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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   38347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.

  1. People don't become psychotic out of nowhere. Years of unrestricted drug use does that to a person. And no, I don't want the continuation of the war on drugs, but I'm convinced that without somehow removing the drugs from the equation it's infinitely harder to approach a solution.
  2. Why do other countries don't have this problem? It's multifaceted, for sure - Finland and Japan use the "housing first" system Scott suggests and achieve great results, but I'll highlight one factor that I don't see anyone talking about in the first world: shame. In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless. It's largely a cultural thing, but ultimately having relatives care about the homeless is a cheaper solution than building endless fields of Soviet blocks and intentionally creating ghettos that require policing. Is it possible to change a culture? How exactly is the western culture different? This is much harder to answer, but if we are talking about an ideal world with ideal outcomes, I'd prefer the community that experiences the issue to directly handle the issue.

It's predicated on the idea that to solve the problems with the homeless, you must solve the problems the homeless have. And that is simply not true. You don't need to solve the problems the yellow smoke has, and you don't need to solve the problems the (aggressive, drug-addled, mentally ill) homeless have either.

Suppose we've built institutions for the mentally ill. And we put people in them, and they take their drugs, and they get better. Now we let them out. We don't need armies of social service workers... we just tell them that if they don't take their drugs and they start doing whatever got them locked up, we're going to treat them as criminals this time. If they can't understand that, they're not well enough to be let out. And so each time they don't take their drugs, we lock them up for some fixed and increasing term until either they're locked up forever or stop committing crimes.

That's the nice approach. The nastier approach just treats them as ordinary criminals from the get-go and ignores their mental health problems.

Long term incarceration is expensive. In California, it is about 350$ a day. And you would have to be prepared to lock up a lot of people, because the chronic homeless population is heavily slanted towards people who are unable to follow their long term incentives -- jail one to deter 100 will not work.

If we ignore the utility to the homeless themselves (as you seem to prefer), the question becomes whether the negative externalities of the median homeless person are above that sum. I don't doubt that there are some whose negative externalities can reach 1k$/day, but I don't think that is the typical case.

I think the obvious is unions. Outsource this stuff to the rust belt. The flight each way is like $1k with security.

The all-in costs should be something like 16k a year in rural areas. Notre Dame room and board is 17k. Lower the quality of the housing and the food. Add-in some expenses for security. Probably got more rural than there. Get rid of so it’s impossible to bring in substances. Make it one road in one road out type of compound.

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