5 ms·

Paying a lot of money into education prevents homelessness! Educated people are more likely to find an income than people who have less knowledge of the world.

• regularfry 5y ago
  The same argument applies if you pick a different alternative, though. Money you choose to spend on education (with all its knock-on effects in homelessness, public health, employment, and so on) is money you can't spend on street cleaning, road maintenance, whatever, but also the investment you're making via education in the future homelessness problem is money you can't spend on acute homelessness problems today that can't be reached by education because it's too late for the people involved.
  • zaarn 5y ago
    Then you need to make your spending on these other problems more effective. Give tenants more rights to stay in a home, give people more job security, make mental health programs cheaper and target vulnerable populations. Etc.
    • regularfry 5y ago
      ...and the same argument applies again. It doesn't matter how effective they are, the same logic applies: money you spend on thing A cannot then be used on thing B. That is a choice. I should add that changing things to make them more effective also costs money.
      • zaarn 5y ago
        But can you then spend anything? Because spending anything is also a decision on what is more important? By the argument you propose, spending money seems immoral. But spending money on education and homelessness isn't immoral in most moral frameworks, hence the argument must be faulty. Something must be spend and that means allocating how much to spend on what. Preventing future harm on countless people is morally better than preventing current harm on countable people, hence it must be better to prioritize improving the situation in the future before improving the current situation. In conclusion, we ought to spend on education first (or preventative measures in general), then on everything else.
        • deleted 5y ago
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        • regularfry 5y ago
          > But can you then spend anything? Yes, of course you can. > Because spending anything is also a decision on what is more important? Yes, that is literally true. Or at least, it's true in a rational economic framework, which is the most common shared fiction when people are discussing these things. When a rational actor spends $X, that means they expect to receive a value of more than $X. Between two things that cost $Y, the rational actor will prefer the one with a higher net present value. The decision that society makes about allocation of money is equivalent to a decision of how to represent the intangible portions of the value of a given investment so that the things we as a society deem important have enough money spent on them. > But spending money on education and homelessness isn't immoral in most moral frameworks, hence the argument must be faulty. "Giving benefits only encourages dependence on the state and discourages people from improving their own situation" is a very frequent argument from conservative types. One assumes it's made in good faith. From upthread: > It's a totally valid thing to wonder whether it's the best use of that money there is. You have a particular answer to that question in your head, and that's fine. It does not invalidate the question, nor guarantee that the assumptions leading to your conclusion are universal in time or space.
• edanm 5y ago
  > By spending more on education you may spend less on homeless right now but you can prevent people from becoming homeless. I'm not comparing against education with money for the homeless, specifically. It was just an example that money can be spent on other things we value, and we have to decide what we value more. There's not way around it - you're either spending money on education, or on something else (or just reducing taxes). Of course if you can show that education causes less homelessness, that makes it an obvious "win". (Though I think that you're not grappling with Bryan Caplan's actual argument.) > And on top of that, you can also reform how homelessness works in your country. In Germany, having a home is a fundamental right, why is it not in America? If the assumption is that I'm from the US, I'm not. But solving homelessnes is kind of besides the point I was making anyway :)
• datavirtue 5y ago
  I have the same theory about healthcare. If you put the cost burden 100% on companies (copays, drugs, everything) they will lobby for sensible changes to the system. Sidestepping the glacial pace of reform we find ourselves in now where normal people are picked off one by one.
  • czbond 5y ago
    I believe the same way about taxes. As long as over 50% of the population makes low contribution to actual federal budget, they don't care much about how the money is spent unless it impacts an ideology - which allows forevermore government spending.
• avgcorrection 5y ago
  > Educated people are more likely to find an income than people who have less knowledge of the world. Oh I see. The previously uneducated Scizophrenic people bootstrap themselves off the street by virtue of having read Homer. I doubt that education can directly fix homelessness.