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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

This is a fundamental problem with capitalism for which various band aids have been tried but no real solution has been found IMO.

Capitalism gives stuff according to one’s production, where one’s production is judged in a distributed way by others in the society (subject to various flaws and exploits, of course).

The question is - what do we do with the people whose production (again, as judged by others in society, not in any absolute sense) does not cross the threshold to get enough stuff to live?

We need to tack on some extra subsystem which generally has not integrated well with capitalism in terms of scalability, distribution of judgement, etc.

We should be looking for a decentralized fix of some sort, ideally, in the way that capitalism itself is decentralized. Any ideas?

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Just provide a cheap alternative. It doesn't have to be decentralised, it could even come from the government.

Mass produced self-contained pre-fab storage container style houses. Bed, shower, toilet, window, stove. The uglier, the better. You don't even need to sell them cheap, just cheap enough for enough millenials to be able to buy one in two years.

Flood the market, and deregulate where they can be dropped. There'll be a mass exodus of people fleeing from tight landlords to these beauties, and rents and housing prices would drop.

I'm waiting for the 3D printing revolution to take care of this one.

Poverty isn't an unsolved problem of capitalism, it's one of its core functional mechanics and it's not clear that or how it would work without it.

Most people are not willing to work in the ways and amounts that are necessary to generate surplus value for asset owners. Left to their own people would work enough to meet the needs of themselves and their communities and stop. So we don't leave them alone. We create a dangerous and criminalized situation you can fall into to provide "incentive" to create excess labor.

Capitalism can't solve this problem because this isn't a problem from the point of view of capital. From capital's perspective unrest and violence is a problem, and that is what police are for.

Very well-put.

California also keeps homeless people down with their insane rents and requirements.

Even working people have a hard time getting and keeping a 650 credit score, as well as first and last month's rent and a security deposit. Used to be the last month's rent was the security deposit.

Couple that with the fact that 99% of properties are run by the same handful of 'property management firms', and it's nigh impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Perhaps instead of spending so much money on what I saw accurately dubbed as 'the homeless industrial complex' it could better use the funds to assist home-buyers and even renters to get off the streets.

California offers a form of assistance in helping you by paying your first, last, deposit, and three months rent at a new place. They issue you a letter but inform you that it takes 90+ days to pay out. No one will accept the paper in lieu of real money now, so the case worker's advice? 'Pay it up front and we can pay you back instead'...because homeless people have several grand on hand and a good credit score. Three months of searching until the letter expired and all I had to show for it was approximately $600+ spent on rental applications that were supposed to be paid back by the entity providing the assistance but never was. I stopped paying for them when I realized this. Also some places had literally hundreds of pending applications for the same places and were still accepting more- how is that legal?

Good ideas killed by bureaucracy should be termed 'Californication'.

Edit to add- they also have insane income requirements like 4-6x and up. So $1200/mo for a one bedroom would easily be $4800+/mo required income. On top of $3600+ to move in. At minimum wage if you're lucky enough to find full time you will barely make $2400 pre-tax.

Can you expand on how poverty is a core functional mechanic of capitalism? That is not obvious to me. Capitalism would cease to function without poverty?

It seems to me more like capitalism just does not do anything to prevent poverty, since the system itself is blind to human needs.

I do think that inequality is fundamental to capitalism, and that if we added an equality constraint the system would definitely cease to function. But I don’t see how the same applies to poverty.

If you had inequality without poverty, eg a true basic income or a standard of living "floor" that provided for all basic needs, a grueling low wage job would not be an attractive alternative for a great many people.

When you look at capitalism globally it depends on a tremendous number of people who are paid much less than the value their labor produces, straightforwardly because the alternative is misery and plausible death. The real threat of penury provides the coercive force that gets work done at rates that capital owners are able to take as profit.

And like yes there is varying tolerance of different forms and degrees of deprivation, and maybe there is some balanced "sweet spot" where you can keep people sad enough, and provide a well paid-enough minimum wage where grim poverty is gone but owners can still accrue profits.

But if that's even possible which I'm not convinced about, we are deep in a local maximum and not climbing out of it. The accumulation of capital provides its own feedback loop for optimizing the value extracted from peoples' labor. The existence of poverty is a highly efficient pressure mechanism in that cycle. There's no incentive from the top to remove it and make the machine less effective at its purpose, generating profit.

So many times I've read a thoughtful comment on these topics, and when I look up it is by giraffe_lady. Like, literally dozens. Probably just an odd conjunction of interests and views.

Anyhow. Keep up the thoughtful writing, and thanks.

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