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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25921 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

NYT: A City’s Campaign Against Homelessness Brings Stories of Violence Local officials called for residents to deter the homeless in Kalispell, Mont., but unhoused residents said they were then accosted and attacked.

In Kalispell, city leaders approved an ordinance to punish motorists who give money or supplies to panhandlers. They shut off water and electricity at a city park where some were seeking refuge. The county commissioners wrote an open letter to the community early last year, warning that providing shelter or resources to homeless people would “enable” them and entice more of them into the area.

Homeless residents said the city’s letter unleashed a punishing public backlash, with many reporting that groups of young people were roaming through homeless encampments and tormenting those living there.

The article then notes acts of violence including eggs thrown, paintballs shot, and one homeless beaten dead (though the motive is not specified). None of this seems particularly remarkable to me, as the base rate for being subject to intra-homeless violence and general excess mortality seems substantial in any American city.

Yet the article's top reader comments predictably shout from the rooftops "cruelty", "what happened to compassion", "these so-called Christians", "it's a war against the homeless, not homelessness". Worse, I don't get the sense this chorus is particularly performative as compared to other virtue signaling hobby horses. Instead, my read, based on nothing more than a decade-long familiarity of NYT reader comments, is that a majority of the readership genuinely believes the people of Kalispell, Montana to be deplorables as a result of their anti-homeless actions.

I haven't egged, paintballed, or beaten any homeless and don't intend to start, but I firmly believe that any city will be worse off if a "compassionate" genie magically conjured up 100 homeless people to live its streets; no comment on whether I think a city should welcome a "cruel" genie who's able and willing to magically poof away the same. I also understand second order effects and believe people respond to incentives. It seems to me, then, that every compassionate Times reader equals something like 0.0001 compassionate genies, and every cruel Kalispell resident 0.01 cruel genies. Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused, and a Kalispell with a cruel lid on the homeless, and maybe even a reduction down the line.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion? Even if the rational counterarguments are themselves obvious, it seems like a fundamentally losing messaging game. We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate. Trying to shout from the rooftops that compassion is actually bad when it comes to the homeless feels akin to telling the world that generosity is bad when it comes to tipping. Which is why I'm resigned that no matter how many articles are written about the tipping culture being out of control, it will creep up to more industries and circumstances and higher preset amounts. Similarly, I'm resigned that more tax and charity dollars will go to the homeless and the homeless industrial complex ad infinitum, because you can't argue against compassion, at least not outside of the ratsphere and among the voting masses.

But perhaps an answer is to change the framing entirely. Ivy League campus DEI would have never died from straight white men (and adjacent Asians) arguing how anti-white and anti-man the apparatus is; it's just not persuasive enough for the public long accustomed to hearing about oppression, systemic racism, patriarchy, and the value of diversity. Falling the accepted wisdom requires something entirely different, recently having one oppressed in-group fight another until the contradiction is impossible to sustain.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

By showing that what is claimed is compassionate is not really so.

Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused

The alternative hypothesis is that the homelessness in San Francisco is driven by a very brutal housing market.

For example, this paper finds that "a 10% reduction in housing costs is estimated to lower homelessness rates by around 4.5%". The median rent in SF is $3275 and $1434 in Kalispell, MT (i.e. 130% higher in SF).

It always kind of confuses me that people think treating the homeless a little bit meaner or nicer will have a meaningful effect. Being homeless really, really sucks. I don't think it is the lack-of-sucking that enables the homeless to keep being homeless.

Seriously think about it: you've homeless for 4 years, have no education, references, or work experience. 2/3 long-term homeless have mental health issues and 2/3 have drug issues, so tack on one of those.

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?

(This isn't to say that typical "compassionate" solutions are effective either)

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?

That’s not the point of shooting paintballs at them. The point is to make them go away. To send the very clear message, “You are not welcome in this area. The next time you come to this area, something even worse will happen to you.”

My neighborhood has a very bad homeless problem. They have colonized several areas, setting up elaborate multi-tent encampments on residential sidewalks and next to businesses. Recently, one of them decided to set up his encampment - which included multiple shopping carts roped together - right in front of my apartment complex, with the carts blocking the footpath. I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc. None of this was designed to help him better himself, or to show him a path forward to reintegrate with society. It was intended only to dissuade him, in the strongest possible terms, from ever showing his face near this complex again. And sure enough, I haven’t seen him since. I did the same to a different bum whom I caught digging in our dumpster. Haven’t seen him since that day either.

As far as I can tell, very few of these long-term homeless have any chance of effectively reintegrating into normal society. Furthermore, I do not care if they do. I don’t concern myself with their wellbeing. My only concern is doing everything in my (very limited) power to get them as far away from me as possible.

I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc

I wish I had your fortitude, and I'd appreciate any member of my community who did the same.

My fear with doing something like that is it escalating into physical violence (I'm fit, but pretty short). Did you worry about it escalating? Best case scenario, I end up getting shanked and recovering for a week in the hospital. Worse case, I get killed. Worst case, I kill the homeless person and get my and my family's lives destroyed by my local government and media.

Oh god yes, I was internally terrified. This guy was a bit shorter than me (and I’m a short guy) but could almost certainly have kicked my ass if he’d decided to fight me. (I’ve never been in a fight and have no confidence in my capacity for interpersonal violence.) He was clearly an immigrant, presumably from Central America, and I wonder if fear of deportation was the main thing that caused him not to escalate things to a physical altercation. He got in my face at one point and made a vague physical threat, and that’s when I told him, “You just threatened me? Cool, that’s exactly what I needed in order to get the police involved.” He seemed to immediately regret it, and that’s when he started gathering his shit and preparing to leave.

I have gotten very close to getting beaten up by unstable homeless people, because I am too proud to passively accept their insults or let them colonize public spaces. If a time traveler from the future informed me that my cause of death will be “stabbed by homeless black guy at the trolley station following an avoidable verbal altercation” it would not surprise me in the least.

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job?

The paintballs are motivation to be homeless somewhere else. A local solution that is not masquerading as a global solution.

I don’t think @vpn’s comment is advocating for trying to create a negative sum game where cities race to the bottom to be as nasty as possible to the homeless, but he’s welcome to correct me.

As the others have noted, the cruel response is meant to motivate the homeless to go somewhere else. This seems optimal if it means moving them from a place that wishes to make itself known as "cruel" [to the chronically homeless] to a place that wants itself seen as "compassionate".

I'll add too that it's also optimal if it means moving them from high cost of living to low COL areas.

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivation behind the paintballs. The local citizens are not trying to solve the problem of homelessness, locally or globally. They are acting in their self interest, attempting to preserve the good aspects of their city and prevent them from sliding down into vagrancy, filth, violence, and drugs. This is a broad, human, historical civilizational norm.

Austin, SF, and Seattle violate this norm. They attract vagrancy rather than repel it.

If you want to solve homelessness, start with one. Pick a project person, take them into your home, let their problems become your problems, and I believe you will understand the nature of the solution and be able to advocate for it more effectively.

Can you spell out why you believe that giving things to the homeless, or abstaining from assaulting or expelling them, is bad? Is it just the "more of them will move into the area" thing (so it's bad that they disgrace some people who don't want anything to do with them with their presence, as opposed to... staying somewhere far away from civilisation? If they otherwise just hung out in another city, the total number of people unwillingly exposed to the homeless would be about the same), or do you actually think that this materially increases the number of homeless (either by keeping them alive when they would otherwise die, or by incentivising people to become homeless who otherwise wouldn't)?

It seems to me that the last theory would require extraordinary evidence, and the "homeless would stay in the woods if civilisation were successfully hostile to them" route can be expected to result in them dying all the same (I'd guess that the majority of people who are homeless don't have the executive function/skill level to eke out a living on land that is so useless as to remain unclaimed by civilisation). If your ask amounts to solving the homeless problem by accelerating the homeless-to-dead pipeline, you should be explicit about it, because the main obstacle to realising your proposal will be that upon reflection most people will be against it on moral principle, and this topic attracts enough attention that you can't hope to sneak some policy past the public without them realising this.

I would think the point is instead "accelerating the homeless here to homeless in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco pipeline". As South Park explained many years ago with their "California is super cool to the homeless" song.

The effect of the carrots and sticks is largely to displace them to areas that are more willing to give up beauty, cleanliness, safety, tax dollars etc. vs. areas that are less willing to. Seems Pareto optimal for all involved, including the homeless themselves for a sufficient amount of sticks should they stick around in a hostile region.

There's a big difference between NYC homeless problem, California homeless problem, and Kalispell, Montana having a homeless problem. NYC homeless are people who are/were otherwise living in NYC and wind up on the street, NYC faces relatively little risk of attracting outsize homeless population to the working population, NYC is simply so large that its resources will be large enough to handle the situation. California cities attract some homeless people, who like the mild weather, and faces some risk of attracting too many homeless people if they are too generous, but again has a large economy and resources to handle them.

Kalispell, Montana can quite easily attract too many homeless people for a town of 20k residents to handle. We have no concept of residency in a town, as opposed to a state, and a strong tradition of freedom of movement between states. If Kalispell is facing a wave of homelessness among people who grew up in Kalispell and its environs then Kalispell has some responsibility to care for them. But to say that Kalispell must care for thousands of homeless residents raised anywhere in the United States is difficult. And if Kalispell is too generous, they may run that risk, of thousands of bums finding their way to town to take advantage of the situation.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

This is the problem brought up in David Stove's What's Wrong with Benevolence? His answer to the title is: nothing, if it is combined with other virtues. The elevation of benevolence to the status of fundamental virtue, which began around the 18th century and which was accelerated by utilitarians.

What is required is the recognition that other virtues have a fundamental value, e.g. justice and prudence. This is not easy, even if the arguments are good, because most people are highly agreeable (in the Big Five sense) so they fear conflict, and they tend to see benevolence as a route to conflict-avoidance: "If only we are kind enough to the unhoused darlings, they won't cause any trouble to us."

It's the same dynamic with a lot of woke activism. Disagreeable radicals can bully around most people, because most people's default model for handling such conflicts is to bend the knee and hope it saves their own necks.

So elevating benevolence as the sole virtue has the persuasive power of elevating most people's submissive natures into approved virtues, and hence it has both philosophical arguments and self-interest in its favour. That's also why people's benevolence tends to extend to e.g. accepting misbehaviour by the homeless, but not Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk and donating all your income to the poor. Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.

I'll add one more explanation, beyond most people are highly agreeable: most people are lazy. Figuring out what is just and prudent takes more mental energy because it involves trade offs. It's way easier to assign a vague benevolence label onto some idea or policy. Hence, it's easy to be pro raising the minimum wage because it's benevolent! Takes way too much thinking to figure out the second order costs that make it unjust and imprudent.

An example of this is labels for legislation. The reason why they tend to have fuzzy "apple pie" names like "Inflation Reduction Act," "Patriot Act," "Social Justice Act" etc. is because a lot of voters will never think too far beyond the labels.

Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk

ಠ_ಠ

Maybe "Peter-Singer-essay-style austerity", to ensure accurate phrasing just in case those allegations aren't all faked?

Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.

Is it? I'd argue that there's a popular "millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute" philosophy that points exactly the other way. Even if the first-order utilitarian analysis might judge a particular instance of abuse to be cheaper than privation, a second-order look at incentives suggests that rewarding abuse might merely engender more abuse.

I fear the real distinction here is that abuse of other people (the ones who can't afford to isolate themselves from crime) is easier for most people to accept than privation of themselves.

Although, in this analysis, "donating all your income to the poor" is deprivation that's also often tainted with various levels of abuse. The guy who takes your donations to buy food because some combination of his employer/family/government/health screwed him over is merely depriving you. The guy who takes your intended-for-food-and-shelter donations to buy intoxicants is abusing you. The guy who blew off high school and was then surprised to find that he can't get or hold a livable wage is in between.

Maybe "Peter-Singer-essay-style austerity", to ensure accurate phrasing just in case those allegations aren't all faked?

I was thinking specifically of his ideas about giving aid rather than his sex life, but yes.

I fear the real distinction here is that abuse of other people (the ones who can't afford to isolate themselves from crime) is easier for most people to accept than privation of themselves.

That's certainly easier, but people also seem willing to tolerate e.g. volunteering their pronouns when it's required for the job.

Although, in this analysis, "donating all your income to the poor" is deprivation that's also often tainted with various levels of abuse.

Depends on the poor people in question. Singer was thinking of starving children in the Third World, IIRC. However, as you say:

a second-order look at incentives suggests that rewarding abuse might merely engender more abuse.

Malthusian logic would suggest that the response of many of the Third World parents would be to have more children... At this step, serious benevolence-only types might start consider measures to encourage smaller families, such as "More education for women" or "More encouragement of contraception."

Malthusian logic would suggest that the response of many of the Third World parents would be to have more children... At this step, serious benevolence-only types might start consider...

Garrett Hardin was big on this. He thought standard charity to 3rd world countries was net negative. It merely lets them have more children and be further food insecure. If you want masses of starving people, give food to the poorest Africans.

I once tried to explain Garrett Hardin's point in a college anthropology class discussion and the TA became very mad. Her face frozen in anger glaring at me. Pointing out second order negative consequences doesn't make you thoughtful, it apparently makes you evil.

That was one of the formative experiences of my life watching that anthropology grad student lock up in anger because I said that dumping food on Africans whose agricultural capacity was decreasing due to desertification was actually a bad thing. Some large portion of Africa getting screwed by desertification was a major point of that class. So what happens when you send them food aid? One of my only failures to hide my contrarian nature in college.

Yes, one of the marks of bad social science (and other sciences, but it's particularly tempting in complex open systems) is not to ask the question, "And then what?"

At the risk of beating a dead horse I feel like this is another case of the "leviathan-shaped hole" rearing it's ugly head because to me the obvious answer to "How does a prosperous society combat insidious 'compassion'?" is via "charity" but I also recognize that "charity" has a very different meaning to liberal-brained people than it does to non-liberal-brained people.

A week ago there was a post about parenting that feel like kicked the same ant-hill and that I wanted to reply to but couldn't because I was sitting out a ban.

The short version is that specific choices don't matter much. But attitude matters a lot. To that end a point where I've found myself at odds with members of my family and other parents my age is that I don't want to be my kids' friend. I am their father and my job is to tell them "no, you don't get ice cream unless you finish your veggies". My job is to tell them to "stand up straight shoulders back, chins up". Am I doing this because I'm an asshole? Maybe. Am I doing this because I hate them and want them to suffer? Fuck no. I'm doing it because I give a shit. I'm doing it because I want them to be better, and while it may be 10 - 15 years early to tell I think it's working. I can already see a difference between my kids and my nieces/nephews and their peers/classmates. I am prepared to embrace the possibility that I am the "bad guy" and may be better for it.

One of the common failure modes of liberalism is to assume that being good means being nice when the truth is that sometimes the best and most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them "Get your fucking shit together dude"

There's a whole 'nother story I want to get into here, but it's getting late and I should probably call it. Have a good night.

One of the common failure modes of liberalism is to assume that being good means being nice when the truth is that sometimes the best and most compassionate thing you can do for someone is to tell them "Get your fucking shit together dude"

This calls to mind "The only Theodore Dalrymple article anyone reads", as Scott Alexander described it. It starts:

Not long ago I asked a patient of mine how he would describe his own character. He paused for a moment, as if savoring a delicious morsel.

"I take people as they come," he replied in due course. "I'm very nonjudgmental."

As his two roommates had recently decamped, stealing his prize possessions and leaving him with ruinous debts to pay, his neutrality toward human character seemed not generous but stupid, a kind of prophylactic against learning from experience. Yet nonjudgmentalism has become so universally accepted as the highest, indeed the only, virtue that he spoke of his own character as if pinning a medal for exceptional merit on his own chest.

Thanks for sharing. It's depressing to read about his patients. Surely, after twenty years of beatings and still not escaping, you and your broken brain chemistry actually enjoy it?

I also didn't see the author suggest that his patients are nonjudgmental because they know they themselves are deeply flawed, which means it's far safer to proclaim oneself above judgment in either direction. The accomplished and strong woman doesn't find herself in the same situation in part because she doesn't live in a glass house and so can readily cast stones.

I'd argue you can be a figure of authority and discipline for your children, but still be their friend as well. You can go too far in either direction.

For instance, if the only way you ever interact with your children is to discipline or scold them, that's too harsh and likely not good for them. Likewise, if you only ever act as their friend and never discipline them, well, look at America nowadays and you'll see the issue there.

Now I'm not a parent so I don't have the personal insight, but I'd always imagined the goal is to strike a balance.

I'd argue you can be a figure of authority and discipline for your children, but still be their friend as well. You can go too far in either direction.

I'm not saying I don't love them, and I'm not saying I'm not "friendly", telling bad jokes and playing Super Smash Bros with them. But a man can only serve one master and when push comes to shove one must choose between being the friend and being the authority figure.

Very true. Especially when they’re young. Glad to see we’re on the same page old man.

No dude, that's America nowadays, everyone trying to find a balance between being a parent and being a friend. People think back to their own childhood where dad was just this hard ass who appeared after 5 every day to whup you for whatever your mom said you did wrong and associate their parents checking out with parenting (apathy = aloofness = authority, hence the apathetic anti-authority that is everywhere these days, we hate authority because it wasn't fair to us as kids but still perform it the way we were taught to) and resolve not to do that to their own kids, so they befriend them.

But kids get an indefinite number of friends throughout their lives, they only get one dad and one mom. And those two figures shape how you see every other person you meet. Your dad becomes your model of authority and your mom becomes your model of empathy, an emotional anchor. This whole weaponised compassion thing is from a similar source imo - when dads were working 60 hours a week everyone became atheists, and when dads were taken out of the equation altogether empathy became the highest authority.

A kid needs their dad to show them who God is, what ultimate authority looks like. Ultimate authority is not your friend, can not be your friend, because friends get compromises and compromises destroy authority. If you want to be a good father you have to be willing to sacrifice everything for your kids, and the most important sacrifice you can make is to sacrifice your wants and desires - including the desire to have a good, friendly relationship with your child. It will feel like cutting a body part off, but that's how you know it's necessary - it only hurts you. Your kid won't be hurt by you deciding to be a father over a friend, only you will - it's a you thing, not a you and your kid thing. That is a much tougher sacrifice to make than any amount of time or luxury goods, and therefore a much more powerful sacrifice.

when dads were working 60 hours a week

I'm skeptical. The typical F500 CEO has at least half a dozen direct reports and probably averages fewer than 2-3 hours of face time with each direct report. Yet the direct reports presumably are modeled much more by theses 2-3 hours with the CEO than however many hours they spend with their own direct reports or assistants. I agree absent fathers won't have much influence, but fathers working 60 hour weeks can and should impart sufficient modeling and influence compared to SAHMs.

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply, but I'm not sure where we disagree. I think everyone becoming atheists wasn't great for society, but it's not catastrophic like the love is God cult.

I should say, I think every generation fucks up their kids in a different way. Even a generation that somehow did everything right during their development would have unintended negative consequences, because those kids still need to rebel against their parents at some point, to sever the drawstrings and enter adulthood. Beyond that, how do you decide where the cut off of responsibility is? I think it's fair to say that parents are only responsible for their children, but that they also bear some responsibility for how their children's children come out - their parenting being the guide for their children's parenting, and if their children parented in a way that is opposed to their parenting, then it was in reaction to their parenting.

Please pretend that last bit made sense.

Happy thought: if you believe nature > nurture, then the generational fucking up is merely par for the course at conception!

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?

I know your post ties these questions together but I think they are actually pretty distinct.

For the first question, one of the best grounds to argue against compassion is its effectiveness. Pretty much no one wants homeless people to exist for their own sake. Even the "compassionate" side wishes there were no (or fewer) homeless people. The question is do compassionate means actually function to reduce the homeless population? Are we willing to devote the kind of resources that would be necessary for those means to succeed? As @guesswho says, we could just build every homeless person a house if we were willing to commit that level of resources. The best way to attack compassionate solutions is probably to argue against their effectiveness, either in total or in terms of tradeoffs. "This thing might be good to do but would not be worth it" is an argument everyone can understand (though perhaps disagree).

On the second question it depends on what you mean by "cruel." If you think we should merely leave the homeless alone, devoting no resources to helping them, I think that becomes a variation in the tradeoff argument I discussed above. On the other hand if you want to inflict some more active harm on them you are going to have problems. My impression is lots of people think some good reason is required to justify harming other people. Those people do not generally regard "does not have a permanent residence" as being a good reason. Often discussions about homelessness focus on other bad things homeless people often do as justification but is this other behavior that is functioning as justification, not homelessness itself.

There's a lot of ruin compassion in a Nation, especially a wealthy and liberal one.

But not infinitely or indefinitely so. Eventually, even the bleeding hearts stop, if only because they exsanguinated.

For example, see how the sentiment has turned against Middle-Eastern immigrants in the Nordic states, from them once being misunderstood darlings to far more Right-wing and integrationist parties coming into vogue as a battered populace changes their mind.

The same is true for many YIMBYs and people-of-houselessness defenders, who get a rude wakeup call when the homeless are camping in their neighborhood parks, ruining their public transport, and clearly demonstrating that efforts to simply be nice to them by offering housing, shelter or safe drugs are far from sufficient to solve the problem, at least for the worst homeless who are either crazy or too addicted/drug-addled to respect carrots and not sticks.

Of course, this does require things to get worse, and people can be stupidly kind longer than your housing market or appetite for Hep-B can bear, but it can happen and is happening. I've seen plenty of outcry on Twitter from Californians outraged that what their politicians had wrung hands about as an unavoidable problem of the homeless ruining the place mysteriously vanished overnight when Xi Jinping visited. Huh. It seems the state capacity to handle homelessness exists all along, just a lack of will to use it.

While I don't endorse Accelerationism in general, since I'd much prefer finding a solution that isn't "let it all burn to the ground knowing it'll be built back better", I still think that the general ethos has a point, at least when it comes to shocking the complacent into noticing reality.

people-of-houselessness

It's "people experiencing homelessness", deplorable. Report to your local bugpod for re-education.

Excuse me? Is it okay these days to just assume that other people have the privilege of a bugpod to retreat to, especially with the recent budget cuts to education?

In Airstrip One, we have a bugpod in every fifteen minute city. Has Emmanuel Goldstein sabotaged the provision of bugpods in your District?

How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

With actual compassion.

It's not like homelessness is an unsolvable problem.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup? More to the point, do you realize that the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%? We have plenty of excess capacity that could be turned towards solving this problem, if we wanted to.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices. We could make a big impact just by lifting the zoning restrictions that economists are already telling us to lift for non-compassionate reasons.

It may be true that some specific types of half-measures towards compassion are worse than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should accept doing nothing. It means we should use full measures.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Is this correlation or causation? What do you think it's like being homeless in small town Indiana? Way shittier than San Francisco or Seattle, I guarantee, both in terms of support for subsistence as well as entertainment and amusement.

The chronic, problematic homeless have very little incentive to stick around where they grew up, their families, local support networks, because they have already lost or devalued them. The people shitting or shooting on sidewalks in SF have already exhausted the patience of those who once cared about them.

People want to deny this for some reason, and say that the vast majority of SF homeless are former SF residents, implying that maybe they've never left.

The question I would ask any homeless in SF:

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

As for why they might choose SF over Indiana, I hope it's obvious.

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

From the 2019 San Francisco homeless survey

With the relevant 2019 answers being-

Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year.

Eight percent (8%) of respondents reported living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty- two percent (22%) reported living in another county within California.

Thirty percent (30%) of respondents reported living in a home owned or rented by themselves or a partner immediately prior to becoming homeless. Thirty-three percent (33%) reported staying with friends or family. Twelve percent (12%) reported living in subsidized housing, and 5% were staying in a hotel or motel. Six percent (6%) of respondents reported they were in a jail or prison immediately prior to becoming homeless, while 4% were in a hospital or treatment facility, 3% were living in foster care, and 1% were in a juvenile justice facility.

I have a prior against the accuracy of the surveys, as there is definitely a "narrative" to uphold, and I have to imagine the survey takers are themselves homeless advocates and activists, more interested accumulating and distributing resources than hardheaded analysis. Still, taking these numbers at face value:

Of 100 homeless people:

  • 30 were homeless elsewhere and moved to SF
  • 4 became homeless within a year of moving to SF
  • 28 were living housed in SF for between 1 and 10 years
  • 38 were living housed in SF for more than 10 years

How does one randomly sample homeless people? Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police. I can imagine the sampling in this survey was done via more "official" means, like those contacting advocacy orgs, shelters, case workers, etc. There are very real methodological difficulties here. I haven't yet dug into the details of the survey, but maybe you are familiar with it?

Smells like narrative to me too. But even if we accept the numbers are accurate, I don't see how having a high percentage of locals changes the bottom line. SF has had high levels of out-migration to other cities and states for years, with cost of living being the top cited reason. Presumably the vast majority of these who moved did not end up homeless in their new locales. Why should policy reward those who chose to stay behind and end up homeless? Seems to me society is better off if it incentivized mobility so people on the verge of homelessness at a HCOL area can have a home in a LCOL area.

Not beyond what is covered in the document itself, but yes any survey like this is going to be biased because at the bare minimum the respondents are cooperative and capable enough to answer a survey instead of stabbing the person attempting to administer it or simply staring into space when asked questions.

Here is how they said they got responses:

Surveys were conducted by peer survey workers with lived homeless experience who were referred by local service providers. Training sessions were facilitated by ASR, City staff, and community partners. Potential interviewers were led through a comprehensive orientation that included project background information as well as detailed instruction on respondent eligibility, interviewing protocol, and confidentiality. Peer survey workers were compensated at a rate of $7 per completed survey. It was determined that survey data would be more easily obtained if an incentive gift was offered to respondents in appreciation for their time and participation. Socks were provided as an incentive for participating in the 2019 homeless survey. The socks were easy to distribute, had wide appeal, and could be provided within the project budget. The incentives proved to be widely accepted among survey respondents.

Based on a Point-in-Time Count estimate of 8,035 homeless persons, with a randomized survey sampling process, the 1,054 valid surveys represented a confidence interval of +/- 3% with a 95% confidence level when generalizing the results of the survey to the estimated population of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. The 2019 survey was administered in shelters, transitional housing facilities, and on the street. In order to ensure the representation of transitional housing residents, who can be underrepresented in a street- based survey, survey quotas were created to reach individuals and heads of family households living in these programs. Strategic attempts were also made to reach individuals in various geographic locations and of various subset groups such as homeless youth, minority ethnic groups, military veterans, domestic violence survivors, and families. One way to increase the participation of these groups was to recruit peer survey workers. Since 2009, the ASR survey methodology has prioritized a peer-to-peer approach to data collection by increasing the number of currently homeless surveyors. In order to increase randomization of sample respondents, survey workers were trained to employ an “every third encounter” survey approach. Survey workers were instructed to approach every third person they considered to be an eligible survey respondent. If the person declined to take the survey, the survey worker could approach the next eligible person they encountered. After completing a survey, the randomized approach was resumed.

And their self-admitted problems with their methodology:

The 2019 San Francisco Homeless Survey methodology relies heavily on self-reported data collected from peer surveyors and program staff. While self-report allows individuals to represent their own experiences, self-reported data are often more variable than clinically reported data. However, using a peer-to-peer interviewing methodology is believed to allow respondents to be more candid with their answers and to help reduce the uneasiness of revealing personal information. Further, service providers and City staff members recommended individuals who would be the best suited to conducting interviews and these individuals received comprehensive training about how to conduct interviews. Service providers and City staff also reviewed the surveys to ensure quality responses. Surveys that were considered incomplete or containing false responses were not accepted, the process for which included reviewing individual surveys submitted by surveyors and assessing patterns in survey responses for inconsistencies. It is important to recognize that variations between survey years may result from shifts in the demographic profiles of surveyors and accessibility to certain populations. Survey confidence intervals presented indicate the level of variability that may occur from year to year when interpreting findings. While every effort was made to collect surveys from a random and diverse sample of sheltered and unsheltered individuals, the hard-to-reach nature of the population experiencing homelessness prevents a true random sampling. Recruitment of diverse and geographically dispersed surveyors was prioritized. However, equal survey participation across all populations may be limited by the participation and adequate representation of subpopulations in planning and implementation processes. This includes persons living in vehicles, who are historically difficult to enumerate and survey.

Edit :To your point:

Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police.

I am not sure how this would be a more representative sample of the homeless population as a whole. I do think that for many matters involving the homeless it would be far more useful to drill into the disruptive + perennial homeless population rather than those who are unobtrusive or temporary. Though there are obvious difficulties in collecting data on those actively working against you doing so.

Great response. No quibbles. Fully agreed on final paragraph.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Could that be because both homeless people and non-homeless people want to live in certain areas, while the latter pay for the privilege and thereby drive up housing prices?

Probably not. The vast majority of homeless people became homeless in their current locale, which suggests the relationship is people move to attractive location => housing costs go up => some segment of the population that wasn't at risk of becoming homeless now is => individual episodes of misfortune amongst the now-larger at-risk population lead to more homeless people.

Ah, that additional data does give a clearer picture.

the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%?

It's actually 85% when you remove people past retirement age.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

You can get paid six figures working at a buc-ees in rural Alabama. The 15% not participating in the labor force have reasons for this and are unlikely to be interested in government make-work.

Considering stay at home parents, students and people between jobs or purposefully marginally employed: that's really high.

I thought labor participation rate was at an all time low, but this sounds sensible.

People between jobs or marginally employed usually count as the labor force, but yes.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup?

It's hard to get exact numbers, but between the city, state, and non-profits, the spending on San Francisco's homeless is on the order of 1 billion per year. That's like $4000 per San Francisco household, and a far cry from "beer and makeup" money.

What has SF received in exchange for these billions spent? Nothing but more squalor, decay, and crime. That's because more money is either useless or actively harmful. Solving homelessness is a fairly intractable problem if all you have is a carrot and no stick.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem. Last year in King County (Seattle), there were 1293 drug overdose deaths. In 2022, there were 1001. In 2021, there were 708. In 2020, there were 509. In just 3 years, overdose deaths increased 150% from an already high level.

These are the drug deaths. Imagine how many drug users there are. Imagine trying to get a job or respond to government incentives if you are addicted to fentanyl.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers. Maybe this wouldn't save our current batch of junkies. But it would stop new ones from being created.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers.

To be the devil's advocate: the true best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to spike drugs with enormous elephant-killing doses of carfentanyl.

I'm not saying, "Do it," I'm just saying to run it through the computer and check. It'll say that it won't help, and I'll stop going on about it.

It's crazy, but fentanyl is probably making a dent in the homeless population. With 3,000 deaths in last 3 years, that means 0.1% of the county's population has died of an overdose.

Possibly something like 10% of the people living on the streets have died of a fentanyl overdose in the last 3 years.

A few years ago I read an article from a group of journalists in some Midwest city on their experiences following police and ambulances for a week. All the drug addled homeless they saw. All the fatal overdoses they saw, seemingly miraculously reversed and the dead brought back to life by narcan.

I can't seem to find the full write up now, but here is one of the fun parts.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

But more seriously, yes, fentanyl and it's equivalents have surely killed off a significant minority of the would-be indigent population. And the fake not-meth cooked by the cartels is rotting the brains of much of the rest. This is an enormous tragedy seemingly unnoticed by almost everyone.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

Hmm, I've never actually seen an interosseous injection or infusion, I always assumed it involved a very sturdy needle and a hammer, but I suppose power tools make more sense.

Insane story. Yeah, Narcan has saved many. I've heard anecdotes about the same person being revived a dozen times by paramedics.

I mentioned elsewhere on this forum that I am mostly a libertarian. Addictive and deadly drugs are one of the few areas that I am not. The harms to society are just too great.

I find it bizarre that some people would defend statements like "you need a license to cut hair" while at the same time saying "if someone wants to sell an addictive and lethal drug that's fine". And yet that is the status quo we've arrived at in places like SF and Seattle.

Overdoses deaths are like 10x what they were during the so-called War on Drugs.

The dealers are just people responding to market incentives. If you arrest them, someone else will take their place.

I can understand the people who look at the crime that results from drug prohibition and try to estimate that it is higher than would be from increased drug usage in the population. Reasonable minds can estimate those factors differently. What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd. At least with the former, one could have the faintest of theoretical support if they posited a totally inelastic demand curve, one that could not even be shifted by applying/removing literal criminal penalties. This still seems like a pretty whack assumption, but that's what you'd need to even get the weakest version of this sort of claim.

Addicts are relatively insensitive to cost fluctuations. Sure maybe the equilibrium will drop slightly, but I don’t think” arrest the dealers” (if you can identify and incarcerate enough of them without authoritarian measures) isn’t going to solve the problem in a way that would be satisfactory to me.

You're not thinking marginally. Any demand curve has "high value consumers". The "addicts", so to speak. They're the ones all the way up at the top left part of the curve. Literally no other product in existence leads people to reason by way of, "There are some high value consumers of this product; therefore, the entire demand curve is nearly perfectly price inelastic." None.

Years back, in the old old place, we analyzed published estimations of the price elasticity of marijuana. I can try to find some time to dig it up. In the meantime, would you like to venture a guesstimate?

What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd.

Aren't there some goods for which lowering their price actually decreases the quantity sold, because it allows people to substitute it with more expensive, higher quality products? However, I've also been told that this was just a hypothetical good speculated by some economists rather than something observed to exist in reality.

But either way, I think almost no one thinks to model this type of thing in terms of supply and demand. There was another comment a couple days back here about why Freddie DeBoer and/or people like him didn't find it obvious that slut shaming was a metaphorical form of unionizing by women in the metaphorical mating market where I think the same phenomenon happens. For some topics, people tend to see as almost supernatural in how they're free from the basic laws of reality, and both crime and love fit into those things. As for why people treat these things as supernatural instead of bound by reality, I think it mostly has to do with how most people, most of the time, including people like me who write on this site, prefer to feel good than to be right. Being right takes hard work, research, skepticism, correcting self-biases, modeling, etc. But it's easy to believe that whatever my side is saying about some controversial topic is correct, and it feels so damned good to do so.

It still shifts the supply curve leftwards. No one ever said it would eliminate the supply completely.

Huh? No they won't. The chance of getting arrested changes the incentives.

SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.

Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).

I have the misfortune of visiting San Francisco. When I bitterly complain about the aggressive street-shitting drug-addled homelessness people, I don't mean to say that they'd be productive citizens if only $1000/month studio apartments existed.

Sure, rezone and build some high rises. Step 2: the guy screaming while he sprays diarrhea onto the sidewalk for some reason doesn't get a lease in one. What shall we do with this man when more multi-home zoning doesn't fix his drug-fried brain?

I currently reside in a city that has a homelessness rate similar to SF. While there are some really unhinged characters, the vast majority are merely visibly homeless (which, I will grant, still puts people off - most people don't like being accosted by scruffy strangers asking for money). Cheap housing won't transform them into model citizens, but it will get them off the street and facilitate enforcement against the more genuinely anti-social. I don't know, maybe the SF vagrants are built different.

Perhaps more importantly, it alters the homelessness-generating function. As mentioned, WV is dirt poor and full of addicts, but they are able to die of a fentanyl overdose in the comfort of their own living room, because housing in WV is cheap enough that even a marginally employed fent addict can afford a place to live. If the current crop of homeless contains a large share of people who are unfixable to the degree the only real choice for them is whether or not their cell has padding, preventing more people from ending up in that circumstance is a major part of actually fixing the problem.

Point taken, I guess I was responding to GoodGuy's attitude that "it's just so simple". It's really not.

  1. Which place has "built more housing" and solved their homeless problem. People were pointing to Salt Lake City as an example. As far as I know that has utterly failed now.

  2. Which place has successfully housed fentanyl addicts at reasonable cost

West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington. But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia. So West Virginia is outsourcing their drug problem elsewhere.

Even if housing prices are a root cause, we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems. Many places with cheap housing in the Midwest have had declining populations for decades. West Virginia has a lower population today than it did in 1950. On the other hand, the U.S. has built tons of homes and has the same amount of housing per capita as in the year 2000.

The amount of housing we'd need to build to make a dent is huge. Marginal increases aren't going to cut it. Cutting rent from $3000/mo to $2800/mo isn't going to make SF any more affordable for the fentanyl addict. So what's the cost of increasing our housing stock by 20%? There are 144 million homes in the U.S. Building new ones is very expensive, on the order of let's say $350,000 per (a huge underestimate for places like SF). So it would cost $10 trillion to build enough homes, although of course in practice it would be impossible.

Building housing is not really workable. It's too damn expensive. I would be in favor of measures that make homes a much worse investment in order to curtail market speculation. But I don't think it'd fix the homeless problem.

But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia.

Drug addicts mostly don't move anywhere. I've never seen any evidence that bears out the idea that there's a significant mobile homeless population migrating towards the most accommodating locales. As near as I can tell, it's the opposite: homeless addicts (and homeless generally) are overwhelmingly in the locality where they became homeless, and where they aren't they're usually near-ish.

we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems.

True.

There are approximate 1,500,000 new housing starts in the US per year. If we take your estimated cost per unit of 350k (tbh I think this is high, but this is all ROM so it's not going to radically change the picture), we're already spending ~$525b/year. $5T over ten years. Hitting the 20% you suggested entails doubling that. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of money, but an extra $5T over years for a country with the wealth of the US is not some inconceivable sum. Especially considering that most of it would be coming from the private sector rather than the government. (I also note that it is probably overkill - housing shortages are highly concentrated. WV doesn't need to increase its housing stock at all, CA needs to increase it a lot)

I'd also note that marginal shifts do matter. If the average rent goes down by $200, that suggests low end rent is also going down. It may not be a radical, sweeping improvement, but there will be people who can afford housing who couldn't before or who move from precarious to... less precarious. If building housing is unworkable than that is in effect saying the problem is unsolvable. Solving the opioid crisis is a worthy political goal, but it won't do much for homelessness.

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm

Even if it's equalized in the intervening time, it doesn't alter the underlying point that the relationship between drug ODs and homelessness rates are not strongly correlated. A hypothetical scenario where WA and WV have the same OD rate but WA has four times the homelessness rate does not suggest drugs are driving homelessness. On the other hand, the median home price in Charleston is $150k, in Seattle it's $800k.

Wonder if all the confusing noise can be cleared up if a city managed to build a sufficient number of bare bones housing that the bulk of the local homeless simply do not want to live in. As it stands, the call to build more housing is all muddled up between the (imo) legitimate call to ease zoning and environmental regulations and the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

Contra this, there is a certain fetishization of cruelty - often disgust papered over with affected ruthlessness ("sometimes hard choices are necessary; this is a hard choice, therefore it is necessary) - when it comes to discussions of how to handle the homeless/drug addicts/[insert undesirable here]. There is a great deal of room in between the idea that kindness requires us to tolerate anti-social behavior from homeless people and endorsing extra-legal violence against them.

In particular, I tend to find a tendency to underestimate how harshly the homeless are currently treated. For example, I often see the question asked "why don't they break up homeless encampments?" or similar sentiments. And the answer to that is that in most cities they do (to the extent that it's legal to do so). But this doesn't actually accomplish very much - they might temporarily move to a different street, but it can't meaningfully fix the problem because the homeless don't have anywhere to go. Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

It's a nice thought to think one categorization up, but akin to Theresa May's warning of citizen of nowhere, in practice Texans aren't going to be losing too much sleep over the welfare of people in NYC or Chicago forced to deal with bussed migrants, just as the latter cities never lost much sleep over Texans.

I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that one way this can be positive sum is to better match what a community is willing to give with how much it actually gives--let the compassionate sanctuary cities provide the sanctuary, and let the cruel law and order states enforce rule of law.

the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices

Yeah sure, offer all of them a spot in a shelter or halfway house.

And then the unrelated problem of crazy aggressive street-dwelling drug addicts will remain. Because there are two problems here: homeless "but there for the grace of God go I" and by-choice drug addicts. No one forced the meth pipe into their mouth.

And if housing prices were so high that you and I couldn't live in our current places: we'd move. We wouldn't move to a city park and get really high and yell at people and shit on the sidewalk.

I want compassion for the homeless. I support shelters for them somewhere far from my neighborhood and I want huge Chinese-style concrete housing blocks legalized on the city core. And we are going to need some other strategy for the drug-addled street-shitters.

In an alternate world, considering China has a glut of housing in its ghost cities and a population bomb, America can send its homeless over along with a big fat check for each.

At 650k homeless and 500k per unit of housing, that’s 320 billion which is maybe doable for the federal government. Double that price (for California) and not so much. I have no idea what the ongoing maintenance cost for that housing would be - a typical house is .5%. Let’s 10x to 5% which is tens of billions per year. Having said that, we’ll manufacture more homeless next year and it’s not like we have the infra, materials, real estate or man power to actually build all of that anyway. I’m not sure this is actually fixable with money after all.

  1. Is it possible that housing pricing is correlated with cities and cities may be easier for homeless people to navigate? That is, high home prices don’t cause homelessness but instead is a function of the same thing that attracts homelessness.

  2. Other argument is people aren’t really worried about the working homeless that housing prices may cause. Instead, they are worried about the drugged out crazy.

I think it’s likely that the correlation is caused by far left politics that favor both impediments to building housing and funding homelessness.

  1. It's possible, but my understanding is that the homelessness is highly correlated with housing prices between cities in a way that's hard to square with that assumption, and that homelessness rates responds to changes in housing prices too quickly for anything like that to be a plausible mechanism. Not an expert though, feel free ot research it more and report back.

  2. Maybe, but a lot of the money and political capital that gets spent on 'homelessness' as an issue end up going to support the working/sane homeless. Take them out of the equation, maybe we find that the drugged out crazies are actually a really small population that we could help pretty cheaply. It at least resolves the confound between the groups and lets us work on the problem more directly.

When people make this argument it drives me nuts. I'm sorry, but I hope you don't actually believe this and honestly I think you are arguing this in bad faith and we should dismiss it because you aren't even arguing against what people are actually talking about. When people complain about the homeless, they aren't complaining about people who can't afford rent or have fallen on tough times. They are complaining about the insane people who scream at women and children and shit on the street or the drug addicts who have no intention of getting sober and leave used needles in parks children play at. Housing prices have no effect on these people because they either have no intention of getting a home, are too mentally ill for it to matter and need full time care, or would just use any housing you give them as a flop house to use and sell drugs at. The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will. Since you aren't allowed to do that, the only other thing you can do is to make it clear to them being homeless in your areas will suck and force them to go elsewhere.

The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will.

Even three months in jail (for possession) would probably work miracles. Break their cycle of compulsive using and let them sober up and give them a chance to try being something other than a junkie living in a tent in a park.

(The public thinks of jail as a fate almost like death but they’re not that bad. The best jail is probably better than the worst public school)

Jail is much worse if you're a typical middle class person. If you have no family, no job, and no home, jail isn't such a step down.

Right. If you're a middle class person and go to jail, you're probably no longer a middle class person when you get out.

Going to jail doesn't stop people from using drugs -- in fact it's even worse than rehab in that not only do you meet & spend all your time with a lot of people having a shared interest in doing drugs, but these people also enjoy doing crime in order to get more drugs.

Going to jail forces them to mostly stop being floridly actively addicted for a bit. Those few months where they can think some thoughts aside from how to get their next hit of meth/fentanyl 100% of the time is the valuable opportunity here. Jail has bad parts too: person's re-integration in society becomes harder because they have a record, and they meet a lot more criminals who can teach them to do more crime.

But, this forced sobering up might also be the only tool our society has that stops them from being a junkie destined to overdose in the near future committing crime the whole way.

That's just it -- it's pretty easy to get drugs in jail, drugs addicts that are sent there don't (generally) sober up.

And zero interest in helping you get off drugs. Negative interest really, if they're cooking or supplying helping you get clean cuts into their bottom line.

To be fair, I think of the worst public school as a fate almost like death.

You need to make the public understand how chronic stresses add up and lead to obesity, cancer, etc. Someone soliciting 500 people at an intersection is someone giving 500 people needless stress. The negative consequences of this are not canceled out by the benefit to the homeless man. Same with a park — a person should be able to walk in one rare beautiful piece of nature without seeing sprawled junk and disheveled tents. The benefit of this stress-free nature exposure is, ironically, protective against the possibility of developing homelessness in the future.

Anyway I would write something like, “we have noticed an uptick in minor trauma and stress responses among our residents, including women and lower income minorities. We have traced this stress response to the individuals who are soliciting money to stressed drivers trying to watch for incoming traffic; this is not just distracting, but it reminds many residents of their own lack of financial stability. In order to safeguard our most at-risk residents from further stress, we are going to make soliciting for money in public illegal. We instead ask everyone to donate to a town-wide fund for our poorest residents. The town will match dollar per every $400 donation. We are also going to ensure that our parks are free from unnecessary stressors.”

Love this. Unfortunately the hierarchy of oppression seems to me unweighted, so because chronic stress ranks beneath poverty, it doesn't matter that 500x chronic stress > 1x homeless. Maybe a clever thought leader could try upgrading solicitation to rape, and since rape still out-oppresses poverty, society could rightfully lock up all the rapists who invade the psychological safe spaces of BIPOC folx.

Yeah, great answer. Chronic stress kills.

Unfortunately as @Fruck says, our entire worldview, especially the medical establishment, is firmly against chronic stress being an issue. Just take a look at muscular injuries. While many doctors such as John Sarno have done great research and essentially proven that most chronic injuries are psychosomatic, the modern establishment view within medicine is that pretty much all injuries are mechanical, and need to be fixed with surgery. The idea that chronic stress over time leads to emotional issues which lead to physical pain is a massive threat to the current medical system.

There are a lot of researchers, doctors, and therapists doing good work in the chronic pain space, but boy are they fighting an uphill battle. And just imagine trying to tell someone "Yeah well... you didn't really need that shoulder surgery that cost you (or likely other taxpayers) tens of thousands of dollars, but it was probably easier than getting you to do some self-reflection and actually fix your personal problems." It's not exactly a sexy argument to make.

the modern establishment view within medicine is that pretty much all injuries are mechanical,

This is a gross oversimplification. The consensus view of pain is the biopsychosocial model.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6067990/#:~:text=The%20biopsychosocial%20model%20of%20pain,that%20reciprocally%20influence%20one%20another.

The thing about Sarno is that his model is pretty much only psycho.

Yes this is the consensus view in chronic pain science - do you think it’s the consensus view among everyday doctors, especially those for specific disorders like carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, tendinitis, etc etc? Hell no.

Most of these doctors haven’t even heard the term biopscyhosocial. I can tell you that confidently because I spent almost ten thousand dollars and got 30+ different opinions from these doctors for my own chronic issues, and only found out about the biopsychosocial model myself. All this less than five years ago.

I even acknowledge that there are doctors doing good work in the chronic pain space, as you discuss. But to call my claim a gross oversimplification is simply not true.

While I'm no fan of the homeless, I really don't think chronic mental stress can cause SLAP tears.

No idea what SLAP tears are, but hey man the link between mental stress and physical injuries keeps getting validated to impact more and more issues that were previously thought to be mechanical.

Anything that is caused or exacerbated by ‘stress’ is an excellent candidate.

Personal bugbear: Superior Labrum, Anterior to Posterior. The labrum is a bowl of cartilage that provides passive stabilization of the shoulder joint, which in humans is significantly less structurally sound in exchange for a greater movement envelope. The labrum can be torn by heavy exertion at the edges of the envelope or by the proximal head being driven through the labrum, as in holding your arms rigid during a car crash.

That wouldn't work man, because people can't wrap their heads around cumulative issues. You can't make them understand because to understand that they would have to do a lot more work thinking about shit. If you say "ok take the stress of that guy selling oranges and add it to the stress of the guy wagging his dick at you on the overpass", they check out at the word add every time. "You want me to think about things instead of instantly defaulting to my knee-jerk reaction? Fuck you, this is America!" You have to go the other way, make it easier to think about somehow.

I'm comfortable with saying that it's deplorable to throw eggs at homeless, shoot paintballs at them, beat them, or infringe on people's liberty to give each other money.

It's just that it would be silly to judge the entire town as deplorable because those things happened.

It's just that it would be silly to judge the entire town as deplorable because those things happened.

Not if you want a casus belli to force toxic compassion unto it.

infringe on people's liberty to give each other money.

How do you feel about people's liberty to feed bears? Giving vagrants money is apt to have a similarly salubrious effect on the local quality of life as feeding the local bear population.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

Have more children. That simple. People redistribute their compassion quite a bit when they have family. I think that a lot of carebearing that we have lately is just the desire to take care of something and the thing most people would have otherwise in history is children. Right now it is at most dog or cat.

Also we better find out soon how people to prioritize their compassion, otherwise the flood of migrants that we deal with right now will become biblical in proportions.

Interesting model. I wouldn't call it simple per se, and suspect you say it more for dramatic flair, but as a solution it seems persuasive.

We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate.

We raise our kids to lead with compassion in interpersonal settings where it is relatively easy to notice free-loaders (and for them to be punished for callousness as well). When dealing with freeloaders or people who not only can't participate in beneficial exchange but will actually punish you for trying, we tell them to stand up for themselves and not be gulls.

People get cut off all the time in interpersonal relationships (even the "pro-'Be Kind'" side is down with this). But they don't get to sue for human rights reasons to get back on the gravy train.

Many of us would find the sort of "compassion" suggested on a policy level that leads to defectors and the mentally ill corroding society absolutely asinine were it promoted to kids. It's not even acceptable when dealing with animals at the zoo.

We know a lot of people are not confused about this because "help your own, avoid freeloaders or impersonal systems that can create or incentivize freeloaders" is basic conservative ideology in America. Let's not even speak globally.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem?

The problem isn't just compassion it seems. Eric Adams seems to want to change NY's position on right to shelter. But he can't do so unilaterally. He basically seems to be working to limit (or soft ban, if you're being a cynic) asylum seekers - another compassion case - but is also seemingly stymied by the political and legal situation.

How much of it is really legal and political barriers that favor those who can navigate such systems (and do have that version of "compassion")? If homeless people could be committed at will, it hardly matters what litigious bleeding hearts at some charity think. If the UK Home Office could simply summarily deport, it hardly matters that people protest. I suspect far more people - who consider themselves compassionate - are annoyed by the inability to just get rid of people, and are constantly given the runaround with the "it's the courts! Nothing we can do!"

To put it another way: I'm not sure that it's the general public that needs to be retrained here.

I'm not sure that it's the general public that needs to be retrained here.

Depends on if you believe people ultimately deserve their government. Who's at fault for the fall of Afghanistan? Besides Biden and Obama, I think the conservative circles blame the Afghans. Ukrainians are (so far) willing to die to preserve their state and government, and Afghans aren't. Meanwhile Israel is willing to die to live, and the big question mark is what about Taiwan.

My point is, even if the courts are "technically" impeding deportation, it still goes back to the general public. The UK did Brexit, after all, so it can leave the ECHR, and Parliament can certainly seek to overrule its own high courts, and I think its recent legislation did basically dictate that courts define Rwanda as safe.

"it's the courts! Nothing we can do!"

There's an American version of this.

"We can't ban public camping, the courts ruled on this. Except of course when President Xi visits. Then we clear the streets."

We know a lot of people are not confused about this because "help your own, avoid freeloaders or impersonal systems that can create or incentivize freeloaders" is basic conservative ideology in America. Let's not even speak globally.

Jonathan Haidt identified the group who bucks this trend as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic). It can feel like these people's values are dominant in the population if you live in a WEIRD enclave but as you mention, globally and even just in more conservative areas they really aren't, even if they are still able to hold an outsized amount of influence due to the concentration of mediatic, economic and political power in WEIRD enclaves. Haidt identified that WEIRD people tended to compress all moral judgement to the harm/care and cheating/fairness moral dimentions, wheras conservatives (and non WEIRDs) had a more multi-dimensional moral judgement.

Nothing about leaving the homeless on the street is compassion. Most of them belong in institutions or jail.

Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to commit people against their will, so it's going to end up being jail.

Unfortunately activist DA's have more or less decided not to enforce laws against even deadly violent hobos.

Instead they are left on the street to die, and occasionally take people down with them.

The status quo is already cruelty all around. Cruelty towards them, cruelty towards their victims future and present. The response depicted in the article is merely the last resort of self preservation.

And given that this is Montana, homeless people are at extreme risk of just freezing to death, I would think:

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

Popper said it best: Tolerance for tolerant, compassion for compassionate, but franchise only for democrats, and when dealing with defectors, one must defect.

His principle is merely self-defense on the society-wide scale. One who instead blindly tolerates everyone, etc, at the very least increases instability, for contra-systemic forces are empowered.

franchise only for democrats

Was this link supposed to go here?

That one's "franchise only for Democrats" instead.

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