Bezos can keep his donations, I just want Amazon to pay tax like any other business would in the UK, pay employees NI like any other business in the UK, and pay minimum wage like any other business in the UK. It shouldn't be up to the billionaires to choose where to spend money that should be in the hands of national governments and workers. This article for instance shows homeless Amazon warehouse workers living in tents [0]. Maybe a better solution to homelessness is to pay people properly.
> I just want Amazon to pay tax like any other business would in the UK, pay employees NI like any other business in the UK, and pay minimum wage like any other business in the UK
I agree with you, but you can't blame Jeff Bezos for UK legislation.
> ... but you can't blame Jeff Bezos for UK legislation.
Ahh, the old 'unless it's specifically and explicitly denied, regardless of moral or ethical considerations, let alone acting contra to the spirit of the law, then it's okay' defence.
Your misdirection is correct - Jeff Bezos is not responsible for UK legislation - however how Jeff Bezos instructs his vendors and employees to act is very much his responsibility.
If you want to optimize systems, you should expect people to operate with self-interest with respect to the law. Attributing moral blame for self-interested parties not donating money to be within the spirit of the law is unreasonable.
Attributing moral blame to self-interested parties is exactly the point of moral blame. Moral blame is specifically about accusing people of going for their self-interest and little else...
Why must there be anything else? If you're going to make this argument then you must have a compelling answer, specifically in the context of a corporation.
Companies follow laws and regulations, and optimize for profit and sustainability within those rules. Why would they ever pay MORE than they have to? There are no ethics or morals here. Taxes are not charity.
If you want to change the tax laws then you can do so, via the government that you take part in.
I don't have complete control over every government in the world. It is perfectly reasonable for me to criticize the way that companies act, even if it is incentivized by a government. People do not have to be mindless money maximizers. They have a choice in how they act and they are responsible for their own actions regardless of what incentives the government creates.
Nobody has complete control over any government, anywhere in the world.
Companies are also not citizens, they are abstract structures designed to deliver value to customers and make a profit in doing so. A corporation has no specific loyalty to the government beyond following the laws and paying the dues required for operating. Corporations are also not able to judge what the "ethical" amount to pay is, which is why the government sets those rules on behalf of the people it represents.
You're turning a government issue into a corporate issue because it sounds easy, but ultimately its just treating (or rather complaining about) the symptom rather than enacting any solution. Again, perhaps you should join the government and enact the change you want to see?
Also since you are talking about responsibility and actions, I assume you donate all the spare cash you have that isn't going to taxes. Or is that not ethical in your case?
This is an absolutely horrifying argument. You are basically getting rid of any notion of personal responsibility and saying that I cannot criticize anyone for doing anything that the government does not prevent.
Definitely not what I said. Your comment also doesn't seem to make much sense and I don't see what personal responsibility has to do with corporate taxes. You can also criticise all you want, that's never been the topic of discussion in this thread.
> People do not have to be mindless money maximizers.
No. They don't. Companies do.
To a degree, they DO have a fiduciary duty to maximize profit over the long haul; if Amazon didn't take all legal shortcuts it'd be at a competitive disadvantage and a competitor could put it out of business.
Optimizing every aspect of their operation gives Bezos, the person, the opportunity to act following his moral compass (space exploration, philanthropy, etc.)
You don't think that negotiation and outright bribery (oh I'm sorry in the civilized West we call it lobbying) don't drive either the laws or the uneven enforcement of them?
Amazon is so big that they can jurisdiction shop or even just shop for legislators/civil servants to help fashion the regulatory environment they prefer.
Bribery is already illegal so what's your point with that?
Everything you're saying falls under "change and improve your government" if you want to see something different. If they fail to act in the public interest then vote in someone else, or run for office and show them how it's done.
It's not easy, but it's not impossible. And it's far more realistic than posting some comments and wondering why companies don't magically just donate their money away.
Jeff Bezos has a legal obligation to Amazon shareholders. He's not really allowed to donate their money to the UK government beyond what is required by UK law.
I'm not blaming the legislation, I'm blaming him for ignoring it. Using sub- contractors to evade employment taxes, for instance, is illegal in the UK. Somehow Amazon (and similar others like Uber) are above that. Jo Maugham QC (tax lawyer) has aledged that there is some kind of sweetheart deal with the UK government with regards to US tech firms, and brought a related case against Uber for using a similar ruse to evade sales tax.
I like your thinking but Amazon/Bezos will push the boundaries to minimize costs and to be successful.
The 2B is a start but it's up to society to make sure he doesn't go too far by putting limits where needed.
Amazon's ways would change tomorrow if customers would speak up against its abusive ways but we all love PRIME, their customer service, and the convenience.
Amazon at least has to hire people to get the job done, good or bad people still have work. Apple, the largest cap company in the world, does its work with a fraction of the people that Amazon does, 500k+ for Amazon vs 120k+ for Apple. And they minimized their tax footprint while having truckloads of externalities that cost society billions.
The criticism of Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller was highlighted by the longterm reporting of Ida Tarbell in the Saturday Evening Post. He was criticised before but Tarbell brought up to a different level in people's minds. No one seems to have the guts and long-term focus to do it for the new tech giants.
They pay the tax they are legally obligated to. You can't expect any business to pay a penny more than that. It's on the lawmakers to remove the loopholes (which they and their friends probably exploit as well, so good luck with that...)
Not OP, but OP's point stands. If they can get special treatment, someone else's might be able to. The fact that it's a possibility means they must use it or risk being at a competitive disadvantage of a less ethical player.
Before an argument of "this justifies any type of behavior such as murdering your competitors' CEOs." There's a natural limit (albeit fuzzy) to what rules is in the company's self interest to seek a "special treatment". Relationships with gov't go sour, governments change, etc. What used to be "special treatment" might quickly transform into proof of wrong-doing against the company.
But then the argument becomes rather different. It is no longer a question of "If that's the law then it is not Amazon's fault". It has moved on to "Can we get away with coercing the government into allowing us to break the law".
That is morally a lot more challenging, and there is nothing in the managements fiduciary responsibilities that compels them to break laws. Nothing. Indeed the responsibility to shareholders is more complex anyway, aggressive tax planning may for instance damage your brand and reduce the future profitability.
Yes, there is. Societies — as we know how to make them — break down if everyone figures out how to avoid paying their way.
If a hacker gets root, they’re just using the rules of the system, finding a loophole they can exploit… taxes and laws are systems that can be exploited, but even in the cases where I find them bad (and I have plenty of broad examples of things I don’t like), I think it’s worse to let people get away with exploiting weaknesses in the system.
It's not weakness, it's a commercial decision, both for Amazon AND for the jurisdiction. It's another tool the governing body has for drawing (or repelling) businesses.
There isn't a moral rate of taxation anymore than there is an absolute moral price to pay for a night at a hotel.
I’m not arguing about the absolute rate of taxation, I’m arguing about the ability to exploit different rates. Arbitrage of rules, I guess you might call it, in an environment where those setting the rules can be pressured into what would otherwise be suboptimal decisions.
Deciding it’s best to operate in a low tax jurisdiction is not “exploiting a weakness in the system”. It’s simply acting rationally in an environment when you have multiple options for where you operate.
I'm not participating in the conversation around the moral imperatives for corporations.
I am curious about your statement:
> Government shouldn’t be in the position where their own tax base can manipulate them.
I would like to hope by definition a democratic government is one where the tax base can manipulate the government. Going against that seems like suggesting we move to a model of "Taxation without representation".
I'm bringing it up because I'm sure you didn't intend your statement in this way. It might be worth it to re-think/phrase it.
> I would like to hope by definition a democratic government is one where the tax base can manipulate the government. Going against that seems like suggesting we move to a model of "Taxation without representation".
The tax base and the voters are not the same thing. Unemployed have a vote, corporations do not.
Additionally, in the case of tax system manipulation, it is the richest who wield the greatest power. As a relatively boring private individual, no action I personally take to move my income to regions of low tax has any noticeable impact on a government — 100% of my tax is still less than most rounding errors. Large multinationals, on the other hand… Apple International is tax resident in the Republic of Ireland, and Apple (parent company not International) has an annual revenue of 70% of Ireland’s GDP.
I can see how my language choice led to your comment.
I’m worried this is one dollar one vote, not one person one vote.
The head tax was a poorly thought out law that would have inflicted a lot of collateral damage on Seattle-based businesses without trillion dollar market caps. It was broadly unpopular here for that and a number of reasons, in spite of widespread controversy about Amazon's effect on Seattle.
Of course they did, why wouldn't they? You don't expect them to willingly pay more tax than necessary. They're a business and their job is to make money.
As they were almost certainly legally obligated too, the problem is individuals still vote in officials who bend to the whim of businesses instead of individuals.
What are you talking about? Jimnotgym is precisely asking to not screw the society and follow the law (yeah, they found some "legal" loopholes, therefore one could argue that Amazon is in the "legal green zone") pay regular taxes and treat the warehouse workers et al like decent humans.
Stop making nonsequestirs. If Amazon is breaking laws, sue them. There's no forced labor in warehouses, it's at-will. No one's stopping the unhappy from getting another job. Raise the minimum wage in territories you suspect are untenable.
Then there's the whole hypocrisy of you shopping on Amazon. How much do you save by shopping on Amazon (and equivalents). Why isn't a 100% of your shopping local and sustainable?
You're missing the larger point. I'll try one last time.
Labor "at will" doesn't mean you get to abuse the conditions "at will". If you can, and do have all the wherewithal in the world to make your workers lives less inhumane, why on earth wouldn't you do it? You jolly well must do it!
On your assumptions on where I shop, yes, I admit that occasionally (maybe once in 3 months) I do shop on Amazon (for the things that I can't get locally; and these are not any 'big expenses'). But I boycott them to a large extent. And I "vote with my wallet" (and end up spending more than I "should") to support the local and stay sustainable to the most meaningful extent that I can, knowing my circumstances and dependents. I am reasonably proud of how I make my spending choices.
There's no end to your moral policing of Amazon's wearhouse policies. No matter what they do, you'll find a reason to demonize them.
But just to play along with your line of attack - the answer is obvious - it would affect their bottom line. Their retail is legendary for being unprofitable, there's very little wiggle room for increasing costs. What
would you rather have - a large army of employed, productive wearhouse workers, whose experience at Amazon opens up further opportunities, or an army of unemployed?
Like I cited initially, the permutations have played out before, at etsy. Etsy's flat growth, and reduction in employment, while simultaneously cutting back on previously granted generous endowments is what will result if Amazon does what the social media lynch mobs of Justice seek
Like it or not these things are done at the will of the people of the country; they could vote to change it, or vote in people who would change it but they won't. It's horrible and unacceptable to you, and to me, but not to your (technically, our, but I can't vote in the UK due to residency requirements) fellow countrymen.
Humans fear devastating but statistically unlikely things disproportionately to their chance of happening, and will do basically anything to avoid them. Terrorism is such an example, and surveillance is a consequence.
Thing is, if the people of the UK decide it's an unacceptable tradeoff they will vote to change it, and it will change. Just look at, lord have mercy, Brexit. It's in everyone's hands. That's not true of a billionaire's discretionary fund.
Exactly my point. I just was been sarcastic (sorry). We believe they will do the best for us. But all this things happen all the time under the table. What I meant is that we don't like this things happening but we wont probably do much to change it.
> It shouldn't be up to the billionaires to choose where to spend money that should be in the hands of national governments and workers.
Yeah I couldn’t disagree any harder with this statement. The property rights are an essential element of a free society. The notion that government or “workers” are somehow entitled to prescribe or direct another’s property is at odds with the principals the United States was founded on.
If you don’t like how someone else makes their money, you are free to take your patronage elsewhere and convince me to as well. Don’t try to convince me government or “workers” have a right to his property.
I dont't care if this is a PR stint to ward of recent criticism Bezos is getting from Bernie et al but if this fund goes and actually help and make a real life impact on the lives of homeless people, then I am fine and I will hold back my criticism of Amazon. I mean clearly I have not done enough to mitigate homelessness in this country who am I to question others motives trying to solve the same problem?
Looks like this was cheaper than upping the salaries of warehouse workers to get them off food stamps and provide healthcare. For Bezos this is just another calculation, nothing more.
I feel people like Jeff Bezos, who already have all the money in the world, are more interested in winning/power and money is only a way of keeping score.
Bezos is probably interested in growing Amazon into the biggest business in the world, and part of that strategy is cutting costs to the bone.
What I'm trying to say is he's looking for a way to maximize Amazon's growth rate, not necessarily pinch pennies (pinch billions?). So if he can preserve his current strategy by giving a few billion away, I don't think he cares.
People think they have it scored when they make 10m, but some still don't stop.
The game at his level of scoring includes different variables in the profit equation. He has to worry if poor people repoduce enough, is the overall population growth expanding, etc.
He "scored" really doesn't apply.
I was told once that if you are a business, either the grow, or die.
It is really frustrating when a man makes that much and does so little.
Like, I don't think/know if it should be law. I'm not talking about being Robinhood with our taxes or whatever. I don't know any of that.
All I know is it's frustrating. Look at all the good Gates is working towards. There's just so much room for people with that much wealth to strive for.
Honestly.. I think what's most frustrating is I can't even imagine what you even do with that much money, aside from watch it get bigger, if not helping people. These people have so much money that they can't even spend it. Short of trying to personally buy a company or a country, there's just nothing you could spend it on.. it grows too fast. So it's frustrating that the human condition so easily falls towards hoarding.
And yes, I'm largely ignoring the idea of liquidity, but for this discussion I think we can.
That's the charity of Kings. The French king gave a lot to charity with one hand and created a lot more misery with the other.
This is just the return of the times of charity.
You’d think people would remember how that worked out for the French royalty, but I guess it’s always “going to be different this time.”
The Kings have learned - between unrestricted surveillance and a far better armed military, any hope of sending to the aristocracy to the guillotine probably ended sometime in the 40s.
Not to mention it's been learned to label those sorts of revolutionaries as "terrorists," among a lot of other social engineering tricks.
I should note - I'm not for lopping off anybody's heads. I'm just saying the shortlist of solutions for a trapped peasantry class has grown quite slim.
Surely a few people in the French aristocracy knew they were sitting on a time bomb. But nobody had the will, the skill, and the charisma to defuse the damned thing.
Mind you that the french aristocracy was dealing with a revolution which upheaveled the entire meaning of being a royal/noble, it's principles and the "entity" that they derived their "rights" from.
Prior to the french revolution, many royalty's (including the french) got their righteousness to rule from 'god'.
The french revolution was the first which actually abolished this ancient idea and tried to hold the nobles accountable to the state. (early revolutionaries even wanted to keep the bourbonnes, until the jacobins and Robespierre came around and ended that rather... certainly).
To be fair, there were liberal nobles who wanted to ditch their titles and make the system more meritocratic (with the subtle acknowledgement that nobles could afford education). America’s favorite Frenchman, the marquis de Lafayette, was one of them.
They just weren’t very effective at defusing the time bomb.
After centuries of a system people integrate their role in it. After a while you really feel that you are the superior or the inferior. It's really hard to get out of it.
I’ve maintained again and again, the current trajectory of American business and finance looks a lot less like capitalism and a lot more like feudalism.
At this rate I'd be happy if they simply paid as much as everyone else (percentage wise). Rather, that they didn't find as many legal tax avoidance methods.
I don't know if they should be taxed more than the 99%, I'll let someone who knows economics tell me what is best.
The richest people make their money primarily from capital investment, which has returns proportional to the capital invested, which in the long run is exponential. Laborers make their money primarily from effort over time, which is linear. So it makes sense for their taxes to be different. Additionally the amount of money someone needs to live comfortably is more or less constant (regional differences apply), so it's less harmful to tax someone with more than that than someone with less.
An economist will tell you that a handful of taxes are inherently helpful and getting money is a nice bonus (externalities taxes, some amount of LVT). If you need more money than what you can get through those (and you do) then the least harmful tax is a wealth tax, but those are unpopular and difficult to administrate. Income-based taxes are less efficient but still okay. Sales taxes aren't very good at all.
It is a common misconception that high income tax rates would affect the ultra-wealthy to any significant degree. It would not, because their wealth almost never appears as ordinary income.
High income tax rates (such as we indeed used to have in the United States) affect people like dentists and pediatricians, not people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.
Note that Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Mitt Romney, and Michael Bloomberg, among others, have all "taken a salary of $1/year" as a publicity stunt at various times, yet somehow managed to wind up billionaires in spite of that. Harry Reid never had a real job in his entire life, and never had any ordinary income outside his congressional salary, but wound up massively wealthy nonetheless.
Try proposing a tax on net worth/assets and see how many of the Pelosis, Feinsteins, Heinz-Kerrys, Warrens, Obamas, or Kennedys sign off on that.
Just do a search for historical tax brackets. The OP is correct, however he doesn’t follow up with the effective tax rate paid. In the 1940s there were a lot more tax deductions.
The effective tax rate for those in the top 1% hasn’t changed all that much and is near historical highs.
That said, you're making the fallacy of thinking like money is a natural resource we dig up from the ground or something, that Bezos is hoarding.
No. Money is just an abstraction of barters and favors owed. Suppose Bezos pays a surgeon $100k to treat a patient. Well, the surgeon could have done it for free. So if Bezos didn't pay the surgeon, who is responsible for the lack of treatment? Bezos, or the surgeon? (An over-simplification, but the point doesn't change if you shift the money from one surgeon to a whole hospital etc.)
My vote: allow Bezos and others to operate within the law. If they're exploiting a loophole (like tax-free Amazon competing with taxed local shops), fix the law.
That's an interesting viewpoint. Though, I view it more as; if you're starving and I have 10 apples, should I give you an apple? Why shouldn't someone else?
Should the surgeon really do the work for free when 100k to him means a lot; but 100k to Bezos is meaningfully less?
By the same token, if there's someone in front of me who needs help and I can help them with 5 cents? 5 cents is nothing to me, I'd do it in a heartbeat. $10,000 I could also afford, but it would be a considerable risk for my life and long term happiness.
The point I'm getting at, is expectation of helping someone or doing something noble seems to be relative to how much excess you have. Though, another important angle is how likely it is to help someone. I don't give $25 to charitable TV advertisements because I don't trust them. Despite being able to afford $25 to help someone.
So it's definitely complex, but correct me if I'm wrong, but your barter abstraction doesn't feel right to me.
No-one eats money. Money is just how we notate that we owe each other stuff. The surgeon can operate on the patient but decides not to, because the patient is a stranger. Bezos says "Please help that patient". The surgeon says "I know you! You convinced a bunch of vendors to send physical products to me and my loved ones. Therefore, I'll help the patient if you insist."
The above dialog is unfamiliar because it gets abstracted away by money, but if money works correctly, then that's what it really means for Bezos to pay the surgeon $100k to treat the patient.
Imagine I know how to fish. I go and teach one million people how to fish. I charge them $1 each, which they gladly pay because they consider the skill worth more than $1. Now I have $1M. I hoard it. Am I greedy? By no means! It's a paradox: you think I'm greedy because I'm hoarding that $1M, but actually I have the $1M because I provided so much value!
> Imagine I know how to fish. I go and teach one million people how to fish. I charge them $1 each, which they gladly pay because they consider the skill worth more than $1. Now I have $1M. I hoard it. Am I greedy? By no means! It's a paradox: you think I'm greedy because I'm hoarding that $1M, but actually I have the $1M because I provided so much value!
Okay so I think I'm getting where you're going with this.. though I feel like it's a separate argument. Honestly it's difficult, so I'm not trying to be dense or coy and argue your point lol.
If I understand you, your saying the $1M does not denote you owe something - and that I can totally agree. You provided value, you have $1M, it was fairly acquired and you don't need to contribute back to society.
However, I don't think it matters to me, honestly. In my personal view, my 5c example still holds true. If I can give someone 5c, I don't care that I earned the 5c - providing value to the population around me. I have enough money that giving 5c away is meaningless, it's a level that I can easily help someone at - not just easily, without question/hesitation even.
Which goes back to what I said earlier, it's all about relative excess. In the $1M example, you don't owe anyone anything - you provided a service, you're better off because of it. Yet, if $1/m is all they make, your level of income os miles above theirs. To the point that, you could spend $25 for a goal you deem helpful to society, and it would mean little to you, but a ton to other people.
So yes, you don't owe anyone anything. But that's why I called it a personal responsibility. I want to be kind, and 5c for me to help someone is a no brainer. I don't owe them, I want to help them. Bezos and other massively rich people might be missing that.
I'm not saying Bezos sell some houses/cars and donate. I'm not saying you should take a loan out and donate. I'm saying we all should want to help people with a an amount that is trivial to us. If you're poor, helping people with trivial money may be of no value (in USD), time is likely more valuable. If you're mega rich however, a trivial value can change lives.
You keep returning to the fundamental fallacy of thinking of money as a fixed natural resource with its own intrinsic value.
That 5c you give doesn't accomplish anything by itself. If the recipient uses it to buy a slice of bread, the merchant could have just given the slice to him for free. Now you'll say, "The merchant needs the 5c more than I do", but again, no: no-one eats nickels. If the merchant 'needs' the 5c to buy his baby son some milk, again, the dairy could give him the milk for free.
Money is a tool for convincing people to do things. Bezos could use his fortune to convince people to do nice actions to each other, but if he doesn't, those people could still do those nice actions to each other anyway. The surgeon does not literally need the money as if he was going to use the dollar bills as a suture (lol). Paradoxically, by saying Bezos has an obligation to donate money, you're essentially saying Bezos has an obligation to dictate how people should act. Somehow I doubt that was your intention!
> That 5c you give doesn't accomplish anything by itself. If the recipient uses it to buy a slice of bread, the merchant could have just given the slice to him for free. Now you'll say, "The merchant needs the 5c more than I do", but again, no: no-one eats nickels. If the merchant 'needs' the 5c to buy his baby son some milk, again, the dairy could give him the milk for free.
I get that, though admittedly it's a very strange point. What's the tactile, real world application of this line of thought?
Ie, it sounds like you're making a random argument akin to "we could all be in a dream, why try?". I'm not mocking your argument, I'm stating that it feels oddly philosophical in a real world.
Yes, that 5c doesn't inherently do anything. Yet, why should I expect the merchant accept the work for free? I'm the rich one, not the merchant. Which is my point - I'm acting, I'm doing something with the excess I have.
And yes, I am thinking of money as having an intrinsic value. "Convincing people to do things" has a form of value to me, and I imagine is very valuable to the person who needs bread considers money to buy bread very valuable. Again, your argument feels.. weirdly philosophical.. which again, is not me bashing your argument/you in the slightest. I mean no disrespect.
> Money is a tool for convincing people to do things. Bezos could use his fortune to convince people to do nice actions to each other, but if he doesn't, those people could still do those nice actions to each other anyway. The surgeon does not literally need the money as if he was going to use the dollar bills as a suture (lol). Paradoxically, by saying Bezos has an obligation to donate money, you're essentially saying Bezos has an obligation to dictate how people should act. Somehow I doubt that was your intention!
I think I fail to see it that way, honestly. If Bezos buys a movie ticket, is he dictating how people act? He's purchasing a ticket, which is a tool to convince people to do things - but again, this seems like an academic definition.
To think of it differently, if Bezos buys 2 loafs of bread, one for himself and one for another person as charity - does it matter what definitions we use here? He can afford to buy more loafs than anyone he knows. He can buy a near infinite number of loafs, especially compared to the bread maker who didn't do the work for free. Yes, the surgeon, bread maker, etc all could have done the work for free - but they don't have as much of this "convincing tool" as Bezos has.
This is why I think this argument is weirdly philosophical. I can instead just say everything I've said with the words "convincing tool" used instead of "money" and I feel like nothing changes on my argument. Bezos has more convincing power than almost anyone in the world. Whether or not it has intrinsic value is .. imo, irrelevant. Bezos' convincing power is leagues beyond that of the surgeon. Like mine is leagues beyond that of the 3rd world homeless man. I'm struggling to see what labels matter here.
At the end of the day, we're just talking about helping people, and how many tools you have to do so. When put so simply, does any of this debate.. matter? Is this debate more than just pedantic?
Well, I'm a logician, so maybe that's inevitable :)
>I'm the rich one, not the merchant
Saying "I'm the rich one" is appealing to the fallacy of money as fixed natural resource. Try this: instead of picturing yourself as rich, picture yourself as a renowned hero, maybe you've cured cancer. Does the fact you've cured cancer place on you an obligation to use your celebrity status to convince the merchant to give the homeless man bread?
No! If anything, people should have an obligation to give YOU bread. Why would it be an axiom that "whoever has done the most to improve the world, is the most obligated to improve the world more"? That's essentially what you're saying, except it gets all confused because you replace "done the most to improve the world" by "has the most money", and treat money like a fixed natural resource.
>If Bezos buys a movie ticket, is he dictating how people act?
Yes, on a small scale.
>He can buy a near infinite number of loafs
No, as soon as he started buying on super-industrial scale, he would drive the price way up. He probably couldn't even buy all the bread in one city, at least not all at once.
This again illustrates the money-as-resource confusion people have. If it were a video game and the bread vendor were an NPC with an unlimited amount of bread with a hard-coded price, then yes, Bezos would be able to buy a practically infinite amount. (In which case, the vendor would be more of a force-of-nature than a person, and the ability to exchange dollars for bread would be a fundamental law of nature. When you think of it this way, video games have very, very, very weird physics :)
>I can instead just say everything I've said with the words "convincing tool" used instead of "money"
Yes, now you're starting to understand :) And so, when you say Bezos is obligated to donate money, you're essentially saying Bezos is obligated to act as a benevolent king/dictator. The act of choosing which scientist to give the money to is no different than the act of a king/dictator deciding which scientist gets a royal commission, etc.
> Yes, now you're starting to understand :) And so, when you say Bezos is obligated to donate money, you're essentially saying Bezos is obligated to act as a benevolent king/dictator. The act of choosing which scientist to give the money to is no different than the act of a king/dictator deciding which scientist gets a royal commission, etc.
Not exactly. I'm saying that people naturally want to help others. To think of it differently:
If I could give 5c to help someone I'd do it in a heartbeat. If I increased my income 100fold (or some astronomical number), I would expect that 5c figure to also increase by a similar amount.
I would sincerely hope that should I obtain this 100fold increase, my desire to help people would not change. This philosophical debate seems.. odd, and entirely off mark imo. All that matters is the world around me (and each of us). I am only one man, I can only do what I can. If I can give 5c to someone directly and it helps them, great. If I buy bread for them with 5c and it helps them, great. The specifics don't matter to me, my thoughts are that I expect most people to naturally want to help others.
Yes, the bread maker also wants to help people. Yes the surgeon also wants to help people. Yes, Bezos should want to help people. No he's not obligated to, but as I said, I consider most people good. That goes back to my question of why people with so much, do so little.
And yes, I am again using money as a resource. Which fundamentally I don't want to debate, because anything you call a resource I can buy with money, so I'm trying to avoid (what I feel is) pointless philosophical debate. So if we can step aside what we call a resource or not, if we can agree that I can help people with what is in my bank account, then we don't need to debate. If we can't agree that I can help people with money.. then I don't know where to even go. I fundamentally do not understand you if that tiny agreement is not possible. At that point, I'd even question if you're just being purposefully difficult/pedantic... no disrespect meant, I said it's a hypothetical question, not that you are.
Frustrating? I can understand why you would feel like it's a shame, or feel disappointed, or even ashamed of tech/bezos/humanity, but why frustrated? Is it that you're upset that you can't change the way someone else spends their own personal fortune?
> Is it that you're upset that you can't change the way someone else spends their own personal fortune?
I haven't thought too much about it honestly, but it seems so, yes. I'm frustrated by a lot of things. It doesn't mean I think I should be trying to change Bezos' mind, but I think being frustrated in this scenario just means you feel a level of personal responsibility for the world around you. Even if you're not immediately responsible for it.
I'm frustrated by a ton of things I'm not personally able to change. Yet it doesn't change by desire for it to be different, my desire to find a way to improve the situation, and ultimately my tiny but meaningful feeling of personal responsibility.
Anyway, take all this with a grain of salt. I chose a word (frustrated) to express my emotion towards the situation I described earlier. I don't think it's wrong, but emotions are hardly a science.
> I'm frustrated by a ton of things I'm not personally able to change.
It's a matter of perspective, which is why I asked the question in the first place. Can you personally change how Bezos spends his money? No. Can you personally help the homeless and disadvantaged? YES!
One would be using Amazon's money and would affect Amazon's ability to continue growing and employing more people, the other is using Bezos' money, and does not, except by maybe affecting the share price as he sells more of his holdings. They're not the same thing.
If that is the case, nothing stops him from creating a Bezos Amazon foundation and making every Amazon employee below a certain salary threshold eligible for grants/help etc etc. With all the accounting jugglery they have access to, I'm sure there are multiple ways to making the employees financially happier while satisfying the shareholders thirst for squeezing the last drop from the last penny.
I've never heard of any precedent, do you know of one? In any case, why should Bezos use his personal money to improve Amazon workers' salaries vs. trying to fix a problem for needier people who don't have a job at all? Or trying to make humanity a space faring species (which he spends $1B/year on, IIRC)?
Why should there be expectation of precedent? Isn't he supposed to be a pioneer (like doing things such as trying to make humanity a space faring species)? Also, charity begins at home and Amazon is his home.
Because usually when you're proposing something new, it's good to ask yourself why it hasn't been done before, or why it's not currently being done, if it has been tried. Oftentimes, there are very good reasons. Very occasionally, there's not.
There is a flawed assumption -that the jobs were created by it in the first place. Jobs exist from demand and the best way to do them. While labor cost influences the approach the demand creates the job. Essentially it is revenue spent on what would have been done anyway to help get the already well off for no lasting benefit. Worse it incentives lower paid jobs by passing off some of their payroll.
If jobs are being made solely through and for subsidies they are better off doing it directly usually.
If they automate more things from the rules change? Mission accomplished - we have more productive work, more private investment in research and development, and technology marches forward and people can do more productive things with their time.
That’s very possible. Altho this is from his own money and not the corp. Though I agree he should try and follow the example of CostCo and maybe outdo them and set an even better example.
Bezos owns 16.4% of Amazon. Donating $ 2 Billions of his own money costs him about as much as donating $ 12 Billions of Amazon's money, which would likely result in him getting replaced.
Another problem for another thread. This will not silence the critics of salary issues at Aamzon warehouse. Give it a few weeks and you will read it for yourself in the news.
Bad actors must be held to account even if they occasionally do good things. I see no compelling reason to withhold criticism of Amazon because of this.
The reverse is true as well. It would apparently kill people to admit that giving two billion dollars to something like this is an act of good faith because their judgment is so clouded by hate.
Right, Amazon is purely net negative. Billions of dollars of wealth, the vast majority created on the backs of laborers via exploitation the world 'round.
I get the shtick. I hear it enough. It's not true, but it's a good story. Plays well on social media. The world is almost certainly better off with Amazon existing than without, even if they do some heinous stuff.
Funny, I think that about your opinion. Which is what both of our statements are, except that I actually admit it while you and others assert it as fact.
> I mean clearly I have not done enough to mitigate homelessness in this country
Don't know your situation but assuming you are not on the Forbes billionaires list you probably pay higher tax rate than Bezos. In that sense you did do something to mitigate homelessness.
"...but if this fund goes and actually help and make a real life impact on the lives of homeless people, then I am fine and I will hold back my criticism of Amazon."
That's precisely what Bezos is going for here.
I feel you though... I'm glad something is being done.
But let's keep criticizing Amazon as an exploitative enterprise.
And let's keep criticizing the homelessness crisis as a systemic issue which needs a systemic solution, not just a bone thrown from the table of the world's richest person.
The workers gained an additional job opportunity because of him, one that was likely better than all other options they had at the time (or else why would they accept?)
He also has made goods generally cheaper and much more easily accessible to the world.
it isn't like Bernie has been all the successful in doing much about it anyway. Most Washington politicians only remember the homeless come election time. They are but a foil to use on the other guy, a sound bite, and not much more.
The same is true of many local politicians. They have political links to activist groups in their area who they steer funding in return for support during elections and also for intimidating developers into contributing to them.
this is not a problem that could not have been solved it is a problem that solving is not an actual goal but a means to continue the gravy train and perpetual power lock.
Finally someone realizes that there is a problem. There is no justification in the biggest economy of the world to have this much poverty and homelessness. I am amazed every time I travel to Europe, how few homeless people there are, despite their economic growth lagging the US. And it is inherently a solvable problem with adequate resources. We have $1 trillion for the military. Surely, we can spare a few billions and house the downtrodden and provide mental care for those who can't take care of themselves.
Agreed 100%. I live in California which has the same massive homelessness issues as Seattle. I also travel to Europe frequently and have noticed the same stark contrast where they seem to do much better at this.
To try to understand why homelessness feels so much worse an California than in Europe, I did some very basic research (which I also posted on a similar thread once before). The numbers are shocking:
San Francisco population: 884,363 (2017/Wikipedia)
San Francisco unsheltered population (conservative): 6,600 (7,499 SF self-reported homeless count * 88.2% HUD estimated unsheltered rate)
Unsheltered population rate (conservative): ~0.75% of residents (my calculation) - nearly 1 in 100!
Compare that with London, a city also experiencing a homelessness epidemic due to explosively rising housing costs:
London population: 8,825,000 (2017/Wikipedia)
London unsheltered population: 1,137 (homeless.org.uk)
Unsheltered rate: ~0.01% of residents (my calculation)
Homelessness rates in SF are absurdly high. In fact, there are more unsheltered homeless people in SF than the entire country of England(!):
San Francisco unsheltered population: 6,600 (2017)
England unsheltered population: 4,751 (2017)
They are not equivalent situations obviously, but somehow a country with a population greater than the state of California manages to have fewer homeless people than one relatively tiny city in California. Something is very wrong.
Homelessness is a complex issue with lots of intertwined causes and no single solution. Not only is affordable housing an issue, but mental health treatment is an equally important problem. I don't have the answers. But I do know that it is a public health crisis and we are currently completely failing to solve it. We need big changes if we actually care about addressing it and we as a country definitely have the resources to do it.
There is no political will to fix homelessness in San Francisco and it’s actually a big business and money maker for certain people. It’s just a way to funnel tax payers money to those groups. As usual, follow the money.
No matter how you slice the numbers (SF, Oakland, San Jose, all of them combined, etc), the homelessness numbers for the bay area are terrible and way beyond London.
I'm wondering why homelessness is not as large in NYC? The prices here are as high as in SF. Is it due to the slower rate of a price increase? Colder weather?
This is very misleading and doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.
NYC has a homeless population of 76,501, but according to HUD, only 5.1% of NYC homeless are unsheltered. In SF, the unsheltered rate according to HUD is almost 90% - nearly the worst in the country. That means NYC actually has fewer unsheltered people than SF on the streets despite a much larger homeless population.
So while NYC has a big issue with housing affordability and homelessness, they are actually doing a much more effective job of keeping people off the streets and reducing the rate of the kinds of severe public health issues you will see everyday in downtown SF.
> Where are you getting the information that New York's problem isn't as bad?
He must have visited the city and walked around. The population might be larger, but the problem is less egregious in NYC; we don't just let them camp out in the streets and rule the city.
NYC shelters nearly 95% of it's homeless population. SF only manages to shelter about 11% of it's homeless population (about the worst rate in the country). Thus there are more homeless people on SF's streets despite a much smaller total homeless population than NYC (and NYC is of course also a much more populous city).
My recollection: when I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU, the number of homeless in San Francisco was similar to the number in New York in spite of it being a much smaller city.
The most current stats I have indicate that California has about 25 percent of the nation's homeless:
Yes, exactly. The point is that in a warm climate there may not be more homeless people, just more visible homeless people.
NYC now shelters most of its homeless mainly because state law requires it. We’re spending a ridiculous amount of money putting homeless people up in hotel rooms because the process to get new shelters built is stalled and we can’t even build enough market-rate housing to account for population growth, let alone affordable housing.
Curious if you've accounted for issues like metro area vs. city limits. It could very well be the case that the London contains more of it's metro area within city limits than San Francisco, thus increasing the divisor vs. the numerator.
SF has more unsheltered homeless people than the entire country of England according to these numbers. So even if SF's per-capita homeless rate is lower when you include some surrounding SF suburbs, it's still absolutely terrible and far worse than London.
And if you consider the whole Bay Area (which is closer to London in size), the homelessness rate remains very bad overall because homelessness is also very severe in Oakland and San Jose. Some of the smaller cities of course fair a lot better than others, but the total numbers of unsheltered homeless is very high across the whole Bay Area region.
Even Palo Alto has a high homelessness-per-capita rate when you count people living in vehicles as homeless. It's not nearly as bad as SF, but it's not good either.
> I am amazed every time I travel to Europe, how few homeless people there are, despite their economic growth lagging the US.
This. I grew up in Eastern Europe where middle-class people would make and eat every single meal at home, but I have never seen such level of poverty as I saw in the streets of the US.
Do you really think the problem is at the realization phase?
I'd say we all know this to be true, but whether we care enough is another question. There's a fair amount of people in this country that see homelessness as "lazy".
To those afflicted by the Just World Fallacy, the agony of the homeless is a pleasing reminder of one's own moral superiority: they suffer because they're terrible people, while I'm successful because I am virtuous.
If you include all DoD spend include VA, it is well over 20%. Why this portion ? Because it is mostly unnecessary and just needed to foster faux nationalism
This isn’t popular, but I’d challenge anyone who thinks homelessness in Seattle isn’t primarily an addiction and mental illness problem to go spend a few afternoons in areas with significant homeless populations (3rd Ave in Pioneer Square is a great place, if you need a suggestion).
It’s not that affordable housing isn’t a problem in Seattle. I know people who couldn’t live on their own in Seattle anymore due to rental increases, including members of my extended family. But those people either move away to more affordable areas, moving in with family or friends or into (sometimes questionably legal) group housing situations, but they don’t live on the street.
You're not seeing all the other homeless people though who were displaced by high housing prices and who aren't spending all their time drugged out in highly visible urban areas. There are many homeless people living out of cars or shelters, or in tents. Many of them even still have jobs, they just can't afford housing.
I'm not in Seattle (I live and work on some of the most conspicuous blocks in San Francisco for homeless drug users), but I'm sure that both groups exist in both cities. I think what's important is for policy proposals to treat the groups differently, rather than bundling them together into a proposal to "solve homelessness." In my experience in SF these proposals usually only focuses on one set of issues, like minimum wage and rent prices, which are unlikely to significantly help both groups of homeless people.
> to treat the groups differently, rather than bundling them together into a proposal to "solve homelessness."
I agree. Add the absence of a healthcare system to that too. Personal anecdote: a homeless man offered to wash my car for money. He seemed intelligent and nice, so I agreed. He told me the story of him becoming homeless. Both he and his wife worked and rented an OK place in OK part of SF. His wife got into a car accident and their crappy insurance couldn't handle it, the deductibles were astronomical because, as usual, some of the "independent businessmen" who "provided care" were out of network, as if the unconscious victim had any control over who touched her.
So they had to drop their income below certain level to qualify for free healthcare. Now he didn't have enough for rent and moved to under a highway bridge and was visibly embarrassed by it.
I agree that both are problems worth solving, but one is pretty obviously a more urgent public health problem, and unfortunately, the more difficult one to solve.
When people are talking about Seattle's worsening homeless problem, they're talking about the presence of needles and fecal material on the sidewalks, and being harassed, and sometimes even attacked, by clearly mentally ill people, not about people living in trailers in non-urban areas.
I don't think the original cause matters so much. It's the cause that sustains their homelessness which needs to be addressed. People with strong support networks can bounce back from a lot of difficulties. It's the unlucky few who end up on the sidewalk in abject despair.
Maybe the people peacefully living in tents outside of town should instead start being more visible and getting in people’s faces, if that’s what it takes to be a priority.
We’re not talking about “getting in people faces”, we’re talking about a situation that is extremely unsafe, for everyone, homeless and non-homeless alike. If you’re suggesting more of that, there’s something seriously wrong with you.
Wow, slow down on the insults, cowboy. All I’m saying is if you’re considering group A a more urgent priority for providing help to than group B, then you’re incintivizing group B to be more like group A.
Officials need to address the whole problem, not just the visible problem.
What is the difference? I'm not going to read multiple posts in multiple subreddits that aren't esp. related to me while at work; elaborate on your point.
I don't think they disagree. I think the person your replying to is writing it that way because the parent commenter are using that as anecdotal evidence for saying all the homeless they see have mental issues, without necessarily understanding a lot of homeless aren't necessarily people with mental issues living on street corners with the rest, as they imply.
What is it about the car, that it doesn't actually have living accomodation or that it is not a house and has no address? For example, does living in an RV mean you are homeless?
Under HUD’s definition, a car is not a place suitable for human habitation, so that’s clearly someone who’s homeless. An RV dweller may be considered homeless if they are in an “unstable” living situation (moved twice or more within the past 60 days), or if the RV is in such disrepair to not be suitable for habitation.
speaking from experience, even a short gap during which you do not have an official address can create tremendous hurtles to getting housing, insurance, and employment.
There seem to be a lot of things like that in the USA, where if it happens even once or briefly, it screws up your life long term. Homelessness, poverty, seeking mental health help, arrest, prison, bankruptcy, a medical emergency. Every application form with a checkbox that says “Have you ever...” perpetuates this “gotcha” long-term punishment. Why does society insist on setting these traps for people?
Because everyone just cares about covering their ass and washing their hands. See all the comments above in the venue of "well, they're following the law, what else do you expect them to do?":
"Homeless" is a qualification metric that has a far darker history than being relevant at all to shelter or habitation. Metrics, even if not quantified, are always goal-oriented in providing an explanation or use. Even for something as "physically objective" as measuring time there is always an inherent question the metric is designed to answer, a problem to solve, or an ideology to support.
Do we define time as an anthropocentric artifact such as linking it to average modern human chronobiology markers or quirky orbital parameters of our homeworld, as a political artifact such as dividing the surface of the Earth into regions with artificial offsets to accommodate national or supranational policies such as industrial energy consumption management in resource crises or supporting coordination efforts of governance and military structures that have specific information-flow rate characteristics dependent on the availability of logistics mastery and locus diameter of projected force and interventional reach, as a capability artifact such as atomic clocks and the networking thereof with global navigation satellites and the Internet that require readily sourced technology supply chains for inexpensive manufacturing of electronics, refined knowledge of controlling engineering precision tolerances, and worldwide negotiation of protocol adoption, adherence, and upkeep in an effort for a singular master goal of providing location services at a scale relevant for the size and velocities of current weaponry?
That's just getting started on some of the ways we intend to measure the difference between one specific aspect of often fuzzy conformational states and the ever-present linguistic and cultural conflations of many competing metrics in different scenarios being erroneously regarded as the same thing.
So now, what does "homeless" mean? A better question is asking _why_ is such a metric required.
In _any_ large-scale society, the regulation of basic supplies such as shelter or food is designed (whether unconsciously emergent or not) to be artificially restricted as to maintain and stabilize certain systems through meeting goals of riot control, surveillance, profit, and inducing dependency and learned helplessness. This is a _universal_ property of any large-scale social structure although the terms I used are somewhat anachronistic and culturally-specific. If you're a competent spin doctor, you might say the goals to be met are respectively harmonization of inclusive diversity, identifying and personalizing the accommodation of individual needs in a vibrant community, allocating resources efficiently to maximize the full benefit of society, providing stability and reducing uncertainty by supporting people through difficult times and ensuring their mental health through wellness initiatives, holistic education, and self-actualizing opportunities.
Some purposes and scenarios a specific definition of "homeless" could help address:
- Criterion for administering supplies to highly specific, purposefully carved out population demographics as gerrymandered token aid in placating increasingly unruly members when systemic defects start to shine through where resources are unavailable or unwilling to be used and a cheap patch is preferred over rehauling a design that would inevitably converge back to the same problems anyways but also ensues a risk or requirement that even in a non-zero-sum outcome the standards of living for certain individuals would go down just by changing things up since an important aspect of perceived well-being in most humans is completely due to relative posturing and takes time for hedonic adaptation to kick-in while also presenting a predicted future cost and stressor to avoid in calculations of whether to allow change or persecute it.
- Identifying and targeting threats to the status quo. This could be either the traditional fear of resistive violence, but far more likely and subtle is control of members exiting from the current system into perpetual self-reliance which is far more subversive and damaging than a mob a rioters destroying some infrastructure. Opting out of debt and dependency by living far below your means without a permanent address outside of social expectations and control places a huge burden on the sustainability of traditional ways when people start to realize there are alternatives to the living plan laid out for you by someone else.
- Ensuring a proper scapegoat for "bad things". A fundamental mode of human conflict resolution is avoidance of responsibility and instead mutual externalized blame on a concept that is ill-defined, irrefutable, and circular-causative or a marginalized outsider that has no capability for either refutation, redress, retaliation, nor rehabilitation.
- Unavoidable persuasive rhetoric deficiencies in logos, ethos, or kairos that requires the pathos of either compassion or spite to be anywhere near convincing when the argument for various policies are not only self-damaging to the audience but also infeasible, intractable, ill-conceived, ineffective, irrational, irrelevant, and ironic.
The world's largest drill keeps getting stuck in the cars buried beneath the city.
Northwest Harvest's food bank lost their lease on Cherry Street, but there's still a soup kitchen under the overpass, supporting the unofficial Cherry Street Tent City.
A couple of things: one, there is a selection bias involved, as another responder pointed out. You don't see the non-addicted, non-mentally ill homeless, or at least when you do you might not even realize they are homeless. Unless someone is pan handling, a homeless person doesn't wear a sign saying they are homeless. You probably walk by countless homeless people on the street that you don't realize you are homeless. Only the drug addicted/mentally ill ones look like the homeless you are thinking about.
Second, your observations won't tell you whether the drug addiction caused the homelessness or vice versa. Many homeless people turn to drugs to cope.
Third, you don't have to live on the streets to be homeless. Those people who are crashing at friends and living in unstable group housing situations are homeless.
Before you draw conclusions about all homeless people based on the the ones hanging out in Pioneer Square, I challenge YOU to go to a homeless shelter like Mary's place and learn a bit about the people living there. My fiancee is a doctor in the Central District and deals with homeless people every single day. A huge number of them are working families with children who work in the city and can't afford to rent, commute, or find a job in a cheaper area.
> This isn’t popular, but...
Sorry to break it to you, but you're not the independent thinker you might believe you are:
"Drug and alcohol abuse tops the list among the general public as a major
factor why some people might be homeless. More than eight in ten (85%)
adults feel this is a major factor. "
"Mental illness or related mental disorders such as post traumatic stress
disorder are cited by two-thirds (67%)."
Resident of Seattle here, who has spent a number of years volunteering with a variety of homeless services (Real Change, Urban Rest Stop, for the other locals on here).
I think you're right that the WORST of the homeless crisis is due to addiction and mental illness, but honestly that's only about half (edited [1]) or so of the homeless population.
The majority of the homeless or near-homeless people who use the city services try to stay off the grid as much as possible as to not draw any trouble upon themselves. The unfortunate reality of this scenario is that the public typically only sees the worst of the problem, and deems it nearly impossible to fix. I understand why that is the perception, but it's not taking into account the large population of homeless people who are mentally stable. I was also plesantly surprised by the large number of the homeless who are sober as to not be spending the little money they collect on expensive addictions.
To be clear, I have volunteered with a number of organizations that help the homeless in Seattle. I don't know where you're getting 25-30% from, but that doesn't match with my experience -- I'm inclined to believe it's much higher, but it can really depend on what neighborhood you're in.
I am really confused as to how your personal experience would ever be able to figure out the actual percentage of homeless people who suffer from mental illness/drug addiction. No amount of experience would tell you those percentages, because no experience would have you meeting with a uniform sample of the homeless. Your experience is always going to have a huge selection bias.
It takes rigorous research, with properly accounted for selection biases, to determine actual ratios of the population as a whole.
I mostly agree. But, surely, you'd agree that personal experience, especially extensive personal experience, might give one an inkling about whether a particular statistic is accurate. I wasn't arguing anything more.
I've looked at a number of studies about this. In general, it's hard to find much agreement between them about actual numbers. I suspect some of that is related to how "homelessness" and "mental illness" or "addiction" are defined by the people doing the studies, but most indicate that some kind of majority are influenced by one or more of those issues.
You know what helps mental illness and addiction? Stability.
The kind of stability you get from knowing where you'll sleep each night, knowing that you'll be safe, not simply trying to survive each day.
It is a complicated problem. There are no magic bullets, no panaceas, but it's ludicrous to think that housing per se isn't a major aspect of this issue. The threat of homelessness introduces anxiety that exacerbates mental problems and leads toward drug abuse. The reality of it is no better. Don't confuse causes and symptoms; the many aspects of homelessness are tightly linked and teasing out causality is no easy task.
We can't expect everyone to have the presence of mind, at a dark and low point in their lives, to uproot their entire lives and find new housing and a new job in a completely new area. Many don't have any kind of support network to make that work, or know of the services or resources that could make that happen, if they even exist.
The literature disagrees. The causes of addiction are complex, but are broadly based in factors that are reasonably considered 'instability' in the colloquial sense. These include things like adolescent abuse, SES, disengagement from 'conventional' society, mental illness, etc. There is a genetic component, but its contribution is relatively modest.
The trope of a well-functioning adult succumbing to the allure of drug abuse is a red herring.
I used to think this, but I live near a few encampments in Oakland and I see new arrivals regularly who start with ok cars, clean tents and tarps, who get up early (when I'm on my way to work) and clean up - very much like me car camping.
It's really sad to see, but even worse is recognizing them later after they've clearly fallen into heavy drug use.
Yes, we need harm reduction for drugs, and mental health care, but the housing crisis is exacerbating those two problems.
That is actually a very popular opinion, and also very poorly informed. Your reasoning is entirely anecdotal and a trivial exercise in confirmation bias.
Here's one article (among many) exploring why "Seattle's homeless population went up 44% in the last two years."[1] Spoiler: it's not because addiction and mental illness went up 44%.
> It doesn't explain what stops people from looking for jobs in other, cheaper places, which is something I'm struggling to understan
What's hard to understand? Moving anywhere for a new job is expensive, and most people (even those with well-above-median incomes) have no savings. Most jobs don't include relocation, and the first paycheck doesn't come for ~4 weeks after starting. That means that moving as one person bringing nothing with you, you still need to house yourself for a month with no income, likely no connections (since you've moved somewhere presumably away from the family/friends in your hometown), and where you have no idea about local circumstances.
Maybe there's a difference of perspective here. My parents are both one of many, many siblings who were all born in Pakistan.
Their opportunities in Pakistan were pretty poor, so most of those siblings chose to emigrate and leave. Now most of those siblings are spread out around the US and Canada. My family moved to the US from Pakistan after his employer in Pakistan was unable to pay it's employees for months and we started from scratch here. This isn't just a new city, but a whole new country and culture.
All those siblings had to struggle like crazy to establish themselves, but it wasn't impossible.
Clearly there's a different perspective that others like yourself are seeing which I haven't understood.
Very often conservatives will tell "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" stories that worked for them. But there are literally tens of millions of people in Pakistan who cannot even afford the plane tickets yet along the other costs of moving their entire family internationally. That your family could do that indicates that it had relatively good resources. Also, you didn't mention whether your family had an immigrant community network here that could help you get started and find work. Your case is no doubt an example of hard work and struggle but it is not proof that addiction and mental illness are the primary things keeping people homeless.
There is a link between homelessness and addiction, but it's not the primary one.
Several years ago I quit a stressful job, left a stressful living situation and ended up staying with a friend. I went to social services in SF to get health insurance benefits to make sure I could continue getting medication I'd been on for years. When I applied they classified me as "homeless". If you saw me on the street or on the bus next to you, you probably wouldn't have called me homeless.
It's helpful for most social programs to have a broad definition of "homeless". It allows granting assistance before an individual actually ends up living on the street. When most people think of "homeless" they envision a person passed out on the street under a dingy blanket who's probably high or mentally ill. That definition is a harmful one and it prevents the community from getting involved in solving the problem. They don't want "those people" living in shelters that might be built in their neighborhood.
For every mentally ill/addicted homeless person you see living on the street there are probably 2 or 3 living in temporary housing because they can no longer afford a place of their own.
>Getting government and NIMBYISM out of housing policy will lead to affordable housing and is paramount to fixing this.
The trick is getting government and nimbyism out of housing policy while getting them into drug and mental illness treatment at the same time. These days it doesn't seem like there's a political party that can handle that kind of nuance. It feels like it's either expand government on all fronts or retreat on all fronts and that's not what's needed here.
Seattle's homeless camping problem has gotten really out of hand in the last 2 years.
I moved away about a year and a half ago, when homeless tents were pretty common. When I visited recently, it was stunning how much worse it is. Almost every green space in the city (except for popular parks) is filled with tents. It's really crazy.
Its an unsafe solution. There have been a number of fires in homeless camps in the East Bay and as larger camps continue to be built there will be more. Recreational camping tents are not safe for semi-permanent use. They are fire hazards.
It's one of the side-effects of having a relatively nice climate.
Quite frankly, given how many decades Seattle has had a significant homeless population, I'm surprised the city hasn't taken point on treatment and housing programs. They have a unique opportunity to really help a lot of people out if they'd step up and do it.
Defining what you mean by the term 'homeless' is actually very important to having productive discussions about homelessness. The vast majority of people are referring to people living on the streets when they take issue with the homeless. They are not referring to people who are living in their cars or whatever.
Yes, and that's exactly the issue, because people living in their cars also need help, and ignoring them because they don't have mental health issues or sleep on the sidewalk compared to other parts of the homeless population is ignorant and stupid.
Many people want to tackle homelessness by providing homes first rather than addiction help.
Without a home and some semblance of stability people can’t cope with addiction or find jobs. The approach is meant to be very effective and makes sense when you consider how difficult it would be for someone without a house to take their meds on time, show up regularly for a job, or get counseling and suppprt.
My experience in Seattle matches yours, but I think its because other types of homeless people are generally less proud/open about their situation. I think also, for better or worse, most people in Seattle are referring to this most obvious segment of the homeless population when they talk about the crisis.
Despite this, its still hard for me to overlook that almost all of the homeless people I've spoken with/met are either- struggling with serious mental health issues/drug problems, or 'urban survivalist' types who say they are on street by choice (It could also be that once your homeless its better to decide that its a choice).
This isn’t popular, but I’d challenge anyone who thinks homelessness in Seattle isn’t primarily an addiction and mental illness problem to go spend a few afternoons in areas with significant homeless populations
Chronic homelessness is at the very least, a huge confounding factor in terms of social work, combating addiction, and treating mental illness. If someone doesn't have a stable address and someone else has to go out to one of several encampments in a dry river bed just to find them to deliver treatment or services, those services are going to be much more expensive. The living conditions themselves are also going to exacerbate the problems to be treated. This is why it's commonly thought that the 20% of the homeless population which falls into the "chronic" category accounts for most of the crisis services expense caused by the homeless.
>but I’d challenge anyone who thinks homelessness in Seattle isn’t primarily an addiction and mental illness problem
Ya, there's a fraction of homelessness that's caused by that but even if it was 100% caused by that, which it's not, it is still a big problem that needs to be solved. If only not to have people living in the street. It doesn't help when a big company is not paying its fair share of the tax base and adding to the problem by attracting workers and paying them a wage that doesn't allow them to afford to live where they work or squeezing out the lower level workers out of their homes because the cost of living skyrockets.
First of all, those people are only one part of the homeless population. Not all homeless people are drugged out or mentally ill, and the ones who aren't don't want to be around the addicts and mentally ill any more than anybody else.
You're more or less seeing a self-selected group of the worst elements of the homeless population.
And I didn't see any details in the article, but it'd a good thing if some of this donation goes towards helping homeless people with addiction and mental illness. They're definitely contributing factors for some people.
The chronically street homeless, are very different, and far more visible than those who experience homelessness and housing insecurity that have the mental stability to either find someone to stay with temporarily or take advantage of shelter services.
This fund targets homeless families, these aren't groups of people you see shooting heroin on the street corner yet they make up a sizable part of the homeless population.
So I'm confused; you agree that housing is a problem (people move away or move in with others/into legally gray housing situations), and you agree that substance abuse and mental healthcare are problems.
Taken together, you're agreeing to the same set of problems that are popularly agreed upon as being problems. Seems like you're just quibbling?
You're only seeing one part of the situation. I've been homeless and it wasn't apparent to anyone I didn't tell. That's what makes the issue so hard, the assumption is that you're part of that crowd who needs medical attention when all you need is access to opportunity
If you have no idea how prevalent mental illness is in homeless people, and also its role as the single most important contributing cause, then you are commenting from a position of ignorance. Instead of devoting effort to virtue signaling you'd do better if you educated yourself on the problem.
If we go by these sources[1][2], homelessness is overwhelmingly an economic issue.
That's not to say mental illness isn't a contributing factor, just that the lynchpin into homelessness stems from economic factors, like insufficient income or lack of affordable housing.
When you subsidize poverty you are going to have more of it and local bodies love these people as the establishment can always buy their votes through doles.
This actually hurts the real needy people who are trying to get by.
Under that logic paying people making a billion per year would encourage more billionaires. Clearly that wouldn't help create any more of them.
While incentives are powerful they still require an actual mechanism to work.
As for buying votes that assumes so many facts not in evidence it isn't funny in addition to being flat out prejudicial - when the budget is spent on something I support it is deserved when it is on others it is bribery. Actual vote buying was solved centuries ago with the secret ballot.
I tend to be fairly opposed to the do-nothing stance taken by West Coast cities with regard to homeless camping, but I don't think it has anything to do with a vote buying conspiracy. There are much simpler explanations.
You are taking your personal anecdotes and extrapolating. No one would disagree with you that mental illness and addiction are major factors in homelessness. But your argument is like saying, anyone who doesn't believe everyone in the world is wealthy go spend some time in Medina. It's a ridiculous argument.
I've had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy and I've been homeless.
Addiction is not, per se, a major root cause of homelessness. There are people with addictions who have careers. If addiction caused homelessness, then getting addicted would land people on the street as a routine consequence.
People see homeless individuals do X and conclude "X causes homelessness" or is otherwise some inherent trait of "those people" and it's usually unfounded.
No. Addiction is rooted in the same intractable personal problems that lead to homelessness.
People on the street are often using street drugs in place of prescription medication, sometimes by preference because, for example, they have a psych diagnosis and street drugs have preferable side effects to the medication they are supposed to be on.
I knew a bipolar man somewhat well who was homeless. He smoked marijuana in preference to the prescription drugs he refused to take. He was unemployable due to his undamaged mental health issue, not because he toked. Toking was just how he got by. He wouldn't have been more functional without pot. He likely would have been less functional.
We still don't have a slam dunk cure for most mental health issues. As long as this remains true, it is problematic to act like addiction is not merely a side effect of the problem and, instead, to pretend it somehow causes the problems an individual has.
Saying addiction is the problem is a little like blaming chemotherapy for ruining someone's life and not acknowledging the underlying cancer as a problem.
I didn't say addiction is the problem, I said it was a major cause of homelessness, so I don't really understand the downvotes.
The National Coalition on Homelessness seems to agree, citing "A 2008 survey by the United States Conference of Mayors asked 25 cities for their top three causes of homelessness. Substance abuse was the single largest cause of homelessness for single adults (reported by 68% of cities). Substance abuse was also mentioned by 12% of cities as one of the top three causes of homelessness for
families. According to Didenko and Pankratz (2007), two-thirds of homeless people report that drugs
and/or alcohol were a major reason for their becoming homeless."
The American Public Health Association as well states, "On an individual level, persons who have a problem with alcohol and/or other drugs, and who are in marginal economic circumstances, are at especially high risk for homelessness."[1]
The road to addiction is complex, and yes mental health treatment should absolutely be better in the United States, but to claim that addiction is not a risk factor to homelessness is disingenuous.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I did no drugs, but I had the myriad underlying personal problems that so frequently lead to drug use.
What I'm trying to tell you is people blame drug use when it is really more like a symptom than a cause. It's like saying "The pain killers did it."
The conclusion winds up being that if people wouldn't do drugs, their lives would work. The reality is more like if their lives worked, they wouldn't do drugs.
Again, it's like saying "Chemotherapy causes homelessness!" because some folks on the street are having a medical crisis. If you just stopped chemo cold, it wouldn't get them off the street and now their cancer is going unchecked.
There are things you can do that help, like improve the crappy American health care system. But "Just don't do chemo" isn't an answer but that's exactly how substance abuse gets addressed.
Think of it this way: Most people on the street are male. No one goes around saying in all seriousness "Just don't be male. Problem solved!"
I am not sure how hanging out with a particular group of homeless people is going to let you understand homelessness as a whole. It will only tell you about that particular group of homeless people.
Your argument makes no sense. "Go where the mentally ill homeless people hang out, therefore most homeless people are mentally ill." Homeless who are not mentally ill do not congregate together (why would you want to hang out with other people specifically because they are homeless?), mentally ill people and drug addicts like to hang out together.
First, you are going to a known location which increases the concentration of one type of homeless person in space.
Second, you are looking at a particular point in time, which will increase your odds of seeing chronic homeless people versus people who have had a brush with homelessness.
Mental illness and drug addiction are absolutely a big part of the chronic homeless problem. Either as a cause (schizophrenic people are more likely to wind up homeless) or as a negative feedback loop (extended extreme stress can made addictive escapes more tempting, and can cause a psychotic break).
However drug use and mental illness are not the main things determining whether temporary homelessness becomes chronic homelessness. And programs that attempt to solve that should look very different than ones which try to help the chronic homeless.
I would say the same is true here in Toronto. Almost all the homeless I see appear to fit either of those two descriptors, either clearly mentally ill, drug users who are tweaking, or they have the signs of extreme drug use (visible scabs where they repeatedly inject), or are day drinking right there on the street. I'm not implying anything like they don't deserve help or whatever, I'm just agreeing that affordable housing or subsidies or something of that nature would have almost zero impact on homelessness IMO.
How do you know people don't become mentally ill or homeless after losing their home and their life spiralling out of control? Or perhaps that if you have a support structure you can manage mental illness?
If you don't have money or friends, what group housing would you find?
Why would you move to a different city, away from everyone you know, if you don't have a job to pay bills?
> How do you know people don't become mentally ill or homeless after losing their home
Because a substantial portion already have a history of mental problems before they became homeless, and typically they find themselves homeless because they reach adulthood and thus their primary caretaker either can't or won't be able to keep them off the streets. I personally know a couple of homeless individials that suffered from schizophrenia who found thenselves on the streets after their patents passed away.
Earlier this year, under pressure from Amazon and other large employers, Seattle’s City Council repealed an employee head tax designed to provide housing and services for the homeless. In a statement, Amazon called the vote “the right decision for the region’s economic prosperity. We are deeply committed to being part of the solution to end homelessness in Seattle and will continue to invest in local nonprofits” that work with the homeless.
Speaking as a Seattle resident, and despite my dislike for Bezos, this was a stupid tax - more connected to Seattle's dysfunctional politics than solving our bad homeless problem. Among other things, it was keyed to revenues not profits (specifically to target Amazon) but it ended up burning the likes of grocers who provide decent jobs but don't have a lot of margin even with large revenues. Good riddance to it and a pox on our local Pol Pot that drove it.
Let's go back a little bit further in the history. In 2010, Washington took a shot at an income tax for individuals making over $200,000 a year. Bezos spent $100,000 to oppose that (along with a lot of other wealthy Washingtonians). Bezos also didn't support the Seattle income tax, although as far as I know he didn't spend money to oppose it.
The head tax was suboptimal and, yeah, stupid. Nobody would have proposed it if Seattle didn't have a regressive tax system. Compare us to Texas, another state with no income tax -- our property taxes are substantially lower. Seattle's infrastructure problems will continue because the city is underfunded to deal with them.
Anyhoo, I'm glad Bezos is spending this money on the homeless. I would recommend that he divert some of it to a deep dive into Seattle's problems. I think that committing to solve the problem in one city would yield insights that would be very valuable when he expands the program elsewhere.
Oh yeah, just like Prop 1 in Olympia WA in 2016/2017.
Prop 1 is an initiative to "help educate the children of Olympia", using a little tax to help pay for college tuition. So noble!
Except: it proposes a levy on households of $200K or more (not constitutional in Washington), is an income tax, also not constitutional in Washington, requires the city of Olympia to fund the administration with no enforcement clauses, and multiple groups have already announced that they intend to sue the City if it's passed (which it will, because it's a 'think of the kids' measure), and the City knows it won't win but could not get the measure struck off so is already budgeting for constitutional lawyers. Hell, the City doesn't have the authority to see these people's tax statements, so it'd rely entirely on self-reporting. It's just a mess.
So you look a bit closer, and who is pushing this bill? A group of locals just concerned about local education?
No. A bunch of multi-millionaires from Seattle who want to use this as a proving ground for their challenges to state taxation law. Of the top ten donors, not one has ever lived in the County, let alone the City, nor does any of them have any children who attended school in either. (Olympia, like most state capitals, is far smaller than the largest city in the state), which makes you wonder why they're not pushing this in Seattle/King County - probably because they don't want their own taxes going to fund the defense of a proposition that's very specifically unconstitutional.
- earlier years - there have been Washington state income taxes proposed over the years, which have been usually shut down. googling shows the last might've been Senate Bill 6559 in 2016 - https://www.theolympian.com/news/politics-government/article...
The inability to pass a city income tax or a state income tax has been part of the arguments for why a head tax was proposed in 2018 - it's not ideal, but everything else in the past has been rejected.
Yanis Varoufakis (fmr greek minister of finance) gave a talk in Seattle a few months ago talking about the head tax: https://youtu.be/Z0M24CEEMFk?t=2m16s
My 2 cents is that Amazon isn't a major cause. There's a few things going on(1):
- exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues
- Seattle does a remarkably crappy job of assigning the low income housing we build and/or contract for. Too many people get it who shouldn't qualify. Too many non-profits cherry pick their clients. Etc, etc.
- It's super hard to get coherent services out of the system. Which makes it self-selecting in the sense of concentrating the worst cases.
Amazon, to a certain degree, was/is part of running up the price of apartments and homes. Some homelessness is a consequence, but mostly that pushed people further (or totally out) of the area.
I'm not at all convinced that if we raise 2x the money, we'll spend it intelligently enough to make a difference here.
(1)My partner worked in the area homeless system and I'm getting a lot of my info from that.
> - exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues
I think cause and effect are backwards here. Low wages and high housing prices seem like they'd naturally lead to homelessness and rates of drug addiction and mental illness among the homeless, although very high compared to the general population, are nowhere near as high as people would like to think.
rates of drug addiction and mental illness among the homeless, although very high compared to the general population, are nowhere near as high as people would like to think.
Probably because nobody notices the clean, sane person living out of their car. We probably need better terminology, like functional vs. dysfunctional homeless, or something.
I feel like the reason it's so prevalent is less a question of terminology and more a question of absolution -- if, after all, the homeless have some immutable characteristic that makes them homeless, there's nothing society could have done for them.
I think these people are referring to those visible on the streets, and not living out of their car or in the shadows of homelessness. Oftentimes in Seattle the people who are visible are unfortunately in the worst shape, mentally or otherwise.
You don't have to be a drug addict to be homeless, the majority of homeless people are not, nor are the majority (or even a substantial minority) seriously mentally ill.
It's not controversial to say the sky is blue because you can turn up a couple people who say it is green. You've really never heard of people turning to drink or drugs because of, day, the death of a family member? You can't see why someone who sleeps rough might seek escape through psychoactive drugs?
> - exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues
Unless there's another reason we would expect mental health issues to increase I don't see why this would lead to more homelessness.
I also talked to one of the people in charge of a non profit for providing housing to the homeless and he was saying how the longer people stay homeless, the less likely it is that they will ever be able to integrate with society again.
I am much more inclined to believe homelessness is causing the mental health issues than vice versa. Or at least I don't see why Seattle's homeless problem would be caused by greater rates of mental illness than previously seen and compared to that of other cities.
As a fellow Seattle resident the arguments seem to break down this way:
(From the left)
1) Amazon contributed to homelessness by increasing property values by paying too many engineers too much money
2) We don't have an income tax, so that increase in wealth does not come back to pay for services
(From the right)
1) Enforcement of laws about sleeping in public spaces is very low so people feel comfortable being homeless here.
2) Increases of property taxes have increased rents leading people to not be able to afford rents
(From both left and right)
Housing developers are buying up as many cheap places as possible and turning them into high end houses that only the rich can afford muscling out people that could have both those cheaper places.
My take:
If you isolate and fixated on one variable being the only cause of a problem, it's pretty easy to create a narrative, but the answer is probably more complicated and the solution is probably even more complicated.
I recently moved away from Seattle but that seems correct to me.
I don't think the problem is REALLY Amazon's fault per se, since they are just paying people more than other companies in the area which I think most people would agree is a good thing.
I think the problem is more that we in the US treat housing as an investment which makes people more willing to pay higher prices and to borrow money to buy a house. When people see the housing prices increase then that further raises housing prices.
The issue is that housing prices, and subsequently rent, increasing is not a good thing for society. Even though the value of the house has changed, the house itself hasn't changed at all, and yet people now have less money to spend on other things. The only thing it really does is make banks and people who were already well off enough to buy a house wealthier.
Sadly I have no idea what we can do to solve this that isn't communist.
> A relatively small percentage of all homeless people nationwide — 13% to 15% — are mentally ill, but their symptoms — paranoia and delusions — draw attention and mislead others into thinking their numbers are greater, Culhane said.
> However, Los Angeles’ homeless population skews heavily to single adults who have lived in the streets a year or longer — a subgroup with a high incidence of mental health issues. Local authorities estimate that 30% of the county’s homeless people have serious mental illness.
you might want to check up on the actual breakdown of that specific head tax bill, there is a bunch of fairly neutral and level-headed discussions of it on Seattle subreddits. Tldr, it was really bad, as it hurt a bunch of small to medium sized local businesses that everyone uses, but somehow no one thought of when crafting the bill, and they were among the ones spearheading the repeal.
The only thing that bill illustrated to me personally is how ineffective and ridiculously bad Seattle government officials are. Passed with a 9-0 vote, repealed extremely shortly after with 7-2.
Can he do more net good spending $2 billion to help the homeless, or spending an equivalent amount to double the take-home pay of warehouse employees and/or convert the "money towards medical insurance" plan into a company-supplied medical plan?
(Follow-up question is "Given he doesn't have plurality control of the stock votes, does he have the authority to do so in a vacuum without getting ejected from his own company?")
Wouldn't it be weird if a direct wealth transfer to group A was preferable to group B where group A is the better-off of the two? That's what you are suggesting, as far as I can tell, where group A is people with jobs at Amazon and group B is homeless people.
The homeless are usually worse-off than people having a job, so by diminishing returns one should expect to be able to help more by spending on the homeless. In addition, if worker pay is increased significantly above market rate, this will plausibly lead to things changing elsewhere to get closer to market clearing, such as via worse working conditions or additional automation or requiring Bachelor's degrees for pickers.
While we are being utilitarian, it seems clear that either option is far from optimal, and the money would better be spent on the global poor, or farm animals, or helping future generations.
This fund has way more PR value than just paying his workers a decent amount. The latter creates entitlement and expectation which this avoids as well. I personally have a very dim view of these philanthropic efforts.
Amazon has (conservatively) over 500,000 employees. This $2B would cover a pre-tax salary increase of $4000 for one year, which wouldn't come close to doubling take-home pay.
I was thinking specifically of anyone making below $15/hr, not of the entire employee pool.
Amazon software engineers, I love you to pieces, but you're capable of negotiating your own salary or leaving the company to pursue other opportunities if you're feeling under-paid. ;)
1. Contribute early on little by little
2. Contribute nothing to very little for a while amassing huge fortunes (and compound interest magic), then donate big.
Pretty much the same question as lump sum vs dollar cost averaging in investing.
Seeing how few people make it to the huge fortune stage it seems like a very bad strategy if broadly adopted. How we do it now makes sense, contribute as much as you are comfortable with regardless at which step of the ladder you are on.
Money given today pays dividends in the lives of those who benefit and the lives of people who are around them, it just doesn't show up on any balance sheet. The after school program that provides the missing support network for a child, keeping them out of a street gang and later prison, and helping them develop the skills to find gainful employment pays hidden dividends of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for society. Also there are second and third order effects that amplify those gains further. If that money was instead earning 5% in an endowment fund, it may keep the name of a robber baron alive for perpetuity, but it does far less for society today. And if you could trace the knock-on effects of the money given today, you would likely find that the benefits distributed throughout society accumulate quicker than the 5% rate of growth achieved by that endowment fund.
If you amass a huge fortune through paying your workers low wages, it would probably be best to avoid amassing that huge fortune, give your workers a larger share of your profits, and allow them to donate themselves. It helps you to avoid the temptation to cynically set up a tax-offsetting fund to avoid potential legislation that forces you to contribute to the communities where you are located.
Either way, it's good to figure out how to contribute back to a country who created your wealth, by allowing you to operate a business for two decades without being subject to the sales taxes that the long-shuttered businesses who previously employed your desperate applicants were required to pay.
So donate to politicians early so you don't have to pay taxes, donate to charity to avoid taxes later, buy a newspaper somewhere in between.
I think history gives a bit of the answer. There's always been work done to help homeless people, and it never really got better.
Worst part IMO is that it's not to be a money sink. I deeply believe that homelessness is mostly emotional, these guys need deep moral support and a bit of material support. But you can't buy moral support. Having someone drop 2B might help motivate society and finally realize how to fix the problem, even if not all the money is spent.
I think that may be overstating things[1], though I agree it's a tough problem. Lots of folks need some extra help, they're disabled, they have mental illnesses, or substance addictions (or all of the above). Just giving them a tiny house or apartment is not enough to keep them housed. But typically we fund programs to address all of those problems separately, with varying degrees of cooperation between them.
I would recommend you do both. Give a little (but only less than 1%) of what you make today, but aim to make a ton of money. Once you've made the money, give all you can. Your children don't need that much to live a life without work (10-20M).
It's more important to know how you give and whom you give it too. I'm of the opinion that given $5 to a homeless person is much more effective than giving $5 to a charity.
That ignores the psychology of your Bezoses and Gateses, though.
They are maniacally obsessed with growing their companies as much as possible, and everything they do works towards that goal. They don't have time for philanthropy, or worrying about social issues, while they're doing that.
Gates was able to give so much away because he shifted focus after leaving Microsoft. Hopefully others like him will follow.
He's also doing this at when the stock market is very high, which means that this is the cheapest $2 billion he's ever owned. I say that not to undercut the significance, mostly to point out that the stock market is also important to this consideration.
It's not really the same thing, because (assuming a positive ROI) dollar cost averaging will always end up better off than lump sum investing (assuming the same amount is invested).
Homelessness in the USA in most places is an emotional or mental problem, but in some parts of the country, it's actually an affordability / NIMBYism / price control problem. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a broad swath of folks who work full time (or more!) who have three choices:
1) Live with roommates, often exceeding the legal limits on the dwelling on the number of occupants, or live in illegal and often not-up-to-code housing.
2) Live two or more hours from their job(s), each way.
3) Live in a van, tent, or truck.
Sometime, people make a sane (for them) choice to choose the last one. Driving around the bay area, one can see these tents and vans in many places. There are obviously thousands of people (perhaps tens of thousands?, it's hard to get a census of these folks) who are plainly visible once you know the signs (blacked out windows, small exhaust vents, generators, etc.)
On the margin, some folks end up sleeping in doorways because of the pressures involved with choosing one of those choices. You could see the evidence for this in a recent article in the Economist which included a diagram of feces complaints spreading out from the Tenderloin (bad neighborhood in central San Francisco) across the city, and the new mayor has hired a "poop patrol" to start cleaning up after them.
Meanwhile, homes that would rent for under $1000/month in many parts of America are renting for over $5K a month. (Actually, in most parts of America, these homes would come with much larger yards, as well as lower prices.) Proposal after proposal to densify the bay area or improve transit get shot down on thinly veiled racist or nakedly self interested grounds. Those proposals that get through are intensely profitable, often to the tune of 5x return on investment or more (not counting fighting the inevitable lawsuits), because the market is so starved for housing.
Forgive the rant, but price controls never work,* and efforts to mitigate the problems caused by price controls are so expensive as to never really solve the problem. The only solution here is to abolish the price controls and the incentives they cause for subsequent laws and zoning which make development impossible. However, that's politically untenable at this time. (So frustration and rants.)
* Actually, the price controls in CA do EXACTLY what they were intended to do, which is to raise the prices on homes, to the benefit of homeowners. As a side effect which many folks foolishly welcome, they also serve to keep Hispanics and Blacks in deeply segregated neighborhoods.
I'm a clueless foreigner [0], and HN is my only window into the Bay Area (and, in a more general sense, into America), so I appreciate your writeup. On HN my impression that absolutely everybody agrees that SF and the cities near it should just build more and higher. It appears to solve all the problems (insane rent, extreme commutes, homelessness, poo), so why is it politically untenable? Who exactly is pro insane rent, extreme commutes, homelessness and poo?
I mean, the home owners can't be the voting majority right?
In many parts of the bay area (SF, Berkley, East Palo Alto), the incentives of large swaths of renters are neutralized on this issue through extremely severe rent control laws. Between rent control and Proposition 13,* the vast majority of residents in most jurisdictions have incentives to either not care, or to actively oppose anything that would lower home values, either by improving transit, or densification.
* Proposition 13 is a law which is effectively "rent control for property taxes." It was passed through a direct democracy provision in the CA constitution, which prevents it from being undone by anything other than another direct vote by the residents of CA. It allows people to own homes worth many millions of dollars, while only paying a few hundred dollars a month on property taxes. This tax rate is inheritable, effectively creating a "landed gentry" class in CA. The tax rate is lost in most cases if the owner moves or does renovations beyond a certain extent, leading to numerous seemingly insane behaviors: for example, tearing down an entire house except for a single small wall, and then building a new house around that wall, or continuing to live in a 5 bedroom home long after all the children have moved out, crowding out a new family from being able to use that space. Worst of all, however, it has created incentives to vote for any and all proposed laws that make new building more difficult, leading to numerous follow on laws.
NIMBY-ism mostly. The people lucky enough to already own property don't want further residential development. It keeps their property values artificially high. There is an unreasonable expectation that if you buy a house in a nice quiet suburb then it should stay a nice quiet suburb the entire time you are living there.
In California specifically, they voted themselves (via referendum) a law which also keeps property taxes down for incumbents
"The proposition decreased property taxes by assessing property values at their 1976 value and restricted annual increases of assessed value of real property to an inflation factor, not to exceed 2 percent per year. It also prohibited reassessment of a new base year value except for in cases of (a) change in ownership, or (b) completion of new construction. "
Let's say you paid $1,000,000 for a home that would fetch $200,000 in most other parts of the country.
What would you do if someone proposed a law that you figured would half the value of your home? Eat the loss or oppose the law?
Property owners in CA are being rational. They don't like the poop, commutes and homelessness. But they aren't willing to take a half-million dollar bath on their real-estate investment.
Property owners in SF are extremely motivated to be politically active. The insane raises in property values are literally their profits. Voting is not the only avenue. Try to build anything and the whole neighborhood will call for “studies on the effect on the community” to keep you tied up in court for years.
SF does spend a huge amount on its homeless. But, it’s apparently not effective. I can’t speak to why.
Well there is the thing - jobs usually require locality which mean they come before choosing a home unless you are a retiree in which case they lack services which can be a problem for the aged and infirm. A place with no jobs has cheap housing because nobody can afford it.
Bezos pays the Danegeld. I'm disappointed in him. I'm also not sure what political player he's paying off...he didn't seem to need much influence with Seattle politicians lately.
Bezos is smart enough to know that the problem with Seattle homelessness has nothing to do with access to money. The city spends like water on the homeless, and we see nothing from it (which makes the spending a complete success for its intended beneficiaries, the bureaucrats in charge of the money.) We need a new policy to deal with them, and with this we won't get it.
But with Amazon you don't have to build your own storefront, or online site at all. Just make a listing, and ship to FBA. I imagine that alone creates more businesses.
Businesses originally existed and had a profit margin. Then Amazon came along and competed directly against that profit margin so businesses lost business. Then Amazon said you can sell on our site, but in order to compete there businesses had to compete at the new lower profit margin, but then ontop of that give a slice of that to Amazon, so now they are losing profit margin, but losing more giving amazon a slice of the pie. It will take a LOT of extra business to make that part up. Walmart is a town killer, Amazon is a business killer.
The reason Bezos is the richest man in the world is he successfully tapped into facilitating the supply chain and has continued to fill different roles of the whole funnel and on a massive, growing scale. His success is shining a light on the future of using autonomous systems to further reduce costs and increase profits, however that doesn't lead to any individually owned system or organization to being incentivized to allocate their services or products to take care of society's basic needs. This is where government should come in, however then you have competition against what's best for society - you have layers upon layers of for profit systems pressuring the system for their own advantage, their own specific needs to succeed and benefit the most, at the direct or indirect cost of others and society of a whole. Jeff and no one should have to shoulder these costs on their own, though he certainly is heavily benefitting from the status quo, and the exponential benefit weighted towards his scale and foundational transactional layer they support, and so it's good he's directing some resources - however whether his core values and efforts are attempting to solve the deeper problems or if he and his companies will simply pressure existing systems to benefit their own systems they excel at primarily for their own benefit, and not the benefit of the system as a whole, is what we should be questioning.
Strange to think that a model where people getting disproportionately rich, then give some of that richness away to poors, is going to work. The problem with US seems more that people lose the way because the state does not provide any fundamental help when you need it. So IMHO makes more sense to increase spending (and maybe taxes) in order to provide things like free health care, minimum pension, and so forth. This way the homeless can be, in part, prevented.
I would still much prefer to live in a culture in which obscene concentration of wealth–not least at the expense of meaningful government checking of the race to minimize employee count and wellbeing–does not mean we are beholden to gracious oligarchs to bestow basic services, thereby distinguishing themselves from the oligarchs who invest only in consolidation of their own power.
Recall that Bezos effectively undid a Seattle tax, already passed by the democratic government there, to fund affordable housing.[0] This is not a substitute for that tax and policy. Instead, it part of a dangerous trend where an aristocracy substitutes for a democratic society, seizing power and decision-making from fellow citizens.
If Bezos or his company would pay their share of taxes, then society could make a joint decision and investment on how to help the homeless. Instead he does not pay, undermining democracy, and then he has power over the homeless and over the policy of his country.
(In fairness, not all charity is aristocracy, but I'm talking about charity in the absence of democracy and as a substitute for it.)
It’s pretty telling that his company went all out against increased taxes in Seattle to help the homeless only to then start this initiative once being attacked by Bernie.
This shouldn’t be praised as companies doing good, it’s them shirking their taxes and having enough money to start a 2 billion dollar PR campaign.
Same shit with Amazon helping start a new Insurance plan, they want to demonstrate they have an alternative solution to Medicare for all.
Heck, look at the fall out from the Facebook / Cambridge Anlytica scandal, no new regulation, just a brief verbal flogging and FB assuring they will change.
This is all a sign of the times, corporations can’t be regulated and only when threatened, or in a deep scandal, will they briefly self regulate to show how they don’t need it.
Conservatives already hate the government and liberals buy up this PR, we seem pretty screwed. Goodbye democracy hello corporatocracy.
The thing that pisses me off, more than anything, is that huge companies like Amazon take advantage of a society and lobby for laws more favourable to them until society reaches a breaking point in tolerating it. Small businesses are already pretty much dead in the water by the time that happens due to the anti-competitive nature of these behemoths. And then the government decides to crack down and regulate and once more it's always the small businesses that suffer the most or go out of business.
A self-regulating free market with competition would be beautiful but at this point we're past that and this scorched earth policy has to end somehow because it's a race to the bottom.
As much as I wish it would pass - and know it won't - Sanders' plan of charging back to employers the cost of social assistance incurred by employees who are paid below the cost of living is a clean and elegant solution to this.
I'm curious why you see Sanders' plan as a "clean and elegant" solution to this problem. It is a solution, but it seems likely to introduce some bad incentives at hiring time. For example, if a high school student and a single mother apply for the same job, which one should Amazon hire? Right now, both cost Amazon the same, but under the Sanders plan, hiring the single mother would likely cost a lot more due to the chargeback.
Fair, I hadn't considered that. I guess I'm just happy the conversation is being had.
That said to solve your specific problem, I'd say this is meant to be a punitive measure and therefore it doesn't need to be a 1:1 dollar-for-dollar cost recovery program. Take the 80th percentile burden on the government from underpayment, assign a 50% surcharge as penalty, then apply it for each employee paid less than a living wage, period. Now the mother costs just as much as everyone else, and it's a lot - so now it's in their interest to simply pay a living wage as it would be less expensive than paying the penalties. These problems have solutions, let's focus on finding them instead of pointing out problems and throwing our hands up.
Or better yet don't tie it to the cost. Fine them. Or like. Set a living minimum wage.
It's great to see Bezos invest in a way that is quite different than other folks in tech's Big Philanthropy approach. Many are piling their money into trusts to avoid taxes now, but don't deploy their philanthropic dollars quickly. Even with increasing wealth and charity dollars in cities like San Francisco, local charities have had a hard time making ends meet. International philanthropy and trusts are not bad in and of themselves, but need to support local charities as well which seems to be the goal. Pretty awesome.
The homeless issue is, IMHO, a mental health crisis. We as a society didn't want to pay for the freeloading mental health patients, so now we have the homeless.
In 1955 there were 560,000 patients in all mental hospitals across the united states, private, public and government.
In 2010 there were 43,000 psychiatric beds in the United States, or about 14 beds per 100,000 people—the same ratio as in 1850
In 1950 there were 300 state psychiatric hospitals in the U.S., with 320,000 patients, today there are about 180 hospitals, with and about 20,000 patients.
It’s not about not wanting to pay, it’s about the changing attitude towards institutionalizing people, in particularly when it’s involuntary. Around the 1970-80s there was a big push to move mental patients out of institutions and into the community. It was viewed as more “humane”.
From A History of Richard the Third by Jacob Abbott (1901):
"This ceremony being concluded, a company of heralds came forward before the king, and proclaimed 'a largesse,' as it was called. The ceremony of a largesse consisted in throwing money among the crowd to be scrambled for. Three times the money was thrown out, on this occasion, among the guests in the hall. The amount that is charged on the royal account-book for the expense of this largesse is one hundred pounds."
At some point in the next decade, I believe shareholders or the govt will break up Amazon into retail and aws. There’s just too much unwanted public attention at this scale.
Bezos ought to start by paying each and every one of his employees enough so that they don't qualify for public assistance, and are able to support themselves in the respective community where they work.
You know he could just pay his staff more directly. I guess he found a loophole where the money ends up at the same place, but this way it's more of a tax write-off.
Asking who else has donated anything close to this is a bit silly considering most people aren't billionaires. It might be more fair to ask how many people have donated 1.2% of their net worth to charity, and I think the answer will surprise you in that a lot of people have.
A second question is whether or not this makes up for how Bezos has gotten his money and the potential damages on society that has. If I burn down a house and then donate to the rebuilding it's still a net negative. The systems that allow people to amass this much wealth need to be looked at critically to see if they really are benefitting society or are just causing increased problems.
As a final note Bezos is getting a lot of negative attention because he's made comments before about how hard it is to get rid of his wealth while seemingly ignoring a lot of really good ways for him to do so. It took years of negative attention to get him moving on causes like this.
I don't think using a percentage as reference is useful in this case. There are a variety of reasons why giving 2 billion (even if it's 1.2%) is much different then giving a few hundred or thousand dollars. You have to be much more concerned about the overhead, how the money is being spent, who is managing it, etc... because even a 1% waste results in a loss of 200 million dollars.
Secondly, I don't know if anyone has really quantified how much damage or potential damage Bezos has done in his lifetime, and I would be surprised if it was actually net negative. What honest to god damage has he done? Some people have rough working conditions and are underpaid ( these people are not forced to work at Amazon). I agree that is bad and think they should be paid more and treated better. What did the world benefit though? Everyone gets generally good cheap stuff reliably within a few days to their doorstep, saving millions in man hours yearly.
I donate more than 1.2% of my income each year to charity, and that amounts to a lot more than 1.2% of my net worth (it should be noted that people in my generation tend to have a negative net wealth due to student loans and being locked out of the housing market, which means most of them can meet this requirement by giving five dollars to a homeless person on the street if you want to use a more liberal definition for charity).
Specifically, I donate money to (and this is not in any particular order)-
* ACLU
* EFF
* NAMI
* NAACP
* BLM
* NPR (local affiliate)
* Between $40 and $100 a week directly to homeless people.
I also try to volunteer time as well.
What charities do you donate to, and more importantly why is that even relevant to a conversation about what responsibilities people with obscene amounts of wealth should have?
1.2% is not some lofty, unrealistic amount if you are financially secure. The median net worth of Americans by age 55 peaks at $85,000 [1], which comes out to just under $20 per week. If you exclude home equity from net worth, half of Americans under 55 could donate 1.2% for less than $6 per week.
The world isn't skin deep. There's a clear historical continuity to these appeasements.
A poor person giving half their bread to a sick neighbor should be applauded, however, the Church of old providing charity from the king while still promoting the king's divine right to indiscriminate rule should not be.
No one's shaming him for not doing something better. They're shaming him for having a direct role in creating the problem this charity is supposed to resolve.
Look at their home in Seattle. The influx of people is pushing up housing prices to pretty unbearable levels. It's not as bad as the Bay Area, but the homeless situation there has been bad for a long time.
The large Seattle companies also work in discount deals for housing, which is far from ethical or fair:
People are critical because Amazon has rarely given to charity, or when they do it's something like letting a charity temporally use an existing building before they renovate it:
I mean, maybe we shouldn't be so critical if Bezos is legitimately concerned and they're doing something, but I can understand why people are skeptical based on their track record.
Increasing home prices in Seattle, where the median rent is $2,400 [0]. By bringing in people from out of state with high salaries Amazon is making the housing market in Seattle much more expensive as more people compete for a mostly static stock of housing. Zoning laws, mandatory parking, improved public transportation, affordable housing regulations, and new development could all improve the current situation so local and state governments play a role, but it would be naive to assume the largest private employer in the region didn't play a role in creating the current situation either.
:/ The math you are presenting is “One family gets a large raise. Another gets a slightly harder time finding affordable housing”. Multiply that by a large number and you get a large number of families cannot find affordable housing. But, a similar number got large raises. It’s not a universal win, but it’s still a net win. It’s not even a horribly skewed distribution.
If I could make a genie wish, it would be that there was a bunch of luxury condo&apt construction for the new residents so that none of the old residents would have any pressure to move. But, I can’t blame the lack of construction on Amazon.
> If I could make a genie wish, it would be that there was a bunch of luxury condo&apt construction for the new residents so that none of the old residents would have any pressure to move.
Seattle has had the most cranes in the country for 3 years now [0] and so much new housing has been built prices recently went down [1].
How is increasing inequality a net win? The situation you've presented is even somewhat zero-sum, i.e. the first family's gain comes at the expense of the second. That's exactly what we should be trying to prevent.
It's not zero sum. One family makes more than before. The other makes the same as before. Net win. The extra money in the pocket of the first family is not coming out of the pocket of the second. It's coming out of Amazon's pocket.
The alternative is that no one gets raises. That's would be loss for a large number of families and no change for others.
You are not presenting a scenario in which one family gains and the other stays the same, you're presenting one in which one family makes more money (gain) while the other makes the same amount of money but is less able to find affordable housing (loss).
It's not strictly zero-sum because the gains and losses may not exactly offset each other, but one agent's gains still come at the expense of another.
I don't know what you are advocating. Amazon paid people a lot locally. That's usually considered a nice thing. As a side effect, that inflated prices locally. That's sad. So, to not be shamed by you, they should have been doing ambiguous something all along. What?
I suppose I'm advocating that we structure our society such that one person gaining wealth does not make it more difficult for another to live their life. I'm pointing out that, in a vacuum, this specific scenario:
> One family gets a large raise. Another gets a slightly harder time finding affordable housing.
Sure. But, it feels like there is a lot of shooting the messenger here. There is obviously a fault in the housing market of Seattle. If there wasn’t, supply would have risen to meet demand. But, Amazon didn’t cause the fault. They just made it obvious. So, when shit gets bad, who does the pitchforks come out for? The ones who made the problem obvious.
> Zoning laws, mandatory parking, improved public transportation, affordable housing regulations, and new development could all improve the current situation so local and state governments play a role
Wow! "Play a role" has an amazing undertone here; It's Amazon's fault for offering good salaries in Seattle; a better company would offer fewer jobs, at lower salaries, spread out (oh that's what's happening at the warehouses).
Local and State Governments (and the people they represent who are profiting from real estate in San Francisco and Seattle) should not be the distant second you're pointing at here!
Indeed, Amazon HQ2 is considered by many cities to be a giant opportunity for economic growth.
And this is to ignore that Amazon Seattle is located where a previously blighted community was.
Nay, I say, I've considered Seattle as having a higher cost of living since 'You've Got Mail' came out.
X used to own a bookstore. It was good enough to put him in middle class. Then the culture changed, it was easier for people to read reviews online and buy, than to shop in book stores. His shop has to close down, now he drives for Uber and tries to make ends meet. He is no longer in middle class. Not homeless, but I'd imagine if there are more competition for unskilled labor, more people would be squeezed into homelessness
By centralizing giant swathes of the consumption economy to run through Amazon, destroying jobs at every step of the way. Sweden have banned Amazon so their local economies can flourish. I think this is good macro business logic for a nation state. https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-amazon-competition-ec...
So Amazon gets credit for killing jobs, but no credit for creating jobs? Without a doubt Ikea has killed the small time furniture making industry, yet is listed as a "charity."
My own company has been slowly getting killed by amazon in the past 10 years, but we’ve also killed countless brick and mortar stores along the way. Where will we draw the line? Are we to fight the newfound efficiencies of technologies like the Luddites?
In case you don't care to read an article they're just coming off an effort to kill a tax that would have affected them and which was specifically designed to combat homelessness.
So shame on them as opposed to most of society that has an indirect role and we therefore are not part of the problem? Society keeps buying things from Amazon. We as society created Amazon. I don't have a lot of sympathy for big corporations but also dislike when individuals try to disproportionally blame them without taking a look at what we do at an individual level to make a difference. By almost any standard I'd consider the average HN'er 'rich' (myself included) and benefiting of the same conditions that are in some way also responsible for the same problem (tech bubble, big tech corporations) Amazon is allegedly guilty of.
You could make that argument as well, but I'm specifically talking about Amazon's underpayment of workers and efforts to kill taxes that would fund efforts meant to curb homelessness, among other things. Some of the other replies to my comment have links to articles about these.
Yes. We should tax billionaires out of existence. This level of wealth and power accumulation is as unseemly as it is dangerous to our democracy and economy.
Not sure if that’s the line of reasoning. A well known danger of democracy is rule by mob. For instance a tough thing to get right is protecting rights of minority groups. If everyone voted for their own direct benefit, we’d just be locking minorities up and taking their assets with power of the majority. Luckily doesn’t seem to happen much.
If the government taking things by force, or by the implied threat of force, is bad, then taxation is bad, and if you don't have any kind of taxation you don't have a government in any meaningful sense.
I think taxes are a bit better because you're also agreeing to pay your own money (vs only taking other people's money only as the original commenter said). I had a different reading of "taking other people's money by force" as meaning specifically voting to tax a minority group more just because you can. This is based on the GP comment being "We should tax billionaires out of existence" as opposed to "taxes are immoral"
That isn't taxing a "minority group." It's just progressive taxation, an idea almost everyone accepts to some extent. "Taxing billionaires out of existence" could be achieved simply by increasing marginal tax rates.
billionaires are literally a minority group. they certainly don't need protected status, but, whether or not it is "good" to take their money, they can't effectively oppose this just by voting.
The argument for preventing one person to amass that much wealth is at least in part that it gives them tremendous political influence. The preferences of Sheldon Adelson arte far more consequential than an average voter living in the same district, for instance. Appropriating the language of "minority" discrimination, which traditionally refers to marginalized groups, to talk about people who are very rich strikes me as distasteful.
one could just as easily make the argument that academics and social theorists have appropriated a word that has a commonly understood statistical meaning. no one objects to calling the alawites of syria a "minority group", even though they are relatively privileged and literally control the country. especially in the context of a (putative) democracy, it makes sense to use the word in the statistical sense.
Nonetheless, most of us would agree that some abridgement of rights is acceptable for this "minority group." This is why I don't think talking this way is helpful.
Let's not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with addiction and mental health. Stop avoiding the real issues- it's harmful when everyone pins Washington's problems all on Bezos.
Who's pretending that? I said Bezos and Amazon play a direct role in creating poverty and homelessness, not that they alone are culpable; obviously there are many factors. Let's also not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with our economy and political systems.
> What's up with the critical comments in here? How many of the judgemental and jaded posters here donated anything close to this to a charitable cause?
I mean it's much easier to donate to charitable causes when you have more than enough for yourself and your family so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but he's also donating less than 1.5% of his wealth. Have I donated that much? No but I think I'm close and I still don't even have enough for my own emergency fund.
>>I mean it's much easier to donate to charitable causes when you have more than enough for yourself and your family so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but he's also donating less than 1.5% of his wealth
So he should donate 99% on that cause and today? No tomorrow, no other worthy causes? Bezos, alone, cannot solve all the world's problems. He should be commended for his donation and willingness to help solve the problem. Haters gonna hate...they can't sleep well at night unless they do that.
Hopefully Gates and Buffet will get Bezos and Zuck onboard with the giving pledge. Those two will have a tangible impact on humanity. Page and Brin wouldn't hurt, either.
It because the source of the money has cynically evaded tax for years and pays some of his workers less than they need to live such that they are supported by food stamps. The working conditions in Amazon factories are notoriously tough.
It's hard to take charitable giving seriously when someone has run their company in a cutthroat manner for years at the expence of some of the poorest workers.He could do better with his own businesses first.
I hope it works out and does some good but I hope this explains to you why people are cynical.
I donate much more than 1.2% of my net worth to charity, and every 2 weeks to boot. Somehow I also manage to do it without publicizing it on dozens of media outlets every time or blowing tens of millions on a disgustingly wasteful luxury lifestyle. But where's my army of loser internet sycophants?
I'm one of the people being critical. My definition of "better" is hardly made up randomly on the spot.
If someone intentionally gave people AIDS, then volunteered to cover the cost of their pain meds, would you say "Ah, what a great guy!" Or would you go "Oh, really now? Puh-leez!"
As someone who sees the systemic problems that cause homelessness because I have studied it for many years, I'm going "Oh, puh-leez!"
Your framing of the issue is incredibly hard to engage because it presumes those years of study do not exist, aren't a valid basis for my opinion etc.
(Or a slightly more accurate metaphor: They have AIDS, they keep screwing people and refusing to hear they shouldn't and are generously offering to pay for pain killers, but absolutely refuse to stop screwing people.)
Because he's contributed much to the problem, especially with the wages he's paid to his warehouse employees. We'll see if he's actually able to contribute to the solution.
There are so many options out there today but the customer experience isn’t as good as amazon. Fact is amazon’s customer obsession is a real thing, and so they’re deservedly winning customers right now. If they ever slipped, Walmart is definitely eyeing their spot.
Your question reminds me of the Australian moral philosopher (and one of the founders of the "Effective Altruism" movement) Peter Singer. I have an inkling that you know him.
He talks about (and makes people squirm) "how much should one give?":
"[...] In particular, he expands upon some of the arguments made in his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he posits that citizens of rich nations are morally obligated to give at least some of their disposable income to charities that help the global poor. He supports this using the drowning child analogy, which states that most people would rescue a drowning child from a pond, even if it meant that their expensive clothes were ruined, so we clearly value a human life more than the value of our material possessions. As a result, we should take a significant portion of the money that we spend on our possessions and instead donate it to charity."
People have punched some solid holes through his argument, I can't link to them all, as I'm typing on the phone. But regardless, it's impossible to ignore Singer's arguments.
An "anonymous" author sharpens this argument in a Current Affairs essay called It's Basically Just Immoral To Be Rich. The logic works better applied to super-rich people than trying to get to the assertion that everyone should give up expensive things they have or want and live in some minimal way. Also check out This Little Rock And All Who Sail On It on the same website.
Does he have authority to? Immediately yes, but he only owns 17% or so of the company. If he doubles / triples the wage in absence of market pressure to do so to keep competent staff in the warehouses, how long does he get to do it before the stockholders gang up and replace him?
I think it's good for Bezos to fight homelessness, but funding drug treatment programs from the sale of legal drugs would be a better long term solution. Treatment should be the first, if not the only, spending target of marijuana revenue.
It depends. Like in USA i would agree because there is a lot of mentally ill people on street.
In other cases like teaching is better. They spend all day on street. Going somewhere learn it is just much better environment for them.
I don't drink but If was homeless in cold country I would drink and take drugs to forget about cold. It requires so much strong will to live in this environment.
There is more glory in philanthropy than in paying your employees. The ROI in terms of reputation is higher.
Addition: the same is true for funding something like a computer lab at a school. Lots of good PR for funding a new one but nothing for keeping an existing one funded for the next few years. Although I think it's more valuable to make sure existing infrastructure stays funded.
You aren't anywhere near cynical enough. Taken far enough, programs to "help the homeless" -- instead of programs to reduce homelessness -- are a de facto plot to keep homelessness alive and well. It's a form of oppression of the masses.
I don't necessarily agree with you, but another interesting take on this is by Slavoj Zizek, who argues that charitable giving perpetuates the problem:
There's a place for charity in the world. But charity doesn't you give you a middle class life. When a man worth many billions can't be arsed to pay his employees a living wage, but wants to kick a few bucks towards "helping the homeless", something smells very rotten.
I see some parallels with aid sent to Africa. Charitable giving can alleviate suffering short term with the side effect of perpetuating suffering long term.
> Aid [to Africa] is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.
You might enjoy reading Diet for a small planet. It gets remembered as a vegetarian cookbook, but the first half of the book is about international politics and how food aid is part of the problem.
Given that Bezos envisions, for example, creating a network of preschools in low-income areas, I'd say he's at least thinking about helping people get out of cyclical poverty.
Still, I'd also like to see Amazon pay its employees better...
Or he could just pay his employees adequately so they aren't forced to live in poor neighborhoods and they could afford to pay for private preschool themselves if they decided for themselves this makes sense for their family.
But, no, that he won't do. Which means there's actually a hidden agenda here.
Actions speak louder than words. You can charitably argue that he needs a good therapist to help him root out subconscious bias, but you aren't going to convince me he's somehow doing a good thing here.
Given the ROI that corporations get on lobbying, it would seem to be a better investment to "solve" this issue is to lobby for a tax sufficient to provide funding of preschools, but I suppose that's not a good philosophical fit for a bezos foundation...
so the one person that reads the article gets down-voted to oblivion, thanks for taking the fall mate! Your altruism will not go unnoticed
I was going to comment about the preschools and how that idea came from ideas solicited by the public because everyone was just assuming it was just arbitrary helicopter money exclusively for PR
I've read the article. I've also had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I spent nearly 6 years homeless and got myself off the street without going through a program. The programs are often revolving doors that don't really fix the intractable personal problems that are a root cause of homelessness.
The other two big issues: inadequate income and lack of affordable housing. Bezos is directly responsible for his employees lack of adequate wages, an issue he won't fix.
No, he is going to build preschools in poor neighborhoods so that poor kids can get properly educated and break the cycle of poverty 2 decades from now when they grow up.
Conveniently kicks the can down the road and does nothing to solve homelessness in the here and now, plus comes with all kinds of plausible deniability. "Just wait 2 decades! You'll see! It will help them... Eventually!"
"The beatings shall continue until morale improves." and all that.
> The other two big issues: inadequate income and lack of affordable housing. Bezos is directly responsible for his employees lack of adequate wages, an issue he won't fix.
You realize that if Bezos gave all the Amazon employees 'adequate wages' that you would then still be blaming him for inadequate housing? Or at least different people in Seattle would.
> No, he is going to build preschools in poor neighborhoods so that poor kids can get properly educated and break the cycle of poverty 2 decades from now when they grow up.
The horror. Setting up lower socioeconomic statuses for long term success.
Would it help if the article didn't masquerade this effort as a cure all?
The horror. Setting up lower socioeconomic statuses for long term success.
Poor children live with enormous daily stress and chronic lack of adequate nutrition sets up permanent problems that tend to be unreasonable. Children with stunting earn less wages over the course of their lives and have many other intractable problems.
There is always some hoop to jump through for the poor as to why adequate money must come someday down the road - just not today.
A la President Clinton famously announcing that he didn't want to give a tax cut because poor people would just spend their money foolishly and he was more qualified than them to spend their money wisely.
Would it help if the article didn't masquerade this effort as a cure all?
It would help if you would drop the sarcasm and contempt and take me seriously as a subject matter expert.
You came out of the woodworks because Jeff Bezos is doing something with money and the PR engine is masquerading this as a panacea to chronic homelessness. You want the world to know that "something" isn't enough and isn't holistic enough. And I'm right here in the middle saying "huh preschools thats kind of interesting"
I know plenty of people that do things for schools, Jeff Bezos doing things for more schools (or at least on the subject of schooling) at once is nice. I support that. Its not the only thing he might do, not the only thing he has to do, or plans to do, yet it is interesting that he's being held to a separate standard solely from the announcement alone.
If he just said "yo I'm making preschools its gonna be lit", a wild Doreen Michele would have never appeared. But because it was billed as a solution to homelessness and impoverished areas, here comes college educated Doreen Michele to let everyone know its totally wrong and misguided!
a wild Doreen Michele would have never appeared. But because it was billed as a solution to homelessness and impoverished areas, here comes college educated Doreen Michele to let everyone know its totally wrong and misguided!
That's incredibly dismissive.
For one thing, I'm simply here a lot. I didn't "come out of the woodwork" like some lurker who normally keeps my mouth shut.
For another, I comment on lots of different subjects, not just homelessness. I'm well known for my views on homelessness, but long before that I was a homeschooling parent and Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. It isn't at all unusual for me to comment on education and related subjects.
I'm not a big fan of the idea out there that poor families are helped by good preschool education. One of my sons went to preschool and he really benefited tremendously because he had specific issues I wanted addressed. So I'm well aware that preschool can be a good thing and I would rather see more money spent on preschool than on prisons and there are studies that show that spending more on preschools reduces how much we spend on prisons.
But I would much, much, much rather see parents make enough money that they can make choices like whether or not they want one parent to be home full time. I think we really, seriously undervalue full time parents.
(Please note that I am saying parents, not mothers. I get a lot of BS off of people who like to imagine I mean only mothers should be at home with kids.)
I've thought long and hard about a lot of subjects that happen to intersect here and even studied some of them formally.
I'm also medically handicapped and I happen to spend more time on HN on days when I am short of sleep or not feeling so hot, like today. That is a much, much bigger factor in me leaving multiple comments in this discussion (as well as others) than the topic per se.
Though I will say this comment is evidence that your opening line is probably not entirely disingenuous. You are taking me seriously enough to apparently view me as some kind of threat (to what? I have no clue) and thus feel some need to try to shoot me down personally.
It is hard for me to differentiate users, but I don't consider your activity on HN a crutch or needing rational
Glad to hear more about your background in this area though
Jeff Bezos says his action was guided by something akin to a public comment period. Not sure how anyone would have known that in advance but maybe thats something you can contribute to in the future, or push for more billionaires and well funded organizations to take suggestions from the public
Reminds me of the writing coming from Anand Giridharadas. In the New York Times last month he wrote:
"...even as they give back, American elites generally seek to maintain the system that causes many of the problems they try to fix — and their helpfulness is part of how they pull it off. Thus their do-gooding is an accomplice to greater, if more invisible, harm."
There's a good 2-part podcast about Benevolent Billionaires from the "Citations Needed" podcast that goes a bit over the history of billionaire benevolence and what the good deeds cover up.
Just until someone actually responds... I haven't watched part 2, but I remember part 1 being focused on Bill Gates as the main example to showcase their points. A big focus is how non-profit organizations aren't as benevolent as they appear to be. For example how Bill Gates' charity has more money than it began with and how a lot of what's classified as "charity" ends up being stuff like media influence and making a documentary about why private schools are gonna save education in America. They also point out how easy the media goes on Gates and other "charitable" billionaires and how seriously they take their worldviews despite not having any real education in, say, economic theory or history.
Sounds nice on paper, but that's not how accounting works.
While Bezos' wealth has skyrocketed in the last year, the portion of that wealth that actually came out of the Amazon ledgers was under $2 million in 2017. [1]
Since it is the responsibility of the company to compensate employees, at most Bezos' cut is taking $2 million out of the pie, which divided across the several hundred thousand Amazon employees would give each worker less than $20 per year. Not exactly life changing.
Regardless of whether or not Amazon should pay employees more, basing that argument on the CEO's capitol gains on long-standing investments is ridiculous.
The $2B isn't over 1 year...it's over several years or decades. In reality it would be a few dollars per year extra for 600K employees. Let's not get carried away.
EDIT: For comparison, 50k USD is approximately 65k CAD, which makes higher than the median starting salary for a mechanical/electrical engineer in Canada. I would be surprised if they are paying their lowest-paid employees that much.
And for a lot of families that is the difference between a staycation and Disneyland. Don’t underestimate how much an unexpected infusion of cash helps people that are near paycheck to paycheck.
This means that the public is subsidizing a company owned by the richest man in the world because he refuses to pay his employees a living wage. Doesn't this sound wrong?
We can argue until we're blue in the face about whose fault it is and who should be responsible for ensuring workers are paid a livable wage, but I would hope that we can all agree on this:
If you work full-time and you do a good job, then you should earn a wage that you can live on.
The question is, "what is a living wage?" The goal posts keep shifting...which doesn't help the case for this. If it were just "you can afford rent and food" that would be fine, I suppose...but it has now extended to so many other things that I wouldn't really call necessities.
Should Amazon workers only barely be able to afford rent and food. Should they have $0 left over after rent+groceries? $1? What amount is reasonable, vs what amount becomes excessive? What if they have a child? Or an elderly parent? Or student loans?
> but it has now extended to so many other things that I wouldn't really call necessities.
What ridiculous lavish spending do you think Amazon warehouse workers are capable of buying with their (on average ~$12/hr) wages?
The general argument is that a living wage should cover life. All people are entitled to enough money that they can pay for rent, pay for food, pay for healthcare, pay for basic transportation, and have some amount of discretionary money to spend anyway they want (like say, raising a family, or continuing their education, or having a hobby, or volunteering for a cause their passionate about, or whatever)
I consider it everything up to the level of participation in democratic politics and civil society. Different people may put different needs and functions above or below their line of demarcation.
breathable air
drinkable water
nutritious food
safe shelter
quiet and dark sleeping area
secure property storage
equal access to the commons
basic education
job skills education
scientific/analytic education
access to communication
access to markets
personal mobility
medical care
social contact
family formation
social organization
political influence
.------------------------------
< this is where I draw my line
'------------------------------
mercantile education
philosophical education
luxury goods
psychological individuation
independent exploration or introspection
artistic and aesthetic pursuits
finding a meaning in life
spiritual enlightenment
Veblen goods
Yes and presumably other companies should also pay them more but I suppose the blame is more focused on Amazon/Bezos because he is the richest person in the world and this article is about him.
Yeah, it does. But Bezos/Amazon is simply taking advantage of the laws and the political system (just like many corporations pay so little tax). The real solution is to raise the minimum wage, plug tax loopholes etc and not expect billionaires to play fair, out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's wrong but how is it the company's fault? It is the government's responsibility to set a minimum wage. How come the blame doesn't fall on the policy makers and lobbyists?
It does. You're left with little recourse when policy makers and lobbyists are apathetic or actually working against the public good (by refusing to raise the minimum wage, which hasn't increased in some places for over a decade, and should be indexed to inflation).
Can you not assign blame to someone abusing a broken system? Surely you can. They are still abusing the system.
What's even the point of government services then?
If I use roads or public parks, or my social security, does that mean that my employer never paid me enough, then?
And we already have a concept that covers this. It is called the minimum wage. It makes no sense to talk about government services that people are using when you should instead just raise the minimum wage.
These people needed government support, and Bezos is giving them a job, so now they need less government support than they did before. Bezos is helping to give money to people who would have otherwise been totally on welfare.
Turn it around again, Amazon has underrun the competition that was paying living wages before and destroyed the jobs those people had before, by not paying taxes.
Their competitors were not paying "living" wages. Brick and mortar retail, especially mom&pop stores, were notorious for paying low wages.
Destroying jobs is a good thing. It means that Amazon can pass on the savings to consumers. I know that Amazon is disliked in Seattle & the bay area, but if you go around the rest of the country, people love amazon.
That’s a complicated issue. I’d hope they’d get better jobs, but in the interim, should any full-time position be permitted to pay an unlivable wage? If so, why?
Those benefits are public resources that could be used for other things, like helping the homeless. You could say that taxpayers are subsidizing Bezos' PR stunt
Because the taxpayers are effectively subsidising their employer by “topping up” their wages to the true market level . We see this happening alot in the UK too.
There's nothing to say that people were offered full-time work and opted for part-time instead. Regardless of employee preference, it's still not apples to apples if trying to make a comparison to income qualifying for government benefits.
Is a business owner that only requires part-time work supposed to hire full-time workers for some arbitrary reason all of a sudden?
I think the point is that if his business is making so much money to make him the worlds richest person and his company one of the top two in the world, you would HOPE that would trickle down into good jobs throughout his business such that people who work for him had no need of public assistance.
Jeff Bezos, for once in his life, gives away a money and all anyone has to say is that he's a monster for not doing something else. He doesn't have to. It's a free country and he follows the laws.
I work most days inside Amazon Fulfillment Centers. No one is forced to be there and most are happy they have the jobs they do because every other company out there treats them as bad or worse. If they don't want to be there, they can quit at any time. The problem isn't Amazon, it's a society that doesn't give a shit about the lower class and won't pass any laws to help them. Not if it would mean higher prices. Not if it's the demonized 'socialism'.
Complaining about Bezos feels great, but it doesn't do anything. Lobby your congressman and senator for law changes that force all companies to treat their lowest-paid employees better. Tell them to support Sander's "stop Bezos act" too if you like- I think it's a great idea.
Fight the root of the problems, not the symptoms. And don't complain when someone actually tries to do good for once.
And of course, bias note: I work for Amazon but I don't speak for the company in any capacity. These opinions are my own.
He's obviously trying to diffuse the momentum of a movement that is aligning against him. The most popular politician in America just introduced the Stop BEZOS act:
The 2B are less costly than losing the whole shebang. I would not be surprised in the least if he ends up still controlling the 2B and this ends up as just a headline.
"Philanthropy" is just another way that oligarchs take tax-free control of our society and shape it to their whims. A fine example of this is Bill Gates - with no educational training or experience, he used his fortune to push failing methods on millions on American kids.[1]
Bezos is a great creator of poverty. He is the wrong person to try and fix it. We need to just make these oligarchs pay taxes and living wages, full-stop.
Potentially hot take: charitable donations (perhaps over a certain small amount) should not be tax-deductible. "Philanthropy" by the ultra-rich is essentially just them deciding where their tax dollars go.
I just finished reading the book "human universals" which mentions that we're neither in a full democracy nor a full autocracy, so we're in a de facto oligarchy.
So where as I've often sneered at Russia for it's oligarchs we clearly have the same issue. Perhaps the Western oligarchs have earned their money more transparently, but they're still oligarchs.
Also one of the human universals is that we admire generosity in leaders, so these grandiose gifts are what oligarchs love.
Gates also has no educational training in Computer Science / Engineering nor Business, and he's seem to have done pretty well in those areas. :)
There's plenty of room to throw rocks at billionaire philanthropists, but Gates is more knowledgeable about the areas in which his foundation operates than the heads of most well-known non-profits and relief organizations.
> Gates is more knowledgeable about the areas in which his foundation operates than the heads of most well-known non-profits and relief organizations.
This is laughably absurd. Come on.
Edited because I was still thinking about this
Who do you think knows more about Malaria, Bill Gates (who is incredibly knowledgeable about Malaria) or Dr. Pedro Alonso who runs the WHO's malaria program?
> His professional career began in The Gambia in the 1980s. A study on the validation of verbal autopsies was followed by the scientific assessment of the efficacy of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) as a preventive tool against malaria. The utility of such nets was, at the time, controversial, and the publication of new results in The Lancet[1] was critical for the launching of subsequent studies confirming first evaluations. Based on this evidence, WHO recommended the universal use of ITNs as a vector control tool, since a pillar in the fight against malaria. It is estimated that extensive distribution programs of ITNs can claim responsibility for 69% of the 663 million of averted malaria cases in Subsaharan Africa between 2001 and 2015.[2]
..
> With the support of the Hospital Clínic and the University of Barcelona, he founded in 2006 the Barcelona Centre for International Health Research (CRESIB). In this institution he accomplished one of his most renowned works, the contribution to the clinical development and impact assessment of a new malaria vaccine: RTS,S. In collaboration with the Manhiça Health Research Centre in Mozambique, he implemented two proofs of concept that established for the first time the efficacy of the vaccine in infants[3] and children aged 1–4 years.[4] These results opened the door to subsequent assessments and to a Phase 3 clinical trial performed in 11 African research centres. Ultimately, this vaccine received a positive assessment by the European Drugs Agency, in 2015,[5] while the highest expert committees at WHO have recommended that it starts to be utilized, as of 2018, in pilot programs in three African countries.[6]
I appreciate you editing to acknowledge that Gates does, in fact, know a _lot_ about these topics (the main point I was trying to address with the parent post).
I was thinking of your example (and others in the WHO) as exceptions when I said "most". I more had in mind people who run organizations like the Red Cross.
Anyways, did not mean to denigrate the non-political / non-figurehead appointments.
I don't believe these externalized 'throwing money at things' solves much.
What he can do is find innovative solutions within is own organization for the wellbeing of his own staff.
And given his power in the value chain, start to demand basic rights in the crap countries of the world where the crap he peddles is made.
Steve Jobs had so much power that literally in one, single email, in one sentence, could have changed workers rights globally. His supply chain would have had to bend to his specific requirements and it would have propagated. A simple 'charter of workers rights', you know, like the 'right to go to the bathroom' and to 'not be woken up in the middle of the night' etc. would have been nice to see.
That he subverted democracy by threatening the Seattle city council as they attempted to address their homelessness crisis makes me skeptical of this effort. I doubt we can do much to fix the underlying issues in a context where billionaires can intimidate governments into surrendering power to their unilateral, authoritarian control.
So brave of him to donate 1.2% of his vast fortune to a PR project with his name on it! This really makes up for the whole FOXCONN-level human despair harvesting labor practices thing imo. Hell, we don't even need to go through with that legislation any more.
I don’t agree with Bezos on a few things, but this is big. It’s about time companies care for their down and out compatriots.
Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans—this is a nice start. Let’s see where it goes.
Wonder if he’ll get Bernie to contribute (tongue in cheek)
The best way for companies to care for their down and out compatriots is to pay their workers their due instead of profiting handsomely from underpaying them.
This is something I have legitimately wondered for a while now, and maybe someone on here with an economics background has some links to share:
Which is more economically efficient:
1. Pay workers above-market wages
2. Pay workers market wages, but use taxes and some sort of welfare to bring the workers effective income up to where it would be had you paid them above-market wages.
Presumably the taxes used to fund Option 2 would be something like a wealth tax (including corporate wealth).
My non-economist intuition is that Option 1 could have weird effects on the economy due to paying non-market-based wages.
the problem is that the "market wages" generate both humanitarian disasters of poverty and also demand gaps wherein people can't afford to buy goods, which puts a drag on the economy.
#2 is an issue because government transfers nearly always have terms attached. people get food stamps for food, housing assistance for housing, etc. so demand gaps can still occur because people still don't have the "right" kind of money. plus, it's less efficient because the government has to be involved.
i'm in favor of a wealth tax, however. implementation issues aside, it's the most realistic chance we have of making businesses pay up.
> Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans—this is a nice start.
That's pretty presumptuous of you, isn't it?
For one, it ignores that the system and actions that give Bezos the ability to do this, i.e. accumulation of wealth, are a contributor to problem itself. Second, he'll use this as both a distraction and tax write-off. Third, rubber meeting the road isn't just about money. I spend many, many hours each month doing service within my community - from youth groups, to after-school programs, to community cleanup, etc. As do many of my friends, both conservative and progressive.
Trust me, he isn't special. $2 billion is LESS THAN 2% of his net worth!!
So, yeah, he's still a scourge, but I'll happily encourage him to distribute the wealth he builds off of the exploitation of average people.
> It’s about time companies care for their down and out compatriots.
A nit, but this is still a little like dominoes fixing pot holes in the city so their drivers can actually deliver. Sure it's great, but it would be better to pay a more fair share of taxes and provide a safety net for our people and the money needed to maintain common infrastructure.
I don't doubt this will be a more efficient endeavor than a government one, but it's also not really accountable to anyone. And bezos can actually just hire two PR people and shut the rest of it down. He has no obligation to homeless people, and no obligation to see this to the end. I'm sure he will, but it's pretty fucked to think that companies will be less self interested in their charity than in their business, or a government.
The idea that we should just make a few mega rich then depend on their kindness to address societies woes is really toxic.
Agree with almost everything you wrote. But given the track record of big philanthropy I doubt very much that this will be more efficient than government efforts.
> Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans
If progressives were really serious about helping the poor, they'd all become extremely wealthy and donate 1% of their wealth to a fund for the homeless.
We have homeless, we have veterans, we have addicts, we have people with mental health issues and we have illegal immigrants. The latter gets much more vocal support from progressives over fellow americans. We can have an influence on how we treat compatriots. So while some progressives want to subsidize services out of our tax dollars for people who have not contributed to our society, they don’t fight for fellow Americans in need with the same vigor, nor do they even denounce the policies or governments in those countries which contribute to those counties’ economic malaise —quite the opposite, some admire Chavista and Catroist policies.
I have never seen or heard of progressives voting down on programs meant to help the homeless, veterans, addicts, people with mental health issues, or illegal immigrants. I do see progressives being more vocal about illegal immigrants because that is the only group that is vilified by the current administration. Illegal immigrants do contribute to society by being nanny's, cleaning houses, working at farms, and paying sales tax.
Disagree. Progressives very actively campaign on helping all of those groups of people. It's the centrist democrats who are focusing solely on illegal immigrants--to the neglect of the others--because it's a corporate-friendly issue.
I hope this works and is successful. Still I can’t help but be reminded of the saying that roughly goes “the people who are paid to solve a problem end up having a vested interest in the problem not being solved.”
Specifically with regards to homelessness, the problem seems to be the critical shortage of housing for people in general, leading to a total crisis of affordable housing, rather than a specific problem of insufficient services exclusively for “the homeless.” Certainly there are people who need support above and beyond affordable housing, but isn’t the bedrock of this whole crisis the shortage of homes in the places where people are trying to live and work?
That's why surgeons always leave a little cancerous tissue, to maximize their chances of getting paid to do another operation.
(Since HN probably won't get that: it's a satirical joke meant to point out some flaws in the commenter's argument. There's no evidence at all that the people involved in, say, providing services for the public have any desire to see the public suffer more so that they can roll in that awesome $30K/year social worker salary for a little longer. Pretty sure that the folks that run soup kitchens would be very happy to close up shop if the need disappeared. Etc. The idea that this is some initiative of Big Homelessness to rake in the gravy is..... sad.)
Every time I see Seattle mentioned on HN, there is someone who says something to the effect of "That is all very nice, but let's talk about the homeless problem in Seattle." Considering that that is where Amazon's SWE core is, it might be profitable for Bezos to see this problem reduced/resolved.
[0]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/amazon-worke...