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Comment by teaearlgraycold | Hacker News Reader

Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works. Why should someone grind away barely surviving when they could become homeless and get UBI instead? Now you need to pay UBI for way more than just 90k people.

Not that I think we shouldn't try to solve the problem, shouldn't work towards UBI, etc. Just saying the shortest path from status quo to the ideal will break the system.

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> Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the most efficient thing, giving people money to go find housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in the idea of how our society works.

This is a cultural thing that is harder to change - but it does not result in this.

I live in Finland and the only reason someone is actually homeless here is because they refuse to take the aid that's given to them.

I can assure you, that no one who doesn't have severe mental issues WANT to live on social wellfare.

In the US, the homeless commonly refused aid too. Mark Laita, who runs the large yt channel where he talks to the homeless, has spoken at length about this.

Because of policies mandating to stop using drugs, follow a specific religion or give up their possessions and live in bunks without private spaces or storage for personal items.

Mark is intimately aware of those programs and the hurdles they can create, he works directly with many of them. However he has repeatedly had people who come to him begging for help, and then they do nothing to actually realize that help. Even the most basic "Be outside your motel room I bought you at 11am to get in the car I will send that will take you to the counselor I'll pay for" and then they ghost it.

At the end of the day, they would in fact rather live on the street doing dope rather than live in a (paid for) motel room (or even apartment) and work a job.

If you try to take Finnish cultural norms around work and apply them to the entire American population, you're going to have a bad time.

There are a lot of people in America who want to live on social welfare.

I don't think this is something you can change intentionally without extreme and politically unviable interventions.

I don’t know how many people that is. Understanding the quantity would be very useful for shaping policy.

I do think in the US there could be much more multi-generational trauma from our cold heartless system. Honestly some people are owed a lifetime of relaxation.

A lot of Americans think they want to sit around doing nothing all day, but having done that on medical leave, and observed other people, my remark is, people hate ennui.

And most people can't get enough stimulation just from social media or TV, so given infinite leisure time, a lot of them are going to go stir-crazy and want to do _something_.

Look at all the elderly people who are constantly craving _some_ stimulus in their lives.

People think that the natural state of others if given no challenge in their lives is indolence, but having met a number of people looking for social safety nets, most of them just want the ability to get out of the pit they're in...and even the ones who think they want to just not care forever, everyone I've ever met who ended up in situations like that, had to find _something_ to stimulate themselves, sometimes including developing crippling addictions to feel _something_ for a moment.

Thanks, this is actually very insightful. Reminds me of the hamster entertainment park/heroin experiment.

I think some studies have refuted this and found that most often if you house people they become productive. But those are very small studies and I am skeptical they could scale that well or persevere long-term, it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it, and people will find ways to manipulate the system and steal from it. But UBI is inevitable, we will have to figure it out or watch our civilization fail.

> it will just bother too many others who are not benefiting from it

The bit this comment misses is that the people who are not getting anything from it would be the people who pay for it. You can’t create such a strong incentive for failure and not expect failure to increase.

The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets. This leads to more sustainable street-level businesses (because there's more foot traffic), which leads to more choice and better prices. Overall it's just a higher quality of living.

Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my perspective.

The basis of your premise is correct. If people are sufficiently deprived, some non-trivial portion of them will become highly anti-social, often violent, often criminal, and otherwise just disruptive to society. Even if it’s entirely their own fault for ending up that way. But you’re missing a couple of things.

Firstly, if you reward people for failing, you’re incentivising more people to fail. So the problem isn’t that a poorly conceived welfare program wouldn’t manage the anti-social aspect of society properly, it’s that it would create more of it.

Secondly, the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.

So yes, managing depravation at the bottom has a benefit for society. But the threat of “give us money or we’ll just rob you all the time and otherwise ruin society as much as possible” isn’t specifically a good argument for the type of policy you’re advocating.

> Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.

I feel like you are conflating two things here that are not related. These places can take the heavy handed law and order approach they have because they are some of the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least in Japan, it’s nearly impossible to not have some form of housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a one-room apartment.

This just seems like a completely insane take to me. Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.

Singapore is the most expensive city in the world, has no minimum wage, and doesn’t have a universal welfare program. It also routinely hands out prison time and caning (which is rather gruesome if you weren’t familiar with it) as punishments for crimes as minor as graffiti. That combined with an effective police force, a very high police to resident ratio, very low corruption, and there’s no question at all why their country is so clean and safe.

> Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime approach with an actually effective police force has incredibly low crime rates.

You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?

Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.

> You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what is cause and which is effect?

Out of the top 10 lowest crime countries in the world, you have two micro states, Armenia (which has its own unique problems), and 7 rich countries that are either overtly authoritarian and very hard on crime, or are far more authoritarian than most westerners would be comfortable with (especially with regards to their justice system) and also very hard on crime (those being UAE, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).

What is the cause and effect? If people think they are likely to be caught for committing a crime, and that the punishment will likely be severe, then they are less likely to commit crime. This is simply common sense.

> Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other methods.

I’ll just directly quote my parent comment.

> the people in the middle who pay for everything have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can take the big social safety net approach like an idealised Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach

Though I will add that the social safety net approach seems to only work in rather limited circumstances. I doubt Singapore for instance would be able to implement such an approach, even if they wanted to.

I have a pet theory which says wealth and political stability over long periods of time and cultural homogeneity together lead to lower crime rates and this doesn't indicate anything about how law-abiding these countries citizens are or how big their social safety net is. And those countries still remain higher crime rate than countries who are both hard on crime, have an effective police force and have citizens who believe someone is watching them and will severely punish them even when they are out of the FOV of a CCTV camera (God in Islam. Christianity doesn't count, you won't be punished cause Jesus died for your sins).

Cultural, religious and ethnic homogeny are all obviously very beneficial for social stability, and I think the homogeny of Scandinavia is one of the main reasons that its social approach to managing crime has been so successful up until now. With the other major difference being that involuntary institutionalisation is rather high in those countries, where a lot of the anglo-sphere has instead opted to just release those people to live on the streets. These are however massively controversial ideas to a lot of people.

Singapore also proves that you can establish an incredibly high level of social stability without that homogeny though (and even with massive inequality), as the composition of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity they have has been a source of instability and violent confrontation for nearly every other country in the region.

> This just seems like a completely insane take to me.

Not any more than the original. But yeah, I agree it’s insane to reduce the whole crime problem to just those two variables.

I haven't seen anybody in this thread suggesting that there are only two variables involved in managing crime rates. This discussion is about two different general approaches to the problem, each of which have their own complex set of variable to manage.

It's your suggestion that the low-crime jurisdictions that take the "hard on crime" approach can do so because they are just naturally low-crime jurisdictions and they have the luxury of being able to implement any policy they want that I consider to be rather insane, and completely in conflict with all of the data on the topic.

The government cleans the streets regularly, so relocating unclean people into places the city doesn't clean isn't going to make the city any cleaner. You probably haven't had much experience being around people who can't take of themselves and haven't got anyone caring for them. Whatever properties they inhabit will become blighted and swarms of insects like cockroaches will infest everything nearby.

Is there any way to turn these people into productive members of society?

You'd first need to help them live with dignity. For the genuinely homeless the only social environment that's equipped to care for them are mental hospitals. Secondly you'd have to recalibrate your expectations for what productivity means. A person who isn't functional enough to to work with a manager to help a corporation achieve its goals, can still make meaningful contributions to society. Even if it's simply by helping their own self and then telling their story. Like the stories of the people with encephalitis lethargica who came back to life by taking the drug l-dopa. It didn't exactly help them rejoin the workforce, but it brought hope to humanity.

> The thing that frustrates me about that is that the people who pay for it will get something from it. They get cleaner, safer streets.

At what price? What alternatives exist to them?

As I have gotten older I have slowly been getting tired of supporting people who not only do not pull their weight, but also whine and demand even more from those of us paying for the services they receive. Not only they are not grateful for receiving social services that their taxes are unable to fund, they also have the stones to blame those of us paying for everything for all their problems.

Sorry for the rant.

I think we already allocate enough money to solve the problem. Spending more will likely just reinforce the industrial homelessness complex. We need to change how the money is spent.

But also, clearly what we spend money on isn’t fixing the problems. The homeless know that better than we do. They’re right to complain.

You don’t have to house the people in very desireable locations. If becoming homeless means that you instead get relegated to a massive concrete block, most productive members of society would do their hardest to leave as soon as possible. Those that don’t (for a variety of reasons) are at least off the streets.

That situation would be significantly better then a temporary bunk in a warehouse which is the best case scenario given all the problems with way homeless people are provided with shelter in the US.

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