> Carmel did not invest in poverty. Carmel pushed it out of town. Now it is extremely wealthy per-capita.
What exactly does that mean, I'm reading it quite negatively, but the rest of this is positive, so I might be missing your true meaning.
What exactly does that mean, I'm reading it quite negatively, but the rest of this is positive, so I might be missing your true meaning.
Carmel did not invest in anything that anchors poverty into the community. They were very careful not to overbuild section 8 housing, they aggressively police blight (i.e. people not taking care of their property), and also required homes to be made with more expensive finishes (i.e. brick instead of plastic siding), so cheap housing was simply not possible to build.
The negative side: police tail old poorly maintained cars, are very quick to move homeless out, and generally make being poor in Carmel a bad experience. The local joke is "you got pulled over for being poor in Carmel".
What I’m really looking for is governance that helps solve these types of problems, not pushing them away with the engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries.
This is true. A lot of the problems that go with poverty simply moved somewhere else.
> engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries
I think Brainerd's we don't invest in poverty is an interesting stance because on the surface it seems to be just pushing the problem away... but if you look a little deeper, investments in large amounts of section 8 housing attract even more poverty, lower tax rates, thus creating blight, which lowers tax rates more, which requires more subsidized housing and so on. There is a death spiral for cities, and I suspect that over-investing in poverty is one of the forces that causes it.
I would expect a well governed municipality to have the ability to absorb, and ideally mitigate, an increase in low-income populace. To me, raising the lower-limit of quality of life is one of the measures of a good government. I’m just not sure artificially raising it by expelling poor people, or making their life miserable so they expel themselves, is actually doing that on a larger scale. Rather it’s a bit of poverty shell game. Granted, there is a tipping point by which any system will become unstable if it absorbs too much, but again, I think a measure of good governance is the height of that threshold. The discussion about Carmel seems to indicate their threshold is low.
FWIW, I don’t want this to come across as a dichotomy, but instead about where the appropriate balance point is.
We’ve all probably worked on teams where a member wasn’t pulling their weight to solve problems. At the myopic individual level, that’s a great strategy because it maximizes their rewards while minimizing their cost. But that can’t be applied globally because at some point someone in the team has to actually start solving problems. We can’t all be the team free loader and a lot of social structures and game theory is about avoiding the tipping point where there are too many free loaders and not enough people solving problems.
It would be like a city having a lot of veterans returning from war and struggling to transition to civilian life. IMO, the solution shouldn't be "remove all veterans services and make it harder for veterans to live here so they take their problems elsewhere." Superficially, and locally, that "solves" the veteran problem, but globally it probably makes things worse. That's not really the type of society I would advocate for.
All I’m saying is I prefer politicians and policies that focus on actually solving root problems. There are many people who are quite fine ignoring those problems as long as it doesn’t affect them, and their policies reflect that. They’re just not the horse that I want to back with my vote, even if it would be materially better for me.
Both of these can be true. A larger available labor market of less skilled workers lowers wages.
Low wages lead to more poverty created.
The real problem is the pyramid of needs. In lots of blighted neighborhoods people struggle just to get by, hope they don’t get shot or mugged and can pay next month’s rent. You can shove as much money as you want into a school in that neighborhood and it’s going to underperform because the kids are worried about their next meal, parents getting high, cops harassing them, being downtrodden because they’re “poor”. How do I know? I lived it. Lost friends to it. I got out because I was the kid who aced everything that came him in math and science and honestly didn’t have to try very hard until I hit college, so I got up to a lot of the same BS other kids did.
I also had stable home life, unlike many peers, at least until 16 or so. I’m pretty sure the state still spends almost as much in $$ on the students in that district to this day as some of the richer communities, but the community has changed and I don’t think the graduation rate has changed much either, getting out of there is pretty much luck of the genetic and family draw and environment matters more than money.
I'm not sure about that. They were paying people $18/hr to make submarine sandwiches in Carmel in 2018. Just a 1/3 of a mile south, in North Indianapolis, the same chain was paying $12.50/hr. There is an entire world of businesses that exploit government poverty supports to get cheap labor.
Alternately: Carmel invested in making life easier for wealthy people to live here and harder for the poor.
This doesn't seem like an innovation much as it does run-of-the-mill gentrification. Not taking a side here, but that's clearly how this worked
Carmel is an example of investing heavily into gentrification.
The rule is freedom of movement across the USA, so it is obviously a losing policy for any government other than the federal government to tackle national problems and implement wealth redistribution.
One of the difficulties in game theory is mitigating all kinds of human biases that lead to suboptimal solutions. In this case, governments can be myopic in both time and space. There are examples in game theory where the rational choice in one context leads to worst conditions for everyone, overall.
As to the "rules" of game theory in this context, they are arbitrarily set by society. They are not natural laws, so we probably shouldn’t treat them as immutable.
(As an aside, I don't think that "most likely" should be conflated with "optimal". There's lots of analogies that come to mind to describe that point, but I'd rather hold off so as not to come across as debating in bad faith)
Which is why I wrote that the federal government needs to take action. Expecting a city or state to go bankrupt trying to solve a national problem is not helpful.
I'm more inclined to think poverty, like most complex problems, requires actions at practically all levels, ranging from familial, local, state, and national actions. One of the downsides to federalism is it creates a way for people to absolve themselves of any responsibility. As long as I pay my taxes, it's "not my problem" to solve. Ironically, most people acknowledge it's the people closest to the problem who are in the best position to solve it. It's also hard to expect these problems to be solved nationally when roughly half the population wants to see the federal government reduced.
I don’t understand the relevance or logic of this paragraph. Carmel borrowed money to buy amenities that attract a higher socioeconomic class of people. That they did not spend it on courting lower socioeconomic classes is the claim that indymike made for why Carmel is the way it is.
> One of the downsides to federalism is it creates a way for people to absolve themselves of any responsibility.
I vote for the leaders I think will help raise the floor of quality of life, but I do not think I should sacrifice and possibly sink my community because other parts of the federation are not ready to play ball. At some point, I have to prioritize me and mine.
Yes, that's what I was saying. I took your previous statement "Expecting a city or state to go bankrupt trying to solve a national problem" as an implication that Carmel's debt was somehow trying to solve a poverty problem. It isn't. As you say, it's about attracting wealthy people (and to a certain extent, expelling poor people).
>I do not think I should sacrifice and possibly sink my community
Utilitarian thinkers may disagree on this.
>At some point, I have to prioritize me and mine.
Kantian thinkers may disagree on this. If you logically extend this, it becomes a prisoner's dilemma and results in worse results for everybody. (which brings us back to the issues I have with applying game theory as your original post stated.)
The real argument is defining that "point" where sacrificing for the group devolves into worse outcomes. If you have succinct ideas on that, I'd be curious to hear them. But too often it becomes a fuzzy, abstract concept that just rationalizes otherwise selfish behavior.
The second thing is making the presidential election a popular vote election. This is almost done if a few Republican led states switch to Democrat led states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
And the third is reducing the power of the Senate.
Then we can finally get some movement towards what we want, rather than just try to avoid going backwards.
Despite what many people intuitively think, there is no right to vote for the president guaranteed by the Constituion. There's been something like 1k proposed amendments to change the electoral college and, given that they haven't been adopted, I'm not holding my breath. I'm curious why more individual states don't adopt a different way other than "winner takes all" to their electoral votes. I believe it's in their power to do so, and that seems like a much more likely route to having electoral votes reflect popular voting.
It's interesting that you would want to reduce the power of the Senate because there seems to be a lot of people who think the House is the more dysfunctional arm of Congress. Given the nature of terms and demographics, the House feels like has more members taking more polarizing stances.
In this case what we're seeing is simply setting inequality as a goal its own right rather than as a tool to accomplish another purpose. There's nothing to admire or emulate here. Reading through the comments it's clear that this aligns with the values of a lot of the community, and they are being honest about that. If this is the case for you too then take responsibility for your vision here.
Cheems Mindset is strong on HN. I don't know any other community who are so sure about "What's Impossible To Change."
This is a very practical concern of implementing broad population wide benefits.
City / state A says they will subsidize people who need help, and politician in city / state B says they will keep taxes low by sending people who need help to city / state A.
This is the extractive relationship you're worried about. It's the same deal with singapore! It is critically dependent on the labor of impoverished disenfranchised malaysians it keeps as close as possible but avoids spending any of its resources on. As always it is simply the poor subsidizing the rich.
If you asked me to vote for a federal marginal land value tax on ALL land, I would be down. I would be down to help provide a floor for quality of life for everyone.
If you asked me if I want to make only myself poorer relative to my peers across city/county/state lines, I am going to say no.
Just curious: who gave you the right to decide how other people's resources should be allocated?
I mean, that's what's really going on here, right? If we discard all of the melodramatic bs, it's just you trying to tell other people how to allocate their resources?
What's going to happen if they ignore you? Are they going to get passed over in the rapture or something? Is the psychological weight of their own guilt going to make them snap and go psychotic? I'm genuinely curious what the consequences are and when they'll deliver
This is extremely Singapore.
A general problem for all metric-based social improvement is people gaming the metric by moving problems somewhere else.
I can see how the latter is “not invest in poverty”. But I have doubts that the trickle down effect can be that effective. Maybe it works well in a small population?