[didgetmaster]

People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame.

If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.

[al_borland]

Problems like those don’t just get “solved” one time. They require ongoing maintenance to keep levels low/manageable. If that isn’t understood by those in government, I would say that is a level of incompetence.

This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership.

I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.

[DrScientist]

Indeed.

You could go even further and say that the modern Western preference for whack-a-mole politics rather than long term competence is one of the reasons that countries like China is on the rise.

[MattGrommes]

I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings.

I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?

[Tangurena2]

> would go about preserving a problem like homelessness

My state chose to outlaw homelessness [0] and to make it illegal for cities & counties to offer places to lawfully camp unless the campsites are basically enough to be KOA Campgrounds.

Actually solving homelessness is politically unacceptable, therefore it will be criminalized & preserved.

Notes:

0 - The crime is "unlawful camping".

[LorenPechtel]

That's just pushing the problem around. You aren't doing anything about the actual cause.

[MyHonestOpinon]

"KOA stands for Kampgrounds of America, the world's largest system of privately owned and franchised campgrounds"

[nostrademons]

All you have to do is promote policies that make the problem more palatable but don't actually solve it. Treatments instead of cures. As long as the problem needs treatment, the organizations dedicated to treating it will still be around, but as soon as it is no longer a problem at all, those organizations will cease to exist and everyone working on it needs a new job.

For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

For taxes, it's accountants and tax preparation software like TurboTax or H&R block. The actual solution is to make the tax code simple enough that anyone can understand it and then withhold the appropriate amount so that nobody even needs to file. The big tax preparers have repeatedly lobbied against this.

For medicine, it's lots of prescription medication that you have to be on for life to "manage" your condition, as well as recurrent doctor's visits to diagnose and treat it. The actual solution for the vast majority of conditions that kill Americans today is diet, exercise, fiber, reduce stress, stop smoking, and wear your seatbelt. Modern medicine is also very adept at solving acute problems like broken bones, bacterial infections, appendicitis, etc. But once you've got a chronic condition of indeterminate source (many of which are actually solved by the advice above), you're in the system and can expect to pay through the nose for no solution.

For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

[ChadNauseam]

> For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?

> For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

Environmental impact studies are required by federal law for projects receiving federal funding. It's not CAHSR's fault that they have to be done. You then have to go through the process of acquiring land along the track, which you probably should do before people start moving dirt (it's going to be pretty embarrassing if your track has a hole in the middle where someone refused to sell their house).

[AlexandrB]

> I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?

There's research that shows why increased housing prices cause increased homelessness. One of the mechanisms is that the family and friends of the homeless can no longer afford the additional space to house the folks who have literally $0 because they themselves are priced out of larger homes or have to rent space to make ends meet.[1]

> Unlike Diona’s mom, Sherman’s parents had extra space. That’s very common among homeowning, empty-nest parents, meaning that a great deal of vacant housing is in the hands of the two people who are most likely to love and forgive an adult child in dire circumstances. But in more expensive regions, fewer parents (or other loving figures) have that resource, either because they couldn’t afford to buy a house in the first place or because there are demands from multiple family members to share the legacy residence.

[1] https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/posts/2025-01-16-homelessnes...

[inigyou]

If we literally gave them free housing it would be cheaper than whatever the fuck we're currently doing.

[Swizec]

> how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally

Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.

[verteu]

This is a fallacy because it's not the same people homeless each year. There's substantial turnover in the homeless population.

"Replace services with direct transfers" would eliminate homelessness for 1 year. Then new people would become homeless, and you'd have no services, because your budget is already committed to the "year 1 homeless-cohort."

The money spent grows quadratically (not linearly) over time.

[inigyou]

If you only gave $100k to the people who are currently homeless that year, then (ignoring that people would start keeping themselves homeless for several years on purpose) you'd still end up better than the present situation.

[verteu]

Not likely: SF has ~7,973 homeless people now, and current spending provides housing for 14,498 "previously homeless" people: https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/Agenda_Item_9_HSH_Budget_...

Thus, cutting all budget for cash transfers could increase homelessness by 80%! (Are those 14,498 now-homeless people eligible for this year's $100k? They can't be, since you already spent it on the 7,973 currently-homeless people).

Model the situation as "X(t) people become homeless at year t, Y(t) people become housed at time t," and you'll see the most important metric is "how much can we decrease X and increase Y per dollar spent"?

"Number of dollars per current homeless" is not really meaningful at all.

[AussieWog93]

If those are the actual numbers, you're proving GP's point. You can give each of those 14.5k people ~$55-60k instead of giving 8k people $100k and homelessness is still solved.

[verbify]

> ignoring that people would start keeping themselves homeless for several years on purpose

Don't you need to spend on bureaucracy to figure this out? That then increases the cost.

[reverius42]

How many of the homeless people in SF are from other parts of the US and are given one-way bus tickets to SF by their own hometowns? Because just giving them money could only possibly make that problem worse.

(Yes, this is a real thing that happens, though I'm not sure the extent. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/... )

[reverius42]

Not sure why I'm downvoted for asking a question based on reporting from a reputable source.

[tikhonj]

The biggest obstacle to that is the electorate. People (voters!) would go wild. Anything the NGOs do, however shady, won't compare to that.

We had a successful campaign to recall a progressive prosecutor over less.

[RugnirViking]

But the idea that that is intentionally done is the leap, right? In my model of the world, it's very easy to believe how overlapping & duplicate programmes, middleman corruption, and ineffective programs can cause this without meaning to, rather than some deliberate attempt to engineer the morass of beuracracy.

[Swizec]

I didn't say it was intentional, it's the result of millions of little decisions that all make total sense in isolation.

[c22]

Identifying and distributing 100k to each homeless person would require many layers of bureaucracy.

As it should. It is not responsible to give millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to an intern and tell them to start passing it out to random people on the street.

[inigyou]

We could just give 50k to every person, and then increase taxes enough to make up for it.

[brabel]

It may sound crazy but that may be cheaper than maintaining the status quo. The idea is serious and it’s called Universal Basic Income, or UBI. It may arrive earlier than most think.

[SoftTalker]

In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.

[tikhonj]

None of those things make homelessness appealing in any absolute sense. Like, if people had a (reasonable-to-them) path to getting a home, the vast majority would go for it even if there were a bunch of services available.

The real answer is that the electorate is vehemently opposed to providing paths like that if those paths feel even remotely like "unfair handouts". Votes hate that idea even if it would be empirically cheaper. We collectively preserve the problem of homelessness because we feel like people who can't/won't work deserve to be unhappy, because we believe that we need the threat of homelessness to coerce people into working, because we believe people on drugs/etc are undisciplined and immoral, because... well, you get the idea.

[inigyou]

I don't think many people are being homeless by choice no matter how comfortable it is. Perhaps it makes more of them choose homelessness over suicide but I don't think it's making anyone choose homelessness over homefulness.

You know what does though? Making it really hard to get a home. That makes more people homeless. I hope that's obvious.

[Ferret7446]

Quite a few are homeless by choice. There are shelters available but they choose not to go because the shelters ban drugs. So they choose drugs over shelter.

[duskdozer]

It's easy to frame it like this to portray them in a negative light. Many also ban pets, enforce strict curfews, force you to live in close quarters with people who you don't know and who can be dangerous to you, demand you practice their religion, separate you from partners, subject you and what they allow you to keep of your belongings to frequent searches.

I don't know about you, but that sounds horrible to me. I don't see how anyone can be surprised or aggrieved that some people choose to stay away from them under those conditions.

[superb_dev]

Shelters also ban lots of normal things that make them harder to use, or have onerous rules around your schedule that make working impossible. There are a lot more reasons people don’t use shelters

[DeluluDon]

I was homeless for 6 years in the PNW due to PTSD. A lot of people do not, under any circumstances, feel comfortable sleeping next to a violent offender, child abuser, or gang member. So they sleep outside and risk a lot instead.

When I was there, I counted about 2 drug users out of 100 people in a shelter in Spokane, Washington. The rest were either ex convicts, disabled/mental issues, or just simply lost their home.

[cwmoore]

Jail time is a sure spiral into unemployment and homelessness, privations, and more jailtime.

[conception]

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

[im3w1l]

I think you could solve homelessness really simple by allowing something like a favela. It will be an eyesore so pick an area out of sight of rich people. Then split it into like idk 200sqft plots. Give everyone enough corrugated steel to build a primitive shelter. Have like a central sanitation place with a shitton of toilets and showers.

[treis]

You start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.

[jerlam]

Often, the homeless programs provide aid to the homeless with food and clothing and health care, not necessarily to make them not homeless.

It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.

[inigyou]

But they're not even doing that. It's not the case that tents and benches have been solved and the definition expanded. There are still people sleeping on benches and in tents - more than ever before.

[MyHonestOpinon]

In your example, (it seem to me that) is not that the problems is expanding (getting worst) but it is reaching (helping) more people.

[have_faith]

Does anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.

[didgetmaster]

I don't think that anyone believes that some problems like crime and poverty can be solved such that it completely goes away. By 'solving', I meant take action such that the result is obvious in that the problem is greatly diminished.

And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.

[deelayman]

The article is written from the perspective of a business / management consultant, rather than a public policy shop perspective. In general, I think social problems move slowly, and solving them in a three year business plan isn't realistic. You'll see many agencies use a version of Mayne's Framework or Contribution Analysis to report on progress for big social problems.

It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.

[treis]

It's not quite that black and white. You have fixed amount of policing resources and it goes to the most impactful crimes. If crime goes down then they start caring about petty stuff. If it goes back up then they stop.

This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at the margins so a borderline case that might have resulted in removal before now doesn't.

As you note it's unlikely that some problems can be completely solved. But our resource allocation is mostly fixed or varies based on circumstances beyond whatever problem is being solved.

[enos_feedler]

If this is true then a restructuring of the entire organizations might help. It seems the flaws are built in.

[ElevenLathe]

This is exactly what "defund the police" is (IMO) trying to say. The justice system (really it extends to the courts, the law itself, etc.) we have is corrupt. To really solve the problem that currently-existing policing purports to solve means scrapping it altogether and starting fresh, with fresh people, culture, goals, and processes.

[dooglius]

It's going to be a much more granular detail than all of crime. If your job is to investigate counterfeited 27B-6 forms, you are going to be threatened by that form moving to being filed digitally with cryptographic signatures.

[cwmoore]

The homeless provide a visible incentive to work harder and pay more in rent, and property owners and other taxpayers certainly engage city services (mostly enforcement) in competitive battle for the big bucks. There’s a lot of unrecognized coercion built into the incentive structure underneath the f** y* money tiers. About 50,000,000 hours every day are spent in incarceration, and however many salaries for corrections jobs. The same kinds of system have been around since medieval times.

[dmitrygr]

A LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime.

"75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...

[blharr]

"Solved" (heavy quotes) because instiutionalizing dozens of millions of people with no improvement is a massive crime in and of itself.

That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely

[dmitrygr]

Wouldn’t you say that the lowered crime rate enjoyed by the innocent as a result is an improvement?

[srveale]

Why not just incarcerate everyone between the age of 15-27, if what we're worried about is crime rate.

[dmitrygr]

Because most of those people are not repeat violent criminals? We only need to incarcerate repeat violent offenders to reduce crime noticeably. This is not controversial. The data is linked-to above.

[RugnirViking]

Is it really true that in places with longer jail sentences (specifically, tile spent in prison) and/or higher prison populations as a share of general population that there is less crime?

[inigyou]

America has the most people in prison (both absolute and per capita) and also some of the highest crime rates, so it seems the correlation is the opposite.

[tcmart14]

Just to throw my two cents in. We could look at Singapore which does have harsher sentencing and low crime rates. However, there is a bit of caveat. Singapore has its red light districts where law enforcement sorta turns a blind eye. Its more of a, "so long as you keep your bullshit there, be classy about it and don't let it spill out, we will just conveniently ignore it."

[tchalla]

… in the US

[skinfaxi]

Yes, kind of obvious from the .gov right?

[numeri]

I read the comment you're replying to as saying, "in the US, but other countries may have different policies that result in lower recidivism, and that might change the conclusion; maybe people aren't inherently criminally insane, but can become useful members of society, if given a chance"

[skinfaxi]

While I think your interpretation is possibly overly charitable, I agree my comment was unwarranted and unnecessary. I can't delete it at this point.

[whall6]

seems cruel and unusual…

[GauntletWizard]

Unusual? Only because we've made it so. Cruel? Nah. Locking someone up because they're criminally insane is less cruel than letting them roam the streets, both to the perpetrator and the people around them.

[foolswisdom]

While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).

[wombatpm]

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules.

So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.

I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.

[cwmoore]

I am not aware of any real tests of effectiveness of these organizations, but I am a huge proponent of progressive UBI so that the systems might actually serve people with chronic or recurring need and not simply being dragged along. What we do as a democracy is cede the status quo to paternalistically penalizing the poor out of contention, and is pretty ethically corrupted bh it’s own effectiveness.

[edoceo]

Simply: the Bureaucracy exists to perpetuate the Bureaucracy.

[skipants]

Am I wrong in thinking this comment is absolutely bonkers? It's basically a conspiracy theory.

When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing.

You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much?

Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues?

Or heck... just a shit ton of constraints than incentives?

I mean... there are people who are incentivized to keep drug use going: drug dealers and kingpins. And I'm sure there are some with their hand in governments. But there's no way that's the default.

[fwip]

Yeah, it's a little bonkers. I've run into it a few times IRL, and I find that it tends to come from the kind of guy mocked in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/793/ That is, somebody who is basically unfamiliar with the subtleties of the problem, thinks of an "obvious solution" for it, and then assumes that anybody who doesn't do it isn't trying to solve it.

[galaxyLogic]

3 groups are suspect: Doctors, Police and Firemen. If they did their job well, they would have no job.

Politicians too, by having big problems they guarantee they can get people to vote for them by promising to solve those problems. But people are getting smart to that. The Who said it well: We won't get fooled again.

Doctors have their Hippocratic oath. Do police and firemen have something similar, or don't they need it?

[childintime]

Why stop at them? Lawyers, politicians, psychologist, bookkeepers, the list goes on and on. Why? Because our GDP includes them. Look the numbers are higher. It doesn't matter if your work promotes a parasitic outcome. The system produces it's own problems and then diligently works to solve them... Yeah, right.

[brabel]

> If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.;

Crime is really hard to solve, but many cities in the USA and elsewhere have managed to largely do it.

Homelessness is something I think is very much an American problem among developed nations. It’s always shocking to see the campgrounds in American cities, some of the richest in the world, coming from Europe. I suspect it’s mostly related to drug abuse and the lack of social assistance for those in need which the Americans are allergic to solving due to the culture of freedom, or autonomy at all costs (which somehow gets interpreted as not having to pay taxes to help those in need).

[HPsquared]

It becomes a "problem farming" situation. Someone who profits from a problem existing, will work to preserve the problem either consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps even just through a process of evolution.

This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.

[yongjik]

The interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?

[Ferret7446]

It's just an incentive problem. If the people in the government would get fired or lose their personal income if they did not deliver results, then they would be effective like you wouldn't believe.

As it is, they're spending other people's money on other people's problems with effectively no accountability.

[QuiDortDine]

Possibly the dumbest take I've ever seen on HN.

Like politicians are going "without the homeless, I won't have anything to do anymore!". Like the street workers are thinking "shit, what'll I do if this goldmine dries up"?

Ridiculous.

[grim_io]

Big Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!

[edoceo]

Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

[wat10000]

That report proposed three pretty reasonable approaches to this problem, and none of them were "avoid curing diseases."

[jryle70]

They asked a tough question that needs to be addressed. It's as necessary as "is there a place for assisted suicide?" question.

They proposed 1) Address large markets; 2) Address disorders with high incidence; and 3) Constant innovation and portfolio expansion.

Does that sound like to you they proposed not curing patients?

[izacus]

Famously, a pharma company.

[oatmeal1]

Not quite, but big pharma promotes preventive screening in excess of what is justified. They don't care if false positives create stress and unnecessary, dangerous procedures that eliminate the benefit of screening. They just want to make sure before you die they get a chance to sell their most expensive drugs.