[gambiting]

It's probably easier to get a charity or a philanthropist to buy few thousand phones to give away to poor people than to convince someone to just give $200 each to the same number of people. In the first case, you are solving a specific problem(homeless people don't have phones, therefore they can't even start looking for a job, or shelter), while in the other case you would have a hard time convincing someone to do it. And even if you did, someone else would come along, just like you did, and ask - why not give this money to a shelter, which knows what is better for those people/can provide more food/beds, or whatever? The thing is - people will ALWAYS have a better idea what to do with someone's money, and I think we should appreciate all actions like this, even if we don't personally agree with them.

[jensnockert]

You are right that I should have been more nuanced in my critique, and you're probably right that it's easier to give away stuff than money.

But I think we should try to always show trust in people who are vulnerable due to the situation that they are in, and by giving money instead of things we show that we trust that they will do what is best for them with the money. By giving things we signal that we know better than they do.

The main reason why people are homeless is after all that we built a society where we accept that people don't have a place to live. We prioritized other things, and left these people on the streets, sleeping in cars, etc.

There's different solutions to this problem, but I don't believe that we should accept in 2015 that people in the EU, the US, etc. do not have a home.

[thaumaturgy]

I'm not really in vehement disagreement with you -- I like the way you're looking at it. But, once a person has no cell phone, address, home, facilities for personal hygiene, bank account, credit, or income, getting those things with money alone is tremendously difficult. Many of them require at least one of the others. You'd end up giving them a lot more money just to get the things they need anyway.

For example, cell phones: if you have no address to send a bill to, no bank account, and no credit, what kind of options do you have for service? You're a lot better off getting access to a service designed especially for your situation.

...and, much as I'd like to sidestep this point, the reality is that a lot of homeless people don't have the best financial judgement. That's not to say they're bad people or will spend money they can't afford on drugs or alcohol (I don't think either of those is as true as most people seem to think it is), but prolonged homelessness is rarely caused by a single bad decision or stroke of poor luck.

[ada1981]

Humans as a species don't have the best financial judgement, which is one of the reasons we have homelessness to begin with.

Even if everyone had an ivy league degree, with a cell phone, and was physically healthy, we'd still have unemployment as our economy isn't producing enough jobs for humans.. And unemployment + time with no savings to burn through eventually equals homelessness.

[thaumaturgy]

Is your point that everyone has the same financial judgement, or that homeless people as a group have no better or worse financial judgement than anyone else? Or something else?

[ada1981]

That our collective financial judgement has produced homelessness, more so than the "poor decisions" of any individual.