[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.

[verteu]

No, housing those people is only half the budget, so it's like $25k/person.

It's unlikely there's a trivial arbitrage to eliminate homelessness in a city full of engineers.

[inigyou]

The market would probably solve it if you fired all the bureaucrats but there may be other side effects to that

[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.