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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37705 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.

I think it is becoming pretty obvious that homelessness is a national problem that can no longer be addressed at a local level.

If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas. This doesn't require maliciousness on anyone's part. Imagine city A has the correct solution, and city B just lets them die in the streets. If you are a doctor in city B with a homeless patient, your best advice to them might be to tell them to get a bus ticket to city A. And that doctor would be right to continue sending patients from city B to city A until the conditions in both cities was equal. Or if you are just a semi-aware homeless person, you'd do the move yourself.

If you are just a random person in one of these cities, and all you care about is just not having homelessness. Then being closer to city B is the best option. Its cheaper and will cause the homeless to flee or be taken away by people in the system that care. Any additional amount of draconian rules or cruelty towards homelessness will move your city closer to B. If your job has you living in city A and taking care of homeless people, then you are probably correct to be a little pissed off at the people in city B advocating cruelty or draconian rules in their city. They are just foisting their problem off onto you.

Once you realize its a national problem the approaches that make sense change quite a bit.

There are lots of ways to address it. The government can build the ghettos. That has been done many times in the past. The federal government could offer subsidies to state and local entities that provide beds to homelessness. I think that would at least fit with our existing federal system of governance. The government can build prisons / mental institutions / etc.

Addressing the problem at the national level will not look pretty. It will almost certainly look ugly. Because homeless people have lives that are objectively shitty right now. Even if you are improve their lives significantly you aren't likely to get out of "objectively bad life to live" and into "objectively good life to live". So you'll have the government running a program where a bunch of people seemingly live terrible lives on the government dime, and it will definitely look like the government is causing them to live these terrible lives.

There are a few paths I can envision that lead to 'national government addresses homelessness':

  1. Some existing government org or agency decides to make it their responsibility. I don't see this as very likely. Maybe someone will get suckered into it, but no savvy politician would willingly choose for it to happen. Again, this will be an ugly program that wins you nothing but national condemnation.
  2. The treatment of homeless people gets much much worse. The number of homeless people continues to expand anyways. The calculus on helping these people will eventually shift. But I think it will get very bad before the calculus shifts. Think of every downtown city being worse than Kensington in Philly. And a few cities having violent riots where people hunt down and kill the homeless.
  3. The issue grows worse, but people and political organizations make a big push to have it addressed at the national level. Some well-meaning but ultimately stupid politicians spearhead the effort and put their names on it. Their names get dragged through the mud for the results, but it gets the ball rolling on a federal bureaucracy.

If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas.

This is true only if homeless people have no agency to determine their place of residence, or if the solution is one that the homeless people themselves prefer to the default "unsolved" conditions.

If on the other hand there is a solution that the homeless people would prefer to avoid and they have some agency to avoid it by relocating, then the incentive would flow the opposite direction, with localities that do not adopt it getting flooded.

I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail. It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.

The problem with homelessness is the problem it causes for others, not the problems the homeless are themselves suffering.

Solving homelessness means solving the problems they cause for others. It does not mean fixing their problems as people.

Understand that for many the problem is in fact the suffering the homeless people themselves are experiencing. You might not care about them, but many do, and this is one of the core disconnects in these debates.

Of course I understand that. I can hardly help but understand that when surveying the topic in any depth at all. My understanding of the perspective is why I spoke against it. I don't think there's any policy that can achieve this, and therefore all homelessness policies advocated by you and yours are unlikely to achieve actual results. That's what I want to communicate, to you and to others.

If you'd like to do charity, you may do so in your own time with your own resources, but society needs governance, and that means dealing with the problems they are causing to others, and framing the debate in that manner.

Human suffering is not a solvable problem.

Especially and particularly the suffering of people caused by their own decision making. You can't solve people fucking their own life up without preventing them from having the freedom to control their own lives.

While I agree with you on the general idea here (that we shouldn’t try to solve their suffering) I disagree with this general idea.

You absolutely can do this, it is just incredibly expensive. With enough resources you can catch someone every time they fall, and piece their foot back together after every time they shoot it. Do I want to expend the immense resources this would take in literally insane people? No. But it is possible, especially when the insane people’s own standards for “not suffering” are far below that of a middle-class teenager.

Some people certainly want to expend the resources required, and I think a different argumentative tack is necessary to bring those people around.

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