Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I’m Finnish too. My entirely anecdotal experience of both Finland and USA is that America is about 40 years behind in responding to poverty.

To see men sleeping in trash boxes in freezing weather, you only need to walk a few blocks around midtown Manhattan in the winter.

View on HN

The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.

It won't map because of our national obsession with crime and punishment. I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's far cheaper to put a drunk in a homeless shelter AND give him treatment (AlAnon, etc) than it is to lock him in a cage with a herd of sociopaths. But the Prison Industrial Complex has got to look out for its own, after all.

> a herd of sociopaths

I agree with everything you said except for this. The idea that many/most/all prisoners are violent or sociopathic is a myth propagated by those who stand to benefit from the prison industrial complex. Prisoners are human and prisons are inhumane. For another take, here's the IWW IWOC[0]:

> Incarcerated people are legally slaves as per the 13th Amendment which abolished "slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime". We are legally slaves. If you've been to prison you'd know we are treated like slaves. Billions are made annually off our backs. Outrageously priced or grossly inadequate privatized 'services' like health care, food, phone calls, assault our humanity - they feed us like animals, suck our families dry, and when sick leave us to die. The government spends as much as an elite college tuition per person to keep each of us incarcerated, but this money does not develop us as human beings, reduce crime or make our communities safer.

[0]: https://incarceratedworkers.org/about

I wasn't making any claim to the tendencies of many/most/all prisoners. My point was that putting non-violent petty offenders in jail/prison puts them in the path of a concentration of sociopathic people, those who really should be kept out of society.

The intention isn't so much crime and punishment as is the justification. The need to reallocate idle citizens producing no economic value is the systemic reason to high prisoner count domestically. America's prisons are largely forced labor camps recycling rebellious, able-bodied men into a working, productive labor force. One local example for me is paying californian prisoner's $1/hour to fight forest fires in the American west.

In fact policies that involve the government administering social services are easier, not harder, in a populous country.

Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college.

To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas.

But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like it would be high treason by the US political parties; mostly because they are all in the pockets of wealthy donors who would not like this new regime.

You can’t force people to accept treatment in US. While these might slow growth of the homeless population in dire need of medical help, it won’t prevent it.

To have no homeless, you have to have both resourcing for housing/medical, but also be willing to use force to compel those unwilling to get treatment/be housed where they have little choice. That’s a very tough leap to make.

The choice part never made sense to me - why would anyone want to live like that? But, as a society we value free will and therefore must respect the choices we do not agree with.

You don't generally have to force folks to get help. We (the US) do it in a small portion of the population: Severe mental illness, dementia, and substance abuse. They aren't talking about forcing folks to do things. You can encourage folks to do such things, though.

Most folks don't actually want to live like that, but some really do want to shun society. You can offer folks things like primitive cabins to help them shun society. Substance abuse, mental illness, and job loss are real problema with real solutions. Heck, if you can't solve someone's substance abuse or alcoholism, you can at least make sure they have shelter and food available to keep them safe even if they won't pay for such things. For a single person, it doesn't have to be luxurious: A dorm setup with private bathrooms and shared kitchen can work out.

You can force someone if that person is dangerous to self or others (mental health treatment).

To those bringing the downvotes: please elaborate why you disagree instead of blindly burning this comment into the ground.

Or maybe USA has way more people or other factors that make it a harder problem.

Some homeless people can't be helped since they have mental illnesses and break away from hospitals (USA has 70 times more people and homeless people are concentrating themselves in population hubs - that could make the problem more visible), and so on.

Let's not assume things without proper analysis.

Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs.

When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blame poor people for being poor. This lets them justify voting against social security programmes because they believe "it will never happen to me, I'm not the kind of person who becomes poor".

Is saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.

Homelessness can't be fixed "at source". People become homeless simply by losing their job and defaulting on their mortgage.

Walking around San Francisco you would get the impression that most homeless people are mentally ill, but you'd be missing all the people sleeping away from busy streets, in tents, in their cars, squatting in unused buildings, couch surfing between friends, etc.

Funny thing though: if you default on your mortgage bank gets your home, you become homeless.

What happens when bank defaults? You become homeless!

It’s a win-win (for the bank).

On a more serious note: a society which has homeless ppl, in 2018, cannot be considered “civilized”.

Poverty isn't caused by mental illness though it may be correlated with it. How many were mentally ill before becoming homeless? At what rate would wealthy people develop mental illness if you force them into the same situation?

In a lot of ways America is undergoing a "Caribbeanization" where there are two strata of society who rarely interact with each other except in contexts like buying something from a store and so have little concept of the other's way of living.

Not all social security programmes are good. Some of them are unrealistic, some of them are unfair to other people, etc. Voting against a particular social programme doesn't imply the person doesn't feel solidarity in general.

Maybe they're voting against it because while they're not poor, they still don't have more than enough - you can solve that by funding it through a progressive tax, but that makes it unfair in the views of many people.

That is true as well, including things like slavery, historical and recent immigration waves, and generally a rather different approach to social security, and much much more diversity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com