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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25953 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?

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.

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 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.

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