Fuzzy Necromancer wrote: ↑Thu Jul 12, 2018 5:36 pmSo why do we still allow people to go homeless and starve?
Are we talking regionally or globally? Because those are different problems with different potential solutions.
Regionally, in the US,
we pretty much have starvation beat...in fact, obesity is now a much, MUCH bigger problem than food deprivation. Yes, I realize that there are still problems with food insecurity and malnutrition, but we're still among the very best if not THE best in the world at tackling this problem, and given that Famine is one of the oldest specters haunting mankind, I have no problems giving the US a thumbs up on this problem. There's always more to do, of course, but someone actually
starving in the US today is a pretty edge case, whereas historically, it's been ubiquitous. (Seriously: for most of the history of our country, it was simply an accepted fact that lots of people
would starve every year. Hopefully not to death, but that wasn't out of the realm of possibilities. All you could do was try to not be one of those people.)
Globally, we have a massive distribution problem, because the places where there are lots of people that need food do not line up particularly well with the places where all the food is produced. Global warming is making the problem worse, because while it's not clear that climate change is going to make the planet less fertile as a whole, it's quite clear that it is going to make some places that were until recently very fertile into deserts. (see: Syria) Of course, you can move both food and people around, and we do both on a scale that would have seemed impossible just a few decades ago, but it isn't easy. Most foods spoil, and are vulnerable to pests and contamination. Moving people around comes with different but equally daunting set of problems. But we are trying, and honestly, we're doing a pretty amazing job on this problem, considering how persistently it has haunted humanity since our earliest days.
Make no mistake, this is an
old problem.
The Ugarit tablets are some of the earliest examples of human writing that we have. These things are well over 3000 years old, and what is the translation of one of them? A desperate appeal for aid from a trade outpost in a neighboring kingdom.
There is famine in our house; we will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land. We have literally been battling this horsemen for our entire existence as a species, and while we haven't vanquished it, we've made
tremendous progress, especially since we just keep adding more and more people to the planet. Not long ago, most scientists would have told you the Earth simply could not feed 5 billion people. We're currently at 7 billion and we just keep crankin' em out...mostly in countries that are already struggling to feed their populations. That's a big hurdle to overcome, but we're trying. And new GM foods offer real hope at delivering yet another hard right onto Famine's jaw. We're doing pretty well in this fight, all things considered.
Housing is a different problem all together, and one that I assume you're taking a more regional view of. (I mean, we CAN talk about global housing if you want, but it's not a problem that people usually take a global view of) Homeless in the US, which unlike hunger is fight that we're losing ground on, has (IMO) four driving factors, none of which is going to be easy to tackle.
- Worker pay continues to stagnate. Pay rates have been stagnate for a very long time, and they show no signs of moving up in any significant sense. This is bad, because while inflation is low, it's still been constant, so real worker compensation is at best treading water and quite likely trending down. This maybe wouldn't be SO bad except for....
- American economic activity is centralizing in the cities. This means if you want a job, you probably have to go to the cities. But building housing to accommodate all these new people, while possible, does come with a lot of challenges. (everything from zoning to NIMBY to construction costs to infrastructure strains) So supply gets limited. And when supply gets limited, prices go up. But PAY hasn't gone up, so more people are squeezed to the margins. This is made even worse by....
- American real estate is considered one of the most stable assets that you can own. If you're a newly minted Chinese billionaire who's worried that the government may suddenly decide to look poorly upon your suicide-net filled factory, a swanky apartment in San Francisco is a fantastic insurance policy. So rich people from all over the world are busy buying properties in American and Canadian cities, but they have no intention of actually LIVING there. The result is that developers only want to build luxury housing, because that's what these rich people want to buy, but the development is being used as a asset store, not as a living space, so it doesn't help with the homelessness problem even as it eats up available capital and space. And then there's....
- The smallest, but possibly most difficult problem to tackle: mental illness/addiction. A decent chunk of America's homeless population are struggling with severe handicaps - they either have mental disorders that they self-medicating/leaving untreated, or they are in the grip of addiction to one substance or another. Housing these people is very, very difficult. You can't simply give them a house...they're not capable of maintaining it and they probably won't even stay there, because they either need to find their next fix or they need to carry out whatever orders the squirrels are giving them that day. In fact, it's not easy to do ANYTHING to help these people that doesn't either enable their self-destructive behavior or get into murky civil-rights territory.
Number 1 is almost certainly going to get worse given automation trends. Economists are frankly at a loss as to how to turn that problem around, and I suspect it's going to take a radical shift in our economy to accomplish that. (think New Deal+) We don't have the political unity to do that yet, but we'll get there, one way or the other. (might take a while) Same deal with 2 and 3. There are things that theoretically CAN be done about either problem, but they all run counter to accepted economical wisdom and it will take a big push to start experimenting. And 4 is downright intractable, although fortunately it's probably the smallest portion of the problem, especially once we fix 1-3, which probably contribute quite a bit to the addiction problem.
But apart from the specifics, be wary of simplifications. "The world produces 14 billion potatoes a year, people need 2 potatoes each per year, therefore, potatoes should not be scarce" is a nice little bit of logic that reminds me of one of my wife's favorite sayings: "Calculating the volume of a horse is easy. First, measure the length of the horse. Then, assume the horse is a sphere..." The real world is complicated and messy. Where the people are and where the potatoes grow may not be the same place. When people need potatoes and when potatoes are ready for harvest may not be the same time. All of these things may change from year to year. Problems that are simple to solve have for the most part been solved, so if something is still a big problem, then it's likely that solving it is complicated. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but you need to be prepared to dive deep.
