[splitrocket]

Correct, and generally speaking, economic of scale should apply to social sector programs. In theory, it should be 60x easier for the US to house everyone, simply because we have more resources to aggregate.

Even when you compare per capita GDP, Finland's doing it with $50k, while the US is at $62.5k.

[mkohlmyr]

I'm actually not convinced on the surface of it that economies of scale apply to government. It seems to me like the larger the population, the more layers of government required to effectively deploy capital.

If you assumed a similar per capita tax rate, but more government is required to deploy the taxes in a larger nation, the larger nation would presumably end up with less money deployed per capita.

Of course I am neither a social scientist, economist or political scientist.

[joshspankit]

The simpler the program, the less layers you need. If the todo list for a homeless person is:

- Assign open apartment

- Digitally fill out form B12

- Deposit money

Then there is very little work required.

Where social programs have the highest overhead is where they do things like “Assess whether it’s ‘required’ based on binders 3 through 7” and “Continually check in with all other governmental arms to validate that they are meeting criteria”.

[chimeracoder]

> Correct, and generally speaking, economic of scale should apply to social sector programs. In theory, it should be 60x easier for the US to house everyone, simply because we have more resources to aggregate.

People always like to rush to talk about economies of scale, completely forgetting that diseconomies of scale are also a thing.

(And even that's all assuming that you think Finland's demographics are comparable to the US's and that causes of homelessness and poverty in Finland are representative of the causes of homelessness and poverty in the US.)

[SpicyLemonZest]

Is the US in fact spending less money on homelessness, though? My guess would be that it's spending a comparable amount on a per-person basis.

[claudeganon]

A great deal of spending in the US suffers the problem of direct versus some form of market disintermediation. So, instead of just building houses for people, we funnel it through myriad private or semi-private bureaucracies and suffer their corruption and graft.

[SpicyLemonZest]

That appears to be happening in Finland as well. The article says that state funding is funneled through "NGOs such as the Y-Foundation" who are responsible for actually getting the housing.

[claudeganon]

Yes, it’s not a binary situation. But Finland also directly took over several private/NGO shelters and converted them to apartment blocks. In the US, this would be considered verboten in most major cities because of the challenge it poses to everyone involved in real estate speculation and development.

[soulofmischief]

The US citizen sees a fraction of their tax dollar ever actually reach the ground. The rest gets caught up in people's pockets on the way down. We would need to adjust for this but it's unclear how to create a heuristic.

[_jal]

Do you have evidence that there's more friction/graft in the US than, say, Finland?

[pavlov]

There's the established Corruption Perceptions Index published annually by Transparency International:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Finland is ranked #3 while US is #22.

[yokaze]

The keyword here is "perception". I am not convinced that the perception is deserved.

[soulofmischief]

I don't, because I don't know how to calculate it. Like I said, we need a heuristic but I don't know how to go about it. But it's an important qualifier when we're trying to isolate this problem to just the economics of solving homelessness.