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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

I am confused by this. The comment is against taking care of lazy people directly, but also hits on government spending which would be the way to make direct personal care of lazy people indirect. As to the infinite money - we have more than enough productive capacity to supply basics of life to everyone without trying to somehow further weigh if their laziness needs to be punitively motivated for basic living support.

Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.

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I was replying to an absolute statement, "every lazy person deserves x". My point is that there are probably more aspects to consider in general.

Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.

Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?

I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.

Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).

In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.

Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".

Its actually quite a good claim, for example if we examine UK: we have more empty houses than we have homeless people, and we have more food thrown away as waste than what would be needed to feed said homeless people.

Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.

So the only reason those homeless people don't get their houses is that nobody wants to give them to them? I rather doubt that number. More likely those empty houses are in places where nobody wants to live, or that are unsuitable for homeless (because the environment to support them is missing in the location).

The empty houses in UK and especially London is a well-known and researched problem, they are prime real estate where the owner decided that renting them out is not worth the trouble, they are just land-banking and waiting for their 'investment' to grow. Many (of those) owners don't even live in UK.

We had a 'homeless' guy build his house in a forest, but ofcourse the government showed up to remove him. Many people would sort themselves out if we did not prevent them from doing so.

The narrative of shortage is an obsolete idea from the 19th century. We produce more food, steel, oil, and every other real industrial good than we know what to do with. These discussions are like fighting WW2 with medieval tactics.

Today's economy is not limited by production like it was 100 years ago, its limited by consumption. By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty, the '1st world' is reducing consumption and destroying it's economy.

Think about it - how can we have abandoned factories, unemployed workers and surplus of all materials?

Think what 'productivity growth' means - if 40 hours a week was enough to feed and clothe everyone 70 years ago, and productivity went up 400%, how many hours do we need now?

That why we have useless hobs, and 60% of employees believe their job is useless.

The problem is not about morally corupt rich people being in charge, its about morons being in charge. If they were clever but evil, at least the system would not crash every 8 few years

> By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty

I am sick of hearing about poverty as a growing problem. It simply isn't.

Median income, and the lowest income quintile, have grown steadily. The percent of Americans living in poverty has been declining. Median wealth is still lower than it was before the 2008 crisis, but it was growing strongly before and has grown strongly since the Great Recession.

All trends are upwards. Do not confuse growing inequality with growing poverty. Some are getting richer faster than others, but statistically everyone is getting richer.

Is there a specific metric in mind when you say people are being pushed into poverty? Or is it something you have just heard elsewhere?

In the US, even before the 2008 the percentage poverty rate was higher than the 1970's. It was about to come down lower than the 1970's just before the pandemic hit. After the pandemic I presume we will be back to worse than the 1970's rate. But the poverty rate measure has been flat or worse for 50 years.

However, even though the overall rates were returning to flat before the pandemic - the percent of people below 50% of the poverty line in the US has been historically higher by 50% than it has been in history since the beginning of the measure.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

If you're an HN reader, you have to realize that for the most part you are in an incredibly fortunate bubble of being in a job that is in demand in a financially supported sector of our economy - it is not that way for many Americans (or many other citizens of other nations).

"Poverty rate" is usually defined of terms of earning less than the average income minus some %. It does not imply people actually being poor, in the way people imagine poverty (not being able to afford food, clothes, housing...).

Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.

Homelessness is obviously increasing though it’s difficult to measure with precision. Homelessness is worse than poverty and homeless aren’t even counted in official poverty calculations. The census can’t sample them.

If you are in the US, you may be observing a local trend rather than one representative of the whole country. It's very difficult to measure, but this site has an estimate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...

It shows about a 12% drop in homeless people 2007-2019. The US population overall grew just under 10%, too, so the drop on a per capita basis is higher than that. I imagine 2020 led to a large increase again, though. I also can't vet their sources without registering so take it with a grain of salt.

As someone who doesn't live on the west coast and rarely interacts with homeless people, could you explain how this is "obvious" if there's no measure of it?

Firstly, 12 years is the relevant time period, not 100 or 500 years ago.

Specifically in UK in-work poverty has been going up and up for the past ten years.

The housing situation in London may be special, and I would bet you can find socialist laws behind it that make renting out properties nonviable (like rent controls and making it impossible to get rid of bad tenants). Here in Berlin there is a similar discussion, some people claim empty houses are the cause of the crisis, others say it is a myth. Since I had that debate recently I looked up the articles who found no such surplus, but the "believers" just want to believe, because it is such a handy explanation.

I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.

As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).

Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?

You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.

Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.

You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.

Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.

And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.

Ah yes, the good old: 'this guy dares criticise the status quo, must be a socialist"!

You post is narrow minded and presumptious - I am not socialist, we don't have rent controls in London, and there are economic terms other than 'socialist' and 'capitalist'. Try 'Shumpeterian'

But if you want to go on believing that the only choices are socialism or economic collapse every 8 years, go on.

Do they need to be typical houses?

About 10 million cars are produced in the USA every year. An RV/Trailer type thing is like a car - so quite easily you could imagine producing that many of these 'tiny houses' every year with car style factories.

About 600k people are homeless in the USA. That's about equal to the number of RV's produced every year.

So that solves 'physical' homelessness quite quickly if there was an effort to. (that disregards that some homeless choose to homeless out of mental illness etc)

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