[vaksel]

yes but you have to look at the density of people.

$250 every day = $25/hour if you "work" 10 hours a day. So 1 person donating $1 every 2.4 minutes.

In that 2.4 minute period, there are probably 1,000 people walking by. Is it really that far fetched, that 1 out of those 1,000 people will "give back"? Especially in a city like New York where there are plenty of high income individuals?

[scott_s]

Analysis is not evidence. Yes, it sounds reasonable. But that doesn't mean it's true. There are many factors your simple model doesn't take into account.

[maximilian]

I guess the problem is reasonable to me is not necessarily reasonable to someone else. It still blows my mine that someone could make so much money begging. I haven't read the above posted article, but it still seems unlikely to me that beggars make that much money.

Perhaps a better way of putting it is: The average beggar doesn't make anywhere near that much. I can imagine some especially good ones that make a solid living doing it, but most don't make much.

[ellyagg]

The person he replied to said it "seems highly unlikely". This isn't a peer-reviewed journal here. We're speculating. I will mention that I gave $20 dollars to a girl last week who claimed she had had her stuff stolen and didn't have enough money to get a train back to her house. There's a significant chance she was scamming me, and the point is, with a plausible story, I'm pretty sure you can find many "suckers" every day.

[scott_s]

I, too, think it's highly unlikely that a panhandler is clearing $90k a year, since that would place them in a higher income bracket that every working person I know in NYC. I meant his analysis sounds reasonable, not that it actually is. That's the problem with using simple models: you're seduced by simple reasoning applied to complex problems. The ancient Greeks analysis of matter sounded reasonable, too. It is only with further reflection that the reasonable sounding analysis does not hold up.

This is peer-review. I'm curious what the truth is, so I'm going to consider the validity of someone's speculation and criticize it accordingly.