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Comment by motters | Hacker News Reader

This is an example of making a bad system more efficiently bad. So it's great that the process can be made more efficient, but that doesn't address the cause of why people are having to rely upon food banks in the first place or why food banks have been expanding their activities in the last few years. If food banks exist then something is wrong at a more fundamental level and it would be better to direct efforts towards trying to fix that problem.

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I'm not sure that falls to Toyota to do, though. I would commend them for what they have done, that's a large and direct improvement to the lives of the needy. Just throwing money at the problem rarely results in the same.

What's wrong with food banks? Let's look at the options to handle a person without a job or savings.

1. ignore them, of course

2. give them a job

3. give them money

4. give them food

1 is awful, 2 is infeasible, you can't magically find a productive job for everyone, 3 and 4 both seem fine to me. Would you have them all buying food in stores instead? That seems like it'll take more money to get the same amount of people fed.

What would you prefer?

I would say that 3 tends to be better than 4. This is because it allows greater agency and self-determination to the people you help, which in turn means a greater improvement to their life.

The only downsides I can see are (1) a soup kitchen may become a place for social networks to be established, which is also a benefit for those helped, and (2) the food-to-money ratio may be greater if a soup kitchen can buy the food in bulk (though then one might think about setting up systems where poor people can buy-in-bulk together).

As for 2, this option is actually feasible and the best of all four you have listed. It may not be possible to find a job of the same productivity as the average currently employed person, but you don't have to. As long as the productivity is positive (no matter how small), you get a benefit to society. And, obviously, the benefit to those you help by giving them a job is many orders of magnitudes higher than if you just gave them money, let alone just giving them food.

I think it's okay that, as the donor, you want some reassurance that they won't spend all your money on drugs. They have a choice to not accept your donation.

Ideally it would be a combination of money and food.

You don't need reassurances about how the money will be used. Part of it may be used for drugs. But if a drug user is self-destructive enough to buy only drugs and no food, he or she would probably just take an overdose anyway.

As a case in point, Norway's social safety net provides a living wage to anyone who can't provide for themselves. This involves a lot of drug users. They do end up spending some of the money on drugs, but at least they don't starve or freeze to death. I think this is a tradeoff that's worth it. You both save the effort of micromanaging and provide some dignity to people who have too little of it. If someone wants to be self-destructive, they will be regardless of the circumstances.

It's easy for the productivity of a job to be negative. Transport costs, management costs, opportunity cost because even a jobless person can be productive.

I don't think anyone here will disagree with you that the large problem of hunger is a problem and should be solved.

But how can you solve it? That's a huge problem!

In engineering, and particularly with software, we seek to answer the small questions until we build a robust system.

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