[jordanvisco]

You don't think you'd stop begging at some point and try to do something useful with your life if EVERYONE was nice to you and tried to help you out? I know I would but maybe I'm different. Maybe I have too much confidence in mankind and not enough respect for incentives.

[kstenerud]

Or maybe you just make the common mistake of assuming that everyone else thinks the same way you do.

I'll share a little story about a friend of mine. His son came crying to him one day because his homework wasn't done, so his wife did the child's homework (to ensure that his grades didn't drop as a result of his negligence). 3 months later, both parents were doing ALL of this child's homework, because he'd realized that if he didn't work, someone else would do the work for him. He could sit around playing video games all day (yes, that's exactly what he did) and anything unpleasant or difficult was handled by other people (his parents).

That is, until his teacher figured it out. While his homework was always done impeccably, his performance on tests were abysmal. The teacher rightfully berated the parents, and not a moment too soon.

A second example comes via an old co-worker of mine who spent a large part of his career under communist rule, but was absolutely disgusted at his co-workers. Everyone did the bare minimum because there was no incentive to perform or excel (everyone got paid the same regardless). And so naturally, anyone aspiring to greatness and having some ambition left for a country where performance was rewarded.

You see similar effects in well entrenched union jobs.

[masterzora]

Or maybe you just make the common mistake of assuming that everyone else thinks the same way you do.

And you're not doing the same?

[kstenerud]

I'm definitely not doing the same. I know that different people think differently, and responses to the same stimuli will be all over the map. This is why there's no such thing as Utopia, and why I take any one-size-fits-all solution with a mountain of salt.

[masterzora]

Are you sure you're not? The thread pretty much looked like this when I posted that:

"This won't work because people will react the way I think."

"No, it will work because people will react the way I think."

"You can't just assume everyone will think the same way as you. Here's some anecdata to prove everyone thinks the same way I do."

Please help me here, because I'm failing to see the difference. (Granted, I think in both cases it's not so much "everyone thinks the way I do" as it is "sufficiently many people think the same way I do", but all the same.)

[kstenerud]

Getting back to the original discussion, you were arguing in favor of the amount of beggars going down if everyone helped them out. Beggars are already a tiny minority in the population (around 3.5 million people will be homeless in a given year, and only around 25% of those turn to begging, out of a population of 300 million). In order for begging to quadruple, only 1% of people would have to think like those in the examples I gave before. So if 10% of people think like that (and I suspect it's much higher than 10%), you'd get a 40x increase in begging.

[masterzora]

I think you should read the names of posters, but I am more than happy to take the position you stated so we'll call it good.

I think what you are leaving out of your analysis is that, in this scenario, there is no compulsion to help the beggars. Thus, if everyone actually is helping they are doing for their own reasons: that it is good, that it is right, that they want to help. I find it hard to imagine that a significant number doing so would then take advantage of the same system in the manner that you describe.

"But", you say "it is ridiculous to even assume that everyone is going to willfully give as such in the first place." This much is obvious, so trying to comment on the above utopian ideal has its limits. I am inclined to believe, however, that if everyone who actually would be willing to help beggars of their own accord to make things better did help that it is likely that this would only be done in such numbers that the beggars could be helped but not such that it would become such a lucrative market as posters have described.