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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Yep, you beat me to it. It's like a variant on the old joke[1]:

"You must be a profiteer."

'Sure, I guess I count as one. How'd you know?'

"Well, you learned about the immense, tragic problem of homelessness, and apparently your first thought was, wow, awesome, a cheap labor force I can use to cut costs!"

'Hm, okay, fair enough. You must be a philosopher then.'

"Yes! You're right! How'd you know?"

'Well, because homelessness has been around for ages, and appears to be intractable, and you've been unable to make any real progress on it, and yet when I offer homeless people an alternative to their current state, and some of them take it, somehow, the whole problem is all my fault."

[1] https://www2.bc.edu/~radinr/Management_Humor/jokes.htm

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>Well, because homelessness has been around for ages, and appears to be intractable

It's not at all intractable. Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.

The homeless and jobless serve a function, though - to keep wages and agitation down for the precariously employed and the precariously housed. They're like this mainly for the benefit of corporations like Amazon which farm cheap labor.

Effectively the homeless serve as a form of 'public good' for the owners of capital.

That's why proposals to house or give homeless jobs with government money are met with sheer disgust by the same media that happily endorses spending billions of dollars dropping bombs on brown children.

It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness. You'd have to treat that first. Some of them might not want to be treated though...

The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them. The state may need to step in with a minimum wage (or basic income), but otherwise the system should work fine.

>It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness.

Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.

>The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them.

More unemployed + homeless

=> More afraid workers

=> Workers who are willing to take a lower wage

=> Higher profits

The notion that higher production automatically leads to higher profits is pretty comical.

>>It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness.

>Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.

Achievement unlocked: Trivialized mental illness.

Being homeless is certainly stressful on the psyche, but not every crazy homeless person started as a sane homeless person. Some people just cannot function as independent adults. One person I know managed to score Section 8 housing, and she trashed the apartment and threatened the landlord and ended up on the street. Until her condition deteriorated enough for the police to call a 5150 on her.

But she doesn't consider herself crazy. Just stressed out. Modern liberation theory means the institutions consider her to be an adult, so if she says she doesn't want to stay in an asylum, then there's no way for us non-super-rich people to stop her from leaving psychiatric care and ruining her life.

There is no firm boundary between crazy and sane, and even being delusional doesn't prevent one from being a productive member of society. We just don't have enough appropriate services for all the crazy people in this country.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGY6DqB1HX8

>Being homeless is certainly stressful on the psyche, but not every crazy homeless person started as a sane homeless person.

Most of them started out not being able to hold down a job, however.

>The state may need to step in with a minimum wage

Taking away a low-skilled worker's best bargaining chip (the willingness to work for less money), is generally not a good way to support their ability to gain employment. It does really help middle class teenagers though.

Allowing people to work for less would cause a race to the bottom in which nobody would make enough to survive.

We've seen the tech giants collude to suppress wages, imagine what fast food companies would do if they realized there was no floor to wages.

Finally, I flatly refuse to accept that people are undeserving of a minimal standard of comfort. Just because somebody doesn't know how to code, or hold other marketable skills does not mean we should not value them and the quality of their existence.

I support a universal basic income as a replacement to the status quo, but don't pretend that a minimum wage is a way of "valuing someone and the quality of their existence". It's simply not. It's degrading them by refusing them the autonomy to make their own decisions.

No matter what your feelings on the matter, sweeping a floor only has a value up to some hourly rate that depends on a particular business' circumstances. Beyond this point, sweeping will be substituted with technology or simply forgone.

Also, there isn't much empirical evidence to support your claim about a race to the bottom (note: almost all jobs already pay over federal minimum and yet there is no "race to the bottom"). It's also funny you would cite tech workers--some of the highest paid people in the world--as your example of a "race to the bottom". Yes collusion can happen between companies--no one thinks markets are perfect--but markets punish this type of behavior over longer time frames. If Google and Apple are colluding and pushing down wages, some other entrepreneur has an opportunity to pay their workers more and steal their talent. This is slightly complicated by the fact that competition is often constrained in other ways (occupational licensing, regulations, intellectual property, etc.), but these are artificial barriers (i.e., government) to market competition.

Most chronically homeless people suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, but there's a distinction between the long term homeless and those who are temporarily down on their luck (like one woman mentioned in the article, who moved to Seattle for employment reasons and was thrown off when her state based certification didn't transfer).

I don't think it was Amazon's intent to reach out to individuals whose present condition included serious untreated mental illnesses.

Your theory is essentially Marxist (capital colluding to hold down the workers), and like all Marxist theories, falls apart when applied to reality.

Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society, and not merely businesses which survive via trade.

>like all Marxist theories, falls apart when applied to reality.

Some but not all. This one certainly doesn't fall apart.

>Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society

Cohesive power blocs often come together to act as as a unified political agent when they have shared interests.

Two good institutional examples of corporate power blocs in the US are Cato and the AEI. Many of their members compete for market share, but they joined forces to gain political representation together to have their interests as a whole represented.

This is like saying systematic discrimination doesn't exist because the hegemonic group does not have a single organization deliberately applying discrimination.

Actually according to Marxism capital doesn't have to collude, there need not be any conspiracy, holding down the workers is the natural conclusion of capitalism.

>Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.

Can I live in your simple universe?

Speaking as someone who was homeless for ~5 years, I could have told Amazon exactly how this would play out. The vast majority of the homeless are drunks, addicts, mentally ill, and fantastically stupid (who think they're geniuses). What do you think is going to happen when you hire such people?

Quite so. The term for this is [the reserve army of labour][0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

Yes, yes, very good. But seriously, if you are paying your employees below minimum wage, then one of the following must be true: -Your business doesn't make enough income, possibly a sign of a bad business model; or -You are intentionally paying your employees as little as possible, which I see as profiteering.

Perhaps there are other reasons?

Do you feel the same way about Goodwill?

Goodwill's a non-profit.

Despite their earning statements, Amazon is only a 'non-profit' on paper.

Goodwill may technically be a "non-profit" but they're hardly altruistic.

Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit.

I can think of logical reasons to justify distinguishing them, but I rarely see such reasons made explicit. (One reason might be that there's a greater incentive to cut corners on worker treatment when you're for profit rather then just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, but that would justify at most tighter oversight, not moral condemnation of doing the thing at all, as we normally see.)

>paradox/error

There is none. The ends don't justify the means (Kantian ethics).

There are network effects of a giant for-profit organization exploiting the jobless, vs a non-profit that is regulated to be aligned with the jobless.

If you're using rational beings as a means to your ends, they need to be part of the ends, which is why Amazon is being criticized.

> exploiting the jobless

You're committing the fallacy described by the "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics". http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...

First, why do you describe offering someone a job as exploitation? It's totally not. Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Working a job when you didn't have one before tends to make a person better off - either way it's up to them, and either way, it's one more option they didn't have before.

Second, just by interacting with the situation, you don't become responsible for it. The homeless' situation is not a potential employer's responsibility any more than it is yours personally or any other person's on the world. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Employers who go out of their way to offer homeless jobs, and to indicate that they won't discriminate based on that background, are actually giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. By comparison, most people involved in the thread will have done nothing at all to help homeless or give them opportunities, despite criticizing employers who do.

(Please read the link above; it offers a useful discussion of the issues.)

>Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options.

Is this always true? Imagine a third world country where children die from lack of food, clean water, and medical care. Now imagine a group that goes in and offers to exploit the children (I'll leave how up to your imagination) in exchange for meeting all their basic needs. Is this group making the children better off... and conversely, are anyone fighting for laws to ban the actions of this group working to make the children worse off? Almost every single person I've brought this up to will say yes for at least some forms of exploitation. If you go with child labor, you'll get a decent number on either side, but if you go with other forms of exploitation the rate who say that offering the choice is harmful jumps to basically 100%. (This is one of those questions that, if I ever make it rich, I would fund official research into, but until then I will admit this is based off of my person anecdotes.)

All that being said, I agree that you shouldn't be responsible for the underlying situation. Even if you are wrong for offering a given bad choice, you are not at fault for the underlying situation.

That blog post says nothing about a fallacy, and lists self-serving hypotheticals.

Which fallacy is Kant committing exactly?

Couldn't reply to the child post, so I'm putting it here:

Yes it is true that if a company helps but does not entirely solve a problem, they are not obligated to stick it out. But in this case it may be that they are not helping by offering homeless people seasonal jobs. The fallacy here is that homeless people have a choice: if I were in a desperate situation, then I would take any job on offer. I.e. by being given the option the decision has essentially been made for for me, and whilst I may be better off in the immediate future, that doesn't mean it will last (and it could even be worse in the long term), and whilst I could decline the offer, and wait for something more stable, my circumstances are sufficient motivation for me not to do that.

A cynical person might even posit that by explicitly not doing enough to bring people out of homelessness, Amazon succeeds in maintaining a pool of willing and cheap seasonal labour.

> two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world

There's 'basically' and then there's 'basically'. In the article, it suggests that Amazon misled the potential employees with "temporary-to-permanent" when they were actually "seasonal" jobs. The article's main interviewee then talks about how that made things worse for the people she knew.

A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen.

The effect on the world is a lot more complex than "X people got N jobs at $rate".

>A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen.

Did you read my second paragraph?

Yes, it sounded like you were explaining it away, to turn it back into "X people got N jobs at $rate". For example, what entity is going to do this "tighter oversight" that you suggest? How is that going to work? And so until this entity that does tighter oversight comes along, why should companies get a pass on screwing their workers?

"Well, I would condemn them screwing their employees, but since there's no official entity to watch them, we can't make a moral judgement"?

>Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit.

I see it as very different. The Copenhagen issue is that if you try to help fix a problem, you are now responsible for the parts you didn't fix. Imagine if you fix a bad code base to remove half of the significant defects, and are now blamed for the other half that already existed because your upgrade didn't fix them.

What is happening in this particular case is different. It is judging entities based not only on their actions or effects, but also their intents. This is quite common, for example intent can be the difference between murder and self defense.

No company is paying people below minimum wage... it's literally the minimum wage.

Isn't the whole point of outsourcing paying below minimum wage? (Also I guess more lenient pollution laws)

These positions were in Western Washington outside of Seattle. Standard minimum wages apply and Amazon has a history of paying above min wage.

No, the main point is to get labour at a lower total cost, even though you can't predict very well how much you'll need.

Sign up to a call center, and they'll say "we'll answer your calls and bill you per call. If you want to do it yourself you can, but in order to cover the peaks you'll have to hire so many people that most are idle during the troughs... we know how to plan this and scale and things and more things, and you don't so why don't you just let us do it?"

Getting around irritating minimum wages and other laws is a fringe benefit. Scaling the headcount is the big one.

To make the term "minimum wage" useful, it must have a bunch of qualifier like "minimum wage as set by the law for a set amount of work hours, under the condition that they don't earn other wages". Otherwise special conditions like symbolic wages will ruin the term for everyone.

There are plenty of exceptions to minimum wage. Training, interns, students, restaurant servers, etc. YMMV per jurisdiction.

Not to mention wage theft, not paying overtime, pretending your workers are not employees, etc.

Restaurant wait-staff are often paid minimum wage with the expectation they will make it up with tips. It's a travesty.

If they work N hours and receive fewer than $7.25 * N, then the employer is required to make up the difference. I understand there are some accounting tricks involving another $2.13/hour floor and tips, but regardless of those tricks they can't be paid less than minimum wage without the restaurant violating labor law.

Sure: Minimum wage is too high and the market should set it, not government.

BTW, when I started working minimum wage was under $4/hr. Within four years I was making over 6 times that much. Two years later, over twelve times. Another four years had me at 25 times minimum wage.

The secret? I worked and studied hard. I took nothing for granted and $4 per hour was not enough to be comfortable.

So how about using prison labour, where people are paid 10 cents(or however much, it's an example not a solid number) an hour? The only difference between homeless people and prisoners in that case is that homeless people are not in prison. But the job they do serves the same purpose - offers them something to break the cycle of what they are doing currently.

Although homelessness has been around for ever, there are things governments can do to reduce it.

There is a reason there are more homeless people in San Francisco than all of England.

Yes. Homeless people are encouraged to move there, and people working in charities rely on their existence for their livelihood.

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_san-francisco-homeless...

I don't understand. Are there any philosophers saying that the problem of homelessness is Amazon's fault? Because it seems to me that the people who say that that's what philosophers are saying, simply say that to ridicule a position they don't fully understand so they don't have to listen to what the philosophers actually have to say. I mean, if philosophers have been studying the issue for ages, maybe, just maybe they have a point that's at least worth listening to? Because I do know one thing: no one is blaming Amazon for creating the problem of homelessness.

How old is homelessness, though?

It used to be call cavelessness.

Got anything more than the assumption it was around "since forever"? The only stuff I could find relates to modern history.

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