Yet a study that involved giving homeless people money without strings attached showed that most spent it on things to improve their future, like buying a used car, paying off debt, pursuing education, starting a business and getting a home. There were no adverse outcomes for any of the participants.
But still our society will judge the homeless and make out they’re all feckless addicts who can’t be trusted with help.
Well, we’re supposed to be leftists who value analysis, science, and intelligence, so let’s analyze.
If you read the actual paper on this program, the participants are extremely cherry picked.
To participate, individuals must:
5.1.2 Exclusion criteria
Delivery partners will be instructed that participants should be excluded from the study if they:
They pretty clearly designed this program to help those with the greatest chance and disposition towards rehabilitation and improvement. People who are already clean, competent, and above the homeless “second kill line”. This is good. The scarce resources for help should absolutely be allocated towards where it can do the most good.
Below this homeless kill line are the languishing homeless. They excluded this group for a reason. Because the results would be much, much different. The drug and alcohol addicted, violent, mentally ill homeless which people think of stereotypically. Let me cherry pick samples like this but in the other direction in my neighborhood and I will show you a 100% rate of failure.
I think it’s disingenuous to pretend simply giving out cash is some panacea for homelessness and completely ignores the structure that we must create in society to avoid this funnel downwards into the kill line. We need social workers to help and house (or at least institutionalize) these people, a goal which is often against their own consent and desires. We need to provide them a structured incentive program, and, if they don’t want that life, at least provide a bare minimum QOL for them where they can’t hurt anyone. We need drug rehabilitation programs and addiction programs. We need reeducation and reintegration programs to have these people become functional laborers in society, to the extent of their ability, and receive to the extent society can give, as the communism we claim to follow dictates.
I think too many of us imagine some kind of utopia where nobody works and everyone is rich and completely ignored the concept of labor. This thinking around homelessness is another symptom of this Star Trek view of reality.
It’s more evidence how important and effective preventive social services are than after-the-fact cash handouts.
If you’re unstable and homeless you’re feared and abandoned. People just want you out of sight and nobody thinks where you came from.
If you’re stable and homeless you’re viewed as a lazy person. People won’t do anything until it’s too late.
The study is more about that these “Stable” homeless people aren’t actually just lazy and wouldn’t spend all the 2000 british dollars on plastic crack. Hopefully it makes people open up to the idea that they should be helped and now it’s your job as a leftist to push for more radical change where the issues are directly addressed, instead of sticking to lib solutions like UBI.
Someone actually needs to transform this theory into praxis, without that it is worthless. That’s like the most important part of being a leftist.
I doubt a lot of “Leftists” are willing to actually betray their own class interests and contribute to opening a “Center for Addressing Homelessness” where you put your awesome theories to practice, but I suppose it fits the theory; that things have to get much worse, before they start getting better. Until then best we get is this half-assed lib solutions.
5.1.2 makes this study unrepresentative and ungeneralizeable to the point where I don’t even know what it proves.
No-one is saying giving out cash is a panacea for homelessness. I’m saying let’s not just automatically judge every homeless person as a druggie waster.