Hacker News Reader

Comment by bakuninsbart | Hacker News Reader

> 3. Charity - let's say we actually give every person enough money for food, housing, and utilities. Some people will mess up. They could spend it all on an addiction or just make a bad investment. Even with UBI they could still end up hungry or homeless. Will we help them? Or will we say "you had your UBI, the rest is on you". This changes the morals of how we treat people in the worst times.

I think it should be pretty clear today to any scientifically-minded person that addiction is a mental health problem. Here In Germany, the vast majority of homeless people are addicts or people with major mental health problems. You have a small minority hiding from the law, and an even smaller portion of healthy people choosing the lifestyle.

Instead of relying on the charity of wealthy people, good public mental healthcare, public addiction centres and social workers engaged with the homeless community are the ways forward.

View on HN

The parent comment said "spend it all on an addiction or just make a bad investment". What do we do with the person that gets e.g. their 1000€, spends it on a night with champagne and then has nothing to eat or pay their rent? Too outlandish for you? How about if they spend it on a new TV instead of rent, a new smartphone or a couch?

There's a reason why some people get into debt because of consumption: they don't plan reasonably. What do we do? Do we not pay them UBI but give them pocket money and keep the programs in place to cover their rent etc because they can't be trusted to take care of that with money we give them? Do we just ignore their fate and watch them go hungry and eventually homeless? Do we keep the programs in place, give them UBI and then pay their rent when they spend the UBI but didn't include the rent?

If a person consistently chooses to buy TVs instead of food, I think that strongly speaks for mental problems. I don't think it is really expedient to micromanage people, so if they spend their money unwisely and don't see a problem, that's tough luck. At the same time, having infrastructure to help them get back on their feet is important.

Again, I'm not sure about the situation in the US, but here we have public services that can help people go through debt restructuring or private insolvency in the worst cases, as well as offering classes for money management and centres for addictive behavior. This isn't done purely out of humanitarian concerns either, addiction and lack of education are problems that keep people from being productive citizens - and this is expensive for society at large.

>If a person consistently chooses to buy TVs instead of food, I think that strongly speaks for mental problems.

That's not right. We're living in a world like this. When people cite stats that show x% of people living paycheck to paycheck that is almost guaranteed to be due to over-consumption and consumer debt if your household income is above, say, $50-60k/year. At that level, you have over-consume to have nothing left over.

60k household income is 47th percentile

https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/

Most of the people struggling are below this figure and not because they spend too much on TVs.

That just means that UBI does not replace a welfare system. You still need to have programs that provide a safety net for people who are irresponsible with their income, or just fall on hard times to the level that UBI isn't sufficient to dig them out.

Most of the people who are poor are more careful with their money than you are. The poor aren't poor via consumption. They are poor because they lack the skills needed to earn a better living.

Citation needed. Financial illiteracy is a large driver for poverty, many people have a hard time understanding compounding interest and what that means for the idea of consuming things with credit card debt.

Simple problem to solve. Give them their 1000€ a month daily at 33€ a day. If they blow it all, they are hungry that day but eat the next. With a debit card it shouldn't be too hard.

> Instead of relying on the charity of wealthy people, good public mental healthcare, public addiction centres and social workers engaged with the homeless community are the ways forward.

Those probably don't exist with UBI, because one point of UBI is to take all the money going into those support and give it directly to the people and let them take care of themself.

In german there is a significant number of people and families who are only somewhat functional because of those external support. Without this support, they will probably end on even lower levels than now.

UBI is not a replacement for universal healthcare, in the same way that unemployment benefits are not a replacement for public education: they both may be related somehow, but they do not overlap completely.

The healtcare-system is not responsable for social problems, usually it's not even financed from the same sources, at least in germany. And a universal healthcare-system is not part of UBI. It's also somewhat questionable whether it's possible to finance them both equally.

When people talk about UBI, they usually forget the healthcare-problems, because that's a big financial burden which will sting the posibility of UBI.

>In Germany, the vast majority of homeless people are addicts or people with major mental health problems.

That's true in Canada and United States. The problem is that there are major legal barriers pushed through by activists to prevent forced institutionalization. Apparently it is a fundamental human right to live in a tent city off the freeway without basic sanitation.

This is fallacious. The push against forced deinstitutionalization was made because of the systematic abuse within that system. The role of any modern society is to offer people who need it treatment and basic support (and that should include housing, of course), without impeding their basic human rights.

>The push against forced deinstitutionalization was made because of the systematic abuse within that system.

That is a quintessential example of "throw baby with bathwater". You've replaced regulated institutions staffed with credentialed professionals (medical and otherwise) providing safe and structured environment and healthcare, with mentally ill people living in tent-cities and squalor, surrounded by crime, prostitution, abuse and illegal drugs and exposed to the elements.

Tell me again how you've guaranteed 'basic human rights' with your replacement for institutional care? And don't tell me that any problems in the 60s and 70s with institutional care, could not and would not have been improved over time. Instead, the policy to dismantle state and municipal institutional care destroyed countless lives that would have benefited from said care.

>The role of any modern society is to offer people who need it treatment and basic support (and that should include housing, of course), without impeding their basic human rights.

And people who aren't capable of making the best decisions for their lives due to mental illness - how does that factor to your equation of 'basic human rights'?

Again, this is redirection. Mentally ill people squatting in tents is not a problem everywhere, only in places where nothing was done to replace the asylums, and where people were just abandoned in the streets. Better social programs were created in most places, like supervised housing, regular social worker visits, "Housing First", etc. Putting people in what is in many ways worse than a prison, for the "crime" of suffering a mental illness, was not right, and most developed countries actually chose to improve the existing system instead of just "throwing the baby with bathwater". If the place where you live is full of mentally ill people living in the streets, the solution is not to return to the system that existed before, but to create a better system to replace it.

Wait, so are you in favor of rounding up people in buses and sending them, against their will, in "institutions" for "their own good"?

Yes. 1000x times YES. We're not talking about institutionalizing just anybody who is on the street. We're talking about institutionalizing people with severe mental illness who cannot make those decisions and are living on the street. Are you not for that?

Most of the homeless in the US don't fit into this category of severely mentally ill.

A quick google shows that at minimum 25% to 30% of homeless have serious mental illness, and almost half have some mental illness (50%-60% of homeless females suffer from mental illness). There is overlap with drug addiction, but drug addiction tends to represent around 40%-50% of homeless. It's also necessary to differentiate temporary homelessness and long-term homelessness. I didn't find any numbers, but I suspect long-term homelessness is dominated by mental illness and drug addiction. That's not to say people cannot fall on hard times and end up homeless, but that population tends to bounce back within weeks or months and also requires different policy solutions as well.

On a side note, have you walked through homeless encampments in cities like San Fran, or Seattle? It is obvious that mental illness and drug addiction is rampant.

However way you slice it, mental illness represents a huge part of the homeless population. Policy wise, they are treated no different than people who end up homeless due to economic circumstances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_health

I believe it is more like half at any given time in the US if you would like to support the term "vast majority" feel free.

Between drug addiction and mental illness, it's not 'more like half', but hey - let's say it is - doesn't it bother you that the current policies are created with the assumption that homelessness is an income problem? That, therefore, 'more like half' of the homeless population is not helped by the billions of dollars being spent on combating homelessness?

25% of the homeless are seriously mentally ill according to the most extensive survey ever done by HUD.

35% have a substance abuse problem.

Believing that these populations don't overlap involves some pretty magical thinking. Logically between 40-50% have one or the other problem and 10-20% have both problems.

This doesn't however paint a complete picture because its a chicken and egg situation. Did people end up homeless because they were ill or on drugs or did they end up ill and or on drugs after they were on the street.

Agreed. I also think that in a lot of cases having a stable income will help people the help they need to properly address these mental health issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com