It's nobody's fault for becoming poor. But if you're staying poor (dirt poor) for decades, then there is something you're doing wrong. The other commenter puts it in a rude way, but there's something to it. If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
> If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
We used to have those in the US. Things are better for the poor now without them - a few do freeze to death in the streets today, most do not, while the abuse of those old institutions did hit most. The people who need institutions are also those least able to advocate for themselves if they are abused.
I don't like the current answer, but it could be worse and if you want something better you need to explain how it won't descend into worse. I don't have any ideas myself.
Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.
Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.
Have you seen "the system" sleeping on the streets, starving, or not having enough clothes?
No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.
Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
Yes the argument that being poor is some sort of character flaw, while realistically it's just a lack of money, usually inherited from the parents. I would bet that most people who make these arguments (like everyone else) would end up permanently poor if one was to take away their money and networks.
All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.
In 2024 over 700k people were homeless in the USA. That's a system failure. If you want to talk about personal failings you have to consider individual circumstances. But 700k being homeless is abjectly just not how a civil society should operate.
Yes, because human mind is famously known for being extraordinarily good at getting out of self-destructive spiraling without external help, and that help is famously known for being provided to everyone who needs it regardless of their economic status. Also, chronic lack of money has absolutely no way to contribute to that occurring in the first place. /s
I get it. Everybody gets it. For some months, even years. But after a decade or so in such a situation, you must arrive at some sort of epiphany, look at your life and say "what the fuck?".
And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.
Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead]. That's the prevailing attitude towards poverty among the intellectuals. "Let's talk about them, not with them."
So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:
> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.
You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.
If you'd be actually experienced, you would realize that there's an autokill filter on HN and the comment in question contains the forbidden M word. Apparently my vouch wasn't enough to resurrect it.
Makes sense (I run showdead=no, so I never saw the original), but that doesn’t make my comment any less accurate. We all see this stuff happen on a regular basis.
A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.
With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.
No. After a decade the ‘what the fuck’ is just a distant memory. ‘It is what it is’, ‘nothing ever works out’, other kinds of depression just win by default.
If it only pumped the money to a few individuals someone would've pushed those individuals off a cliff and seized power by now.
The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.
Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.
No, I doubt they are. Most people who are on the streets chronically are there because they’ve burned every bridge. Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks if they had a job loss that put them at risk of hard times — on the other hand those who mysteriously have zero friends or family usually got that way by the same antisocial behaviors that contributed to their problems in the first place, until every last person that once cared said “don’t come around here anymore.”
Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.
> who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
Then they need to start supporting themselves. Or at least not strew needles all over the friend’s living room and pawn their valuables to buy more meth.
Most of those friends would settle for just the latter for several months, but the worst cases 100% got kicked out of even family members’ homes for that kind of thing and that’s why they’re on the street.
10 trillion dollars of welfare, free houses, cash, whatever, is not enough to fix addicts who don’t have an insane amount of willpower. Which most people just don’t have. Drugs are mostly the problem. Most non-addicts sleep in their cars and rely on friends for a month or two and get their shit together. “Homelessness” numbers always conflate both kinds: the lost causes and the temporarily homeless.
I can tell your income bracket from this phrase alone:
> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.
No, most people do not.
I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.
But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.
Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
The friends and family route works the first time around. You couch surf until you find a job, as you go through your contact list people are happy to host at first, but there comes the awkward "so... it's been a couple weeks... how's that job search going?". Then you have to put your job search on pause until you find a new place to live.
Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"
Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.
So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.
I wouldn't say so. A large percentage of the population - double digits - have never had any job security in their lives, or any guarantees whatsoever. We've learnt to adapt and know we can do it again. People aren't allocated 1 job per person for life and if we loose that job we're in the shit for life. Most people know they can get another job.
