This is an absolutely fantastic piece and I am disheartened that only seven people have bothered to click on the link.
Ironically, I can’t foresee how the global community escapes that trap and I think the future is at least as bad as he fears, and it’s probably going to be worse.
Exactly this. The poor don’t have lobbyists in Congress.
Lobbyists in Congress? They don’t have friends with couches.
That was a poorly framed point by me. Apologies.
No it is not.
There are roughly 600,000 homeless in the country. Honolulu has the dubious honor of having the highest rate of homelessness of city in the country,and I have friend working on the problem so it’s not like I don’t see and hear about it all the time. But 600K is less than .2% of the population. So if you want argue that homeless in the US aren’t in the top 5th of the global maybe you’d be right.
But I have clear definition of poor in the US, it is the ~15% or 45 million American who fall below the poverty which is $12K for a single person and 20K for a family of 4. This income they make not counting various government assistance. I’m saying that this group on aggregate is in the top 1/5 of the global population and I stand by this claim.
Here is some data. Virtually every American has access cleaning running water and flush toilets. Only 40% of the rest of the world does. Even if you are an upper middle class person in Mexico or Egypt you have constantly carry bottle water, boil tap water, or risk dying of some awful disease. Diarrhea kills more people than AIDS in the world. That basic fact alone puts American poor in the top 2/5th. Buying clean water is significant expenditure for most the rest of world, and it is not even something that we think about in this country. So yes the fact the homeless person in Portland isn’t a risk of dying from typhoid, dysentery, a zillion water parasites, is actually more important to the their standard of living, than the fact that their tent is reasonable water proof than a collection of cardboard,plywood, and branches that counts as home in developing countries.
Food. Yes a significant number of American poor suffer from food insecurity. But on average American poor are slightly more overweight and obese than the rest of the country. American parents have one significant advantage over parents in developing countries. The school lunch program ensure that virtually all school age children have access to one hot meal and many schools two meals. Keeping the children feed remains a battle for most working and even many middle class families in developing countries.
Education. America provides free K-12 education. In most developing countries there is no such thing as free education, you have to pay for it. Even China elementary schools are free, but high school cost money. So one of the things you have add in when you are comparing a poor person in the US, with a middle class person in the rest of the world in paying for education.
Medical care. Hundreds of pages have been written on the US health care, many by me. For a developed country, we have a shitty system. That said poor people in this country generally have access to health care, albeit a often pain in the ass to get. But compared to most developing countries it is great. We don’t make poor folks walk 4 days with your sick baby even if your the village chiefs wife. Arriving at the clinic, and then waiting for two days to be seen by a doctor, who could treat your baby but doesn’t have the medicine, so your baby dies.
So if you got some data to show me I’m wrong, I’d like to see it.
Wouldn’t a better comparison be to another developed nation?
Sorry, but it’s a reaction to this bullshit:
You don’t mean to say that it’s their own fault, and most of the time it’s not, but actually it is, because they’re just not availing themselves of the right ‘systems’. What the heck is that supposed to mean?
And, I don’t care what your girlfriend does. Describe the ‘systems’, and elaborate on their reach and capacity.
The median global income is something like $10k, and the median per-capita income is about $3k. Some of the Americans you’re talking about are surely not far from that. I mean, $10k is basically two people getting part-time hours working fast food at minimum wage.
I mean, you can invent a set of your own standards to ‘prove’ that American poors aren’t poor, if you like, but I really don’t grasp the point of it. Can you explain why making that point matters?
Guys, I think we are going about haranguing Timex all wrong.
He is right that capitalism is really good at inventing and producing a lot of stuff. Even Karl Marx freely admitted that much.
I think the real complaint isn’t that capitalism does not produces enough stuff, but rather that it distributes and employs that stuff badly.
Going back to Timex’s earlier example, we do have smart phones, and they can be awesome tools for communication and enlightenment. But they are also perfect tools for surveillance and control. The Encyclopedia Britannica had limitations, but you also never had to worry that it was reporting your conversations to the NSA or that it was providing targeting data for a drone strike. Or more familiarly, that it was providing a constant channel for meretricious distractions, Russian propaganda, and second-world scams and spam.
Or for the tricorder comparison; yes we have good diagnostic tools and medical interventions. But they are sharply limited by the cost to actually access them. On the Enterprise they never had to weigh the benefits of using the tricorder to heal someone vs the years of debt slavery that healing would incur. E.g. situations like this:
where the pain from having your skin scraped away to the bone is less than your fear of the cost of medical care.
More generally, there are questions about how this system has allocated resources and where this system is leading us. The current situation is 30+ years of wage stagnation and decline for the 99%, and ever larger pyramids for the 1%. This doesn’t inspire a lot of loyalty. For where this system might be leading us, this is a good outline:
Right now we are firmly in case 4 of that article: Tech Growth + Hierarchy + Scarcity. It’s not a good path, and it turns the massive blessings of technology into equally massive curses. It’s not unreasonable for people to want to push us away from that path; maybe not into immediate socialism, but onto a glide path where the increasing benefits of automation are shared out more equally to enable a mass human flourishing. Rather than enabling a small cadre of idiotic and malevolent man-children to enslave all of mankind.
Thanks for posting that link, great read. I particularly liked the bit about pushing the value of your citizenship:
Hard as it is to believe that Trump actually does have a method to his madness, this might be it.
I see we’re getting into our usual “discussion” format on this: agreement on the general idea with vehement disagreement over what parts of it matter. Yes, 99%+ of Americans are better off than billions of people in impoverished areas of the world, as well as better than vast majority of people who lived prior to 1900. Yes, the USA could do a much better job of helping the bottom (approximately) third that live without stable food supply, housing, medical care, etc. Yes, there are ways for the very poorest to get help in the US (and much of the rest of the developed world), though they’re far from perfect and can often be difficult to access. These things can all be true without calling one another liars or demanding that we get specific in definitions of “top fifth” or whatever.
The bottom line is that the world has improved greatly in terms of how the average human lives in the last couple of centuries. Which is great, but of course that means some are doing better and some worse. (Ably summarized in this SMBC strip.) Focus on the improvement part, and you see a system that’s doing what we want. Focus on the disparities, and you see a system that fails its most vulnerable. Neither position is wrong, but neither is entirely right.
My take on this whole thing is that we should focus on the areas where the system we have is clearly underperforming. Health care is the most obvious example here in the US, due to the inefficiencies created by our terrible private insurance system. But there’s also housing, immigration, civil rights, and many other areas where the worst inequalities could be addressed. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve already done better than a large portion of the rest of the world or not - there’s still plenty in our own house to put in order.
When someone says, “I’m not saying that homelessness is an entirely self-imposed problem,” he’s really telling you that deep down he believes that poverty is the fault of the poor. The need to correlate wealth with virtue is deeply ingrained in American conservatism. Because otherwise you’d have to acknowledge that the message that the wealthiest country in the history of the human race has for people who aren’t actively helping the rich get richer is “fuck off, you useless pieces of human garbage.”
This is actually the message of many things in American life right now. It is replacing the old paradigm, which George W.S. Trow described as, “Like this or die.” America no longer cares even that much. It’s abandoning the pretense that you’re a participant. If you can’t find a role to play - and it’s getting harder and harder to, and the compensation’s getting more and more meager when you do - we have no obligation to keep you alive.
That’s the new deal. On the one hand, rent-seeking, debt peonage, and regulatory capture. Your school will steal from you, your bank will steal from you, your job will steal from you, and no one will stop them. On the other, a sheer drop. If you don’t like it, you should have done something about it, like be born wealthy.
And every step of the way, you’ll get to listen to lucky people telling you that it’s your fault.
$0.02 re original topic. Everyone should always be citizen of some country. Both parentage and natal origin are incidental and contingent. But natal origin is at least relatively easy to establish. Parentage is complicated, so like what if your parents are tourists from different countries on temporary visas in a third country who aren’t married or get divorced and give you up for adoption in some other country? The number of people who are born in some foreign country, whether due to immigration or temporary status is small anyway, so just make the rule universal and no one loses. If sensible parentage rules apply too then you can be a dual citizen.
The thing which is horrifying is making people stateless by canceling their sole citizenship and dumping them somewhere which also doesn’t recognize their status. This is about as wrong as it gets.
No, I’m really not. Which is why i specifically said exactly the opposite in the next sentence.
I think some of you guys are reading one sentence and getting so mad at an imagined argument that you are literally not reading the entire post.
In America, around 0.5% of our population is homeless at any given time. And over 80% of those are sheltered. That means that only 0.06% of our population is unsheltered, and literally living on the streets.
Some of these are due to things like mental illness or drug abuse, which makes it very difficult for them to function within the sheltering system. And some portion of those are making a conscious decision to not seek shelter, due to not being willing or able to give up drug or alcohol use. You see this in places like Seattle and Portland right now, where even now their shelters are not at capacity (although they are approaching it in Seattle).
Shelters may be at capacity in a place like LA, where they currently have a full tenth of our country’s homeless population (i honestly don’t know that they are, just that they may be), but for the most part in America we have the ability to shelter everyone. Those shelters can absolutely stand to be improved, but the statement i made that the system exists to provide shelter was factually accurate, stemming from experiences of someone very close to me who worked in that system, at the street level, for over a decade.
There is nothing about what I’m saying that is, in even the smallest way, a criticism of poor people, or homeless. In most cases, people are homeless on a temporary basis as a result of hard luck.
The point of this was originally, if you will recall, that we do in fact take care of these people. The comparison is not against some ideal situation, because they’re is massive room for improvement. But rather it’s a comparison against other places in the world. Places like Russia have an estimated homeless population of over 5% their population, with much more unsheltered. Or India where they have nowhere near enough shelters to account for even the homeless numbers they count, which are almost certainly a dramatic underestimation of the true number.
Again, none of this suggests that we do enough, or have solved all the problems. My girlfriend constantly dealt with a shortage of resources to help people as much as she would have liked, but still, I would absolutely rather be homeless here than a place like India, China, Venezuela, or Russia
You sure this is right? 0.5% seems really high to me.
Yeah, according to the government, that’s the current homeless rate. And i believe their count is reasonably accurate.
Note, that’s not the number of chronic homeless, it’s just the number of people who are homeless at any given night. And around 80-85% of them are sheltered. It includes anyone who is in a halfway house, shelter, safe space, etc. Some counts in other countries don’t count sheltered homeless. Some, like in gonna, are just artificially depressed for propaganda reasons.
For the vast majority, it’s only a temporary situation, where they just had some bad luck, and they eventually get back on their feet.
Ah, that does make sense. Thanks.
The chronic homeless rate in the US is 0.03%, or around 86k. That’s folks who have been homeless for over a year. Life is really hard for those folks, but it’s often really hard to give them help. A good chunk of those folks are the ones with mental illness, or major drug abuse problems. But it’s still rough to see folks in that situation in the richest country in the world.
This sentence:
seems to be the problem. That sentence quite literally says that help is available to everyone who wants it. The logical consequence of that sentence is that people not being helped are homeless because they want to be homeless; that it is their choice.
Instead of saying ‘you people should stop reading my sentences and responding to them’, why not say clearly ‘that sentence was badly worded and I didn’t mean it’? Why blame other people for taking your sentence at face value?
No, that’s not always the case. In many cases, people are unaware of how to leverage the system to get help. Most homeless people are just normal folks who got thrown out on the street suddenly for some reason. They don’t know how to be homeless, because fills with homes don’t generally know anything about programs that assist the homeless. Why would they? I’d say this is actually most of the folks, who don’t have drug or mental issues.
This is why outreach is important. This was one of the parts of my girlfriend’s job that i hated more than anything, because it was so dangerous. It was often done at night, because that was the only time you could know that folks were sleeping rough. She was attacked multiple times, including getting an 8 inch blade shoved through her arm. But when she asked if i could handle her doing it, i always said yes, because she helped tons of people get off the street.
When i say that there are systems in place, I’m stating a factual accuracy. There are shelters everywhere in America, and very few are running at capacity. Don’t get me wrong, life in the shelters is rough. No one would want to be live in one of the could help it. We can do better, and some places are improving things. Ohio is actually running programs where they put people into real, actual houses, and have achieved very good results, because it’s infinitely easier to get work when you have a home.
Well, in some of these cases, it’s a matter of you only reading SOME of the sentences. I mean, the entirety of communication can’t always take place in a single sentence.
Two problems here. One is that isn’t what you wrote, and the other is that it isn’t true - there is insufficient help for everyone who needs it, especially locally, but more generally nationally.
No, it implies it in this way that’s basically meaningless and gives the speaker wiggle room. Systems exist! No, I’m not saying that they’re adequate, or available, or really that they have any impact at all. Don’t put words in my mouth!
It’s like saying that women can get abortions in Oklahoma. Technically correct, but not relevant to most pregnant women in Oklahoma who need abortions. Or like saying that America is the land of opportunity, really.
Also, the “conscious decision” to not give up drug or alcohol abuse is, like the conscious decision to hand over your wallet to a mugger or the conscious decision to not go to the emergency room for treatment that you cannot afford, a decision made under duress. Yeah, it’s hard to help addicts. It’s even harder if you decide that you’re not going to because it’s hard and anyway they deserve it.