I have a ton of admiration for Dutch society and their social safety net. They do a great job culturally of remembering to treat everyone in a very humane manner. I wish America was more like them in that regard.
Seems to me the US and Dutch societies have moved even further apart when it comes to social trust/social capital. e.g. Fukuyama's warned the US about in 1992's "Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity" has happened.
Everything gets easier, when you live in a high-trust society--unfortunately I don't think the US has been high-trust in quite some time. The bad part is that it takes generations to build and a decades to erode. My local bodega doesn't have free groceries, but rather a sign on the door prohibiting people from wearing ski masks, because groups were walking out with merchandise.
As a counterexample, I know of a church (in the US) that gives away groceries for free. It's once a month, but they allow people to take home a good amount of food, including meats.
This is actually proof of the official safety net failing. It's a private project funded by donations from people and local companies, not taxes. They're helping people who fell through the gaps of the social safety net.
For all it's progressive reputation, Netherland has had economically conservative right-wing governments for a long time now, and vocal extreme-right parties trying to push further into that direction, while the left has been dwindling. A couple of years ago there was a massive long-term scandal where poor families of a mixed background where treated as fraudulent criminals, which has done tremendous harm, and despite everything coming to light and everybody being upset about it, the main person responsible for it is still our prime minister.
It's good that the Dutch people and companies are stepping up where the government is failing, but it would be better if the government wasn't failing this sort of thing.
It’s ok to wish, but don’t you forget that the Dutch government has to solve problems for only 17 million people whereas the American government has 333 million people to take care.
Yes, America can learn from The Netherlands and other countries that are doing well, but it’s also reasonable to acknowledge how hard the American problem is.
That seems like an acceptable excuse until you recognize that America also has about 23 times the GDP of the Netherlands - about 15% more money per person.
It's not just about dollars per person - the difference in size of the countries makes country-wide solutions much more challenging. The Netherlands are about 16,000 square miles. The US is 3.8 million square miles.
Taking something like medical treatment as an example, it's not just that you have to scale up the number of beds and doctors in each hospital - you need to build many, many more hospitals, staff them, ensure they have critical infrastructure, etc.
That's not to say that the US is doing even close to enough, but the fact that GDP per capita doesn't do anything to capture the differences in magnitudes of solutions required by the two countries.
Building one hospital costs the same no matter how many hospitals are already in the country, or am I wrong? Because of this, if the USA has 23 times as much money as the Netherlands they should be able to build 23 times as many hospitals as the Netherlands. (Or am I wrong??)
The issue is that you need to build more than 23 times as many hospitals - if you only build 23x the hospitals in a country that's over 200x larger in terms of geographic size, that means a huge number of people will be hours away from the closest hospital. The majority of those people will be in very rural areas, who are already generally underserved by social and other government services and who are often quite poor.
Given this example, the ratio in square miles US to NL is approximately 237 / 1. So 23x the money and 237x the size leads to one order of magnitude less money per square mile when comparing the two situations.
> > It's not just about dollars per person - the difference in size of the countries makes country-wide solutions much more challenging. The Netherlands are about 16,000 square miles. The US is 3.8 million square miles.
> I’m not hearing concrete evidence of a gulf that can’t be bridged by money.
The land area differences provided is part of the concrete evidence: I can invest a lot of value onto a small plot of land, but it will take many times more money in order to do the same for an area the size of a small town. The costs for infrastructure skyrockets as the amount of land in need of servicing increases. 15% more money per person is relatively useless if the people are spread thousands of miles apart.
Government might scale, but people's willingness to give up their own resources to help someone else does not scale indefinitely. As an extreme example, I'm much more willing to help my immediate family than my extended family and I suspect the same is true for most people. That same property extends to being more willing to pay for my local schools than for struggling schools 1300 miles away in Mississippi or being more willing to pay for support for a homeless person that I can see and interact with than to pay that same amount for one hundreds or thousands of miles away.
You could easily solve that by having social/redistributions measure on a municipality/state level... The Netherlands is also part of the EU, very little social welfare measures are effectuated through the EU, most of that happens on a state level.
Democracy in the US has always been flawed. The situation has been steadily improving in some areas (voting rights) with set backs in other areas (gerrymandering, legalised bribery of politicians). There's a lot that needs to be done, but the US has always pointed in the direction of democracy.
At creation US leaders were selected from a subsection of the population in all land governed by the nation. With Puerto Rico, DC, etc that’s no longer the case making the US an empire not a republic.
Controlling who has the vote has long been an issue, but denying political power to a region is a different category of thing than denying it to poor people etc.
Maybe, but then the US is a weird kind of reverse-empire, because it's exactly the capital where people don't get to vote, at least for the senate. An empire is usually where only people from the core region have any representation (if anyone does, because I don't think empires need to be democratic at all).
One of the biggest issues that prevents this is that states cannot require residency requirements (e.g. must have lived in state for 2 years) as part of the criteria for access to such social safety nets.
Where's the evidence this difference is specifically due to the population or "size" of the country rather than history, culture and any other factors? It's like you put two countries on a scatter plot and drew a line from them.
The Netherlands have been flooded multiple times over the centuries and this has contributed to the idea of helping the people in difficult situation. I don't recall exactly, but after the flood of 1825, a fond was started to collect money to help the ones who lost everything. And a large part of the population contributed money into it as everyone knew a relative or friend who lost some property, his home, or some family members. So geography and history have a part in the way the Dutch care against adversity.
Here is a list from English Wikipedia about the floods. The Dutch Wikipedia has much more info on the flood, as well as a museum in Leyden (from Rijkswaterstaat if I remember well). Not everyone can read the Dutch language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods_in_the_Nether...
Personally I would rather help people in a poorer area as people in my area are fine.
Anyway, money is fungible you could say you’re helping Mississippi schools just as people in Mississippi schools are helping your local schools. Or you can think of it like the electric grid where money doesn’t get sent around the country just shifted left and right regionally which smooths things out.
Richest country in the world but apparently ungovernable according to some.
The problem is that the US isn't really trying, and there's a large movement that's actively trying to make the government worse. Fix that, and I think a lot of problems will disappear.
I am not buying the assertion at face value. The bigger the government is, the harder it is to scale it. Like any bureaucracy, it quickly gains its own life, customs and belief systems. If anything, the reason small d democracy works is because the government is local, everyone is participating and invested in outcome.
The absolute worst case is you break it into independent entities the way US cities operate, larger scales can help solve problems but you don’t need to operate on them.
The freedom of movement between states in the US makes this a challenge. States with better social safety nets end up attracting the low-income residents from other states.
There is free movement between countries in Europe. I suppose there are generally some language barriers, but to me the situation seems fundamentally the same.
Nope, the countries put up significant barriers to access social safety nets (permanent residency durations, proof of working during time before that, etc).
In the US you can generally establish residency in a different state in the amount of time it takes to get a USPS change of address notice and a billing statement of some sort showing that you’re able to receive mail there.
No, there is only a limited the freedom of travel between countries in EU (not Europe), but not of movement. For many years people from the newly admitted countries in EU had no right to work in the rest of EU. Most of the diplomas are not automatically valid in other countries and in some cases, not at all - example: pilot license for light planes, I have a Romanian license and I can fly in Greece a plane registered in Romania, but not a plane registered in Greece. If I switch to a Greek license, with training and exams, I am not allowed to fly Romanian planes :(
Very different systems, very different safety nets, and non-trivial language barriers.
Yeah you can move wherever but you're not eligible for benefits, and the hiring managers want to know you speak fluent $LANGUAGE and have the right certifications from whatever credentialing system exists there.
Common currency and regulatory standards, but it's not like you're just moving from Spain to Poland, at least not without serious hurdles.
This is the kind of response that makes back-end devs fume. "Why is our website going down with 100x the users we had last week? You guys must have built it incorrectly.".
In fact, bureaucracy benefits from economies of scale. You can only get so small (population wise) before you can’t shrink the number of bureaucrats any further.
It's not so much the size of the group, but the size of their problems and conflicts. USA is a very diversified country, with many different groups, cultures, interests and conflicts. Probably more than any other country in the world.
Exactly, America is unique in that sense. China, India, Brazil and Nigeria also have +100 million people, but they are far less diversified, nevertheless, they also struggle with challenges that come from massive scale.
The US spends more of its budget on healthcare for its citizens than it does on its defense budget.
As a person who works for a defense adjacent company, I can tell you confidently that government adjacent healthcare is the closest thing this country has to socialized medicine.
I do agree that it doesn't seem to be a priority. I have to assume there's a bunch of slack and waste in the system given the amount of money that goes into it.
> The US spends more of its budget on healthcare for its citizens than it does on its defense budget.
Yes but most of that is medicare, most of which is really part of social security for the elderly (a very good thing, but not at all comparable to what European countries do in terms of providing access to health care for all their citizens).
It's important to distinguish between discretionary and non- discretionary spending. WH/Congress can't (easily) change the amount spent on medicare because its non-discretionary and therefore somewhat protected. It can however decide how much to spend on defense (which it continues to increase).
After thinking about such large challenges for a while, I’ve concluded that money alone isn’t enough. Money solves money problems, too much money flowing in the wrong direction solves nothing.
+1 too much money flying around just causes inflation, since the underlying resources that the money is trying to allocate remain constrained.
West coast US cities are a perfect example of this, not enough housing means labor resources are constrained which is the biggest input for actually getting things done (fixing problems, creating value, etc).
I think the issue is in regards to who is in charge of the money and what are their incentives.
Overall I believe that free and good(!) basic education independent from status and location is a solution for many problems but it seems that as more capitalistic a system becomes as less incentive there is to actually educate and teach the population.
More specifically the Dutch do not have multiple different multi-million strong underclasses with specific histories of dominated adversity. If you restrict the count of 333 million down to people who more closely match the financial and social background of the majority of the Dutch, you actually find a sub-nation inside America that's doing pretty well.
The program in the article linked is specifically targeted to some of the poorer neighborhoods in Amsterdam. These neighborhoods are known for them being largely inhabited by the descendants of former slaves and colonized people from the former Dutch empire.
No, they're from various parts of the world, not just former colonies. Amsterdam has sizeable populations from Morocco, Turkey and Ghana, none of which were ever Dutch colonies. All those groups suffer from racism and poverty to various degrees.
America is very unique in that sense, given its scale, history and status quo, the Americans will have to find an American-way to deal with some of its own challenges.
Yes, apologies for the short sentence. You further explain what i meant. My point is that one can consider oneself to be part of the earth, a city, the universe or a small group of tech interest people who enjoy reading HN. I find often and specially when good social system are found outside the US, the comments in HN turn immediately US centric, but instead if you think yourself as a citizen of earth, conversation could broaden. Just an idea. Thanks for the feedback to let me elaborate.
Interesting thing to me is: This is a story about a supermarket doing this on their own, not with government assistance or for a tax break and not with tax dollars.
The comments here are focused on how the US government should do more.
In the US we have churches and other religious institutions that would help with problems like this locally but as time has gone on, their membership has dwindled. Perhaps we should take a look at this article and try to get our companies to emulate what is being done here?
This is a very libertarian mindset. The government exists (should exist) to serve its population. We shouldn't rely on private charity for the basics of a functioning society.
I do think the government purpose is to serve it's population and society.
But I also think that it is business's purpose to serve society as well. At some point we moved away from that.
We used to have companies that would donate to the school library or to fund school technology programs. Now, some of that was rooted in the idea that they would need workers in the future so this was part of the pipeline but it was also building society. (You still do see companies donating money to sports programs, for their banner to be displayed)
Currently companies are all complaining about the lack of X, yet are they funding training for X? No, we expect workers to come in fully trained and ready to go.
Looking beyond that, companies are willing to up and shift counties in order to save money but that has effects on the local economy.
Its a prisoners dilemma if you expect business to contribute towards infrastructure that benefits everybody. education and infrastructure has to rely on the government for this reason.
even the most liberal parts of US will not go anywhere near doing such thing. As the name might suggest, I live in such area and the attitude towards such things will not get any backing anywhere (government or private businesses)
I mean, food stamps are a thing. Free school lunches are a thing/are becoming a thing. Public housing is a thing. Medicare/Medicaid is a thing. There's a lot more we could do to make these systems more efficient, less expensive for tax payers, and also provide them much more widely. Clearly there's public support for them, by most, in some capacity.
The Netherlands doesn't have tens of millions of citizens who refuse to engage with society in any meaningful way due to certain circumstances from many generations ago.
Many europeans would feel that precisely describes the roma. Hoo boy you wanna see a European get real ugly real fast, ask them about the Roma sometime. I'm not racist but with those people it's not really racism, it's just fact... type stuff will follow.
but like, at the end of the day thinking that "multiple cultural groups" is the problem basically a coded/socially-acceptable way of saying that we can't have a social safety net because of black/hispanic people (or whatever disfavored minority/immigrant group is currently en-vogue). It always has been.
You cannot dislike an antiquated society that contributes almost nothing to society and parasitises in multiple ways, without being a racist ?
It has nothing to do with race. Roma people have continuously refused to integrate, which is perfectly fine if they don't want to, but then don't be a weight on the host society by receiving every form of financial support you can get your hands on, while being a centre for criminality, and demanding access to what a contributing member of society can access.
I have experienced roma communities first hand. They shun their own who decide to get educated. Is that the kind of societies you'd like around your kids in the 21st century ?
There must be a reason that people dislike certain societies.
We should separate race from lifestyle: Roma, and nomads or travellers.
The British government doesn't, but it does show the "White Gypsy/Traveller" ethnicity has 31.2% "Never worked or long-term unemployed", higher than any other group [1].
Particular types of petty crime obviously increased when travellers settled (temporarily) on some land near where I grew up. It happened every 18 months or so. However, this doesn't show up in arrest statistics, so I think it's that society is accustomed to the existing petty crime and notices the change.
Sure but isn't that a bit of a chicken-egg question? Why doesn't that the Netherlands have a huge poor underclass? Perhaps it has something to do with education at all levels being practically free and having social safety nets to ensure people don't fall through the cracks of the system ending up being homeless/destitute. I can tell you btw we do have a significantly large underclass, they just don't live on the street or in crime ridden ghettos.
It has more to do with the Dutch gaining their wealth through colonising their underclass, instead of what the US did which was import an underclass as slaves. Well, they did enslave Africans, but they were sold to the Americas instead of brought "home".
Because we don't have tens of millions of citizens. But we do have people who, due to a wide variety of circumstances, are excluded from society or aren't very productive.
Our string of right-wing governments haven't done much to fix that (and sometimes made it a lot worse), but it's good to see citizens step up with these sort of projects.
I still think it's a failure of the system that this is even necessary.
So many people seem to forget that - helping those with the least, helps us all. From a purely mercenary point of view, it helps build you more customers and more skilled workers.
At the macro level, a country’s immigration controls are the gates for that community and at a micro level, the locked doors/gates to a house or property are the gates.
At which level they should or should not exist is dependent on many parameters, but I would not classify it as bizarre.
People in the US are fortunate enough to have so much space that many times distances themselves serve as the gate, but if you live in a more dense society, perhaps a controlled border is necessary for some purpose.
It is dystopian though, I imagine it is a direct representation of lack of trust between the members in society, and likely related to the size of wealth gaps.
We have a lot of expats from India, mostly software engineering. They are being picked based on their skills. Income/background does not have anything to do with this, even more so, I think that using that kind of information is even illegal here.
That being said, there is a different argument to be made. The Netherlands does not have a lot of private schools, and private schools generally tend to not be more exclusive than regular schools. This means that an applicant that went to private school might have an advantage but generally you can go to any school and there will be plenty of decent paying jobs or chances for you. Along with that, every person in The Netherlands is able to go and study. Either you take out a (compared to the US, small) loan and even that is being reverted to a gift from the government or you work along side to it. I am quite sure that this is not the case in India and therefore a poor person will have less of a chance then a rich person. But this is unrelated to the companies hiring and it is purely related to your study.
When you say "They are being picked", do you mean that they are being picked for immigration purposes?
The point of the parent is that it is hard for a random Indian to immigrate to the Netherlands, that they must show some skill or ability in order to gain entry.
The argument is that the Netherlands can afford their social net because they do not have an endless stream of people coming asking for benefits. So by limiting the amount of immigration, the Netherlands is acting like a gated community.
A further argument along these lines would be, if you do not feel that the Netherlands is acting as a gated community. Should the Netherlands open it's social programs to people not in the Netherlands? i.e. Should Americans or Mexicans be allowed to apply and receive benefits from the Netherlands even though they have no tie to the Netherlands?
When I say "they are being picked" I mean they are being picked by the company based on their skills. Regardless of immigration.
From a cultural standpoint I wouldn't want to open up further, from a purely theoretical standpoint I would have no problem opening up our social programs to outside the Netherlands if the additional group (regardless of it being a group, country, province, state, whatever) pays the same amount of tax as we do. But good luck implementing that, income tax for India is max 30%, compare that to our lowest bracket which is already 37% and goes up to 50%.
You’re missing the point. The people that would apply would happily pay the increased tax rate because their annual income is going to be <20k euros and they’ll receive far more in benefits.
And that 37-50 percent is just what is necessary to sustain the people already on benefits there, in that geographical location.
If you throw in people that live in earthquake/typhoon/volcanic/etc locales, with different diseases and food production, natural resources, climate, and scale up the population of people to administer all those benefits by a couple orders of magnitude, you can bet you’ll be paying a lot more in taxes to try to afford the same quality of life for everyone.
I'm pretty sure the Netherlands is a "gated community".
Every EU country is.
At current technology levels, it's simply impossible to have a "social net" (i.e. guaranteeing every citizen enough resources for a minimum standard of living) and open borders (i.e. infinite demand for said resources)
Poverty is costly, and if your region has a social safety net that includes healthcare, thus resolving poverty will save tax payers in the long run.
But from the mercenary point of view, I think reducing poverty is worth it from a security and quality of life point of view. If public spaces are dangerous that is no good for people and poverty also degrades peoples quality of life, examples like not having to step over homeless people outside your front door don't really have dollar values, but they make people happier.
This might ignite a fight in the comments, but it’s a genuine question.
(As an American) when I think of places that fight crime primarily with welfare (aka the idea better policing doesn’t work, equality will fix it), I think of San Francisco and Seattle which have crazy homeless and crime problems.
However, it seems to me like in Europe, plenty of places seem to do this and see positive results.
What’s the difference? Why is the welfare city of San Francisco terrible but the welfare city of Amsterdam/Stockholm/etc seem to be fine?
My guess is it comes from drug related policies, education, culture and enforcement. The USA is the developed country with the highest per-capita rates of alcohol & drug use disorders and drug related deaths. I believe this is due to the geography and high purchasing power of americans, not due to any flaws in character. You're in a place it's easy to get drugs into, and people earn enough to buy them. This then creates a mental health and drug epidemic which are the true cause of most homelessness in the cities you reference, as opposed to purely being lack of money, job or housing, though these problems are obviously not mutually exclusive.
The problem for san Francisco is that they just attract more homeless whenever they try to help them. You can not solve poverty in a single city with open borders, you need to solve it for the whole state/country. Especially if the city has a temperate climate that attracts homeless anyway.
As an aside: The big cities in the Netherlands also have some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. If you pick a random smaller town/city it is likely to have less poverty than Amsterdam, (but also less wealthy residents).
Is the goal of policy profit, or to fix a problem?
I am in Canada, so we have a blend of American, and European society, and it seems that when people want to extract money from the community, the problem isn't resolved. I see this in the homeless/drug space from activist organizations who are extracting lots of money from government, but are not doing a good job of solving problems, as that would end the flood of money.
> examples like not having to step over homeless people outside your front door don't really have dollar values
Not trying to be crass but that's literally reflected in the real estate prices. Homes in areas with lots of homelessness and related crime in the area will have lower prices than equivalent homes somewhere else. It does have a dollar value.
Sure... You could also reframe it as the cost of building a big gate around your low homelessness neighborhood to keep the homeless out and to have security personelle to boot them out of the neighberhoud if they do get in...
It sort of seems to me (seattle area resident) that our social programs are under attack from concept to execution by people that would rather the disadvantaged just die. The people doing good work get burned out fast, the money dries up, its just bad.
My neighbor was the director of a homeless shelter and the crap he had to deal with was unreal.
I look at it kinda like the anti car movement. The big companies supported whichever side would save them money. They supported getting rid of street parking for bike lanes and making parking under a building part of code.... then sabatoged it by making the parking all permit only or very expensive. Now theres too little parking either way to go shopping and the anti car people get to look bad. But it didnt really affect the average s class driver at all so who cares right?
This is just the impression I got working downtown for 10 years. Probably have some misunderstandings.
The political reason for the Dutch social safety: stop an impending socialist/communist revolution. This was a real threat in Europe at the time.
A second reason was scientific: poor people were spreading diseases which are a threat for everyone.
A third reason was economic: healthy and happy people work harder.
one could argue that struggling families are families that for one reason or another are not fit enough for their current environment, whereby by assisting them you are gradually lowering the fitness of the entire population, therefore everybody loses.
now of course I am not claiming that this is true, nobody can know, and I'd much rather we helped eachother than not, but there's certainly an argument to be made.
Many years ago, I worked as a short order cook at a chain restaurant. The economy was doing quite well, and unemployment was low. This was actually a real problem for us, because we couldn't hire dishwashers. Turns out nobody wants to do a shit job for shit pay when alternatives exist.
A perhaps generous view of how the Federal Reserve manages our economy is to avoid inflation. A less generous view might be that they aim to keep unemployment high enough that workers are desperate enough to accept shit jobs, and that wages don't take too large a slice of the pie. Obviously this requires less than full employment, such that they actually define full employment as "the highest level of employment that is consistent with price stability".
In other words, one output of the way our economy is managed is that some people are desperate. At that point you're simply stack-ranking people, and claiming that the bottom 3-4% deserve to be desperate regardless of actual fitness. (Never mind that we don't have anything close to a meritocracy.)
>A perhaps generous view of how the Federal Reserve manages our economy is to avoid inflation. A less generous view might be that they aim to keep unemployment high enough that workers are desperate enough to accept shit jobs, and that wages don't take too large a slice of the pie. Obviously this requires less than full employment, such that they actually define full employment as "the highest level of employment that is consistent with price stability".
There's no need to make insinuations that the fed is conspiring to oppress workers when their mandate (as defined by congress) is to both have maximum employment and to avoid inflation.
"The Federal Reserve Act mandates that the Federal Reserve conduct monetary policy "so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."
>In other words, one output of the way our economy is managed is that some people are desperate. At that point you're simply stack-ranking people, and claiming that the bottom 3-4% deserve to be desperate regardless of actual fitness. (Never mind that we don't have anything close to a meritocracy.)
Contrary to what you might think, "full employment" doesn't mean 0% unemployment. There are many reasons why you don't want 0% unemployment[1]. Therefore the fed targeting 3-4% unemployment (or whatever they think "full employment" is, isn't some sort of plot for "stack-ranking people".
Modern society isn't some Mendelian pea experiment. And using the "one could argue" trope is really not helpful and could be construed as incendiary...
> How is laying down an opposing view that I don't necessarily support and using "one could argue" incendiary ?
because it's fundamentally bad-faith argumentation and when it's used to argue that people don't deserve to live, people find that adversarial and an attack on their existence.
> Don't you think there's value in playing the devil's advocate, just for the sake of the argument ?
look, you're not arguing about the color of the bikeshed here, are you?
I think you'll find there's certain viewpoints that we don't want people even "hypothetically" (not really, the whole point of the devil's advocate is that you inherently feel that it has some merit worth) advocating for. People find it real offensive if you argue that they don't deserve to live, and in this case that includes disadvantaged people who are barely scraping by.
it is (or can be used as) a coward's way to argue for something that you think holds some merit but you don't actually want to attach your name to, and when the argument itself is adversarial/antagonistic or genocidal we should generally not be encouraging that even in a "hypothetical" (again, not really) sense, no.
And when you are basically arguing "poor people need to be cut off from their safety net" etc that does reach towards the genocidal things - everyone knows what happens next when people on the edge of survival are cut off from their remaining resources. It's arguing they as a class don't deserve to survive.
Like gosh "I said it was hypothetical, it's a devil's advocate, what are you even mad about???" is such a HN perspective.
It is not fundamentally bad-faith when he presents the argument honestly. He makes no sign that he isn't willing to discuss the argument purely on its merits. His comment could set us up for a healthy discussion on why one should (not) hold that specific opinion.
If one does not already know of any bullet proof counter argument, then presenting a "hypothetical" (devil's advocate) argument is extremely helpful to investigate why that argument is in fact wrong (or the "hypothetical" might even be correct. How can you know if you don't investigate the counter arguments?)
Refusing to engage with an argument because it is "dangerous" leads to no deeper understanding whatsoever.
well, I disagree. I think that entertaining the argument will not turn civilised people into your rendition of the devil, and I think that nothing should be out of bounds for discussion.
I could not argue for letting people suffer and not helping them, I'm not a lunatic. Would the argument that they are unfit for current conditions hold some merit ? Perhaps. I cannot know, and neither can you. It is a far too complex topic to firmly attest an opinion on, especially with our limited current knowledge. Is that an extra reason that this makes it an interesting topic to discuss ? I think so.
The extrapolation to genocide from a simple discussion is akin to calling everyone with different opinions a nazi. It's plain silly.
For as long as we have been humans, we have also changed current environment. Accepting Mad Max as the outcome to breed for, one could also argue, sucks.
This of course makes the assumption that the current environment is any good. Sometimes the current environment is quite bad and hostile to most people. If you are in the artic circle, its probably more realistic to survive being given some warm clothing, than to strip down naked and march thousands of miles to the equator where the environment suits your (lack of) clothing.
The latter is not generally what we do as humans, only when all other means of survival fail do we migrate. We have the ability to use technology to adapt to our environments, such as in making clothing, and even change the environments, like making a warm dwelling or lighting a fire. These are within our toolsets for survival so we should use them, versus moving to where we happen to find adaption without these abilities.
From what I've seen of families in poverty, it is usually less about them fitting into the current environment and more an issue of them having a surrounding culture that makes it hard to take advantage of the current environment.
A simple example is that people in a poverty culture tend to spend money immediately on short term gratification. On one hand, we could assume this is because they are foolish, but many have experience that if they try to save $20 for something longer term, someone in their household will end up just taking the money for something else. So their are acting rationally by trying to convert that $20 to something that will bring pleasure to them rather than deferring the pleasure only to lose the ability to spend the $20 on something they would enjoy.
Citations are of course needed, since I find the idea that most poor families have this pot of money anyone in the household can loot kind of bizarre. In the end, can you really blame a poor person for spending $3 on gatorade instead of water? That $2 price difference might amount to 0.1% of their monthly rent. You probably feel a lot happier at the end of the month eating a variety of things versus rice beans and water day in and out until you die, and the overall financial outcomes would probably be the exact same since no one is getting out of poverty through cutting out snacks and tasty things. They get out when their job changes and they are paid substantially more than the difference between buying a sandwich and making your own would be.
The sum total of all humans alive at moment X are fit to be alive at X and have an equal fitness of survival.
Divergence occurs when we talk about probability of surviving in future time frame Y. Even so, criteria that defines current and future fittest in "survival of fittest" can be many things. Dinosaurs roamed the earth, but mice survived whatever killed the huge, strong lizards.
B.
A society that does not care for its least might find that its least are not loyal. This can have security implications, especially when bordered by unfriendly states.
Is it worth making this specific argument if you don’t think it’s true ?
Otherwise, we’re in societies that evolve at crazy paces, some parts of our lives 5 generations ago were radically different from our lives now, while other groups almost didn’t change. I don’t see the concept of “fitness” to be relevant to our current situation where we have no idea of what’s coming up even in 50 years. In times of uncertainty, diversity is a better bet than trying to optimize for a status quo.
This seems like an argument in favor of social darwinism — a school of thought that has been (and still is, with any amount of thought) thoroughly debunked.
I wonder how effective life coaching is to people in poverty. The condition seems to have a risk of just humiliating those who are poor. Do they have the scale to do this for 80 families or more, or is it more of a rush job with the usual life advice those who are rich patronizingly give to those in poverty?
I keep hearing this but it doesn't resonate against my experience.
My family came to the US in the early 90's with zero dollars, but now we're doing well. The difference between us and those who didn't make it out of the neighborhood was what we did with the little money and time we had.
Basic things like figuring out how to get a bank account open vs paying a check cashing fee, things add up quickly. If you don't figure that stuff out, you're screwed. I find it off for poverty-advocates to get indignant when poverty education comes up, because they don't understand how much ignorance/lack of interest/lack of skill exists in those communities, and how much of a headwind that is.
Forget things like encouraging your kids to study in school, apply for competitive courses - etc. Even if your kids are capable of that, if you don't know to push them, you perpetuate your poverty. In contrast to say Asian immigrants who drive their kids to excel and go from poverty to 1% in one generation. Any coaching that helps people recognize and take advantage of the resources and opportunities in front of them - if it actually sticks - is super valuable.
> My family came to the US in the early 90's with zero dollars, but now we're doing well.
May I ask what was the path to financial well being ?
Coming to US with zero dollars is pretty common and doesn't really tell the whole picture. You might come with things that can be converted to money later like an education, family connections ect.
I came to us with no money but I had education for in demand jobs. Lots of patels from india come to usa with zero dollars but they have family connections that get them started on a path to setting up a business. We are close to a patel family that came to usa with zero dollars but grinded for years to finally become business owners. They are insane hardworkers but having that family connection that set them up on the path was critical imo.
I was a kid. My family came with the value of education and a lot of common sense and frugality.
That's the point - it's things that can be taught and learned. The person I am responding to is acting like an attempt to teach poor people anything is evil.
The disadvantageous behaviour you describe exists at every level. There’s wealthy families who couldn’t care less about any of the things you describe — most generational wealth is lost within a few generations!
There’s also a selection bias amongst immigrants like yourself: immigrant families have already made the biggest leap, they’ve uprooted their family and gone to a new country, and so they’re already on the path towards all of the behaviours you describe — they didn’t arrive in America and then decide that education was the path forwards, they arrived in America with optimism and gusto and were ready to do whatever it takes to realise their dreams.
Many people just want to live a life, they don’t want to pursue greatness at all costs. Many of those people are in poverty, many of those people are rich. Many people are not suited to a life of intense pressure to succeed.
The problem of poverty education as the solution to poverty is that it is built on the idea that education is why people are in poverty, and that if they just knew a bit more than they’d be doing great… but that’s not really true, poverty is a trap, education cannot save you from the poverty trap.
The value of support for people in poverty is that it gives them a better chance to escape poverty and for many people, education is a part of that support, but it’s important to understand that the solution to poverty is not education about how to open a checking account, it’s the whole spectrum of support from financial to education.
Give every person in poverty a million dollars, and many will escape poverty and go on to live very prosperous lives — no education needed.
GP: Basic things like figuring out how to get a bank account open vs paying a check cashing fee, things add up quickly.
You: Many people just want to live a life, they don’t want to pursue greatness at all costs.
These things are incongruous.
Separately, in the US you only need two factors to predict poverty: did you graduate high school and did you wait for marriage to have children. For the vast majority of people, it's their culture that determines if those are valued. You need to change culture to change those, and people are suspect of having the government do that because of past and ongoing mistakes.
The GP suggested that the reason immigrants have succeeded is because they knew to learn to open a bank account, ergo, if people in poverty wanted to learn to open a bank account then they would escape poverty. My point is that is not the reason immigrants are so often successful: rather, immigrants succeed because their entire life is built around seeking out something better for themselves and their family, and they're taking risks and making sacrifices to get it. Education is a means to an end for immigrants looking to build a better life for themselves, it's not the reason they've succeeded. Many immigrants succeed without education!
What predicts high school graduation? The framing of your comment ("did you graduate..." "did you wait for marriage...") suggests that these are choices made by people which determine whether they'll go on to live in poverty and if they just stayed in school and just didn't have kids then their lives would be great. The problem is, poverty does not start with the individual, in fact, it can be traced to before the person was born. High school graduation rates can be predicted based on the circumstance the child was born into.
> if they just stayed in school and just didn't have kids then their lives would be great
Yes, that's literally what they need to do. If we want to change that, then changing their culture to value education is the only way to do it. No culture which denigrates education is going to equip the majority of its adherents for the modern world.
Edit: I feel you're saying the same thing. Said poor immigrants succeed because they value succeeding. That's culture.
"Give every person in poverty a million dollars..." and you will kick off hyperinflation because you will need to print so much currency to make that a reality it will devalue all of the existing dollars in circulation.
it's not a policy suggestion, it's a rhetorical device. If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life because poverty is caused by money, not education. Education helps people escape poverty because education can be used to earn money, not because knowing how to open a bank account is the path to salvation. There are lots of smart and well educated and successful people who are terrible with money but never end up in poverty because they have enough money to absorb the mistakes.
// If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life
You sound like you have never been around a poor person. Most people if they get a raise, their spending magically goes up by the same amount.
And people don't understand how money works.
My in-laws provide healthcare and profit sharing for everyone who works in their business. And guess what, a big percentage of their turnover is someone gets a 50 cent an hour raise somewhere else but doesn't understand that they are missing out on much more in profit sharing and healthcare. When they leave and get paid out their profit sharing, they are like "what's this??" even though it's been explained to them a thousand times.
A million dollars is nothing. You can blow it on a few ill advised purchases and be back where you started. It takes brains to make it last, not to mention make it grow.
I’ve been around rich people, I’ve been around poor people. I am fortunate enough to be well off today but that’s not where I come from, I grew up around people in poverty.
There are rich people who are bad with money, there are poor people who are bad with money. The only difference is that rich people have a much greater ability to tolerate financial mistakes. I can burn $10k and absorb the consequences, a person in poverty cannot.
Poor people are no less equipped to make use of money than rich people: credit card debt is a huge problem _amongst the middle-class_. For every poor person who can’t afford to feed their family, there’s a middle-class person who can only afford to feed their family because they make so much more money and would be even worse off if they didn’t have such a high income.
There’s no evidence that poor people are any more “bad with money” than rich people.
> Give every person in poverty a million dollars, and many will escape poverty and go on to live very prosperous lives — no education needed.
If this were true many lottery winners would have their lives and their children's lives changed forever after winning. As it stands almost every person who wins the lottery ends up in the same place they were before within 10 years.
The skills required to get out of poverty are often the skills required to stay out of poverty.
The "all lottery winners end up broke" meme is just that, a meme. Likewise, the idea that the lottery is a tax on those who are stupid or in poverty is a meme. There's lots of people who participate in (and win) lotteries who are living very comfortable lives, certainly not in poverty. Yes, many people who end up with money will go on to lose it (whether inherited or from a lottery or a lawsuit or some other means) but that's not unique to those in poverty. As I said, generational wealth is the perfect example of this: many rich and successful families will lose their wealth within a few generations. Losing money is an activity enjoyed by rich and poor alike.
Very often if you diff "poor successful immigrant" stories to the stories of poor people who grew up in the same city, the key difference was they relied on bonds of trust between them and other immigrants from their country that helped give them a leg up.
I was pretty shocked to discover that one of my friends (2nd gen asian immigrant in amsterdam) had parents who even tapped large interest free loans, and that the community largely expected this kind of help to be given freely.
>I find it off for poverty-advocates to get indignant when poverty education comes up
Yeah, coz it's well known to be ineffective (by design, pretty much), and is almost universally used by banks and politicians fronting for banks to try and get the heat off their backs and let them keep raking in profits unimpeded.
Stuff like interest rate caps and banning payday lending, on the other hand, is very effective but impedes profits. The goal of corporate lobbyists is to present solutions (usually faux) that appear genuine but don't impede profits.
Lower socioeconomic class stay in the neighborhood that they grew up in and are much more likely to be close to parents and siblings. This is a much stronger network than some immigrant community of strangers based on country of origin.
And if the benefits of networks based on country of origin were so powerful you'd expect places with a large percent of South American or Caribbean countries to be wealthy. But if you look at small Haitian or Dominican you don't see the same kind of upward mobility compared to asian neighborhoods.
>Lower socioeconomic class stay in the neighborhood that they grew up in and are much more likely to be close to parents and siblings. This is a much stronger network than some immigrant community of strangers based on country of origin.
Are you equating the economic potential of being able to tap a large interest free loan from your community and having an equally poor sibling?
I'm an immigrant to the US. My parents had a network of people from the same country (European). It was a good resource of friends and babysitting for my parents, but i never heard of anyone giving large interest free loans to a poor stranger just because they came from the same country. But maybe that's the norm for asian communities.
Btw i wouldn't discount free childcare and is honestly worth more than an interest free loan. If you can help share childcare you can work many more hours
Forget the name for it, but there is community based loan concept where everyone pitches in a little money to give one individual a loan based on luck of the draw with the pretext that in future prior past contributors have better odds of winning.
As a single counter experience, I have repeatedly witnessed established immigrants exploit new immigrants from the same cultural backgrounds. Yes, some people get lucky and find meaningfully help, but others don’t.
Hmm, the argument I always hear is "the poor don't need to be taught, they need (some short term thing that won't scale)"
If you want to argue the effectiveness of various education methods, I am not down to that level of nuance. Obviously if the education is ineffective, that's a problem, it's still necessary.
In the case of the Netherlands, interest rate caps are already in place and payday loans don't exist. Furthermore, it's relatively easy to get help (but not fun) when you're bankrupt and to get out of this bankruptcy with a clean sheet after 5 years. Currently there is a law in the works vetted by the House of Representative to reduce this period.
Well it's sorta true, but the important difference is that the bottom poverty line is higher than in the US, and we do have better social security. Still, the gap is growing. Though recent changes in real-estate legislation are putting a stop to that. Yes, there are the mega rich, entrepreneurs and whatnot. Like it or not, they do participate in society in a way that moves the needle.
Means for the slightly-better-off middle class to exploit the lower class through rent are being thwarted, thankfully. They just allow one half of the population to exploit the other half without providing any tangible benefit in return.
Source: I'm born in, and living in, the Netherlands.
No, the statement is mostly false. The famous Economics Explained video is debunked. Of course, there is inequality and maybe it is too much but is not of a ridiculous level compared to the rest of the world.
I alluded to the figure not being the whole story by saying "on paper". Perhaps you skimmed that part. Nonetheless not the whole story is miles away from "not a problem". It IS a problem.
I actually lived there for a period, not that it's relevant.
You walk around and see how people live and that the difference between the worst neighborhoods is much smaller than the US or even France. Another data point is that you will also see relatively little homeless people (compared to San Francisco for example).
Some of the organizations I've seen in the US to provide "life coaching" for people in poverty are trying to create those types of relationships. Their logic is that the culture surrounding people in poverty tends to make it harder to do the types of things that would help them get out of poverty.
In a vacuum, i'd be inclined to agree with you. However, this is not rich people telling poor people to stop being poor. This exists in a extensive web of social organizations that work together to solve poverty at the root cause.
I can't vouch for this specific organization, but i'm very familiar with similar organizations. This kind of organization runs on volunteers, many of whom have experienced poverty firsthand, and virtually all have experienced poverty secondhand. This kind of volunteer work is typically people actually caring, not people 'virtue-signaling'. This kind of work is done in intimate collaboration with municipal social services, which are typically well-respected in the Netherlands.
There is no doubt in my mind that everyone involved is intending and capable of affecting a change for good.
> I wonder how effective life coaching is to people in poverty.
I've personally volunteered as a coach in poverty situations. It works. The coach doesn't need to do much, just listen to the problems people cope with, and occasionally point them towards a resource that'll help them is enough. Just being able to vent to someone who knows how it feels to deal with poverty might be enough. If it's not, helping people navigate social services and programmes typically ends up lifting them from poverty.
It helps that in the Netherlands, poverty is typically unnecessary. There is (almost) guaranteed livable income for everyone independent of employment, due to our strong social security system.
> It helps that in the Netherlands, poverty is typically unnecessary. There is (almost) guaranteed livable income for everyone independent of employment, due to our strong social security system.
I lived in multiple countries, including the Netherlands.
Living there substantially changed how I view subjects such as taxation and social security. Taxes were high, but the benefits a strong social security brings to the place are great.
Not saying that there's no waste, things that could be improved, etc. But in comparison to the other places I lived, the Dutch were way ahead of the curve.
I completely agree with your skepticism but based on the description of the service I expect it to land on the good side.
The problem with a lot of poverty focused charity is that it is, essentially, a payment to a vulnerable person to be dehumanised. Fortunately, that means we can assess a poverty charity easily: do they humanise the people receiving help? Allowing people to come into a store and shop and engage with bespoke support is very humanising, because it’s just removing money from the equation, it does not take away agency or trust. The support they’re offering is not one size fits all, or a jobs-pipeline, rather, it’s whatever the customers need help with — essentially, what someone with money pays for!
There’s certainly the possibility that even a well designed service can become a karma-mill for the middle-class, but in this case, I think we can be quite optimistic.
That said, “life coach” has terrible connotations in the US but I think that’s just something lost in translation.
Perhaps "life coaching" here means something similar to a thing we have in the UK called the Citizens Advice Bureau which basically helps you navigate bureaucracy, as opposed to charlatans with shiny teeth teaching 10 simple tricks to get rich
That depends. People are in poverty for many different reasons.
I know people in poverty where the root cause is downs syndrome: they mentally don't have the ability to be any more than assistant usher at the movie theater. They can handle most usher tasks, but when there is someone difficult they need the head usher: some 16 year old kid who has been on the job for at least 2 weeks.
I know people in poverty because they despite getting straight A's in school they dropped out at 16 and started having kids (I'm not sure if they dropped out before are after the kids started coming, it doesn't matter: both dropping out and having kids were intentional decisions). 10 years latter it finally occurred to them how much their bad life choices has hurt them.
There is nothing a coach can do to help the first person, no matter what they will still be in poverty as they are not capable of doing better. The second just needs a bit of help to turn life around - this help will work now, but at 21 this person would have refused all help as they didn't see that they were doing anything wrong in the first place. Most people in poverty are somewhere in the middle of these two.
The above is based on real people (though I'm hiding a lot of details for privacy reasons). These are not strawman examples, but they should feel like it. I intentionally picked people who are on the two far ends of the extremes.
Person 1 doesn't have to be in poverty, in most developed countries there would be disability help/insurance/payments/etc. to help them live a non-impoverished life because they cannot realistically work a job.
In most developed countries, disability payments mean living in significant, often crippling poverty.
Here in Canada, a single disabled person that is expected to live independently receives about 800 USD per month from the government. Out of that, they're expected to pay all their expenses. Canada is relatively typical as such things go. In France or Germany it's about 1000 USD a month. It's about 900 USD in the United States. It's only some 300 - 500 USD in the UK.
Depending on jurisdiction, there may or may not be subsidized housing which can make a big difference; but either way, many are paying market rate for housing. There are also other benefits, etc., that may alter the picture. But the overall picture is very very poor. The Scandinavian countries are the only major exception I can think of, where the disabled living only on a government pension might not actually be in poverty.
Yeah people Canada have been wondering where this explosion of homelessness has come from, well, when you look at the amounts that minimum income provides, in an environment of exploding rents, it's state sanctioned poverty.
These coaches are usually people who come from the same families and neighborhoods that face these kinds of problems. Help with navigating government programs and simple tips and tricks with finances can make a huge difference.
I think this is more of the case. I used to live around the described neighborhood. It was an area with a notorious reputation as 'ghetto' where certain ethnic of immigrants live.
I personally have no problem other than the casual nuisance and I have positive experience overall during my stay over there for a couple of years.
The founder of the supermarket/umbrella foundation seems to have the similar background as the people live in the area. Thus, I think he has insight on what the community needs and how to help them.
Seems a bit close to "I wonder how effective knowledge is to people who don't have it."
The two things required for this program to work are useful information & willing learners.
By making it free, the organisers are incentivised to provide the first, and by requiring participation with a coach they're asking for the second. Could your question be more accurately stated as "is the information good?".
People stay in bad situations when they don't know how to change and/or they don't want to change. The former is kind of up to those with knowledge, however ultimately nobody can do anything about the latter but those affected themselves.
Often I find that people in poverty have a great deal of trouble engaging in the external effort necessary to improve their situation. It's nearly impossible to muster the time and energy to fill out applications and forms necessary for assistance when you are barely treading water.
Social workers and life coaches are really great when they are able to fill in the gaps. Help people acquire the resources they need and take advantage of the services offered to them that they may not already know about. Even something as simple as filling in a form properly can be life-changing. Not to mention connecting them to resources like housing assistance and debt forgiveness.
Life coach is dependent on the opportunities available to that family, otherwise the life coach might just be left with cutting the only entertainment or treat food the people buy to alleviate some of their daily stress.
Life coaching could mean things like, here's how to open a bank account, here's how to navigate all the low income programs offered by the government, here's how to enroll in community college or a trade school, here's a local code bootcamp, here are the local food pantrys and their hours, here is a low cost daycare option, etc. All the things middle class people take for granted because its either irrelevant to them, or their parents who already understand these systems help them figure it all out.
You know, life coach helping a group of those in need almost sounds like a shepherd looking out for a flock... now where have I heard this before?
I really wish we could take the good parts of organized religion and turn them into regular institutions. In our town the local library has taken on a strong community center role but that's just because the staff there happens to be excellent.
It is nice to see things like this but we shouldn't forget that we can't charity our way our of systemic problems.
Example: the recent MrBeast video where he restored sight to 1000 people [1]. Really, this should make you angry at a system that allows people to be virtually blind when fixing it is so cheap. It makes no sense from an economic standpoint. People who can see can be way more productive (let alone all the personal benefits of course). But we don't do that. Why? To protect private health care profits.
There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? So a handful of people can become obscenely wealthy. That's it.
The reason our country/world has so many resources, is because people with a commercial interest worked had to develop/build it. Like, our medicine is amazing because there historically has been so much money in it, which attracted talent and research dollars.
So it's easy to look at that and say "oh wow we have so much, how can we not be giving it away for free" but that misses the point that with that mindset, we wouldn't have built what we have to begin with.
People often fail to understand that it's a balance.
I don’t actually know if we have stuff because of commercial motivations. The guys who discovered insulin didn’t do so out of commercial desire. Neither did the people who figured out vaccinations. There are inventors who make money off of their inventions, but they are often poor salespeople and are mostly tinkerers.
These are fair points but they are individual rather than systematic. Was in the hospital with my mom a few weeks ago, in NYC. The amount of equipment, procedure, etc she received was orders of magnitude beyond that which she would have gotten in the USSR where she grew up, and most places today.
For every piece of equipment, mobile bed, ekg, sensor, sample etc - here's a company that makes that stuff, efficiently and at scale. They are driven by the fact that hospitals buy this stuff, which is in part driven by the patients and insurance ability to pay. Money makes this stuff go round.
And yes a homeless person walking into the ER gets a benefit out of all this stuff for free - but only because everyone else pays for them. If nobody paid for it, it wouldn't exist.
This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda. The myth here is that nothing happens without the profit motive.
Another commenter mentioned insulin. Despite insulin being invented 100 years ago and the IP being given away for $1 to benefit people, we're still paying outrageous prices for insulin in the USofA even with supposedly limited patent life. The system has been successfully gamed and government bought so that people can be charged $1000/month for something necessary to live that costs a fraction of that to produce.
A lot of pharma is like this: pharmaceutical companies primarily spend on marketing and lobbying. A huge chunk of the so-called innovation actually happens with Federally funded research in universities that we just give away to a company to profit from.
If you accept that "our medicine is amazing", what about pretty much every other developed nation giving universal access to health care? Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money.
> Another commenter mentioned insulin. Despite insulin being invented 100 years ago and the IP being given away for $1 to benefit people, we're still paying outrageous prices for insulin in the USofA even with supposedly limited patent life.
No, you are not. Out of patent insulin is cheap. Newer, far more effective patented insulin is expensive. Insulin makes for great clickbait, because the average person does not understand there are many different kinds at different prices.
Where is the incentive for a business to research better insulin?
And no one is stopping US taxpayers from voting for US politicians to pay for R&D of insulin (and other medications) so that it is in the public domain and can be produced and sold as cheaply as possible.
// This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda
Comrade, I am curious - what is the economic system of the country you live in? And if it's not socialist, why have you not migrated to one of the existing socialist paradises?
I ask this as someone whose family made the move in the other direction. Life in capitalism is better empirically than the alternatives, it's not propaganda for millions of us who experienced it both ways.
// Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money.
Is that true and is it accurate to compare say Sweden which is a small, uniform country (everyone is an in-shape middle class white guy) to the US which is vast and diverse in every way?
You don't have to go to that extreme. The Myth also says that with less profit motive, less would happen. But, is that really true? If a profitable corporation has to pay a little more in taxes, and thus becomes slightly less profitable, will shareholders simply decide to "Go Galt," close the business, and stop making that delicious profit? I don't think so. If I was a business owner, and I had to go from making "great profit" to "good profit" I'm still thrilled because I'm profiting. I'm not going to take my ball and go home.
Businesses close when they make no profit, or when there's not a market fit, or for many other non-tax-related reasons. I've never heard of a business failing simply because their taxes were too darn high.
To be clear, shareholders do routinely pull their money from companies they believe are underperforming. This is what's happening when a stock price drops or bond rate climbs after a company's earnings fall short of expectations. Investors are generally not equally thrilled with a mediocre profit instead of a great profit because any profit is delicious.
Do they "Go Galt"? No, but their money often goes somewhere else. A different company, a hedge fund, or even a different country are all options used quite regularly. Taking their ball and going to play somewhere else with some other people is always an option. Tax policy can and does influence this.
You are ignoring that the net profit has to be sufficiently high to offset risk in the financial calculation. Expected ROI calculations are always net of taxes, inflation, and risk. Many businesses that look "profitable" on paper are uninvestable due to inflation and risk, so reducing realized net profits pushes more businesses into this category.
There absolutely is a level of positive profit below which it makes more financial sense for investors to sit on their money.
Governments are aware of this and set their taxation policies accordingly. That is why long-term capital gains usually have a relatively low tax rates. There is a high drag on expected ROI due to inflation and risk that makes many of those investments unattractive ceteris paribus.
> This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda. The myth here is that nothing happens without the profit motive.
The strawman here is that capitalist ideology requires "nothing happens without the profit motive" to work. It doesn't. Take food for instance. There's no doubt that there are altruists willing to feed people for free (eg. soup kitchens/food banks), but you can't rely on altruists to feed the world. The point of capitalism is that you don't need to rely on people's charity to get fed, or whatever other products/services you want. As Adam Smith puts it:
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. "
> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why? So a handful of people can become obscenely wealthy. That's it.
Can we stop a second and talk about this? Morally and ethically, you are absolutely and completely right in every possible way. There's nothing at all to talk about.
Yet food and shelter aren't just moral questions of basic humanity. They're also logistical questions. Having a warehouse of stored grain in Nebraska is useless to starving people in Indonesia without a way to get it there and a way to feed them for all the days to come. Having empty houses in Detroit is not useful to unsheltered people in Budapest without a way to get the latter to the former and enable them to actually live there - never mind if they would accept such an offer.
You're absolutely right. These are moral and ethical non-questions. There just might be practical questions in there too. Ignoring the latter to focus on the former is perhaps not an ideal way to identify systemic changes that can address systemic problems.
Otherwise you wind up in a situation like San Francisco's, where people point to misleading numbers on vacant housing (and decry the abominable human greed) in order to distract from a decades-long failure to produce enough housing for people.
Picked at random to serve as an example. Like most places you'll find it has some percentage of vulnerable and marginalized members of the community who are experiencing life as an unsheltered person. A quick search turns up this - https://www.homelessnessimpact.org/post/homelessness-and-the...
I could just as easily have picked almost any major rich world city. A poorer one would similarly have a homeless population, but the point would be less clear.
> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat.
Only on paper. Reality is not that simple. The problems are not solved with giving people food and shelter. Rich countries did that, they still do it, it solves nothing. People will stay hungry, and now they depend on it, and will also raise demand. In the past, we've seen horrible cases of charity destroying local economies, making people even more depending on charity. This can't be an answer for making the world a better place.
We can do better, but not with a simplistic view. It will make things just worse.
> There is absolutely enough food and shelther available on this planet for every man, woman and child to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat. It is a choice to deny it to them. Why?
Because the dictators where a lot of desperately poor people live will use their militaries to control donated food and goods to increase their control over the people.
Related to this: I started reading the Dutch author Rutger Bregman who iterates the point that poor people are just that: Poor. What they need is usually not help but money.
If one believes that this is a well intended effort that, however, is nothing more that a publicity stunt.
This appears to be a private initiative, and the only potential harm done here is iterating a point that is wrong (if one puts themselves in the Rousseau camp).
I'm not sure that's true unless you account for different reasons for poverty. My neighbor is classified as poor, at least judging his official income. He's long-term unemployed by choice because he doesn't like working and has three children he'd have to pay alimony for if he had an income. So he instead does not work, get's ~60% of average net income (part of that isn't in cash, but paying for housing, health insurance etc), has lots of free time, and the state pays the alimony for him.
He's poor. Sure, doubling welfare payments would make him have more than the average citizen, but it wouldn't address the reason he's poor: because he doesn't want to work. If he worked, he'd have more money, but the calculation is simple: get 500 Euros + 77sqm flat + utilities + health insurance for 0 hours / year, or get 2500 Euros, pay everything yourself (including alimony) and have 300-400 Euros more a month for 1600 hours / year.
This is completely aligned with the initial point. Do you think a life coach would benefit him? It is clearly not because he is stupid. He just made some life decisions that you do not agree with.
Pretty much everyone that is poor and isn't a first generation immigrant who has arrived in the last two years is poor because of "some life decisions". And some of them a life coach could help. Some are doing their best and really just need a little bit of help to get on their feet, and giving them that help without much hassle is the best you can do. And others are simply lazy, and giving them more money to be lazy is a waste of money.
I'm not saying that some poverty can be sustainably alleviated by cash. But some cannot. Claims about poverty should consider that not all poverty is the same (and most poverty in Western countries (maybe minus the US) is relative, not absolute).
I guess the point is that with a robust safety net, people wouldn't have to live in crippling poverty because of "some life decisions". The first-order reason they are in poverty is that they don't have money, so if the safety net is robust enough, that first-order problem can be solved by cash. If you think it would also be helpful to coach them on the second-order problem (decision-making skills), great. But money is the immediate and direct solution to the problem.
But there really is barely any absolute poverty in the Netherlands (or Germany, or Denmark, or Sweden, or France, or ....), we're mostly talking about relative poverty, that is nobody is starving or can't get healthcare, or is homeless (yes, homelessness exists, but it's primarily a substance abuse/mental health issue) because they're poor, because the government covers all of that, and the few exceptions are e.g. undocumented immigrants who aren't eligible.
They're poor because we define poverty as having 60% or 50% of the median net income. You still live in a flat, you still have enough money for food and you don't need to beg to heat your home, but you'll have trouble affording things that average citizens consider normal, like taking trips, eating out, buying gadgets, or saving money.
In both absolute and relative poverty, more money helps alleviate it. But giving people enough money to escape abject poverty is something else entirely from enforcing everyone to earn exactly the same so that nobody could have less than the median.
> The Netherlands are in the top percentile of every quality of life metric except for weather.
I’m not going to say it’s bad because on average it isn’t, but this is patently untrue. The Dutch housing market is one of the worst in the world, and doubly so if you don’t speak Dutch or are on a budget. Double whammy for international students.
The healthcare system is... let me put it this way. As an Indian, I’d rather be in the Netherlands if there was a critical medical condition. You’re not actively suicidal or dying in the next 24 hours? Excellent, join the seven month waitlist for getting medical help. Or become suicidal enough to go to the ER, and then back to the waitlist you go!
In India (and what I’ve seen/heard of UK/US private healthcare) you can get faster treatment if you can pay. Nothing of that sort here haha.
(I should probably add that Germany and Belgium have similar issues from what I’ve heard, though that doesn’t excuse the Netherlands.)
> and doubly so if you don’t speak Dutch or are on a budget
Like literally anywhere in the world, in the vast majority of country if you show up poor and not able to speak the language you won't find a place to live.
Yeah but not really. In a lot of places if you can pay market rates landlords couldn’t care less about your language, especially if both of you are fluent in English. Important to note perhaps that this language thing is more for common/shared accommodations, not standalone units.
Also by on a budget I mean a budget that’ll get me a very decent place even in for example Germany. The prices and costs of accommodation in the Netherlands is hilarious, ask anyone living here. One of my professors literally moved to Belgium to save on rent, despite needing to make a multi-hour journey when commuting multiple times a week.
> In a lot of places if you can pay market rates landlords couldn’t care less about your language
How will you sign a contract you can't read ? Outside of tech hubs you can't even find a job in western Europe (not even speaking about the rest of the world) if you don't speak the language, without a job you won't find a place to rent
> Also by on a budget I mean a budget that’ll get me a very decent place even in for example Germany.
Well, one of the big reasons for that in the netherlands is they don't build places to live. Take a look at the satellite view of amsterdam. Huge cycling town, you'd expect everything within a 5 or 10 mile radius of the central rail station to be built up pretty well to maximize the bikeshed, right? Nope. Medieval low rise apartments that are illegal to replace, and protected agricultural lands within 5 miles just to rub salt on the wound that the farmer's tractors harvesting crops for export in zunderdorp have better transit access than you, a rent burdoned low income worker central to the amsterdam economy.
I'm Dutch and work in tech. One of the reasons I'm a digital nomad is because Amsterdam is too expensive. For reference: the city center of Berlin is about twice as cheap, and Berlin isn't cheap anymore nowadays.
>(I should probably add that Germany and Belgium have similar issues from what I’ve heard, though that doesn’t excuse the Netherlands.)
For Belgium at least, these issues are not similar. Our housing prices are high in some cities but definitely not on the level of the Netherlands. And the waiting list for medical help is much less of an issue here.
Belgium definitely has their own issues (often issues that the Netherlands don't have), but the issues you listed are not as relevant in Belgium.
This is kind of an outdated notion. In the 90's NL was very progressive, but after 3 decades of conservative-neoliberal governments it's middling at most.
E.g. selling weed to stores is still illegal - massively funding the underworld because there's no legal supply - which is quite backwards compared to Canada & some US states. Or up until a few years ago NL was dead-last in the EU for amount of parental leave a father gets (2 days), which was only changed when the EU forced them to by setting a minimum. Most (semi-)public services like health, public transport, taxes and education are also performing poorly and/or very fragile after long periods of budget cuts and neoliberal policies.
> > massively funding the underworld because there's no legal supply
If the underworld only crime is to sell weed then what's the problem? It's just a matter of semantics. I think what you mean is that it's defacto legal but you have to chit-chat with some guy or gal who'd also try to sell you some of his/her music or a club entrance when they are DJ-ing as opposed to just ordering it on Amazon
The football ultras/hooligans phenomenon might also qualify as underworld but they mostly beat each others up
The “problem” with this sort of stuff happening in a non legal way is that you end up in a space with no worker protections, no legal recourse, a lot of uncertainty that can lead to exploitation, etc etc etc
Society existed that way for a long time but there’s a reason we stopped doing feudalism
To your point not having everything enter the capitalist sphere is good, I think it’s possible to navigate one without the other
> If the underworld only crime is to sell weed then what's the problem? It's just a matter of semantics.
No it's not because it means it's also more profitable. More profit while something is illegal means it's more attractive to criminals to pursue. It means that the coke dealers, criminals from other EU countries (eastern Europeans or Russians) and other people that don't give a shit about The Netherlands will take it up and do it as a side hustle thing. And sure there are also "pure weed dealers", and yes for this group it's (almost) pure semantics. However, they now have to deal with crazed criminals that aren't afraid of shooting you when things go sour.
Source: I'm from Amsterdam, I've heard enough stories and anecdotal evidence is enough to challenge you on your assumptions that it's "just a matter of semantics".
* Attitude towards food. In many workplaces, universities, schools, etc. a doughnut with some syrup and colored candy sprinkled on it, or a sad sandwich of a lettuce between two slices of bread is seen as an acceptable lunch.
Compared to the Netherlands, the country of Germany or Nordic countries seem like the ultimate foodie-paradise, which tells it all. Perhaps dutch people consume all the good food for supper in the privacy of their homes, but this is invisible to the public.
EDIT: "frikandel-automaat" -- that beast tells all you need to know about a country's attitude towards food.
* Over-designed, over-controlled environment. If your idea of high quality of life is ultramodern office-buildings with no natural light offices, cities with every square foot either concrete or manicured lawn, buildings where you cannot open a window, and cannot water the plant because some central authority takes care of it, and every aspect of your life is efficiently managed, then go for it. I for one, need some unstructured "messiness" every now and then, otherwise I start to feel tense.
* people are nice and open though, society seems to work pretty well, and companies are efficient. No unicorns? ASML makes the machines that make the machines that make semiconductors, the modern world runs on them.
They have too many nimbys that make housing expensive and squander their transit infrastructure. places like zunderdorp or ransdorp or really that whole area outside the a10 in amsterdam are ripe opportunities for housing that is perfectly bikeable to a whole lot of transit, currently being used for agriculture like it has been for the last millenia, and at this rate will continue to be used for that for the next millenia. Then that leaves you with adding housing in town to match job growth demand, seems logical right? But you can't because of height limit ordinances prevent adding any meaningful housing supply even if you were allowed to take down a historic building. This leaves you with the inevitable end result we have today, of Amsterdam being one of the most expensive places to live in Europe.
I have a relative that is an university professor of some social sciences in the Netherlands (not sure what is the exact title); she is very left-leaning, she attended college and doctoral degree in the US and she was a professor in US for more than 10 years and in the Netherlands for almost 15 years: even she is not that optimistic about the country. I had very long discussions in the past 10 years (we spend family vacations together) and she believes the Netherlands is better in many aspects than US, but there are areas where it is a lot worse. The most obvious ones: healthcare, quality of services and social relations (including large scale xenofobia, not so well hidden).
I moved to the Netherlands when I found out that I am going blind. I really enjoy it here - it's very accessible which is my number one need; but with that accessibility comes a more peaceful and active lifestyle. I'm starting a family here and I've been very impressed all around about the process. It makes being a good parent much easier: parental leave, cheap birth, government takes care of things like vaccinations/baby checkups, parks are everywhere, and many dads take "papadag" on Wednesday off from work to spend time with their kids. I'm really happy to be here and I appreciate all of the benefits that come with it. I had to start a business to get a visa but despite all of that hard work it's still very worth it to me.
I've heard relatively bad things about Dutch healthcare from people who have had to use it - basically the doctors will either give you vitamins, or antibiotics and operate, with little nuance inbetween. Maybe it was "foreign student/young person" bias though.
There are a decent amount of big tech jobs here. Uber/Meta/Amazon have a local presence, there are many other non-FAANG tech companies HQ'd here (Booking.com, Adyen), and some household names that also hire remotely or have some presence here.
Can you keep it? As I read 1.55 births per woman, with population growth probably fueled by low skilled immigrant labor. Yeah, you might educate them in time to maintain that high standard of living, you might not.
Rent is not cheap, but if you are okay with 1 hour commute you can live in the Hague, Leiden or Utrecht. Less tourists also.
Btw, there are large companies in AMS (Booking, Amazon, Meta, Uber) and some financial shops. It's not comparable with US, but definitely in top3 in EMEA region.
> Btw, there are large companies in AMS (Booking, Amazon, Meta, Uber) and some financial shops. It's not comparable with US, but definitely in top3 in EMEA region.
Yes, only those big companies pay "ok" wages.
To all others thinking "but free healthcare/whatever/etc", then why don't these companies pay enough (compared to USA,England) for remote where you only pay in gross?
"but free healthcare" is ridiculous too. I don't think people understand how cheap healthcare now is in the U.S.. I know people on ACA plans that cover health, dental, and vision, copays in line with what I pay, for about $75 a month (I think this is silver tier). Chances are you are taking a much bigger salary hit working in europe than $75 a month. I guess you can save on education, but that savings probably starts looking smaller too when you consider in state tuition rates, community college credit prices, or the fact most private colleges dish out full ride financial aid packages like candy to anyone making below a certain threshold.
Here you go: https://studiezalen.com/doneren/. That's the donation page for the organization that's making this happen. They focus primarily on education, and found out that undernourishment or the threat thereof is really detrimental for education. That's why they started this project.
Alternatively you could move to Amsterdam or Zaandam and pay your taxes. This kind of organization lives off government subsidies, donations are just an extra. Last year their total income was 2.1 million euros, although they do not specify how much of that is from donations.
Living in the south of the country (near Breda), I wouldn't be caught dead in Amsterdam and I despise the city. But this is certainly a worthy cause, so I'll gladly donate.
They have raised 250.000 to fund this supermarket. Beyond the fact that a notable newspaper reported on it (Parool) I can't vouch for it other than that link really is their donation page.
In Malmö, Sweden, they started a special store for people who can prove that their income is below a certain threshold. These people get a membership to the store and are granted access to goods that are much cheaper.
Same in Germany. A Lidl supermarket employee explained in a TV interview it's a liability issue though. Somebody could hurt themselves entering a garbage box. Also supermarkets worry people throw in their own trash.
In the U.S. I frequently see dumpsters meant for store/office employee use locked, and the reason is always noted to prevent randoms from throwing their trash in there. They’re usually hauled away less frequently than residential trash cans and they don’t want it to fill up with bicycles, furniture, broken appliances, etc.
It happens in a lot of countries, not so long ago in France they'd spray bleach on the food before throwing it. It wasn't until 2016 that it was made illegal.
I think the health department in several places has put bleach on food that people were trying to distribute to the homeless. The logic was that the food wasn't prepared to commercial standards.
At least it's not motor oil. They seemed to have a kinda-sorta-plausible excuse for the bleach, but it sounds like they've made an internal decision that it was an overreaction and they stopped doing it.
But I kinda see their point, too -- random people making food and handing it out sounds noble, but it probably should have some oversight too. Arguably that would have been the better response from the health department. I don't think the charity in this case did a particularly good job themselves of handling the situation. Hopefully everyone learned something and five years later it's no longer a problem.
Disclaimer might indicate that you allow it to happen. And you would really prefer not to. It might simply be because then people would just spread it around outside the box while searching for stuff. Reasonable balance is pretty hard to reach.
I think the basic assumption is "you need help, and we are willing to help you".
I guess it all comes down to what "life coaching" means in this context. If we are talking about some sort of social assistants that will understand what ails the people in need and help them find a way around their issues (e.g.: navigate state bureaucracy, acquiring some basic qualification, find help with rehabilitation, etc) I see no downside.
Instead of seeing this as patronizing, I actually see it as quite humane.
It's presumptive that any problem you might have could possibly be solved by a state paid "life coach." I'm sure there's a segment of the population that could use this, but likewise, I'm sure there's a segment of the population that's facing unique enough circumstances that a "life coach" would come off as a slap in the face.
This looks like a combination of supermarket and charity; both are great, but does the combination make sense? A regular supermarket is a for-profit legal entity, a charity usually has tax-exemption, how can one manage the legal complications of mixing it?
What's the complication? Their supermarket seems to be "shop normal items, sit down for a session with a social worker instead of paying", so they don't have a commercial interest. Seems like a good approach to get people the items they need and also reaching them with social work and understanding their needs and what problems they might need help with.
So it is not a supermarket, just a charity? Regular people cannot go, buy something and pay like in any other supermarket? I haven't seen that explained in the article.
Municipal subsidies, private and corporate donations. I assume a municipal social worker decides who gets in and who does not. This is a really common approach in the Netherlands, which has been going on for decades for other projects. I can't remember any news articles mentioning significant problems with this approach.
This looks to me like an extended "voedselbank" which involves social work. I don't see anything truly novel or problematic with this approach.
Donations, apparently, likely both monetary and products.
> Who decides the cutoff?
They mentioned in the article that they're not a food bank, and they don't need proof of poverty. Since they connect the "shopping" to working with one of their life coaches (I don't know how often or how long you need to talk to them), I guess that's a deterrent against random rich people getting their diapers there. Or maybe they do, because they also want to talk to someone about their life, in which case I suppose they're also the target audience.
I have no clue about the sustainability or tax exemptions. It sounds like the supermarket is a way to get more people in the community in contact with their social workers. Outreach programs aren't that rare, the combination with a supermarket is, but it doesn't strike me as that odd.
> Wal-Mart’s prices were matched and even undercut by the Aldi and Lidl food chains, which also were ordered to cease selling below cost or face fines of about $445,000 for each product sold in violation of the order.
They probably still would have lost, our supermarket system is very cut-throat ;)
