It's a nice reminder that everybody wins when nobody loses. Life isn't a zero sum game.
But from the mercenary point of view, I think reducing poverty is worth it from a security and quality of life point of view. If public spaces are dangerous that is no good for people and poverty also degrades peoples quality of life, examples like not having to step over homeless people outside your front door don't really have dollar values, but they make people happier.
Not trying to be crass but that's literally reflected in the real estate prices. Homes in areas with lots of homelessness and related crime in the area will have lower prices than equivalent homes somewhere else. It does have a dollar value.
But it's not extra money in your pocket if you don't sell your property.
(As an American) when I think of places that fight crime primarily with welfare (aka the idea better policing doesn’t work, equality will fix it), I think of San Francisco and Seattle which have crazy homeless and crime problems.
However, it seems to me like in Europe, plenty of places seem to do this and see positive results.
What’s the difference? Why is the welfare city of San Francisco terrible but the welfare city of Amsterdam/Stockholm/etc seem to be fine?
I am in Canada, so we have a blend of American, and European society, and it seems that when people want to extract money from the community, the problem isn't resolved. I see this in the homeless/drug space from activist organizations who are extracting lots of money from government, but are not doing a good job of solving problems, as that would end the flood of money.
As an aside: The big cities in the Netherlands also have some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. If you pick a random smaller town/city it is likely to have less poverty than Amsterdam, (but also less wealthy residents).
My neighbor was the director of a homeless shelter and the crap he had to deal with was unreal.
I look at it kinda like the anti car movement. The big companies supported whichever side would save them money. They supported getting rid of street parking for bike lanes and making parking under a building part of code.... then sabatoged it by making the parking all permit only or very expensive. Now theres too little parking either way to go shopping and the anti car people get to look bad. But it didnt really affect the average s class driver at all so who cares right?
This is just the impression I got working downtown for 10 years. Probably have some misunderstandings.
At which level they should or should not exist is dependent on many parameters, but I would not classify it as bizarre.
People in the US are fortunate enough to have so much space that many times distances themselves serve as the gate, but if you live in a more dense society, perhaps a controlled border is necessary for some purpose.
It is dystopian though, I imagine it is a direct representation of lack of trust between the members in society, and likely related to the size of wealth gaps.
Every EU country is.
At current technology levels, it's simply impossible to have a "social net" (i.e. guaranteeing every citizen enough resources for a minimum standard of living) and open borders (i.e. infinite demand for said resources)
Oh? Well how easy is it for a poor person from India to move to the Netherlands to take advantage of this?
That being said, there is a different argument to be made. The Netherlands does not have a lot of private schools, and private schools generally tend to not be more exclusive than regular schools. This means that an applicant that went to private school might have an advantage but generally you can go to any school and there will be plenty of decent paying jobs or chances for you. Along with that, every person in The Netherlands is able to go and study. Either you take out a (compared to the US, small) loan and even that is being reverted to a gift from the government or you work along side to it. I am quite sure that this is not the case in India and therefore a poor person will have less of a chance then a rich person. But this is unrelated to the companies hiring and it is purely related to your study.
The point of the parent is that it is hard for a random Indian to immigrate to the Netherlands, that they must show some skill or ability in order to gain entry.
The argument is that the Netherlands can afford their social net because they do not have an endless stream of people coming asking for benefits. So by limiting the amount of immigration, the Netherlands is acting like a gated community.
A further argument along these lines would be, if you do not feel that the Netherlands is acting as a gated community. Should the Netherlands open it's social programs to people not in the Netherlands? i.e. Should Americans or Mexicans be allowed to apply and receive benefits from the Netherlands even though they have no tie to the Netherlands?
From a cultural standpoint I wouldn't want to open up further, from a purely theoretical standpoint I would have no problem opening up our social programs to outside the Netherlands if the additional group (regardless of it being a group, country, province, state, whatever) pays the same amount of tax as we do. But good luck implementing that, income tax for India is max 30%, compare that to our lowest bracket which is already 37% and goes up to 50%.
If you throw in people that live in earthquake/typhoon/volcanic/etc locales, with different diseases and food production, natural resources, climate, and scale up the population of people to administer all those benefits by a couple orders of magnitude, you can bet you’ll be paying a lot more in taxes to try to afford the same quality of life for everyone.
The political reason for the Dutch social safety: stop an impending socialist/communist revolution. This was a real threat in Europe at the time. A second reason was scientific: poor people were spreading diseases which are a threat for everyone. A third reason was economic: healthy and happy people work harder.
now of course I am not claiming that this is true, nobody can know, and I'd much rather we helped eachother than not, but there's certainly an argument to be made.
Don't you think there's value in playing the devil's advocate, just for the sake of the argument ?
because it's fundamentally bad-faith argumentation and when it's used to argue that people don't deserve to live, people find that adversarial and an attack on their existence.
> Don't you think there's value in playing the devil's advocate, just for the sake of the argument ?
look, you're not arguing about the color of the bikeshed here, are you?
I think you'll find there's certain viewpoints that we don't want people even "hypothetically" (not really, the whole point of the devil's advocate is that you inherently feel that it has some merit worth) advocating for. People find it real offensive if you argue that they don't deserve to live, and in this case that includes disadvantaged people who are barely scraping by.
it is (or can be used as) a coward's way to argue for something that you think holds some merit but you don't actually want to attach your name to, and when the argument itself is adversarial/antagonistic or genocidal we should generally not be encouraging that even in a "hypothetical" (again, not really) sense, no.
And when you are basically arguing "poor people need to be cut off from their safety net" etc that does reach towards the genocidal things - everyone knows what happens next when people on the edge of survival are cut off from their remaining resources. It's arguing they as a class don't deserve to survive.
Like gosh "I said it was hypothetical, it's a devil's advocate, what are you even mad about???" is such a HN perspective.
I could not argue for letting people suffer and not helping them, I'm not a lunatic. Would the argument that they are unfit for current conditions hold some merit ? Perhaps. I cannot know, and neither can you. It is a far too complex topic to firmly attest an opinion on, especially with our limited current knowledge. Is that an extra reason that this makes it an interesting topic to discuss ? I think so.
The extrapolation to genocide from a simple discussion is akin to calling everyone with different opinions a nazi. It's plain silly.
But that's literally what you did in your top comment
If one does not already know of any bullet proof counter argument, then presenting a "hypothetical" (devil's advocate) argument is extremely helpful to investigate why that argument is in fact wrong (or the "hypothetical" might even be correct. How can you know if you don't investigate the counter arguments?)
Refusing to engage with an argument because it is "dangerous" leads to no deeper understanding whatsoever.
A.
The sum total of all humans alive at moment X are fit to be alive at X and have an equal fitness of survival.
Divergence occurs when we talk about probability of surviving in future time frame Y. Even so, criteria that defines current and future fittest in "survival of fittest" can be many things. Dinosaurs roamed the earth, but mice survived whatever killed the huge, strong lizards.
B.
A society that does not care for its least might find that its least are not loyal. This can have security implications, especially when bordered by unfriendly states.
A perhaps generous view of how the Federal Reserve manages our economy is to avoid inflation. A less generous view might be that they aim to keep unemployment high enough that workers are desperate enough to accept shit jobs, and that wages don't take too large a slice of the pie. Obviously this requires less than full employment, such that they actually define full employment as "the highest level of employment that is consistent with price stability".
In other words, one output of the way our economy is managed is that some people are desperate. At that point you're simply stack-ranking people, and claiming that the bottom 3-4% deserve to be desperate regardless of actual fitness. (Never mind that we don't have anything close to a meritocracy.)
There's no need to make insinuations that the fed is conspiring to oppress workers when their mandate (as defined by congress) is to both have maximum employment and to avoid inflation.
"The Federal Reserve Act mandates that the Federal Reserve conduct monetary policy "so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/monetary-polic...
>In other words, one output of the way our economy is managed is that some people are desperate. At that point you're simply stack-ranking people, and claiming that the bottom 3-4% deserve to be desperate regardless of actual fitness. (Never mind that we don't have anything close to a meritocracy.)
Contrary to what you might think, "full employment" doesn't mean 0% unemployment. There are many reasons why you don't want 0% unemployment[1]. Therefore the fed targeting 3-4% unemployment (or whatever they think "full employment" is, isn't some sort of plot for "stack-ranking people".
Otherwise, we’re in societies that evolve at crazy paces, some parts of our lives 5 generations ago were radically different from our lives now, while other groups almost didn’t change. I don’t see the concept of “fitness” to be relevant to our current situation where we have no idea of what’s coming up even in 50 years. In times of uncertainty, diversity is a better bet than trying to optimize for a status quo.
A simple example is that people in a poverty culture tend to spend money immediately on short term gratification. On one hand, we could assume this is because they are foolish, but many have experience that if they try to save $20 for something longer term, someone in their household will end up just taking the money for something else. So their are acting rationally by trying to convert that $20 to something that will bring pleasure to them rather than deferring the pleasure only to lose the ability to spend the $20 on something they would enjoy.
The latter is not generally what we do as humans, only when all other means of survival fail do we migrate. We have the ability to use technology to adapt to our environments, such as in making clothing, and even change the environments, like making a warm dwelling or lighting a fire. These are within our toolsets for survival so we should use them, versus moving to where we happen to find adaption without these abilities.