‘I can work 40 hours a week for the rest of my life, or I can get falling-down drunk every Friday until they give me a home. ‘
Every Friday? I don’t know the clinical diagnosis, but I’d say you’re an alcoholic, doesn’t sound like you can stop. Don’t try and fake it though, as I’m sure there are diagnostic blood tests to find liver failure?
Was the bloke on the flood plain a builder for one of the well-known big firms by any chance? They always try and squeeze those extra units, sorry houses in…
Prevention is always (for a given value of always) cheaper than cure… stop the drinking, make better living conditions, and they may all want to get a job of some sort, just to fill the time. But even if they don’t ITS STILL CHEAPER, but of course, unless you WANT to give all your tax dollars (sorry pounds, I’ll keep pretending I think ur in the UK) to the pharms/medical system… rather than those awful do-gooding types (like cheap-house builders). T

The problem with the study on homeless alcoholics isn’t that providing housing reduces healthcare costs for existing dual-diagnosis people (because it does): it’s that housing first sets up a new system of incentive that increases homeless in the short run and increases expenses in the long run.

“NOTICE: All homeless drunks get a free home” creates an incentive to be the most expensive drunk in town, so that you’ll get a free apartment of your own, paid for by “the government”, instead of couch surfing at your sister’s place. Improving your life (say, getting a job that will let you earn enough money that you can rent a room of your own) is a major incentive for people to get off the sauce and become productive.

We have previously demonstrated that if ‘living on the streets’ is what’s required to get the taxpayer to pay for your apartment, then there are a lot of people currently depending on private charity (read: friends and family) that would be willing to camp out on street corner (or to say that they are) for six months. Now, rather than looking pathetic on a street corner, all you have to do is show up drunk at the emergency room a few times a month. This shouldn’t be a real challenge for people in pursuit of a free home. Let’s see: I can work 40 hours a week for the rest of my life, or I can get falling-down drunk every Friday until they give me a home.

Which one sounds easier to you?

To give you a concrete example of how important private charity is: My own community claims to have about ten times as many homeless people as shelter spaces. However, the shelters are only full a few nights each year.

So where do the other 90% sleep? Perhaps another 10% or so sleep in their cars or RVs, and maybe as many another 10% sleep outside no matter the weather. In a few cases, they’re determined never to go inside any building at all if possible.

But perhaps two out of three of our “homeless” are in a stable living arrangement with a relative or a friend. I’ve spoken with a few, but two examples of this “political identity” or “technically homeless” situation stand out:

One was a mother that lost her job (through no fault of her own) a few months before and had just finalized her divorce; she and her five-year-old daughter were living in one of Grandma’s (three) million-dollar houses while she looked for a new apartment and a new job. The social worker marked her down as being homeless. I wonder if the social worker ever wondered why that “poor homeless woman” drove a fairly new Mercedes (on permanent loan from Grandpa) to the appointment.

Another was a man that had no job, and possibly no job skills. He was just kind of a bum: clean, shaven, polite, sober, well-spoken, but no work ethic and no interest in a job. He had been “homeless” for several years, if you didn’t count the fact that he was living, rent-free, in a little hut on his aunt’s property. He ate at the soup kitchen twice a day (free), and spent the change people gave him on a monthly bus pass and cheap paperback novels.

A third example is one that I never met in person, but who was in the local newspaper dozens of time: A middle-aged man who built a campsite in the river floodplain (an environmental and safety nightmare) because he wanted to live in this (expensive) town instead of back home. Back home, you ask? Yes, it turns out that he had an easily affordable home in the inexpensive community that he’d lived in for decades, but he didn’t want to live there any longer. He declared that living wherever he wanted was a fundamental human right, and if the local taxpayers wouldn’t give free apartments to every single person that wanted to live here, then he’d live in a tent by the river — and call emergency services to bail him out every time it rained.

Possibly the first time I’ve ever screamed “WHERE’S THE STANDARD DEVIATION??” in front of my flatmate. Anyway, watch it (specifically the section where they compare chocolate drink against “placebo” with how much exercise you can do), and fume.

And writing things like “robust trials on social policy could happen routinely, if politicians weren’t scientifically ignorant and unhelpfully terrified of the possibility that they might have to state – with simple, constructive honesty: “well, we tried this idea, in all good faith, but it didn’t work so we’re dropping it now”” – is just this side of a lie.

I don’t think it’s scientific ignorance stopping politicians from ‘robust social trials’, and I think what they’re terrified of in terms of ‘robust social trials’ is something a little more concrete then having to admit to a mistake in the short term.

Scientific ignorance is dreadfully unhelpful, of course, but you’re dancing on the edge of historical illiteracy with those sorts of generalizations, which isn’t much more helpful.

I suppose if memory is malleable, then so would intuition be, if it is based on memory. But it can still be very useful, even if it has a relatively weak signal sometimes.

Journalists at most only envy, want to be players in the real game. Some were that before. Some go on to be. Newspaper owners, of course, have a lot more political power than the poor scribblers who usually write what they’re told or who were given the job because of their existing prejudices.

I don’t see the relevance of the Auschwitz reference either. The kids involved didn’t have false memories about what they had been taught about Auschwitz. They had simply either forgotten details,or had not yet studied the subject.

I think peterd102 makes an excellent point – the media and politicians are trapped in some sort of disfunctional mutually dependent but mutually destructive relationship, that does cause harm to society.

Interesting item in the NYT (Denial Makes the World Go Round) that discussed an experiment by Kim and Ferrin in which groups of business students assess the trustworthiness of a job applicant after learning that the person had committed an infraction at a previous job. Students watched the tape of a job interview during which the applicant was confronted with this issue and either denied or apologised for it.

If the infraction was described as a mistake and the applicant apologized, viewers gave him the benefit of the doubt and said they would trust him with job responsibilities. But if the infraction was described as fraud and the person apologized, viewers’ trust evaporated — and even having evidence that he had been cleared of misconduct did not entirely restore that trust.

“We concluded there is this skewed incentive system,” Dr. Kim said. “If you are guilty of an integrity-based violation and you apologize, that hurts you more than if you are dishonest and deny it.”

The system is skewed precisely because the people we rely on and value are imperfect, like everyone else, and not nearly as moral or trustworthy as they expect others to be.

The article then goes on to discuss other experiments that indicate good people can be dishonest up to the point where conscience kicks in and that a certain amount of denial can keep such issues below the radar.

Kim remarks that it is not unusual for people to ““reframe the ethical violation as a competence violation”” because they are more socially acceptable or tolerable for most people (nothing to do with recent revelations about expenses’ claims).

However, it is not just journalists who would capitalise on error for a story – rival politicians would as well (both within the same party and in others) so it becomes impractical to admit to error or having experimented with something that failed.

in a previous life, did a lot of work for the Labour Party and met a wide range of politicians from local to ministerial level.

My totally unscientific estimate is that 10% of them enter politics for selfless reasons, 10% of them enter politics for personal gain, and the rest of them are somewhere in between.

I think peterd102 makes an excellent point – the media and politicians are trapped in some sort of disfunctional mutually dependent but mutually destructive relationship, that does cause harm to society.

Take the so called War on Drugs. Talk to any politician, police officer or public health official in private and they will happily concede that the War on Drugs is futile and current drug policies are not working. Talk to any journalist and they will say the same.

But no public figure will come out and say the same in public because the media would crucify them for it.

What can be done to break this cycle of hypocrisy is anyone’s guess.

You include this cheap swipe at politicians in this article: ‘Robust trials on social policy could happen routinely, if politicians weren’t scientifically ignorant and unhelpfully terrified of the possibility that they might have to state – with simple, constructive honesty: “well, we tried this idea, in all good faith, but it didn’t work so we’re dropping it now”.’

But the problem is not the behaviour or scientific literacy of lay politicians, but as always the root of this evil is journalists. I genuinely believe that almost all politicians across the spectrum of colours enter politics selflessly to improve lives of people. They figure that if they made the decisions rather than someone else things might just be better.

Unfortunately journalists create the environment where politicians must gain enough support to become elected. Those individuals that don’t survive in this environment fail Darwin’s selection criteria, and we are left with those that can survive in the journalists’ environment.

It is journalists who believe that it is an unpalatable trait in a politician to try ideas and then drop them. That is why the ’successful’ politicians do not have this trait.

then I have made a mistake, sorry about that, thanks for letting me know, I’ll forward this to the readers editor and I hope they will print a correction.

Ben