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.
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.
Broken families and lack of family planning lie at the heart of crime and poverty.
(I can already see the "eugenictler" strawman being put up in the distance)
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.
Empathy and social justice are crucial for any society that wants to be respected. You are proposing barbary. Social Darwinism.
Ironic on HN, because http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
You are judging them all as bad. It seems funny.
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.
Your friends are not a representative sample of the population of the united states.
Those who choose to have children are responsible for providing for them, not their neighbors.
People who can't take care of their children should be discouraged from procreating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention
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.
To instead overwork those who are employed and leave the rest to language is a conscious decision.
So let them be.
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.
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.
This article looks relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Stat...
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.
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".
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.
I would speculate that this is true for San Francisco, especially in the downtown (tenderloin) area.
"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.
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...
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.
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.
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]
- 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.
Places with good weather have huge visible homeless
populations
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.
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].
[1] From a study done by the London School of Economics: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/intergenerationalmobility.pd...
No.
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.
Absolutely fantastic comment.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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'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.
At least in SF a homeless person won't die from exposure in the wintertime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Eastside#Mental_Illnes...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely...
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.
http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
"So let's be clear what reducing economic inequality means. It is identical with taking money from the rich."
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equ...
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.
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.
Is that really true? http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/homelessness-statist... puts Europe, US and UK at very roughly 3-5 homeless per 1000.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
(see http://www.wraphome.org/downloads/without_housing.pdf [pdf] for a fascinating study on the origins of modern homelessness)
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.
Email is in my profile if you want to chat.
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.
http://sfcourts.org/modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=198...
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.
I guess in most countries governments contract out road construction to private companies anyways.
But my primary point was we as entrepreneurs and visionaries need to work on the hard problems.
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??
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.
http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
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 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.
It's interesting to note that SF also has perhaps the strongest "social safety net" programs in the country.
I don't understand how the author then makes the jump to "we need more social safety net programs."
Maybe we should just run them effectively.
Also the characterization of the social lives of SV employees is just plain wrong, but that's a tangential point.
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.
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.
just wait until you get the disillusionment from going down to "Hollywood"
That is quite possibly one of the stupidest comments I have ever read...
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.
Rant over.
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:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism#Classical_and_modern
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".
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.
"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."
- Liberalism, F. A. Hayek
"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
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.
Corporatism isn't a nation with a lot of powerful business corporations, it was a proto-fascist ideological movement in the syndicalist tradition.
Ref: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/138442/corporatism
EDIT: I should say "unprofitable without legislation"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To those surprised by this sentence, jarjoura might be influenced by this recent Priceonomics blog post: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kid...
"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."
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.
I have heard this from many americans, for some reason my european mindset cannot get why someone would not want shelter or food.. a reliable manner.
Most of these people have not had the opportunity to do any better. It is not their fault.
The homeless people who remain homeless are usually in these categories and it can be hard to help them.
{{Citation needed}}
I don't think anyone can say (with a straight face) that most people who live in poverty have chosen that lifestyle.
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".
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.
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.
Motivating the self-absorbed, indolent masses to legislate away homelessness is the problem.