning) for the majority of their lives (30yrs). Now that our life span is increasing, will the norm be 40yrs?
You can get a 40 year mortgage at many banks now. I doubt 40 year mortgages will ever catch on. The banks generally charge a higher interest rate for the longer term so the payments aren't much cheaper than a 30 year loan.
As a person with severe social anxiety, I felt truly anonymous in my visit to San Francisco last summer. I was not worried or threatened like my wife. I knew all things come and go in SF. The inherent risks of SF seemed easier to evaluate due to the larger population. To me, it was bliss. The divide between rich and poor was no different than anywhere I have visited in the USA. A visit to Mississippi can open eyes to the evil dividing lines of human behaviors.
Welcome to a very individualistic and, by consequence, antisocial society. As an American that's never stepped foot in California, this sounds surprisingly familiar, albeit with the unique addition of free food and free beer at work.
Why do people commute 45+ minutes each way to work... To live in a Suburb where the dont interaxt with any neighbors. a place with no public transport, no major retailers, and no place for "malcontents" to flock within 10 miles that's not private property. Even my small city has no "public space" or public transportation after business hours. We have lots of small parks designed to deter "being homeless" there.
Everything about American Rural and Suburb culture drives out those who Rent, and don't want to own full-size autos with all the "rat-race" keeping up with payments and insurance and taxes... Right up until people retire and realize they can't keep up.
In my case: good schools for my kids. I looked at several options nearer to the downtown area, and in every case, the schools were rated at the middle or near the bottom of the rankings. The schools where I ended up are near the top.
The same is true for Los Angeles. I've been in an office building while people were discussing six-figure sums like they were nothing, when outside in the alley below there were literally homeless people in a knife fight over a candy bar.
Are we creating the right kind of "WEALTH"?
This should be a question people (who are doing startups) should ask themselves.
IMHO, that is why socialist Governments providing education, healthcare, roads and security sound popular to some people. All these are part of wealth that are provided to citizens at low prices.
But in a capitalistic economy, it is left to individuals (entrepreneurs) to provide this services at competitive prices.
One way of looking to solve the problems of the poor and deprived people would be to provide them services of education, healthcare, housing etc. at ultra-competitive prices.
I know it is easier said than done. But it is something worth doing.
When the poor have no money they can't pay entrepreneurs.
When the super-rich have all the money, the super-rich drive up the cost of living. The middle class then must directly serve the interests of the rich in order to get enough profit to afford the higher cost of living.
It quickly becomes uneconomical to sell anything to poor people.
It's a poverty spiral. Uneducated families just get more uneducated without state intervention. Rich families just get richer, driving up cost of living, cornering markets to destroy the free market, and making the poor families poorer in comparison.
When are we going to wake up from this Randian dystopia we're creating??
> When the super-rich have all the money, the super-rich drive up the cost of living.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.). What does this do? It increases the demand for food, clothing, housing , etc. in the area. This is _not_ a bad thing. This means businesses in the area, if they are allowed to, will grow and new businesses can come into existence. For a real world example, look at Apple, for example. Apple employs 13,000 in Cupertino. However, Apple also indirectly creates 70,000 additional service jobs in the area through their direct employment. Are you saying this is a bad thing? This is much better multiplier than manufacturing.
The only issue we run into here is housing. If the area can't accommodate the increase in demand, housing prices will increase. This means owning a business will be more expensive, meaning the costs of everything will increase. This is what we're seeing in areas like SF.
But the thing is, this doesn't just have to be the super-rich who cause this. If you see an increase in demand for living in a specific area for any reason, a similar thing will happen as if a bunch of super-rich move into the area.
Further, the super-rich don't actually spend their money in the same way poor people do. They invest a good chunk of their money and they don't spend in the same proportion of their income on necessities, so they'll contribute far less to the increases in the cost of living than previously assumed.
So this entire argument of yours really doesn't make sense to me.
> It's a poverty spiral. Uneducated families just get more uneducated without state intervention
And this is a completely different topic and again I don't understand for what you're arguing. The government has had a monopoly on education for a long time and has gone to great lengths, in both primary and secondary schooling, to intervene. In many ways, this has driven up the cost of education and driven down the quality. But this is mostly a tangent.
> When are we going to wake up from this Randian dystopia we're creating??
I wouldn't call the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, a Randian dystopia. The amount of regulations and taxes one must deal with in this area is astounding. You even brought up the sad state of public education. How is this Randian in any way imaginable? You're on the wrong end of the spectrum.
> For the sake of argument, let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.). What does this do?
Like it or not, changes in wealth for the super-rich seem to have effects on the non-super-rich too. As the richest gain more wealth, the less rich feel even less rich. As they see bigger and nicer houses going up, more expensive cars driving around, etc., the relative quality of theirs is going down. In an attempt to keep up, they spend more, and so on down the socioeconomic ladder. This effect has been called "trickle-down consumption" in a recent study detailed here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/t....
The result is is exactly what you acknowledge later, which is a bit contradictory to your opening assumption: "[T]he super-rich don't actually spend their money in the same way poor people do. They invest a good chunk of their money and they don't spend in the same proportion of their income on necessities..."
People in lower income brackets are spending more money while saving less, and this is in part due to the rising displays of opulence from the upper income earners.
> let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.).
This is equivalent to saying "let's assume 2+2=5, so you see that 0=1". You need to revise basic economics.
Give some money. This won't help the person on your doorstep, but it is probably the best way to convert money into well being. And you can look yourself in the mirror and say that even though the world is quite fucked up, you are doing _something_ about it.
I'm originally Swedish and moved from France to Silicon Valley in 2001; I found it so depressing to see all the homeless people in SF that I ended up getting a place in Palo Alto rather than SF. As I gradually became desensitized I made my way further and further up north, until I finally ended up in SF 5 years later.
I am very happy in San Francisco and have no plans on moving back for a lot of different reasons: lots of smart people working on interesting projects, great weather, beautiful city, and so forth. Having said that, one of the few things that I don't love about living here is a more civilized i.e. socialistic system.
The current situation, where we live in one of the greatest richest cities in the US, with terrible infrastructure (compared to most European and Asian metropolitan areas) and homeless everywhere is completely appalling and depressing, and I do think most people would be happier if we had great streets, parks, transportation and a clean city even if that meant a little bit less cash in their pockets - even if they don't realize it. I think most people that don't value these things have probably not spent a lot of time in cities that have them.
> The cost of living is always increasing, and the flashy money from silicon valley is accelerating the gentrification of SF. rent-control is a last ditch effort to prevent those who grew up here from being displaced, but in return prevents them from being able to move within the city.
In particular, the bit about being prevented from moving within the city.
There are many problems with SF itself. One of which is the homeless population. But that doesn't feel so urgent. After all, what can we do for drug addicts and mentally handicapped people, outside of putting them in institutions? They're better taken care of here than they would be in most places, and those who live on the streets are at least in a moderate climate. It sucks, but it could be a whole lot worse. And every time I see people give them money, I feel compelled to explain to them that the money won't actually help them, but a sandwich might.
This is a visible problem, especially to tourists, which may be why it's so widely talked about. But there are other extreme problems with the city. Consider rent control, which is only barely mentioned in this article. It's actively destroying the city. Most economists agree about the effects of rent control, too, and studies have shown the negative effects to be strikingly similar to many of the problems SF is currently facing (which will only continue to get worse). http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html.
How about we solve this problem before SF is just a business center with 0 housing. Then with all that extra housing, we find a place to take better care of our homeless? It's really hard to put them up when you just don't have the appropriate accommodations for it.
It is no different online. People online know I am homeless. Most of them step over me and move on, though all I have asked for is help figuring out how to make money online instead of going back to a normal job that was helping to kill me. I imagine this comment will get buried or ignored or negative attention, an ironic repeat of the problem people are decrying.
I think it's often harder to acknowledge local problems such as homelessness because they require a sustained commitment. You literally seem them as you walk home or drive to work.
Contrast that with the instant gratification of making a one-time contribution to solve a distant problem, and it's easy to see why many prefer the latter approach.
You want to see income disparity at work, travel to Mumbai and live there for a day. I've lived in Mumbai vicariously through VICE, and that was an eye opener on the income inequality issue.
"Last night, someone told me “In California, there isn’t a conflict between being a Capitalist, and a Liberal”, with a wry grin on his face."
Of course there isn't. Liberalism in its purest form (as espoused by Hayek, say) is, in effect, free market capitalism with a light but universally applicable (no "special cases", as those lead to totalitarianism) set of regulations to prevent bad actors (e.g. hey, let's put heroin in baby formula so it's really more-ish).
There's this odd commingling of the concepts of socialism and liberalism in the general populace's minds, for some reason. The two could not be more antithetical.
As to the rest of it - the US is neither capitalist nor liberal. It's corporatist, with a distinct socialist bent, but not where people usually point the finger. "Obamacare" is not socialist, it's liberal, as a core concept of liberalism is that the state should fund things that people cannot or will not fund for themselves, like roads and healthcare. Protectionist policies to keep the banks, agribusinesses and other without-legislation-to-protect them unprofitable enterprises ARE socialist, as they centralise control of industrial and economic output into government, and allow businesses that would not survive in a true free market to prosper.
"There's this odd commingling of the concepts of socialism and liberalism in the general populace's minds, for some reason. The two could not be more antithetical."
The reasons for this are historical. What you call the "socialist" elements result from the idea that part of being truly "free" (i.e, liberty) requires that people be treated equally, thus liberals in this sense have a focus on social justice. (See this on "positive liberty": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty .) You can get good summary of differences between meanings of "liberal" in other Wikipedia articles:
Because of the way the word's meaning has developed historically, you really need to be aware of the context where it's being used. But there are nevertheless strands connecting all the meanings, namely focus on "freedom" and "equality".
Indeed - perfectly familiar, have read my share of Tocqueville, Hayek, Hobbes and all the rest, but the fundamental point that divides socialism and liberalism is that of freedom of people, vs. freedom of the people - i.e. individualism vs. socialism.
Liberalism has always been about social justice, and the idea that each and every human should be free to run or ruin their own lives (Positive vs. Negative freedom), with a slant towards the positive through regulation and the rule of law.
Socialism is a set of collectivist policies desired or in force while a capitalist society is being consumed (i.e., distribution of goods and services by society's collective dictates).
Capitalism "solves the problem" of production by producing what returns profit (in a market of demands and supplies). Once profit is stamped out, production is unguided except by "society" commanding it (i.e., a command "economy"). Even if this guidance were democratic, it would still be subject to the tyranny of the majority (the bulk of the collective).
Classical liberalism (what you call "true" liberalism) focused on negative freedom. Modern liberalism (what you call "socialism" although it's not: modern liberals are still in favor of regulated but mostly free markets) focuses on ensuring positive freedom. Again, no big deal as long as we understand what each person means when they're talking about being a "liberal". In contemporary world, however, calling yourself a "liberal" in sense of classical liberalism tends to indicate you're that you're an academic, a libertarian, or some variety of free-market capitalist. In contemporary world, the usual meaning when someone says they're a "liberal" is that they're socially liberal, focus on equality and positive liberty. And the usual meaning is entirely correct, even though you apparently want to restrict use of the world to its meaning in classical liberalism.
Couldn't agree more. However I would also add that from a truly liberal perspective the logic behind government intervention is market-driven as opposed to primarily humanitarian. Recognising that markets have failures is a key part of capitalist liberalism, and it is that failure of recognition that makes libertarianism such an unstable and unworkable political philosophy.
"Obamacare" is not socialist, it's liberal, as a core concept of liberalism is that the state should fund things that people cannot or will not fund for themselves, like roads and healthcare.
"More doubtfully compatible with the liberal conception of equality is another measure which also gained wide support in liberal circles, namely the use of progressive taxation as a means to effect a redistribution of income in favour of the poorer classes. Since no criterion can be found by which such progression can be made to correspond to a rule which may be said to be the same for all, or which would limit the degree of extra burden on the more wealthy, it would seem that a generally progressive taxation is in conflict with the principle of equality before the law and it was in general so regarded by liberals in the nineteenth century."
Why are you conflating Obamacare with progressive taxation? Incredibly misleading. Hayek was clearly fine with social insurance programs.
"Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to super-cede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatability in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom." -- The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek
It's probably because he forgot what he was arguing about and defaulted to attacking transfer payments. Isn't that what they (the Hayek quoters)all do - when all else fails, go after 'handouts' because it can always be framed as a moral issue?
Because Obamacare is funded by progressive taxation, as are most programs in the U.S., and the benefits of Obamacare are not equally distributed - an example of the very inequality Hayek was admonishing against in the first quote I posted.
Honestly, who cares what it's called and how it falls into other categories? I think by fighting over what terms to use, we're missing the forest for the trees.
In living in the SV sandbox/bubble, it seems we forget about some of our global compassion. Nobody says we need to be 100% charitable in our actions, or follow some strict socialist regimen, but I think it's useful to acknowledge that we do overlook some of the problems at our doorstep. If we cared, we could definitely create solutions to some of them, and some of those solutions might even be profitable.
In a recent timescale, there was a multi-billion dollar bailout of failed institutions. It was pretty big news. Most of the banking sector would have gone bust without it, which would, as happened in Iceland, have left verdant territory for a new breed to spring up in.
In a more general scale, the entire banking sector is propped up by protectionist policies that allow:
> Fractional lending (this is called reserve banking) on a minimal reserve. It's pretty odd that banks can do this, but, say, you, can't.
> Setting of core econometric KPIs by people who stand to benefit directly from those KPIs. LIBOR and EURIBOR are recent examples of this, but market fixing has been going on since forever, and is endorsed passively through a lack of legislation to do anything about it, and a lack of will to prosecute.
> No other banks to exist, without jumping through serious hoops, and tying themselves in a death-grip to one of the "special" banks.
> Immunity to prosecution for bad actors. Corporate personhood is applied with amazing selectivity. If you're a juggernaut, no worries. If you're a small guy, enjoy federal prison.
> Indiscriminate money laundering and funding of illegal activities overseas. HSBC just got busted for proactively helping out the cartels in Latin America, and got a slap on the wrist. They're not alone in this kind of thing - look at Brown Brothers Harriman. They funded Nazi Germany. Prosecution? Nah. Wild profits that span generations.
I could go on and on and on, but the moment that you treat any particular person or entity "specially", you're on the road to hell, as you've just interfered with a self-regulating system, as free (but blanket regulated) markets are, and you'll need to interfere more, and more, and more, and suddenly you're telling factories that they should only make size seven shoes for the next two years to fulfil their quota.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd have rather taken Iceland's approach and let them fail... their assets would have been redistributed and bought out, and things would have probably recovered much faster, though a harder short term. Which may well have been better than what seems to be a long drawn out recovery.
I'm also against a lot of the subsidies that are out there.. if we really want available food for the poor, then those expenses directed at the farmers directly are the wrong place. I mean we have food stamp programs, and school lunch programs that could be expanded to cover more people, or even everyone domestically.
I'm against the expanded protectionisms in copyright and patents as well. I think they are important to have, but the terms are far to broad and lopsided. Corporate personhood is a directly related problem... I'd much rather see corporations far more limited, including requirements on distributing profits to shareholders, and not being able to make corporate donations to charities (especially politically driven ones) or for that matter employ lobbyists. If an investor wants to directly employ a lobbyist more power to them, the protection of a corporate vail is definitely abused.
I believe personal freedom and ensured competition are key to advancement of society, and protectionist corporatism is just as bad as outright communism, or extreme/fascist socialism for that matter. Then again, people often confuse what it means to be pragmatic, or a libertarian for that matter.
Oh man, agricultural subsidies. Farm bills in the US, CAP in the EU. They're criminal, and socialist in form and nature. They're designed to protect the livelihood of farmers who wouldn't be otherwise economically productive and would fail in the face of labour from other regions which are cheaper, in other countries. This not only impedes development, but results in people selling subsidies to one another, buying agricultural land en masse in order to claim vast subsidies to grow nothing (see Tate & Lyle in the UK - over £1bn a year), and vast amounts of food being burned and buried because it exceeds quota. This is positively insane, even though the rationale (price control - equally insane) makes sense in an obtuse protectionist sort of fashion. Some farmers will fail. Others will prosper. Food won't magically disappear overnight and leave us all starving.
Competition is essential, but so is cooperation. Again, though, you need the rule of law to set universal finite bounds on both phenomena, otherwise you end up with cancer in your soda and PMCs in your back yard, even more than already happens in the US.
I suppose that at least we live in interesting times.
I'm not saying we should eliminate regulation, or outright allow crap in our food (which to a large extent we do), only that we should really limit out spending/subsidies and gear our regulations toward increased competition, not less.
The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs.
There is a disparity between rich and poor in this country, sure, but come on. Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
So many of them are young and it used to make me sad but I have just learned to accept it. I always make a point to package up leftovers and hand them out. I'll even reach into my wallet and hand out a few dollars too.
If there were more I could do though, I would be more than happy to donate some of my time, as I'm sure many in this city would too.
Also, is more public housing the answer? Not sure about that one. They all look like government buildings with horrible fluorescent off-green lighting filled with junkies and drug addicts far from being cured.
Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
That is perhaps the most ignorant sentence I have ever read on HN. Most homeless people don't have a choice. If they do have a choice, the fact that they choose to live on the streets likely speaks to the horrific situation they would face at their home. I can assure you that no one wants to be homeless.
Seriously. Comments like that are the reason I try to frequent HN less often. I grew up in the mission in SF, but that was when it was still a 'ghetto' that nobody wanted to set foot in (I still have a lot of friends that are paranoid about it), and as you might assume from that, my family wasn't ever that financially well off either. So seeing things like this just makes me cringe at how disconnected and insensitive this newer wave of (for the lack of a better term) 'more fortunate' people are.
Being able to simultaneously look at the absurd rent prices in SF, and then interpret the homelessness problem as a 'choice' is some serious obliviousness, if not an all-out exercise in orwellian double-think. I know it's a bit of a popular 'thing' amongst a certain subculture in the Haight (hell some of my friends have done that), but that's been around for ages, and I'd hardly call that culture a majority...
The original article pretty much got it right: people here like living in bubbles.
There are exceptions that prove the rule. But "most" is an excuse.
As Paul Graham said on a different thread yesterday, if you have a choice between two explanations and one justifies you being lazy, choose the other one.
By "offer", do you mean for free? Well, duh. What the GP most likely meant is that some people prefer to be homeless rather than having to get and hold down a job to afford a place to live.
I've watched several friends spend two or three years doing nothing but hunt for a job, and they were lucky enough to have friends with couches to crash on, enough money for interview clothes and a computer to access job ads on. You act like that's a trivial step: it's not.
Besides the challenge of actually finding a job, a minimum wage job won't cover rent in SF and certainly not with money left over for things like food, transportation or phone service. Have you seen the installation art piece about the minimum wage? It's a box with a crank on it that spits out a penny every 4.97 seconds: http://disinfo.com/2012/12/the-mininum-wage-machine/ That's what working is like to most people, except often more dangerous and demeaning.
"Most street kids we spoke to came from one of two backgrounds: either they had job prospects (whether good or dead-end) but preferred the freedom of homelessness, or were transient homeless who fell in love with the street kid community...Street kids defied our expectations of living on the street as a last resort; instead they seem to be drawn to the Haight."
The article focuses on a very specific demographic of homeless people in a specific area of SF. These people do not represent a complete picture of homelessness. For example, most of the people interviewed in the article are white, but other races (esp. black folks) are several times more likely to be homeless or occupying shelter spaces.
> There is a disparity between rich and poor in this country, sure, but come on. Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
This is ludicrous. By almost every metric being homeless sucks: access to work is harder to find and keep, medical care isn't as available, physical safety is harder to keep, you are more likely to be arrested, you are more likely to be assaulted, etc. This mindset is straight out of the Victorian era.
> So many of them are young and it used to make me sad but I have just learned to accept it. I always make a point to package up leftovers and hand them out. I'll even reach into my wallet and hand out a few dollars too.
> If there were more I could do though, I would be more than happy to donate some of my time, as I'm sure many in this city would too.
Homelessness is a systemic issue that can't just be solved only with individual people's time and/or money.
> Also, is more public housing the answer? Not sure about that one. They all look like government buildings with horrible fluorescent off-green lighting filled with junkies and drug addicts far from being cured.
That is because the issues that go with homelessness are not simply done once someone gets shelter. Also, public housing in most places in the US is at capacity and cannot accommodate any more people until someone dies or moves out. Some locales also put qualifications on public housing that will, by definition, keep people homeless or dependent on that public housing indefinitely.
You need a citation to prove that homeless people don't want to be homeless?
Silicon Valley has peaked.
Idealistic, social-conscience-having nerds take note:
This is what happens when you let neoliberalism, Randroidism, and corporate psychopathy infect your tech community.
Technology is supposed to be used to create a Star Trek future. Not to spy on everyone as we make their jobs obsolete, drive up their rental costs, and put them on the street. Then demonstrate zero compassion for the victims that Silicon Valley has created.
Idealistic, social-conscience-having nerds take note:
This is what happens when you let neoliberalism, Randroidism, and corporate psychopathy infect your tech community.
Technology is supposed to be used to create a Star Trek future. Not to spy on everyone as we make their jobs obsolete, drive up their rental costs, and put them on the street. Then demonstrate zero compassion for the victims that Silicon Valley has created.
We really need to push these corporate/private-equity assholes out of our industry. We had a good thing for a while, but they came in and stole it. We have to take it back from those pieces of shit.
Having worked both in finance and in VC-funded "tech" I can only say that the people in finance are a lot better and much more ethical. It seems that technology management (at least in the VC-funded space, where the investors agree that only "their kind" is actually fit to manage) is an Argentina for people who get flushed out of banking because they're too unethical even for Wall Street.
They don't choose to be on the streets, specifically. Instead, they make terrible choices that lead to being on the streets due to things like addiction and mental illness.
> They don't choose to be on the streets, specifically. Instead, they make terrible choices that lead to being on the streets due to things like addiction and mental illness.
Except perhaps in the case of trauma-induced mental illness resulting from a trauma that is a forseeable consequence of a choice made prior to the existence of the illness (and even in that case it may be a problematic position), I am having trouble seeing even a remote argument that "being on the streets due to [...] mental illness" as the result of "terrible choices".
Not everyone can create, whether it's a website or designing the next iPhone. Very few people can. Those people that do are rewarded very well.
Besides, if we were all trying to cure hunger or house the homeless who would be creating all the fancy computers we use every day?
And why blame 'programmers', there are plenty of doctors, lawyers, and financial workers in SF that have to 'step over' the homeless every day on their way to work as well.
"Besides, if we were all trying to cure hunger or house the homeless who would be creating all the fancy computers we use every day?"
You're right, it is hard to imagine how we would survive without Yet Another SocialMobilePhotoSharing Application.
Remember the Dark Days, my friends? When to share a photo you actually had to be around people, and talk to them? Ugh. I shudder to think upon it. We lived like savages, back then; filthy, stinking savages.
Curing hunger and housing the homeless doesn't, the last time I checked, require creativity or programming talent. Growing food and constructing buildings are what we geeks like to call "mature technology", and thus not something we concern ourselves with except at the margins where changes in efficiency have economic impact.
In our world, the needs of many can be met by the work of a few. Only those few will prosper, while the rest languish. The harsh reality is that prospective parents that don't have anything to pass onto their children need to take a hard look at whether they should be having children, given that going forward there may very well be no way for those children to earn a living.