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Comment by pmdulaney | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it is time for K-12 education to include modules on how to avoid homelessness in your future. Western democracies tend to be rather laissez-faire about drug use, for example, but surely there is a strong correlation between drug use and future homelessness. In California, where I live, the state spends large sums of money to discourage smoking, but little is done to discourage the use of recreational drugs.

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The American Enterprise Institute published a notecard-sized piece they call the "success sequence", which I think would fit your bill. [1]

1. Finish high school.

2. Get (and keep) a full-time job once you finish school.

3. Get married before you have children (if you have children).

Their analysis concluded that 97% of millennials in the US who follow this three step sequence are not poor by the time they reach 31 or so.

There isn't anything specific in that sequence about drugs, but I imagine the subgroups for whom drug use would be problematic would also find it hard to follow that sequence while using them.

[1]: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IFS-Millennia...

Maybe they are confusing cause and effect there.

It seems more descriptive than prescriptive. I am sure it is true, but it seems hardly useful.

It's like saying "we finally found the success sequence for breaking into upper middle class in three easy steps: 1) get a high paying job, 2) get raises every year matching or exceeding inflation , 3) avoid layoffs". Or the good old-fashioned advice for becoming rich: "buy low, sell high".

These are all 100% true, but also 100% useless.

To say it is 100% useless would be to say that the moral training of children is useless. You're not really that cynical, are you?

Many of the current homeless within, say, the U.S. would have come of age following "Just Say No", the War on (some) Drugs, and DARE programmes. Casual survey would say effectiveness was limited.

If you're looking for a policy angle, I'd suggest one more conducive to providing more housing and stable incomes.

Most people that use drugs do not suffer homelessness. They experience no social problems at all.

Even if there was a correlation, why do you assume there is a causation?

Well, let A be the conditional probability that one becomes homeless given that he uses recreational drugs. Let B be the conditional probability that one becomes homeless if he doesn't use recreational drugs. If A does not turn out to be significantly larger than B, then my understanding is incorrect.

A reductive trick I have trouble imagining a suitable audience for.

It's not a trick at all, though it might seem so if you're not familiar with the concept of conditional probabilities. And it's hard to imagine a more suitable audience than Hacker News.

But it sounds to me like, for you, the unfettered freedom to use recreational drugs is an inherent good, and that you don't think it should be discouraged even if can be shown to lead to increased homelessness.

Sure it is. You didn't actually say anything substantial, you only described the structure of a hypothetical argument to substitute for having one.

The straw person you've now added fills a similar function. You're clearly in search of rhetorical positions that lets you keep repeating yourself without taking the risk of participating in rational discourse.

How common is it that wealthy people become homeless because they recreationally consume wine? Is the prevalence the same as for other groups?

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