I think economists can be terrible people. Why? I'm an economist, and my first thought to this article isn't "Hey, that's horrible that people want to contract AIDS!" My first thought is "Hey, this is a natural experiment from which I can estimate discount factors!"
Of course, the second thought is then "Once we know that, we can adjust the benefits ratio to discourage people from willingly contracting HIV."
While the real solution would be to provide a real social safety net to prevent that from being an incentive in the first place. The US, where you have to be dying of AIDS to get social services.
America shits me to tears. As someone who has lived all over the world, the absolute cruelty of the American system never fails to baffle me. I love a lot of things about the US but the idea that the suffering that lead this man to contract the disease in the first place is just what he deserved because he was unlucky enough to be poor . . . well, words fail me.
I agree a real nationalized healthcare system is in order, with many improvements possible. In the meantime though, you should know:
You don't have to actually be dying of AIDS to get social services, such as public housing, in America.
In NYC, a single person is eligible for public housing if their income is less than $48,000. [1]
For reference, the median income in NYC is $49,461. [2] That implies nearly half of NYC is eligible for public housing, not to mention a myriad of other social services. Contracting AIDS entitles one to social services in addition to what is normally available.
I'm hesitant to ascribe perverse incentives as a function of the American social system only.
I spent some time in Southeast Asia. The government-supplied social net of the US is absolutely fantastic in comparison, though culturally I found that there the social safety net is the extended family. One didn't need to be a certain socioeconomic level to get help if necessary.
"This cruel paradox — having to get really sick in order to enjoy a better, more comfortable life — has not gone unnoticed. "
There is no cruel paradox here. I cannot begin to understand the level of lazyness, lack of self responsibility, and sense of entitlement that would lead someone to think that contracting full blown AIDS would be the 'only way' to live more comfortably.
This is the line of thinking that only comes from someone that would quite literally rather die a slow painful death than work and support themselves.
It's pretty hard to get VC funding if you're homeless. But I agree, why do they contract AIDS for food stamps when they could just found bootstrapped SaaS lifestyle businesses? The poor are so fucking lazy.
What's with the demeaning sarcasm? No one - except you - said that building software and getting aids are the only two options. I'm sure you can see what he intended - there are many, many other options, starting with a low-skill low-wage job.
I responded with sarcasm because I'm sick of comments like the parent.
Whenever anyone brings up the possibility of creating a proper safety net in the US, or if anyone just mentions that, hey, there are some people in our country living in unbelievably shitty conditions--there's always someone ready to say "no, they deserve it, they're just lazy."
It boggles my fucking mind that someone on HN, who's probably pretty well-educated, who's probably living comfortably on a cushy tech job, could say with a straight face that poor people, as an aggregate, are lazy leeches who would rather get AIDS than get work as dishwashers.
A nontrivial fraction of people who read this article respond with scorn for the people involved, rather than concern about the system that puts people in these positions. That squashes any possibility of political or social change.
Look at some of the other comments in this thread--"why don't they just get jobs?" Willful ignorance at its worst.
>[the people in the article] would quite literally rather die a slow painful death than work and support themselves
And that argument is stupid. I don't care if you call yourself a conservative, people will call you out if you say something stupid. My point wasn't that you should be a liberal, my point is that you're smart enough to know better.
You keep saying these people would rather have AIDS than work. You're naive for thinking that they have the option to work; they would rather have AIDS than starve in a gutter.
Perhaps I never had a choice to make any other argument because I was underprivileged and I couldn't figure out how to ride the bus to get to the library to read about just how underprivileged other people can be. Calling my argument stupid in such a situation would be a lack of your ability to check your own 'sociology' privilege.
All I'm saying is that you should think about what's more likely--that people would rather get AIDS than work, or that work isn't always easy/possible to find.
I'm not implying they should go get funding. but They COULD move to a less expensive city and get a regular job.
There's a big difference between a poor person and someone who thinks contracting a fatal disease is a better approach than finding a job and actually supporting themselves.
But hey, if someone has resigned themselves to leech off society under any circumstance maybe having them contract a fatal disease willingly is simply natural selection at work.
Yeah. Actually, from that guy's perspective, given the actual situation, it is. He'll be sick, but he'll have a home and food, for as long as he lives - and if he was homeless, he might have died sooner than he will now, with AIDS but housed.
Either way, getting a stable living situation after you haven't had one is a tremendous relief.
I've lived in a poor neighborhood before. If you haven't, and clearly you haven't, then you have no freaking idea. I've never been that poor, because for me, you're right, there's always a job; I'm educated and white. But for this guy and for a lot of other people I've known personally, this simply IS NOT TRUE.
Even your blithe assumption he can relocate is naive. His situation might be worse than a dog's in a shelter, but at least he understands it. He knows the people, and may even have some family - even if his family hates him, they're still his people! You think this uneducated black man whose job history consists of getting fucked for cash is just going to pick up and move to North Carolina and get a nice Webdev gig surrounded by a bunch of strangers?
How about we take this the other way around. I'm assuming you're white. Let's say you relocate to the depths of Harlem or maybe the south side projects in Chicago, rent a place, and start going door to door looking for work. Is that something you can imagine working out well?
But be that as it may, there's not ALWAYS a job available if you're willing to accept a low enough wage and relocate. The fact that you believe this already means you simply have no expertise in being disadvantaged.
I have lived in poor neighborhoods. For a period of a few weeks I was unemployed, Because I had been a student I was ineligible for unemployment benefits and living in the woods in a tent. I went out and got a job washing dishes and got on my feet. Moved on to a bus boy gig. Then got a job doing tech support and paid my own way through school that was almost 10 years ago now.
So please don't come to me and tell me I have no idea what it's like to work my way up from rock bottom.
Willing to accept a low enough wage? There's a hard floor on that in most countries. Even ignoring minimum wage, there's a minimum amount of management overhead involved in having an employee, especially a low-wage, low-skill employee, and the value produced by a worker must at least overcome that even if he is to be worth hiring for free.
Willing to relocate? How about able to relocate? Moving to a distant land is a non-trivial exercise.
I seriously don't get your attitude in this thread. You're basically declaring that various serious problems in society are not, in fact, problems at all. According to you, as best I can tell, every single poor or homeless person out there has no obstacles to getting out of their predicament if they just did some obvious things like find employment. This leads me to ask: why do these people exist at all, then? Nobody wants to be poor, so if they can get out of it so easily, why are they still poor?
This is one of those instances where the mere existence of a problem indicates that it's hard to solve, while you're blithely proclaiming it to be trivial.
Maybe i should've used the term 'advantage' then. I simply wanted to point out that the ability to choose/reason is in itself very much something you 'inherit', rather than some innate skill that we all have equally.
'COULD' is a complicated concept. It's something I struggle with too, when I watch movies like 'City of God', where mostly I ask myself 'why the hell don't these kids leave the city. or the country.'
Or The Wire where a kid who 'got out' decides to come back.
There are many factors that play a role in the options we have, and the strongest factors have nothing to do with what's objectively best.
Psychologically speaking, it's a bit dangerous (and too easy) to say that poor people should just stop living their poor lifestyles and leave their poor friends and poor family for a world totally unknown to them. This is also true for addicts, or homeless people. I've come to know quite a few of both, and if anything I've started to respect the difficulty of their situation.
I read several years ago about a woman living in Northern Virginia who was considered a mild "success" story because she was able to get on a bus and ride about 2 miles to her job at McDonald's. She and her family had lived in the same neighborhood for a few generations within walking distance of schools, church, clinic, shopping, social services building, etc. None of them had ever left the neighborhood for anything, let alone a job. Learning that leaving the neighborhood as she did was a significant accomplishment for her - given her history/background - was a real jolt to my worldview.
Provincialism is like a massive invisible wall. The people on either side of it generally can't even fathom what it's like to be on the other side of that wall, but they don't even know it's there.
I spent several years growing up in small-town Wisconsin. The idea of moving to another place is just unfathomable to a lot of people who live in a place like that. Not just hard, like, oh, that would cost a lot of money and be a lot of work, but unfathomable, the way buying a house on Mars would be.
So much of our outlook is driven by our experience and we don't even realize it unless we encounter the right circumstances. If you grew up in one little area and that's all you know and that's all anybody you know has ever known, then leaving it is a big deal. Some people will pull it off, but many others simply won't be capable.
Agreed it's tough. I've never seen any of those movies but after living downtown in a city with about 400k people I've known a few addicts and homeless people. The vast majority had no intention of getting on the right track and would steal from anyone the second the opportunity presented itself. I think it's important to help the people who genuinely want to get on the right track.
But I have no sympathy for someone who thinks contracting AIDS is a way to improve their lot in life.
1) Leaving the city means leaving the safety net of begging for money and food.
2) Would you hire a homeless man who just moved to your small town and is starting to suffer from withdrawal, has no place to live, and has no means of reliably getting to work? for any job?
There's a world of separation between the jobless and the homeless. No amount of willpower can bridge that divide, only fortune.
Bullshit. Almost every sizable city has programs and facilities for the homeless who actually want to improve their lives. They can get Cell phones for a dollar a month, and a place to stay while they get on their feet. The only rules are they have to TRY and kick whatever habit has already destroyed their life.
You do understand, I hope, that poverty and lack of education go hand in hand. Getting a job is not a trivial matter if you're not well educated. That will manifest itself both in less jobs being offered to you, and being less apt at looking for opportunities in not so obvious places.
Wow, work and support themselves! What an idea! I can't believe nobody thought of that! You must go to New York immediately and tell all these people!
Seriously, though, I'm pretty sure they've already had that idea, and I'm pretty sure there are reasons beyond laziness why most of these people haven't carried it out.
Lack of skills required by employers, lack of ability to work, lack of ability to get to work.
In another comment, you mentioned that lacking education won't prevent you from getting a job washing dishes. This is true. However, I bet there are a fair number of people out there who simply can't or don't know how to wash dishes. It's almost inconceivable, but many of the skills that we take for granted, like knowing how to wash dishes, or knowing how to apply for a job, or knowing how to take a bus, are learned things that not everyone gets educated about.
Bullshit. None of your examples hold any water. They teach you how to wash dishes on the job. The person in the linked article was obviously savvy enough to know how to work the system for better benefits I'm inclined to think they are lazy rather than simply ignorant. Not knowing how to ride the bus? Are you kidding me? People will even help you fill out a job app if you can't read.
This has interesting parallels to a frequent bone of contention in the UK: the role of disability benefits or pregnancies in propping up people's lifestyles.
One of the oldest running tales is of the 16 year old getting pregnant in the hope of getting her own "council flat" (i.e. a place to live) rather than because she wants a baby. This just seems like the more extreme end of the same situation in a country that's not quite so forthcoming with social benefits.
Yet another handful of anecdotes about a need-based social welfare program.
If you're desperate enough, sabotaging yourself to qualify for a need-based social program eventually becomes the objectively optimal thing to do. This is the first I've heard of that sabotage extended all the way to intentionally getting AIDS and intentionally not seeking treatment, though.
Typically these stories can be dismissed for the anecdotes they are. I have a handful of right-winger friends who love sending me some article from the Wichita Star or something where some woman got promoted at her job, lost her Medicaid benefits, so she quit her job, and now gets even more benefits, or something, and RAAAR $16 TRILLION IN DEBT WE'RE ON THE ROAD TO GREECE MAKERS TAKERS SMALL BUSINESS THIS COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL.
No, this country has decided it's beyond the state's responsibility to provide food, shelter, and medicine to everyone. Instead, various state and local programs only provide it those things to a fraction of the people who need it, usually based on some seemingly well-intentioned criteria. And then some people have the kind of lives where being a homeless prostitute without AIDS is worse than having a roof and having AIDS, so they decide to do that.
You can accept that any program like this will induce morally hazardous behavior in some people, and look for objective information vs. sensationalized anecdotes to see if that program needs reform. You can also realize any need-based program will almost always introduce said morally hazardous behavior, and the problem is that we underfund these programs so that they need this need-based criteria to begin with.
Or you can push to eliminate all these programs because you think they turn everyone into lazy welfare AIDS-seeking moochers, and the good news for you is there's already a political party in the US that pretty much supports all that.
> Or you can push to eliminate all these programs because you think they turn everyone into lazy welfare AIDS-seeking moochers
So let me get this straight ... for thousands of years, support for the needy was provided by local religious institutions and local efforts. People gave alms, etc to their local church and then the church rendered assistance. Essentially, the community helping itself. Neighbors helping neighbors, albeit indirectly to preserve dignity.
Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related to religion needs to be eradicated, so we can't keep doing things the way we used to. Now we tax the shit out of anything that moves and dispense assistance on a federal level, from Washington DC, thousands of miles away, by some faceless bureaucrats. How deranged do you have to be to think that's an improvement?
Guess what? The poor and needy were provided assistance long before the welfare programs came to the fore in the 20s and 30s. They were provided assistance through private channels, through their community. Unfortunately, due to taxation to provide for similar programs on a federal level, quite a few of those channels have dried up. Unfortunate indeed.
There's a name for when the churches ran the world: it's called the dark ages for a reason. I'd rather not have to rely on someone's (supposed) piety on top of the questionable scruples of the church to render assistance. What happens if you're an outspoken critic of the church or (heaven forfend) a "sinner" homosexual? At least when the Tea Party criticizes the government, the government doesn't pull the welfare checks of its members.
They nail them with a tax audit when there's reason to believe they're cheating on their non-profit status. And if they have nothing to hide and their accounting is honest, then an audit shouldn't be a problem. Right?
> So let me get this straight ... for thousands of years, support for the needy was provided by local religious institutions and local efforts.
No, for thousands of years, we had an economic system in which the needy who were physically able to work were likely to be able to do work in the most common jobs available (largely, barely-better-than-subsistence farming), where the needy that weren't able to work might get some support from religious institutions (not necessarily local), individual authorities or, where it existed, the state, or elsewhere, but mostly just suffered and died. (And were often criminalized.)
Evolutions of property arrangements (including those that enabled capitalism), population density, and industrialization eliminate the easy access to basic work in the developed world (in exchange for more productive work where work was available) before much changed in the way that the "needy" were treated.
> Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related to religion needs to be eradicated, so we can't keep doing things the way we used to.
Neoliberalism [1] is not particularly concerned with religion, pro or con, nor does it generally support replacing private charity with public social support (it generally opposes public social support, and isn't particularly enthusiastic about private charity, though forced to choose between the two -- or just as a convenient way of selling opposition to public support -- neoliberals will back private charity, including religious.)
for thousands of years, support for the needy was provided
by local religious institutions and local efforts.
For thousands of years, inadequate support was provided. People used to die in the streets. Furthermore, such support has historically not been provided to unpopular minorities, unless you consider slavery "support".
Here come the neo-liberals. Anything even remotely related
to religion needs to be eradicated
Show me a single poll of which the results show that more than 2% of participants want "anything even remotely related to religion" to be "eradicated".
This is interesting, I didn't view this article the same way.
"No, this country has decided it's beyond the state's responsibility to provide food, shelter, and medicine to everyone." - this does seem to be true, and I view this article as a criticism of this decision, not as a criticism of the programs these people are seeking to get benefits from.
I think this story highlights the absurdity of not having unqualified assistance for housing, food, and healthcare. If people take this as a reason to eliminate these programs, well... I'm sure people will view it that way - well, I don't know what to say about it. I mean, I can at least agree with this: "THIS COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL."
Some see the main problem here as being moral hazard, which causes social welfare programs to become very expensive, with most of the resources going to people who have been lured in by the promise of 'money for nothing'. This is a normative argument which is what I think you are critiquing here.
I would put forward another criticism of need based programs which is positive, and has recently been made with increasing frequency. This argument is that the nature of many programs induces dependence among the recipients; the principal example of this being US federal disability benefits. These benefits can be permanently forfeited if the recipient earns more than a given amount over a certain time frame, which forces the recipient to consider trading in a long term cash flow (disability benefits) for greater income with uncertain future prospects (a job). The result is that many people with difficulty working, who could do some limited work are disincentivized from ever taking a job; this is especially apparent during recessions. [ http://economics.mit.edu/files/7388 ]
The other problems you can have when you begin to hand out government aid are moral ones, which you may agree with. Those who are lazy and collect benefits get to take from those who work hard; even more troubling is that the workers have no way to force the slackers to do anything, while the slackers can use regulation and taxation to manipulate the workers. This argument does not address people who are unable to support themselves.
The real problem with these programs is that they are designed with a hard cut-off point rather than reducing the compensation at a slightly slower speed than private employment ramps up. For instance our tax system works in a rational fashion: you pay say 0% on the first 8k, 10% on the next several thousand and so on. In this manner, you are never disincentivised from trying to get more money because it's always positive (though more inefficient money accumulation wise).
What I don't understand is why we don't have programs (say unemployment benefits) where when you finally get work, the money you earn above the cut off replaces need based compensation dollar for dollar until you're free of the system. It makes no sense to cut people off the soon as they get a job when the job pays less than the program.
You're talking about what has been called a "negative income tax"; the idea has a long history, but was popularized in the USA by Milton Friedman. A form of this was implemented as the "earned income tax credit", but only as a supplement to traditional welfare programs.
Typical of Out/Advocate to feature blacks/browns only in negative/stereotypical stories. Never a black/brown positive story, of success, excellence, achievement or anything constructive.
I've stopped reading ages ago, and they really only represent and advertise for white gay male.
If you really want to see what white gay men do for "fun", watch (better not really, it's a disgusting true story of a "chaser") Todd Verow's "Bottom". Totally not the clean cut wholesome gay white male these publications like to promote, and equally disturbing.
I stopped reading the mainstream gay media a long long time ago. There was a point when I realized it represented a way of life and culture that I had no interest in, and would never welcome me either. The only thing I have in common with much of the mainstream gay community is an attraction to the same sex, my geekiness represents many more important cultural touchstones to me.
That's really what I do too. My partner still subscribes, so I get a chance to have a look from time to time, and I find it quite upsetting, but mostly tedious/boring.
PS, was going through the comments on out.com, and faire enough, one David Kelsey seems to express the same pov. I guess it's not a coincidence.
(I can't comment there's because I'm not on FB, nor any of the other alternatives needed for commenting. AOL, really?)
Of course, the second thought is then "Once we know that, we can adjust the benefits ratio to discourage people from willingly contracting HIV."