America’s Largest Health Insurer Is Giving Apartments to Homeless People

People don't want welfare infrastructure to be contingent on a corporations ability to profit, because in the end it will be a fickle thing.

I have many, many, many criticisms of Steve Jobs as a human being, and as a leader, but I have literally never before read anyone claiming “he didn’t care about anything but profits”.

If by this you mean Steve Jobs killed a bunch of unprofitable products, and generally Apple as a company on his watch didn’t sell anything without a sizable markup above the marginal cost of production, I would trivially agree.

But your formulation basically reduces a complicated contentious figure down to an absurdly inaccurate caricature. He clearly cared very deeply about a lot of different things.

And despite what GP might think, I welcome this as a nice way to ease people suffering, and I don't think "all corporations are evil". I just believe that people having a roof should not be tied to profit, and I disagree with the ideology pushed to our throats about how corporations chasing profit is good for everyone.

Second, getting people to take action is all about incentives. Those incentives might be profit motive, internal motivation (e.g. feeling righteous), etc, etc. It seems like our job, as a society, is to construct incentives that lead to the actions we want to see. There are various ways of doing that, and profit is definitely one of them that has the nontrivial benefit of being broadly applicable: lots of people are at least somewhat incentivized by money.

Now there are all sorts of ways incentives can go awry, and that includes profit incentives, so we do need to watch out of that. But apart from that it doesn't seem like there's anything inherently wrong with using a profit incentive to produce the action we want.

The Trump supporters at rallies, and the cancel/call out culture on Twitter are two examples that come to mind which bias an individual towards large groups of people who mostly aren’t such caricatures.

It’s like the whole LatinX thing, where no Latinos really identify as LatinX but it’s this narrative pushed forward by an extremely vocal super minority.

Or that whole uproar about white women wearing Japanese clothing that happened.

At the end of the day, I think most Americans are more connected than we think culturally and it’s a bit of a shame but we mostly don’t hear the opinions of the people who’re working, taking care of children, and otherwise enjoying life by partaking in hobbies, social events, and cultural activities.

What we do hear are the people so invested in X or Y as to be extremely strongly opinionated enough about and invested in it that they may drive culture one way or the other without the contributions of most individuals.

Of course there is xenophobia, and strong prejudices and biases out there, but I’m hardpressed to describe Americans as being that way as a whole and in general I think we mostly move forward on social issues even if we take a couple steps back.

We’re seeing one of the most unequal periods of American history come to a head right now, exacerbated by tax cuts for the wealthiest, globalization, unfettered money in politics, and a whole slew of other factors.

But I have a feeling we’re going to come out of it okay, and I’m especially hopeful for Generation Z which seems to be all about achieving universal healthcare, affordable education, the freedom to be yourself in nondiscriminatory ways, and tackling climate change.

A few issues with your argument:

1) "plenty of old men" is almost certainty referring to the common portrayal of "old white men" and more broadly speaking all White Americans.

Let's just pick this one apart. I cannot speak for all the various religions in the US and their relative charity work, but I know that every church I have ever been apart of has done a tremendous amount of charity work not just in their local community but across the globe, mainly in third world countries - of not "white people". I will make the responsible assumption that other religions do the same. Considering more than 40% of US citizens attend some religious congregation weekly, that means more than 150 million Americans are contributing physically, and likely economically, to global organizations that have shared culture and do "goodwill" in the US and abroad... most often for the "suffering", and a large % of this group of Americans are white, many of which are old - as it's well known that religious observation is significantly greater among pre-Millennial generations.

2) Speaking to the remaining 60% of the United States, more than 62 million Americans volunteer, it's growing every year, and more than half of American's contribute to charity. Again, even assuming 50% overlap with the active-observant religion 40% of the population, we can assume almost every American contributes to an organization either through labor or charity to help those who suffer, and the delta of those who are likely not contributing physically or economically are probably those receiving said charity, and not a huge swath of millions of racist anti-American "countrymen".

3) To your point about a "disconnected society of mostly old white men", I have lived in South Florida for most of my life, where there is a HUGE influx of immigrants and refugees such as Cubans, Haitians, Central Americans, and most recently South Americans, i.e. Venezuelans - where these communities often represent double digit % of the population, and majority of the population in certain large geographic areas. You cannot "drive around" without seeing a car displaying a flag of their country of origin. From the tone of your comment it sounds like YOU have a problem with that behavior? You are essentially calling them un-American.

Frankly speaking as someone who has gone to public school with the children of these people, most of which the children were born outside the US, many of which are "Dreamers" - I know many might "long for their homeland". I know many have immense pride of their heritage. But these people that I know most often have joined the military, police, or other government service - because that is more often then not a stable, often guaranteed, step up in society both economically and I believe from a respect perspective which by your argument they apparently still have to earn. I assume you do respect those vital national and local services, regardless of the "Americanism" of those carrying out the services.

4) American Culture is defined by "shared culture", it is unique compared to every other country in the world BECAUSE OF THAT, not in spite of that. It is constantly changing and evolving. And the fringe that you speak to is simply ignorant of that fluidity that makes this country so unique and grand. I won't make the assumption of generalizing you and putting you into that fringe, but you certainly are amplifying that group by accusing all others of being apart of it without any evidence or scientific fact.

https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm

As this article demonstrates, Americans are great at paying out lots of money into private systems without receiving good material returns on these investments. By contrast, for example, my great grandmother in the UK paid into various state taxes regimes all her life. In return, she received very good quality healthcare, home care and long term care in old age, and social housing after the death of her husband. She was a working class person who suffered a lot of hardship, but lived to be 99. In the US, she probably would’ve ended up bankrupt and dead on the street much earlier.

The reason there aren't less fancy, affordable apartments is people weren't allowed to build new apartments 20 years ago, which would have aged into affordable housing this decade.

Though the above does touch on what I think is really missing - a social safety net. I can see how high cost of living could lead to homelessness when you're trying to cling on after losing a job and can't find something to replace it right away. I fully believe we should help such folks, give them a safety net, just -not- in SF. There's tons of inland cities that are begging for people, let's solve two things at once. After they are back on their feet, if they want to move back - so be it.

So the options are to cut social programs, leave them as they are now, or expand them. Which option would you guess has the best chances of helping more people?

Economics (and math) is only useful to life insofar as its axioms model reality well.

If you put a value on human life and model flux across borders, the metrics look different than purely $ spent for # of homeless present.

See Also: where most public school funding goes.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/...

I say "theoretically" because it doesn't entirely work and there are still a gradually increasing number of rough sleepers, but it does at least keep children from living on the street.

https://www.jrf.org.uk/mpse-2015/housing-benefit-claimants

> In 2015 there were 4.8 million families in receipt of Housing Benefit. Most families –2.7 million – claiming Housing Benefit are workless and living in the social rented sector (this includes pensioner recipients). Some 1 million were workless and living in the private rented sector. The remaining 1.1 million were in working families, half in private rented and half in social rented housing.

I absolutely agree with this, and we can find data that supports this concept quite aggressively throughout US history, with one example being that racial integration in schools stopped when it came to northern cities. It was fine as long as we pretended it was a southern problem, but today the most racially segregated schools can be found in major urban centers.

Ultimately, most decisions are made emotionally, and in order to move human society to the next stage of ethical development, we will need to combine an ethical baseline of human welfare (Singer style reverse utilitarianism comes to mind) with the application of data and statistics. Unfortunately, thinking statistically is difficult, and the human mind is capable of rationalizing emotional decision making before the thought it complete.

Ultimately the problem of homelessness is easily solvable from some pure mathematical/economic standpoint, but fails for the same reason that supply/demand is not a law of human society: it all depends on rational actors, a unicorn-like construct.

It doesn't mean that we cannot apply data to our decision making, but it _does_ mean that we need to work our hardest to defend decisions based on high quality data, high quality data analysis, and well-replicated science. Housing first is an idea where all of the early analysis has been extremely promising, and the NIMBY-ism that surrounds it should be called out for what it is: emotional decision making that disregards data and science resulting in a lack of compassion for people. I will say it's unethical, but it's also completely and totally human.