>The simple answer is that if I can't afford to maintain a minimal level of environmental and residential standards, I'm not allowed to rent out my property.
That's all well and good, but what happens to the people who are renting there, and what happens to the people who can't afford a place with "minimal level of environmental and residential standards"? Will those people be better off sleeping rough?
Of course not. But neither is it all or nothing; slum or safety net. My point is the root cause needs to be explicitly identified before it can be rectified. The root cause in this case is America's fetishism for small government and smaller taxes.
Woah, I'm not from America, but that seems really wrong. More taxes and bigger government does not create any sort of extra benefit for the poor - the extra taxes will simply go to creating more levels of indirection and inflated prices in existing government.
Why do you think anything with a government stamp is automatically 10x the price? It's not because of people wanting smaller government. Smaller government is about localizing procurement down to the smallest workable level.
Making a huge tender to build these environmentally safe houses for everyone would mean only the biggest and most expensive companies could compete in the 10 year long bidding process. Making a tender for 10 houses for the local poor in your village would be free in comparison, and those 10 houses would be ready before the poor die of old age.
> Why do you think anything with a government stamp is automatically 10x the price?
In general, yes. But not in the best run governments---Singapore comes to mind.
(But even Europe isn't quite as bad as the US. American public procurement---especially for infrastructure projects---is truly hideous and expensive by global standards.)
The Swiss seem a good model if you are looking for how localized government can work.
>But even Europe isn't quite as bad as the US. American public procurement---especially for infrastructure projects---is truly hideous and expensive by global standards.
I don't understand why that is. We paid ten billion dollars to replace the SF Bay Bridge, and it took forever. Now we're going to spend seventy billion for a train that goes from nowhere to nowhere, and very little is actually going toward construction itself.
Is it the cumulative effect of regulations, or the price of labor, or corruption? Something else?
Labour is expensive in American, but not 10x more than in Europe. You also got corruption, but you got that in Europe, too. Especially southern Europe---but Spain is still not a bad as the US at building public infrastructure.
There's some special American factors. One is that your population, and by extension the lawmakers they vote for, don't trust the bureaucrats at all, and thus make try to micromanage the public servants with laws that remove discretion. These laws are intended to remove opportunities for corruption, but they also remove opportunities for common sense.
For example, in most of the US they have to award public contracts to the lowest bidder---no matter how likely the awarders think the lowest bidder is going to overrun schedule and budget.
I've read a bit about these problems (and my summary above is from memory). Even lurking on HN, this topic comes up from time to time in the comments.
Sort of. Also that for some reason, the government can print money to bail out banks, but when it comes to fixing housing and actually help people, it has to come from taxes. I don't quite understand this.
ALL of the government spending has to come from taxes eventually. It can come today or tomorrow. It can be raised smartly or stupidly, but it's going to come from taxes one way or another.
Depends on how you define taxes. Also, some governments own assets and use returns from those.
(And just to be pedantic, historically there's also spoils from conquest.)
There's also government debt. I know you could argue that this has to be paid back eventually---but when interest rates are below inflation, that's a better than free loan. (And in theory they could invest in assets that yield even more, instead of just consuming the difference between inflation and interest.)
Most people buy government debt out of their own volition even at these low rates. (And if it's foreigners buying it, there's even less direct coercion via regulation involved.)
My point is it's immoral to turn people out of their dwellings unless you've provided them a place to go. It's all well and good to say they should have public housing, but until they do have public housing "slumlords" are providing them a place to live.
Adam Smith, father of free market economics, pointed out already 300 years ago the fallacy of this argument. He has a passage about how an Englishman was expected to wear leather shoes while a frenchman could walk barefoot without being ashamed. Further he talks about how in his day a linen shirt if considered a necessity even for the poor while the ancient greeks and romans could do well without it.
So the point is that following your reasoning there is really no end to the depravity you can reach and somebody would still be able to claim that is all fine, because only rich people in the stone age could afford such luxury.
The point Smith made was that poverty is always a relative phenomenon. What is a necessity is always defined in terms of the society you live in. There is no such thing as a universal definition of necessity.
I had an interesting conversation about this with my wife's American parents. Despite the fact that her parents were noticeably better off economically in their childhood than my parents, they felt a severe stigma of poverty my parents never felt. My parent grew up in a country where they were much the same as everybody else. In fact a little better off. They did not feel poor at all. They had a happy childhood both of them. But one of my wife's American parents had a bad childhood, plagued by a strong feeling of being lesser than everybody else. Never having people over on visit out of shame over their own poverty. She was used to seeing everybody else being better off and internet the idea they they were somehow lesser people.
Today my home country is richer than America by GDP per capita but comparisons of wealth and of people's feeling of wealth or poverty is difficult. Many of my american relatives enjoy bigger houses and cars than I do, but one always gets the feeling that their life is much more of a struggle than mine. I live in a smaller house and have no car. But I have no financial worries like them. I have long vacations, I am not constantly overworked. I don't worry about health care insurance, saving for college education to my kids, getting fired.
So I think one should have some respect for the desperation and despair the poor in America feel. Knowing that a surprising car repair or medical bill could send you onto the street in no time. Even poor in much less wealth western countries have to deal with quite that level of insecurity.
Poverty may always be a relative phenomenon (even in Cuba) but there has been no better system to lift people out of the life-threatening effects of abject poverty than capitalism. In fact, you cannot have a success with socialism without a large number of wealthy (or well-off) people to tax, and a society cannot tax itself to prosperity.
> I live in a smaller house and have no car. But I have no financial worries like them. I have long vacations, I am not constantly overworked. I don't worry about health care insurance, saving for college education to my kids, getting fired.
In America, we trade stability for social mobility (probably truer before the WWII), and our government promotes car and home ownership, but I doubt those were tradeoffs you made for longer vacations and "free" health care and education. We became more socialist and fascist after WWII and during the Cold War, but we've still managed to maintain steady income growth for average Americans, despite what the media would have you believe with "household income": http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-discov...
Poverty will always be with us, but there are plenty of things our bureaucrats can give up to fight it better. Our federal government has more or less the same number (very few added in the last 100 years) of representatives despite our population tripling. This system has become more susceptible and beholden to corporate interests, including media corporations that promote stories like this one and the problems and divisions in our society without any context of our achievements and commonality. This promotes bandaid and politically expedient half-measures that only make the problem worse in the long-run.
> In fact, you cannot have a success with socialism without a large number of wealthy (or well-off) people to tax, and a society cannot tax itself to prosperity.
And you can't have success with capitalism without a healthy and prosperous working/poor middle class to be your consumers.
I'm thinking of democratic socialism. It's capitalism with a heavy emphasis on welfare and super strong social safety nets.
If you look at the quality of life index (the "where-to-be-born" index), you'll see that the top 10 countries all employ a form of democratic socialism. That's saying something right there.
Is it fairer to compare not the hovel of today against those of decades past, but the hovel of today to a satisfactory house today? The occupants of today's hovel are competing with the occupants of the decent home, not their ancestors.
If we hope that they might compete fairly to improve their lot, are they started well behind in a house with failing power, or heat or cold that keeps them awake or sick and so on?
Without a fairer playing field, they can fall further behind.
A satisfactory home that complies with regulations would ideally allow the occupant to get a decent sleep, prepare food healthily and present themselves appropriately for work.
no I'm sorry, I live in a house that was a damn luxury a 100 years ago and it's still a pretty fine house today. The houses described in the article would probably look pretty good compared to the poor housing of a 100 years ago, but not like any sort of luxury. The "look at those big screen tvs the poor have" argument does not translate well here.
Indoor plumbing came to rural America in the 1930s.
Electric lighting came to cities in the 1920s.
Electric appliances were rare in the 1920s, even in cities. The first self-contained electric refrigerator was invented in 1923. (Ever wonder why your grandparents probably still call it "the ice box"?)
Cold running water was probably available, but water was still heated by the stove or fire in most places. (The single-lever faucet was only invented in the late 1930s.) Rural water supplies were still via manual wells.
Heating systems were commonly manually fed by coal with no thermostatic control.
A modern small home, with electric lighting, an indoor flush toilet, a refrigerator and other electric appliances, hot and cold running water, thermostatically controlled HVAC, microwave, and cable TV? Absolute luxury compared to the typical house built and lived in in 1916.
My house (a quite respectable house built in the mid-1920s in Cambridge, MA) appears to have originally been fitted with a coal furnace and has had electric lighting retrofitted (originally had gas lighting). An oil furnace was retrofit in 1937. It seems to have had flush toilets from the start.
I guess I will accept those as a list of luxuries that are available now that would have required servants to match before 1916 ( I guess if you had servants the hot and cold running water, the refrigerator and microwave were matched in utility - and servants are a luxury.)
However there are a number of luxuries that have not increased in these years that are pretty important, such as personal space and privacy, my house and I suppose yours have this luxury. The houses I grew up in, and which poor people are living in now, often do not have these luxuries.
There is another thing that it seems was not a luxury in 1916 and is becoming now, relative freedom from the threat of eviction. According to the article there is a greater deal of eviction of today's poor than there was in the past, and I think that luxury might be really important if you have children. Important enough that I would be willing to trade indoor plumbing, microwave and TV for it, maybe some other luxuries if I was given the tools to make up for them (tools like ice delivery and so forth).
Finally given the low quality of poor people's housing not all of these luxuries you list can be counted on as being available, if for example the heating breaks it might take months to fix etc, so the luxury at the level is highly variable.
That's all well and good, but what happens to the people who are renting there, and what happens to the people who can't afford a place with "minimal level of environmental and residential standards"? Will those people be better off sleeping rough?