quoting
naddr1qq…unjkIt would seem to many of us who live in major cities that something has changed in the phenomenon of homelessness over the past few decades, and very much for the worse.
One obvious thing to point at is the drugs and, indeed, I think that plays a large role, although whether it is purely as a cause or perhaps also to some degree as a symptom of something deeper, I think some nuance is to be found. Heroin has led to fentanyl, crack-cocaine has led to methamphetamine, and bath salts and other fringe compounds have made their way into rotation as well. Long gone are the quaint days of the mere gutter wino; today's street addicts are living in exponentially more horrific nightmare worlds.
I should pause to make the obvious caveat that homelessness and addiction are distinct phenomena. As many a coked-up wall street trader or oxy-addicted blue collar worker can attest, drug addiction does not necessarily preclude one from gainful employment and a roof over one's head. Likewise, there also exist many homeless who are not addicts; unfortunate people of limited capacities who just got hit with one too many setbacks in a short period of time and now find it almost impossible to get out. Poverty can be like a black hole; beyond a certain event horizon there can be little hope of getting out (the analogy only goes so far; a real black hole is literally inescapable, while with poverty there always remains a way out, however difficult, until death finally shuts the door).
The progressive left will argue that every homeless person is the victim of circumstances outside their control, and that personal accountability for poor life choices is uncouth to speak of. The militant right will argue the exact opposite, that every person deserves their exact circumstances in life, that perfect equality of opportunity already exists and, therefore, differences in outcome are necessarily purely the result of personal failing.
The truth, as it almost always does, lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Not exactly halfway in between, just somewhere. Reasonable people can argue the specifics, but the conclusion should be obvious to anyone of middling inteligence or better: that each person should be judged on an individual basis, if one desires an accurate judgement (which, admittedly, is not always possible; each of us has only so much mental bandwidth, and so category judgements are, to some extent, unavoidable).
With that dealt with, I'd like to present three observations on the context of modern homelessness that I believe go some way in explaining why today's ultra-poor may seem to many to be, on balance, more unhinged, hostile, and dangerous than ever before.
These inferences are predicated on the following assumption: that sustained privation of the most basic necessities of human survival (to say nothing of dignity or flourishing) renders one increasingly incapable of making the implicit compromises required for standard functioning in a civilized society. Every social interaction is, in some sense, a negotiation, and that negotiation breaks down when one party has literally nothing to bring to the table. Furthermore, it is now understood that conditions of poverty blunt critical thinking, as more and more mental energy is consumed with the simple act of staying alive. Forward time horizons shrink to as little as the end of the day, and successive nights of little to no sleep, on hard ground, exposed to the elements, mercilessly compound the damage. In their suffering, many will reach for whatever they can to numb the pain, however briefly, and so seal their fate. A zombie is born, continously seeking relief from a now self-perpetuated cycle of self destruction.
I would like to analyze the economics of homelessness, in the most textbook sense of the word: human action under conditions of scarcity. Nowhere are conditions of scarcity more acutely felt in the developed world than among those wretched souls who have so deeply slipped through the cracks of modern civilization. The following are three observations I have made on how the nature of scarcity on the street has changed over the past few decades:
The refundable container market. When I was a kid in the nineties, my sister and I used to collect cans and bottles for refund and donate the money to the local SPCA. I therefore have a clear memory of how much each container was worth back then: five cents for a pop can, ten cents for a beer can, and usually around ten cents for most glass and plastic bottles (perhaps a bit more for some of the larger ones). Thirty years later, little has changed. In my jurisdiction, pop cans have recently been upgraded to ten cents so they match beer, and milk jugs can also now be cashed in, although they take up a lot of space. This doesn't really matter if you have a vehicle, but if you're operating out of a shopping cart this is a significant trade-off. Besides that, things are pretty much the same as they were in the nineties, except that the Canadian dollar has lost 47% of it's purchasing power since 1995. Thus, one of the most reliable forms of income for homeless people has experienced something like a 40% pay cut in the intervening years.
An increasingly cashless society. Panhandling was also once a common way for desperate people to come up with enough money to eat, but as fewer and fewer people carry physical cash, this method of aquiring money has all but dried up. From the once-ubiquitous squeegee kid at the intersection, to the simple beggar on the sidewalk, the pity and generosity of strangers can no longer be relied upon, because even those who might be inclined to help simply do not carry the medium of exchange to do so.
Heightened sensitivity to communicable disease. Related to the previous point, "those who might be inclined to help" is a diminishing category as well. Whatever your personal feelings on the legitimacy of the Covid-19 panic, it is undeniable that society as a whole now has an increased sensitivity to the possibility of contagious disease transfer. To put it bluntly, people who have reached the stage of desperation where panhandling becomes conceivable are, on balance, likely to be visibly dirty, smelly, and may have sores, lesions, or other visible signs of bodily decay. Most well put-together people will find this repugnant, even if they are too polite to say so, and so will recoil from the thought of coming into contact, or perhaps even coming near, such visibly run-down folk, which is of course necessary for the physical transfer of cash. Thus, even those increasingly rare people who carry cash on them are becoming less and less likely to want to hand it over.
Taken together, these three shifts in the economics of street life on the margins paint an increasingly bleak picture. One wonders where these people come up with the money every day to feed themselves (nevermind their drug habits, for those who have them), and one obvious alternative comes to mind: theft. Whether it is the rampant shoplifting at downtown grocery stores and pharmacies, or the copper and tool theft that tradesmen like myself increasingly have to contend with at our jobsites, the evidence is clear: backed into a corner, people will do whatever they feel is necessary to survive, even when it is ultimately self-destructive.
This scope of this article does not extend to the debate about "why don't they just get a job." It merely intends to illustrate the changing conditions of life on the street, without litigating the appropriateness of peoples' response to them. It seems worth pointing out though, that once someone is at the point where they do not have ready access to a shower, dental care, sleeping quarters, or decent clothes and a means to launder them, the prospect of employment is essentially off the table even if their mental faculties are still intact, which seems unimaginable given the circumstances. They are now well beyond the event horizon, trapped in a permanent underclass of the most horrific and degrading kind.
I have no particular solutions to offer here; the scale and complexity of the problem seem insurmountable, and any program for improving the situation, even an agressive one, is likely to take generations. But there is little doubt in my mind that the societal poison of fiat money lies close to the heart of this issue. Eliminating that won't alone solve this problem, but it might just make a solution possible.
FeynStructure on Nostr: Some thoughts on the increasing precarity of life on the street. Not a pleasant read. ...
Some thoughts on the increasing precarity of life on the street. Not a pleasant read.