I normally don't write stuff like this but I did not expect 9 upvotes. I expected a karma hit (but I prefer to just write honestly what I think). That's informative, thank you.

[dead]

I think GP means "masking" instead of "mashing"? And then:

Conservative: "homelessness is a problem! make homelessness illegal and people will get homes because they are homeless by choice!" ("is there any evidence that people are homeless by choice?" *crickets*)

Liberal: "defund the police!" ("but who would deter petty crime?" *crickets*)

A couple examples. They are both common viewpoints that came up in low-key conversation. Other cases are similar. Self-described conservatives vs. liberals I know, seem to adopt a different set of highly correlated views.

Self-described conservative friend: Specific views about dealing with cultural differences that require some kind of resolution. The desire for immediate "simple" solutions, without any signs of awareness or respect for the "others" and why solutions were not attempted before.

My view: Patience is necessary for a real solution. Resolving these kinds of differences takes time, and often is best done case by case directly by the people involved in each situation until a common pattern emerges. The people needing accommodations deserve some extra respect, for the lack of it that made them invisible until recently.

Self-described liberal friend: Inability to consider economic closure over environmental costs, so the market maximizes resource/impact efficiencies relative to their actual costs. The dissonance being this would raise prices.

My view: We are destroying the environment, which economically should be viewed as a commonly held asset, not an unowned asset. The result is we are not optimizing its future value. Any (slowly introduced) rational pricing optimizes both costs and efficiencies, and incentivizes improvements for both. The longer we wait, the more damage our economy subsidizes.

These are reasonable intelligent people. I cannot tell you their nuanced views, just their reactions and a common human theme: reluctance to go deeper.

Well, I guess both risk management and the 5 stages are inherently a human activity. Not too surprised that behaviour transfers across personal/professional boundaries. :D

I don't have a problem.

It's YOUR problem, actually.

I do have a problem, but problems are good if you think about it.

No matter how many problems I fix, there is always a new problem...

These problems aren't that problematic, they're trade-offs.

Indeed.

You could go even further and say that the modern Western preference for whack-a-mole politics rather than long term competence is one of the reasons that countries like China is on the rise.

> would go about preserving a problem like homelessness

My state chose to outlaw homelessness [0] and to make it illegal for cities & counties to offer places to lawfully camp unless the campsites are basically enough to be KOA Campgrounds.

Actually solving homelessness is politically unacceptable, therefore it will be criminalized & preserved.

Notes:

0 - The crime is "unlawful camping".

All you have to do is promote policies that make the problem more palatable but don't actually solve it. Treatments instead of cures. As long as the problem needs treatment, the organizations dedicated to treating it will still be around, but as soon as it is no longer a problem at all, those organizations will cease to exist and everyone working on it needs a new job.

For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

For taxes, it's accountants and tax preparation software like TurboTax or H&R block. The actual solution is to make the tax code simple enough that anyone can understand it and then withhold the appropriate amount so that nobody even needs to file. The big tax preparers have repeatedly lobbied against this.

For medicine, it's lots of prescription medication that you have to be on for life to "manage" your condition, as well as recurrent doctor's visits to diagnose and treat it. The actual solution for the vast majority of conditions that kill Americans today is diet, exercise, fiber, reduce stress, stop smoking, and wear your seatbelt. Modern medicine is also very adept at solving acute problems like broken bones, bacterial infections, appendicitis, etc. But once you've got a chronic condition of indeterminate source (many of which are actually solved by the advice above), you're in the system and can expect to pay through the nose for no solution.

For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

> how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally

Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.

In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.

I think you could solve homelessness really simple by allowing something like a favela. It will be an eyesore so pick an area out of sight of rich people. Then split it into like idk 200sqft plots. Give everyone enough corrugated steel to build a primitive shelter. Have like a central sanitation place with a shitton of toilets and showers.

You start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.

I don't think that anyone believes that some problems like crime and poverty can be solved such that it completely goes away. By 'solving', I meant take action such that the result is obvious in that the problem is greatly diminished.

And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.

The article is written from the perspective of a business / management consultant, rather than a public policy shop perspective. In general, I think social problems move slowly, and solving them in a three year business plan isn't realistic. You'll see many agencies use a version of Mayne's Framework or Contribution Analysis to report on progress for big social problems.

It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.

It's not quite that black and white. You have fixed amount of policing resources and it goes to the most impactful crimes. If crime goes down then they start caring about petty stuff. If it goes back up then they stop.

This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at the margins so a borderline case that might have resulted in removal before now doesn't.

As you note it's unlikely that some problems can be completely solved. But our resource allocation is mostly fixed or varies based on circumstances beyond whatever problem is being solved.

It's going to be a much more granular detail than all of crime. If your job is to investigate counterfeited 27B-6 forms, you are going to be threatened by that form moving to being filed digitally with cryptographic signatures.

The homeless provide a visible incentive to work harder and pay more in rent, and property owners and other taxpayers certainly engage city services (mostly enforcement) in competitive battle for the big bucks. There’s a lot of unrecognized coercion built into the incentive structure underneath the f** y* money tiers. About 50,000,000 hours every day are spent in incarceration, and however many salaries for corrections jobs. The same kinds of system have been around since medieval times.

A LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime.

"75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules.

So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.

I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.

Yeah, it's a little bonkers. I've run into it a few times IRL, and I find that it tends to come from the kind of guy mocked in this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/793/ That is, somebody who is basically unfamiliar with the subtleties of the problem, thinks of an "obvious solution" for it, and then assumes that anybody who doesn't do it isn't trying to solve it.

Why stop at them? Lawyers, politicians, psychologist, bookkeepers, the list goes on and on. Why? Because our GDP includes them. Look the numbers are higher. It doesn't matter if your work promotes a parasitic outcome. The system produces it's own problems and then diligently works to solve them... Yeah, right.

Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

Not quite, but big pharma promotes preventive screening in excess of what is justified. They don't care if false positives create stress and unnecessary, dangerous procedures that eliminate the benefit of screening. They just want to make sure before you die they get a chance to sell their most expensive drugs.

That’s definitely not “inadvertent.”

> Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”

There are plenty of people who are motivated by hurting/harming their "enemies". You may have heard them brag "own the libs", or similar rhetoric, while doing something objectively terrible.

> Do you think people look in the mirror and say “I’m going to be a terrible person today?”

Not so directly, but I do think that a lot of people don't put any effort into being a good person.

Think of the shopping cart problem. Good people return their shopping carts to the store or a cart return. Many people can't be bothered to do that.

People think "oh I'm not bad for leaving my cart in a parking spot" they think "stealing or damaging a shopping cart is what bad people do"

But they're still kinda bad people for not returning their carts. They're certainly choosing not to actively be good people.

Fascinating demonstration of denial

The cool thing about this one is that you don't even have to understand what they said, just learn how to repeat it back to them with a sad look on your face.

Denying the problem exists is not the same.

Denying that the problem is a “problem” would be.

In the first case, the affected do nothing because there is no problem.

In the second, it’s “not a problem” because they did a thing and moved it elsewhere.