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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

I read that as “they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve.”

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.

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> they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve

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.

Is it creating more poverty or “attracting” poverty from somewhere else? If it’s the latter, it’s not increasing the global level of poverty, just the local level.

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.

I mostly agree with you, but there's something to be said for keeping the poverty away from city centres, which is some of the most economically productive land per unit area. American poverty seems to congregate in cities, presumably because the cities can afford it, but that seems precisely the wrong perspective.

My hunch is that poverty concentrates in urban areas for the same reasons economic activity does: there are certain economies of scale that are enabled by population density. If you push poor people to rural areas, you’re also pushing them away from the aspects that make their life easier, like access to public transportation, grocery stores, social services, jobs etc. So we’re at the same place where we make being poor harder for the aim of making being rich easier. I think if we assume the economy serves society rather than the other way around, we come to a different conclusion.

FWIW, I don’t want this to come across as a dichotomy, but instead about where the appropriate balance point is.

I always thought this way until I listened to Mayor Brainerd talk about how cities invest in poverty which results in an expansion of poverty, which manifests as low tax income and increased expenses, which limits the city's ability to invest in growth.

I’m not saying that’s wrong, and that discussion happens elsewhere too. My main issue (also brought up by other commenters) is that this strategy can only work when there are relative disparities in wealth. When you say "expansion in poverty" I'm assuming you mean it attracts the poor to the city (ie moves them), and not that it actually creates more poor individuals. (If that's an incorrect interpretation, please correct me). If that's true, every city cannot “divest in poverty” because it’s just moving problem rather than fixing it. It’s a shortsighted, hyper-localized, and some would say selfish strategy because it pushes the problem somewhere else to be fixed.

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.

> when you say "expansion in poverty" I'm assuming you mean it attracts the poor to the city (ie moves them), and not that it actually creates more poor individuals

Both of these can be true. A larger available labor market of less skilled workers lowers wages.

Low wages lead to more poverty created.

Bit like how private schools out compete public schools academically. Neglecting to mention how private schools can kick out anyone who would bring down their KPIs.

Private schools don’t really “out compete”public schools at the same price points and relative home “stability”/income bracket. There are plenty of nice public schools in middle class to rich neighborhoods that easily hold their own to private schools. If you want to compare apples to apples. Most of the kids in those neighborhoods do as well as the kids going to private school.

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.

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