1. Contribute early on little by little
2. Contribute nothing to very little for a while amassing huge fortunes (and compound interest magic), then donate big.
Pretty much the same question as lump sum vs dollar cost averaging in investing.
He's also doing this at when the stock market is very high, which means that this is the cheapest $2 billion he's ever owned. I say that not to undercut the significance, mostly to point out that the stock market is also important to this consideration.
It's not really the same thing, because (assuming a positive ROI) dollar cost averaging will always end up better off than lump sum investing (assuming the same amount is invested).
Seeing how few people make it to the huge fortune stage it seems like a very bad strategy if broadly adopted. How we do it now makes sense, contribute as much as you are comfortable with regardless at which step of the ladder you are on.
I think history gives a bit of the answer. There's always been work done to help homeless people, and it never really got better.
Worst part IMO is that it's not to be a money sink. I deeply believe that homelessness is mostly emotional, these guys need deep moral support and a bit of material support. But you can't buy moral support. Having someone drop 2B might help motivate society and finally realize how to fix the problem, even if not all the money is spent.
I think that may be overstating things[1], though I agree it's a tough problem. Lots of folks need some extra help, they're disabled, they have mental illnesses, or substance addictions (or all of the above). Just giving them a tiny house or apartment is not enough to keep them housed. But typically we fund programs to address all of those problems separately, with varying degrees of cooperation between them.
Money given today pays dividends in the lives of those who benefit and the lives of people who are around them, it just doesn't show up on any balance sheet. The after school program that provides the missing support network for a child, keeping them out of a street gang and later prison, and helping them develop the skills to find gainful employment pays hidden dividends of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for society. Also there are second and third order effects that amplify those gains further. If that money was instead earning 5% in an endowment fund, it may keep the name of a robber baron alive for perpetuity, but it does far less for society today. And if you could trace the knock-on effects of the money given today, you would likely find that the benefits distributed throughout society accumulate quicker than the 5% rate of growth achieved by that endowment fund.
If you amass a huge fortune through paying your workers low wages, it would probably be best to avoid amassing that huge fortune, give your workers a larger share of your profits, and allow them to donate themselves. It helps you to avoid the temptation to cynically set up a tax-offsetting fund to avoid potential legislation that forces you to contribute to the communities where you are located.
Either way, it's good to figure out how to contribute back to a country who created your wealth, by allowing you to operate a business for two decades without being subject to the sales taxes that the long-shuttered businesses who previously employed your desperate applicants were required to pay.
So donate to politicians early so you don't have to pay taxes, donate to charity to avoid taxes later, buy a newspaper somewhere in between.
That ignores the psychology of your Bezoses and Gateses, though.
They are maniacally obsessed with growing their companies as much as possible, and everything they do works towards that goal. They don't have time for philanthropy, or worrying about social issues, while they're doing that.
Gates was able to give so much away because he shifted focus after leaving Microsoft. Hopefully others like him will follow.
I would recommend you do both. Give a little (but only less than 1%) of what you make today, but aim to make a ton of money. Once you've made the money, give all you can. Your children don't need that much to live a life without work (10-20M).
It's more important to know how you give and whom you give it too. I'm of the opinion that given $5 to a homeless person is much more effective than giving $5 to a charity.
That he subverted democracy by threatening the Seattle city council as they attempted to address their homelessness crisis makes me skeptical of this effort. I doubt we can do much to fix the underlying issues in a context where billionaires can intimidate governments into surrendering power to their unilateral, authoritarian control.
I don’t agree with Bezos on a few things, but this is big. It’s about time companies care for their down and out compatriots.
Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans—this is a nice start. Let’s see where it goes.
Wonder if he’ll get Bernie to contribute (tongue in cheek)
The best way for companies to care for their down and out compatriots is to pay their workers their due instead of profiting handsomely from underpaying them.
This is something I have legitimately wondered for a while now, and maybe someone on here with an economics background has some links to share:
Which is more economically efficient:
1. Pay workers above-market wages
2. Pay workers market wages, but use taxes and some sort of welfare to bring the workers effective income up to where it would be had you paid them above-market wages.
Presumably the taxes used to fund Option 2 would be something like a wealth tax (including corporate wealth).
My non-economist intuition is that Option 1 could have weird effects on the economy due to paying non-market-based wages.
the problem is that the "market wages" generate both humanitarian disasters of poverty and also demand gaps wherein people can't afford to buy goods, which puts a drag on the economy.
#2 is an issue because government transfers nearly always have terms attached. people get food stamps for food, housing assistance for housing, etc. so demand gaps can still occur because people still don't have the "right" kind of money. plus, it's less efficient because the government has to be involved.
i'm in favor of a wealth tax, however. implementation issues aside, it's the most realistic chance we have of making businesses pay up.
> Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans
We have homeless, we have veterans, we have addicts, we have people with mental health issues and we have illegal immigrants. The latter gets much more vocal support from progressives over fellow americans. We can have an influence on how we treat compatriots. So while some progressives want to subsidize services out of our tax dollars for people who have not contributed to our society, they don’t fight for fellow Americans in need with the same vigor, nor do they even denounce the policies or governments in those countries which contribute to those counties’ economic malaise —quite the opposite, some admire Chavista and Catroist policies.
I have never seen or heard of progressives voting down on programs meant to help the homeless, veterans, addicts, people with mental health issues, or illegal immigrants. I do see progressives being more vocal about illegal immigrants because that is the only group that is vilified by the current administration. Illegal immigrants do contribute to society by being nanny's, cleaning houses, working at farms, and paying sales tax.
Disagree. Progressives very actively campaign on helping all of those groups of people. It's the centrist democrats who are focusing solely on illegal immigrants--to the neglect of the others--because it's a corporate-friendly issue.
If progressives were really serious about helping the poor, they'd all become extremely wealthy and donate 1% of their wealth to a fund for the homeless.
> It’s about time companies care for their down and out compatriots.
A nit, but this is still a little like dominoes fixing pot holes in the city so their drivers can actually deliver. Sure it's great, but it would be better to pay a more fair share of taxes and provide a safety net for our people and the money needed to maintain common infrastructure.
I don't doubt this will be a more efficient endeavor than a government one, but it's also not really accountable to anyone. And bezos can actually just hire two PR people and shut the rest of it down. He has no obligation to homeless people, and no obligation to see this to the end. I'm sure he will, but it's pretty fucked to think that companies will be less self interested in their charity than in their business, or a government.
The idea that we should just make a few mega rich then depend on their kindness to address societies woes is really toxic.
Agree with almost everything you wrote. But given the track record of big philanthropy I doubt very much that this will be more efficient than government efforts.
> Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans—this is a nice start.
That's pretty presumptuous of you, isn't it?
For one, it ignores that the system and actions that give Bezos the ability to do this, i.e. accumulation of wealth, are a contributor to problem itself. Second, he'll use this as both a distraction and tax write-off. Third, rubber meeting the road isn't just about money. I spend many, many hours each month doing service within my community - from youth groups, to after-school programs, to community cleanup, etc. As do many of my friends, both conservative and progressive.
Trust me, he isn't special. $2 billion is LESS THAN 2% of his net worth!!
So, yeah, he's still a scourge, but I'll happily encourage him to distribute the wealth he builds off of the exploitation of average people.
But with Amazon you don't have to build your own storefront, or online site at all. Just make a listing, and ship to FBA. I imagine that alone creates more businesses.
Businesses originally existed and had a profit margin. Then Amazon came along and competed directly against that profit margin so businesses lost business. Then Amazon said you can sell on our site, but in order to compete there businesses had to compete at the new lower profit margin, but then ontop of that give a slice of that to Amazon, so now they are losing profit margin, but losing more giving amazon a slice of the pie. It will take a LOT of extra business to make that part up. Walmart is a town killer, Amazon is a business killer.
There is more glory in philanthropy than in paying your employees. The ROI in terms of reputation is higher.
Addition: the same is true for funding something like a computer lab at a school. Lots of good PR for funding a new one but nothing for keeping an existing one funded for the next few years. Although I think it's more valuable to make sure existing infrastructure stays funded.
You aren't anywhere near cynical enough. Taken far enough, programs to "help the homeless" -- instead of programs to reduce homelessness -- are a de facto plot to keep homelessness alive and well. It's a form of oppression of the masses.
I don't necessarily agree with you, but another interesting take on this is by Slavoj Zizek, who argues that charitable giving perpetuates the problem:
There's a place for charity in the world. But charity doesn't you give you a middle class life. When a man worth many billions can't be arsed to pay his employees a living wage, but wants to kick a few bucks towards "helping the homeless", something smells very rotten.
Given that Bezos envisions, for example, creating a network of preschools in low-income areas, I'd say he's at least thinking about helping people get out of cyclical poverty.
Still, I'd also like to see Amazon pay its employees better...
Or he could just pay his employees adequately so they aren't forced to live in poor neighborhoods and they could afford to pay for private preschool themselves if they decided for themselves this makes sense for their family.
But, no, that he won't do. Which means there's actually a hidden agenda here.
Actions speak louder than words. You can charitably argue that he needs a good therapist to help him root out subconscious bias, but you aren't going to convince me he's somehow doing a good thing here.
so the one person that reads the article gets down-voted to oblivion, thanks for taking the fall mate! Your altruism will not go unnoticed
I was going to comment about the preschools and how that idea came from ideas solicited by the public because everyone was just assuming it was just arbitrary helicopter money exclusively for PR
I've read the article. I've also had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I spent nearly 6 years homeless and got myself off the street without going through a program. The programs are often revolving doors that don't really fix the intractable personal problems that are a root cause of homelessness.
The other two big issues: inadequate income and lack of affordable housing. Bezos is directly responsible for his employees lack of adequate wages, an issue he won't fix.
No, he is going to build preschools in poor neighborhoods so that poor kids can get properly educated and break the cycle of poverty 2 decades from now when they grow up.
Conveniently kicks the can down the road and does nothing to solve homelessness in the here and now, plus comes with all kinds of plausible deniability. "Just wait 2 decades! You'll see! It will help them... Eventually!"
"The beatings shall continue until morale improves." and all that.
> The other two big issues: inadequate income and lack of affordable housing. Bezos is directly responsible for his employees lack of adequate wages, an issue he won't fix.
You realize that if Bezos gave all the Amazon employees 'adequate wages' that you would then still be blaming him for inadequate housing? Or at least different people in Seattle would.
> No, he is going to build preschools in poor neighborhoods so that poor kids can get properly educated and break the cycle of poverty 2 decades from now when they grow up.
The horror. Setting up lower socioeconomic statuses for long term success.
Would it help if the article didn't masquerade this effort as a cure all?
The horror. Setting up lower socioeconomic statuses for long term success.
Poor children live with enormous daily stress and chronic lack of adequate nutrition sets up permanent problems that tend to be unreasonable. Children with stunting earn less wages over the course of their lives and have many other intractable problems.
There is always some hoop to jump through for the poor as to why adequate money must come someday down the road - just not today.
A la President Clinton famously announcing that he didn't want to give a tax cut because poor people would just spend their money foolishly and he was more qualified than them to spend their money wisely.
Would it help if the article didn't masquerade this effort as a cure all?
It would help if you would drop the sarcasm and contempt and take me seriously as a subject matter expert.
You came out of the woodworks because Jeff Bezos is doing something with money and the PR engine is masquerading this as a panacea to chronic homelessness. You want the world to know that "something" isn't enough and isn't holistic enough. And I'm right here in the middle saying "huh preschools thats kind of interesting"
I know plenty of people that do things for schools, Jeff Bezos doing things for more schools (or at least on the subject of schooling) at once is nice. I support that. Its not the only thing he might do, not the only thing he has to do, or plans to do, yet it is interesting that he's being held to a separate standard solely from the announcement alone.
If he just said "yo I'm making preschools its gonna be lit", a wild Doreen Michele would have never appeared. But because it was billed as a solution to homelessness and impoverished areas, here comes college educated Doreen Michele to let everyone know its totally wrong and misguided!
a wild Doreen Michele would have never appeared. But because it was billed as a solution to homelessness and impoverished areas, here comes college educated Doreen Michele to let everyone know its totally wrong and misguided!
That's incredibly dismissive.
For one thing, I'm simply here a lot. I didn't "come out of the woodwork" like some lurker who normally keeps my mouth shut.
For another, I comment on lots of different subjects, not just homelessness. I'm well known for my views on homelessness, but long before that I was a homeschooling parent and Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. It isn't at all unusual for me to comment on education and related subjects.
I'm not a big fan of the idea out there that poor families are helped by good preschool education. One of my sons went to preschool and he really benefited tremendously because he had specific issues I wanted addressed. So I'm well aware that preschool can be a good thing and I would rather see more money spent on preschool than on prisons and there are studies that show that spending more on preschools reduces how much we spend on prisons.
But I would much, much, much rather see parents make enough money that they can make choices like whether or not they want one parent to be home full time. I think we really, seriously undervalue full time parents.
(Please note that I am saying parents, not mothers. I get a lot of BS off of people who like to imagine I mean only mothers should be at home with kids.)
I've thought long and hard about a lot of subjects that happen to intersect here and even studied some of them formally.
I'm also medically handicapped and I happen to spend more time on HN on days when I am short of sleep or not feeling so hot, like today. That is a much, much bigger factor in me leaving multiple comments in this discussion (as well as others) than the topic per se.
Though I will say this comment is evidence that your opening line is probably not entirely disingenuous. You are taking me seriously enough to apparently view me as some kind of threat (to what? I have no clue) and thus feel some need to try to shoot me down personally.
It is hard for me to differentiate users, but I don't consider your activity on HN a crutch or needing rational
Glad to hear more about your background in this area though
Jeff Bezos says his action was guided by something akin to a public comment period. Not sure how anyone would have known that in advance but maybe thats something you can contribute to in the future, or push for more billionaires and well funded organizations to take suggestions from the public
Given the ROI that corporations get on lobbying, it would seem to be a better investment to "solve" this issue is to lobby for a tax sufficient to provide funding of preschools, but I suppose that's not a good philosophical fit for a bezos foundation...
I see some parallels with aid sent to Africa. Charitable giving can alleviate suffering short term with the side effect of perpetuating suffering long term.
> Aid [to Africa] is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.
You might enjoy reading Diet for a small planet. It gets remembered as a vegetarian cookbook, but the first half of the book is about international politics and how food aid is part of the problem.
I think the point is that if his business is making so much money to make him the worlds richest person and his company one of the top two in the world, you would HOPE that would trickle down into good jobs throughout his business such that people who work for him had no need of public assistance.
And for a lot of families that is the difference between a staycation and Disneyland. Don’t underestimate how much an unexpected infusion of cash helps people that are near paycheck to paycheck.
EDIT: For comparison, 50k USD is approximately 65k CAD, which makes higher than the median starting salary for a mechanical/electrical engineer in Canada. I would be surprised if they are paying their lowest-paid employees that much.
The $2B isn't over 1 year...it's over several years or decades. In reality it would be a few dollars per year extra for 600K employees. Let's not get carried away.
Why don’t you spend a little more time thinking critically about the real options faced by the working poor in a society with vast inequality and decades of flat wage growth?
That’s a complicated issue. I’d hope they’d get better jobs, but in the interim, should any full-time position be permitted to pay an unlivable wage? If so, why?
This means that the public is subsidizing a company owned by the richest man in the world because he refuses to pay his employees a living wage. Doesn't this sound wrong?
No, because the government subsidizing it reduces the amount people are able to work for. If it's a choice between starving being worked extremely hard by Amazon vs just starving, why would people be choosing the former?
Yes and presumably other companies should also pay them more but I suppose the blame is more focused on Amazon/Bezos because he is the richest person in the world and this article is about him.
These people needed government support, and Bezos is giving them a job, so now they need less government support than they did before. Bezos is helping to give money to people who would have otherwise been totally on welfare.
Turn it around again, Amazon has underrun the competition that was paying living wages before and destroyed the jobs those people had before, by not paying taxes.
Their competitors were not paying "living" wages. Brick and mortar retail, especially mom&pop stores, were notorious for paying low wages.
Destroying jobs is a good thing. It means that Amazon can pass on the savings to consumers. I know that Amazon is disliked in Seattle & the bay area, but if you go around the rest of the country, people love amazon.
It's wrong but how is it the company's fault? It is the government's responsibility to set a minimum wage. How come the blame doesn't fall on the policy makers and lobbyists?
It does. You're left with little recourse when policy makers and lobbyists are apathetic or actually working against the public good (by refusing to raise the minimum wage, which hasn't increased in some places for over a decade, and should be indexed to inflation).
Can you not assign blame to someone abusing a broken system? Surely you can. They are still abusing the system.
We can argue until we're blue in the face about whose fault it is and who should be responsible for ensuring workers are paid a livable wage, but I would hope that we can all agree on this:
If you work full-time and you do a good job, then you should earn a wage that you can live on.
The question is, "what is a living wage?" The goal posts keep shifting...which doesn't help the case for this. If it were just "you can afford rent and food" that would be fine, I suppose...but it has now extended to so many other things that I wouldn't really call necessities.
Should Amazon workers only barely be able to afford rent and food. Should they have $0 left over after rent+groceries? $1? What amount is reasonable, vs what amount becomes excessive? What if they have a child? Or an elderly parent? Or student loans?
> but it has now extended to so many other things that I wouldn't really call necessities.
What ridiculous lavish spending do you think Amazon warehouse workers are capable of buying with their (on average ~$12/hr) wages?
The general argument is that a living wage should cover life. All people are entitled to enough money that they can pay for rent, pay for food, pay for healthcare, pay for basic transportation, and have some amount of discretionary money to spend anyway they want (like say, raising a family, or continuing their education, or having a hobby, or volunteering for a cause their passionate about, or whatever)
I consider it everything up to the level of participation in democratic politics and civil society. Different people may put different needs and functions above or below their line of demarcation.
breathable air
drinkable water
nutritious food
safe shelter
quiet and dark sleeping area
secure property storage
equal access to the commons
basic education
job skills education
scientific/analytic education
access to communication
access to markets
personal mobility
medical care
social contact
family formation
social organization
political influence
.------------------------------
< this is where I draw my line
'------------------------------
mercantile education
philosophical education
luxury goods
psychological individuation
independent exploration or introspection
artistic and aesthetic pursuits
finding a meaning in life
spiritual enlightenment
Veblen goods
Yeah, it does. But Bezos/Amazon is simply taking advantage of the laws and the political system (just like many corporations pay so little tax). The real solution is to raise the minimum wage, plug tax loopholes etc and not expect billionaires to play fair, out of the goodness of their hearts.
What's even the point of government services then?
If I use roads or public parks, or my social security, does that mean that my employer never paid me enough, then?
And we already have a concept that covers this. It is called the minimum wage. It makes no sense to talk about government services that people are using when you should instead just raise the minimum wage.
Because the taxpayers are effectively subsidising their employer by “topping up” their wages to the true market level . We see this happening alot in the UK too.
Those benefits are public resources that could be used for other things, like helping the homeless. You could say that taxpayers are subsidizing Bezos' PR stunt
There's a good 2-part podcast about Benevolent Billionaires from the "Citations Needed" podcast that goes a bit over the history of billionaire benevolence and what the good deeds cover up.
Just until someone actually responds... I haven't watched part 2, but I remember part 1 being focused on Bill Gates as the main example to showcase their points. A big focus is how non-profit organizations aren't as benevolent as they appear to be. For example how Bill Gates' charity has more money than it began with and how a lot of what's classified as "charity" ends up being stuff like media influence and making a documentary about why private schools are gonna save education in America. They also point out how easy the media goes on Gates and other "charitable" billionaires and how seriously they take their worldviews despite not having any real education in, say, economic theory or history.
There's nothing to say that people were offered full-time work and opted for part-time instead. Regardless of employee preference, it's still not apples to apples if trying to make a comparison to income qualifying for government benefits.
Is a business owner that only requires part-time work supposed to hire full-time workers for some arbitrary reason all of a sudden?
Reminds me of the writing coming from Anand Giridharadas. In the New York Times last month he wrote:
"...even as they give back, American elites generally seek to maintain the system that causes many of the problems they try to fix — and their helpfulness is part of how they pull it off. Thus their do-gooding is an accomplice to greater, if more invisible, harm."
Sounds nice on paper, but that's not how accounting works.
While Bezos' wealth has skyrocketed in the last year, the portion of that wealth that actually came out of the Amazon ledgers was under $2 million in 2017. [1]
Since it is the responsibility of the company to compensate employees, at most Bezos' cut is taking $2 million out of the pie, which divided across the several hundred thousand Amazon employees would give each worker less than $20 per year. Not exactly life changing.
Regardless of whether or not Amazon should pay employees more, basing that argument on the CEO's capitol gains on long-standing investments is ridiculous.
So brave of him to donate 1.2% of his vast fortune to a PR project with his name on it! This really makes up for the whole FOXCONN-level human despair harvesting labor practices thing imo. Hell, we don't even need to go through with that legislation any more.
I hope this works and is successful. Still I can’t help but be reminded of the saying that roughly goes “the people who are paid to solve a problem end up having a vested interest in the problem not being solved.”
Specifically with regards to homelessness, the problem seems to be the critical shortage of housing for people in general, leading to a total crisis of affordable housing, rather than a specific problem of insufficient services exclusively for “the homeless.” Certainly there are people who need support above and beyond affordable housing, but isn’t the bedrock of this whole crisis the shortage of homes in the places where people are trying to live and work?
At some point you have to blame the homeless people themselves. I've been walking up to them searching for a hot-spot and found that nearly none of them are choosing to make money by being walking routers anymore.
Also interesting to find out that there aren't any vacant homes anymore.
Every time I see Seattle mentioned on HN, there is someone who says something to the effect of "That is all very nice, but let's talk about the homeless problem in Seattle." Considering that that is where Amazon's SWE core is, it might be profitable for Bezos to see this problem reduced/resolved.
That's why surgeons always leave a little cancerous tissue, to maximize their chances of getting paid to do another operation.
(Since HN probably won't get that: it's a satirical joke meant to point out some flaws in the commenter's argument. There's no evidence at all that the people involved in, say, providing services for the public have any desire to see the public suffer more so that they can roll in that awesome $30K/year social worker salary for a little longer. Pretty sure that the folks that run soup kitchens would be very happy to close up shop if the need disappeared. Etc. The idea that this is some initiative of Big Homelessness to rake in the gravy is..... sad.)
He's obviously trying to diffuse the momentum of a movement that is aligning against him. The most popular politician in America just introduced the Stop BEZOS act:
The 2B are less costly than losing the whole shebang. I would not be surprised in the least if he ends up still controlling the 2B and this ends up as just a headline.
You know he could just pay his staff more directly. I guess he found a loophole where the money ends up at the same place, but this way it's more of a tax write-off.
Earlier this year, under pressure from Amazon and other large employers, Seattle’s City Council repealed an employee head tax designed to provide housing and services for the homeless. In a statement, Amazon called the vote “the right decision for the region’s economic prosperity. We are deeply committed to being part of the solution to end homelessness in Seattle and will continue to invest in local nonprofits” that work with the homeless.
Speaking as a Seattle resident, and despite my dislike for Bezos, this was a stupid tax - more connected to Seattle's dysfunctional politics than solving our bad homeless problem. Among other things, it was keyed to revenues not profits (specifically to target Amazon) but it ended up burning the likes of grocers who provide decent jobs but don't have a lot of margin even with large revenues. Good riddance to it and a pox on our local Pol Pot that drove it.
My 2 cents is that Amazon isn't a major cause. There's a few things going on(1):
- exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues
- Seattle does a remarkably crappy job of assigning the low income housing we build and/or contract for. Too many people get it who shouldn't qualify. Too many non-profits cherry pick their clients. Etc, etc.
- It's super hard to get coherent services out of the system. Which makes it self-selecting in the sense of concentrating the worst cases.
Amazon, to a certain degree, was/is part of running up the price of apartments and homes. Some homelessness is a consequence, but mostly that pushed people further (or totally out) of the area.
I'm not at all convinced that if we raise 2x the money, we'll spend it intelligently enough to make a difference here.
(1)My partner worked in the area homeless system and I'm getting a lot of my info from that.
> - exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues
I think cause and effect are backwards here. Low wages and high housing prices seem like they'd naturally lead to homelessness and rates of drug addiction and mental illness among the homeless, although very high compared to the general population, are nowhere near as high as people would like to think.
It's not controversial to say the sky is blue because you can turn up a couple people who say it is green. You've really never heard of people turning to drink or drugs because of, day, the death of a family member? You can't see why someone who sleeps rough might seek escape through psychoactive drugs?
You don't have to be a drug addict to be homeless, the majority of homeless people are not, nor are the majority (or even a substantial minority) seriously mentally ill.
I think these people are referring to those visible on the streets, and not living out of their car or in the shadows of homelessness. Oftentimes in Seattle the people who are visible are unfortunately in the worst shape, mentally or otherwise.
rates of drug addiction and mental illness among the homeless, although very high compared to the general population, are nowhere near as high as people would like to think.
Probably because nobody notices the clean, sane person living out of their car. We probably need better terminology, like functional vs. dysfunctional homeless, or something.
I feel like the reason it's so prevalent is less a question of terminology and more a question of absolution -- if, after all, the homeless have some immutable characteristic that makes them homeless, there's nothing society could have done for them.
> - exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues
Unless there's another reason we would expect mental health issues to increase I don't see why this would lead to more homelessness.
I also talked to one of the people in charge of a non profit for providing housing to the homeless and he was saying how the longer people stay homeless, the less likely it is that they will ever be able to integrate with society again.
I am much more inclined to believe homelessness is causing the mental health issues than vice versa. Or at least I don't see why Seattle's homeless problem would be caused by greater rates of mental illness than previously seen and compared to that of other cities.
> A relatively small percentage of all homeless people nationwide — 13% to 15% — are mentally ill, but their symptoms — paranoia and delusions — draw attention and mislead others into thinking their numbers are greater, Culhane said.
> However, Los Angeles’ homeless population skews heavily to single adults who have lived in the streets a year or longer — a subgroup with a high incidence of mental health issues. Local authorities estimate that 30% of the county’s homeless people have serious mental illness.
I recently moved away from Seattle but that seems correct to me.
I don't think the problem is REALLY Amazon's fault per se, since they are just paying people more than other companies in the area which I think most people would agree is a good thing.
I think the problem is more that we in the US treat housing as an investment which makes people more willing to pay higher prices and to borrow money to buy a house. When people see the housing prices increase then that further raises housing prices.
The issue is that housing prices, and subsequently rent, increasing is not a good thing for society. Even though the value of the house has changed, the house itself hasn't changed at all, and yet people now have less money to spend on other things. The only thing it really does is make banks and people who were already well off enough to buy a house wealthier.
Sadly I have no idea what we can do to solve this that isn't communist.
As a fellow Seattle resident the arguments seem to break down this way:
(From the left)
1) Amazon contributed to homelessness by increasing property values by paying too many engineers too much money
2) We don't have an income tax, so that increase in wealth does not come back to pay for services
(From the right)
1) Enforcement of laws about sleeping in public spaces is very low so people feel comfortable being homeless here.
2) Increases of property taxes have increased rents leading people to not be able to afford rents
(From both left and right)
Housing developers are buying up as many cheap places as possible and turning them into high end houses that only the rich can afford muscling out people that could have both those cheaper places.
My take:
If you isolate and fixated on one variable being the only cause of a problem, it's pretty easy to create a narrative, but the answer is probably more complicated and the solution is probably even more complicated.
Let's go back a little bit further in the history. In 2010, Washington took a shot at an income tax for individuals making over $200,000 a year. Bezos spent $100,000 to oppose that (along with a lot of other wealthy Washingtonians). Bezos also didn't support the Seattle income tax, although as far as I know he didn't spend money to oppose it.
The head tax was suboptimal and, yeah, stupid. Nobody would have proposed it if Seattle didn't have a regressive tax system. Compare us to Texas, another state with no income tax -- our property taxes are substantially lower. Seattle's infrastructure problems will continue because the city is underfunded to deal with them.
Anyhoo, I'm glad Bezos is spending this money on the homeless. I would recommend that he divert some of it to a deep dive into Seattle's problems. I think that committing to solve the problem in one city would yield insights that would be very valuable when he expands the program elsewhere.
- earlier years - there have been Washington state income taxes proposed over the years, which have been usually shut down. googling shows the last might've been Senate Bill 6559 in 2016 - https://www.theolympian.com/news/politics-government/article...
The inability to pass a city income tax or a state income tax has been part of the arguments for why a head tax was proposed in 2018 - it's not ideal, but everything else in the past has been rejected.
Yanis Varoufakis (fmr greek minister of finance) gave a talk in Seattle a few months ago talking about the head tax: https://youtu.be/Z0M24CEEMFk?t=2m16s
Oh yeah, just like Prop 1 in Olympia WA in 2016/2017.
Prop 1 is an initiative to "help educate the children of Olympia", using a little tax to help pay for college tuition. So noble!
Except: it proposes a levy on households of $200K or more (not constitutional in Washington), is an income tax, also not constitutional in Washington, requires the city of Olympia to fund the administration with no enforcement clauses, and multiple groups have already announced that they intend to sue the City if it's passed (which it will, because it's a 'think of the kids' measure), and the City knows it won't win but could not get the measure struck off so is already budgeting for constitutional lawyers. Hell, the City doesn't have the authority to see these people's tax statements, so it'd rely entirely on self-reporting. It's just a mess.
So you look a bit closer, and who is pushing this bill? A group of locals just concerned about local education?
No. A bunch of multi-millionaires from Seattle who want to use this as a proving ground for their challenges to state taxation law. Of the top ten donors, not one has ever lived in the County, let alone the City, nor does any of them have any children who attended school in either. (Olympia, like most state capitals, is far smaller than the largest city in the state), which makes you wonder why they're not pushing this in Seattle/King County - probably because they don't want their own taxes going to fund the defense of a proposition that's very specifically unconstitutional.
you might want to check up on the actual breakdown of that specific head tax bill, there is a bunch of fairly neutral and level-headed discussions of it on Seattle subreddits. Tldr, it was really bad, as it hurt a bunch of small to medium sized local businesses that everyone uses, but somehow no one thought of when crafting the bill, and they were among the ones spearheading the repeal.
The only thing that bill illustrated to me personally is how ineffective and ridiculously bad Seattle government officials are. Passed with a 9-0 vote, repealed extremely shortly after with 7-2.
There are so many options out there today but the customer experience isn’t as good as amazon. Fact is amazon’s customer obsession is a real thing, and so they’re deservedly winning customers right now. If they ever slipped, Walmart is definitely eyeing their spot.
States aren’t solving homelessness issues any time soon. Homelessness hits mostly men, and the fewer women (1/3 to 1/8 depending on city) have available beds in shelters anyway.
In France we prefer to let homeless people die by freezing than assign them to a female shelter bed. That’s how far we go to protect women from the risk of being raped. Die, men, die.
If the state had more money? They’d simply assign it to the sexism campaigns. Or to one of the 2000 battered woman shelters in USA (and only one for men – hence homelessness?).
From A History of Richard the Third by Jacob Abbott (1901):
"This ceremony being concluded, a company of heralds came forward before the king, and proclaimed 'a largesse,' as it was called. The ceremony of a largesse consisted in throwing money among the crowd to be scrambled for. Three times the money was thrown out, on this occasion, among the guests in the hall. The amount that is charged on the royal account-book for the expense of this largesse is one hundred pounds."
"Philanthropy" is just another way that oligarchs take tax-free control of our society and shape it to their whims. A fine example of this is Bill Gates - with no educational training or experience, he used his fortune to push failing methods on millions on American kids.[1]
Bezos is a great creator of poverty. He is the wrong person to try and fix it. We need to just make these oligarchs pay taxes and living wages, full-stop.
Potentially hot take: charitable donations (perhaps over a certain small amount) should not be tax-deductible. "Philanthropy" by the ultra-rich is essentially just them deciding where their tax dollars go.
Gates also has no educational training in Computer Science / Engineering nor Business, and he's seem to have done pretty well in those areas. :)
There's plenty of room to throw rocks at billionaire philanthropists, but Gates is more knowledgeable about the areas in which his foundation operates than the heads of most well-known non-profits and relief organizations.
> Gates is more knowledgeable about the areas in which his foundation operates than the heads of most well-known non-profits and relief organizations.
This is laughably absurd. Come on.
Edited because I was still thinking about this
Who do you think knows more about Malaria, Bill Gates (who is incredibly knowledgeable about Malaria) or Dr. Pedro Alonso who runs the WHO's malaria program?
> His professional career began in The Gambia in the 1980s. A study on the validation of verbal autopsies was followed by the scientific assessment of the efficacy of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) as a preventive tool against malaria. The utility of such nets was, at the time, controversial, and the publication of new results in The Lancet[1] was critical for the launching of subsequent studies confirming first evaluations. Based on this evidence, WHO recommended the universal use of ITNs as a vector control tool, since a pillar in the fight against malaria. It is estimated that extensive distribution programs of ITNs can claim responsibility for 69% of the 663 million of averted malaria cases in Subsaharan Africa between 2001 and 2015.[2]
..
> With the support of the Hospital Clínic and the University of Barcelona, he founded in 2006 the Barcelona Centre for International Health Research (CRESIB). In this institution he accomplished one of his most renowned works, the contribution to the clinical development and impact assessment of a new malaria vaccine: RTS,S. In collaboration with the Manhiça Health Research Centre in Mozambique, he implemented two proofs of concept that established for the first time the efficacy of the vaccine in infants[3] and children aged 1–4 years.[4] These results opened the door to subsequent assessments and to a Phase 3 clinical trial performed in 11 African research centres. Ultimately, this vaccine received a positive assessment by the European Drugs Agency, in 2015,[5] while the highest expert committees at WHO have recommended that it starts to be utilized, as of 2018, in pilot programs in three African countries.[6]
I appreciate you editing to acknowledge that Gates does, in fact, know a _lot_ about these topics (the main point I was trying to address with the parent post).
I was thinking of your example (and others in the WHO) as exceptions when I said "most". I more had in mind people who run organizations like the Red Cross.
Anyways, did not mean to denigrate the non-political / non-figurehead appointments.
I just finished reading the book "human universals" which mentions that we're neither in a full democracy nor a full autocracy, so we're in a de facto oligarchy.
So where as I've often sneered at Russia for it's oligarchs we clearly have the same issue. Perhaps the Western oligarchs have earned their money more transparently, but they're still oligarchs.
Also one of the human universals is that we admire generosity in leaders, so these grandiose gifts are what oligarchs love.
No one's shaming him for not doing something better. They're shaming him for having a direct role in creating the problem this charity is supposed to resolve.
Yes. We should tax billionaires out of existence. This level of wealth and power accumulation is as unseemly as it is dangerous to our democracy and economy.
Not sure if that’s the line of reasoning. A well known danger of democracy is rule by mob. For instance a tough thing to get right is protecting rights of minority groups. If everyone voted for their own direct benefit, we’d just be locking minorities up and taking their assets with power of the majority. Luckily doesn’t seem to happen much.
If the government taking things by force, or by the implied threat of force, is bad, then taxation is bad, and if you don't have any kind of taxation you don't have a government in any meaningful sense.
I think taxes are a bit better because you're also agreeing to pay your own money (vs only taking other people's money only as the original commenter said). I had a different reading of "taking other people's money by force" as meaning specifically voting to tax a minority group more just because you can. This is based on the GP comment being "We should tax billionaires out of existence" as opposed to "taxes are immoral"
That isn't taxing a "minority group." It's just progressive taxation, an idea almost everyone accepts to some extent. "Taxing billionaires out of existence" could be achieved simply by increasing marginal tax rates.
billionaires are literally a minority group. they certainly don't need protected status, but, whether or not it is "good" to take their money, they can't effectively oppose this just by voting.
The argument for preventing one person to amass that much wealth is at least in part that it gives them tremendous political influence. The preferences of Sheldon Adelson arte far more consequential than an average voter living in the same district, for instance. Appropriating the language of "minority" discrimination, which traditionally refers to marginalized groups, to talk about people who are very rich strikes me as distasteful.
one could just as easily make the argument that academics and social theorists have appropriated a word that has a commonly understood statistical meaning. no one objects to calling the alawites of syria a "minority group", even though they are relatively privileged and literally control the country. especially in the context of a (putative) democracy, it makes sense to use the word in the statistical sense.
Nonetheless, most of us would agree that some abridgement of rights is acceptable for this "minority group." This is why I don't think talking this way is helpful.
You could make that argument as well, but I'm specifically talking about Amazon's underpayment of workers and efforts to kill taxes that would fund efforts meant to curb homelessness, among other things. Some of the other replies to my comment have links to articles about these.
In case you don't care to read an article they're just coming off an effort to kill a tax that would have affected them and which was specifically designed to combat homelessness.
By centralizing giant swathes of the consumption economy to run through Amazon, destroying jobs at every step of the way. Sweden have banned Amazon so their local economies can flourish. I think this is good macro business logic for a nation state. https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-amazon-competition-ec...
So Amazon gets credit for killing jobs, but no credit for creating jobs? Without a doubt Ikea has killed the small time furniture making industry, yet is listed as a "charity."
My own company has been slowly getting killed by amazon in the past 10 years, but we’ve also killed countless brick and mortar stores along the way. Where will we draw the line? Are we to fight the newfound efficiencies of technologies like the Luddites?
Increasing home prices in Seattle, where the median rent is $2,400 [0]. By bringing in people from out of state with high salaries Amazon is making the housing market in Seattle much more expensive as more people compete for a mostly static stock of housing. Zoning laws, mandatory parking, improved public transportation, affordable housing regulations, and new development could all improve the current situation so local and state governments play a role, but it would be naive to assume the largest private employer in the region didn't play a role in creating the current situation either.
:/ The math you are presenting is “One family gets a large raise. Another gets a slightly harder time finding affordable housing”. Multiply that by a large number and you get a large number of families cannot find affordable housing. But, a similar number got large raises. It’s not a universal win, but it’s still a net win. It’s not even a horribly skewed distribution.
If I could make a genie wish, it would be that there was a bunch of luxury condo&apt construction for the new residents so that none of the old residents would have any pressure to move. But, I can’t blame the lack of construction on Amazon.
How is increasing inequality a net win? The situation you've presented is even somewhat zero-sum, i.e. the first family's gain comes at the expense of the second. That's exactly what we should be trying to prevent.
It's not zero sum. One family makes more than before. The other makes the same as before. Net win. The extra money in the pocket of the first family is not coming out of the pocket of the second. It's coming out of Amazon's pocket.
The alternative is that no one gets raises. That's would be loss for a large number of families and no change for others.
You are not presenting a scenario in which one family gains and the other stays the same, you're presenting one in which one family makes more money (gain) while the other makes the same amount of money but is less able to find affordable housing (loss).
It's not strictly zero-sum because the gains and losses may not exactly offset each other, but one agent's gains still come at the expense of another.
I don't know what you are advocating. Amazon paid people a lot locally. That's usually considered a nice thing. As a side effect, that inflated prices locally. That's sad. So, to not be shamed by you, they should have been doing ambiguous something all along. What?
I suppose I'm advocating that we structure our society such that one person gaining wealth does not make it more difficult for another to live their life. I'm pointing out that, in a vacuum, this specific scenario:
> One family gets a large raise. Another gets a slightly harder time finding affordable housing.
Sure. But, it feels like there is a lot of shooting the messenger here. There is obviously a fault in the housing market of Seattle. If there wasn’t, supply would have risen to meet demand. But, Amazon didn’t cause the fault. They just made it obvious. So, when shit gets bad, who does the pitchforks come out for? The ones who made the problem obvious.
> If I could make a genie wish, it would be that there was a bunch of luxury condo&apt construction for the new residents so that none of the old residents would have any pressure to move.
Seattle has had the most cranes in the country for 3 years now [0] and so much new housing has been built prices recently went down [1].
> Zoning laws, mandatory parking, improved public transportation, affordable housing regulations, and new development could all improve the current situation so local and state governments play a role
Wow! "Play a role" has an amazing undertone here; It's Amazon's fault for offering good salaries in Seattle; a better company would offer fewer jobs, at lower salaries, spread out (oh that's what's happening at the warehouses).
Local and State Governments (and the people they represent who are profiting from real estate in San Francisco and Seattle) should not be the distant second you're pointing at here!
Indeed, Amazon HQ2 is considered by many cities to be a giant opportunity for economic growth.
And this is to ignore that Amazon Seattle is located where a previously blighted community was.
Nay, I say, I've considered Seattle as having a higher cost of living since 'You've Got Mail' came out.
X used to own a bookstore. It was good enough to put him in middle class. Then the culture changed, it was easier for people to read reviews online and buy, than to shop in book stores. His shop has to close down, now he drives for Uber and tries to make ends meet. He is no longer in middle class. Not homeless, but I'd imagine if there are more competition for unskilled labor, more people would be squeezed into homelessness
Look at their home in Seattle. The influx of people is pushing up housing prices to pretty unbearable levels. It's not as bad as the Bay Area, but the homeless situation there has been bad for a long time.
The large Seattle companies also work in discount deals for housing, which is far from ethical or fair:
People are critical because Amazon has rarely given to charity, or when they do it's something like letting a charity temporally use an existing building before they renovate it:
I mean, maybe we shouldn't be so critical if Bezos is legitimately concerned and they're doing something, but I can understand why people are skeptical based on their track record.
So shame on them as opposed to most of society that has an indirect role and we therefore are not part of the problem? Society keeps buying things from Amazon. We as society created Amazon. I don't have a lot of sympathy for big corporations but also dislike when individuals try to disproportionally blame them without taking a look at what we do at an individual level to make a difference. By almost any standard I'd consider the average HN'er 'rich' (myself included) and benefiting of the same conditions that are in some way also responsible for the same problem (tech bubble, big tech corporations) Amazon is allegedly guilty of.
Let's not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with addiction and mental health. Stop avoiding the real issues- it's harmful when everyone pins Washington's problems all on Bezos.
Who's pretending that? I said Bezos and Amazon play a direct role in creating poverty and homelessness, not that they alone are culpable; obviously there are many factors. Let's also not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with our economy and political systems.
Hopefully Gates and Buffet will get Bezos and Zuck onboard with the giving pledge. Those two will have a tangible impact on humanity. Page and Brin wouldn't hurt, either.
It because the source of the money has cynically evaded tax for years and pays some of his workers less than they need to live such that they are supported by food stamps. The working conditions in Amazon factories are notoriously tough.
It's hard to take charitable giving seriously when someone has run their company in a cutthroat manner for years at the expence of some of the poorest workers.He could do better with his own businesses first.
I hope it works out and does some good but I hope this explains to you why people are cynical.
The world isn't skin deep. There's a clear historical continuity to these appeasements.
A poor person giving half their bread to a sick neighbor should be applauded, however, the Church of old providing charity from the king while still promoting the king's divine right to indiscriminate rule should not be.
Asking who else has donated anything close to this is a bit silly considering most people aren't billionaires. It might be more fair to ask how many people have donated 1.2% of their net worth to charity, and I think the answer will surprise you in that a lot of people have.
A second question is whether or not this makes up for how Bezos has gotten his money and the potential damages on society that has. If I burn down a house and then donate to the rebuilding it's still a net negative. The systems that allow people to amass this much wealth need to be looked at critically to see if they really are benefitting society or are just causing increased problems.
As a final note Bezos is getting a lot of negative attention because he's made comments before about how hard it is to get rid of his wealth while seemingly ignoring a lot of really good ways for him to do so. It took years of negative attention to get him moving on causes like this.
I donate more than 1.2% of my income each year to charity, and that amounts to a lot more than 1.2% of my net worth (it should be noted that people in my generation tend to have a negative net wealth due to student loans and being locked out of the housing market, which means most of them can meet this requirement by giving five dollars to a homeless person on the street if you want to use a more liberal definition for charity).
Specifically, I donate money to (and this is not in any particular order)-
* ACLU
* EFF
* NAMI
* NAACP
* BLM
* NPR (local affiliate)
* Between $40 and $100 a week directly to homeless people.
I also try to volunteer time as well.
What charities do you donate to, and more importantly why is that even relevant to a conversation about what responsibilities people with obscene amounts of wealth should have?
1.2% is not some lofty, unrealistic amount if you are financially secure. The median net worth of Americans by age 55 peaks at $85,000 [1], which comes out to just under $20 per week. If you exclude home equity from net worth, half of Americans under 55 could donate 1.2% for less than $6 per week.
I don't think using a percentage as reference is useful in this case. There are a variety of reasons why giving 2 billion (even if it's 1.2%) is much different then giving a few hundred or thousand dollars. You have to be much more concerned about the overhead, how the money is being spent, who is managing it, etc... because even a 1% waste results in a loss of 200 million dollars.
Secondly, I don't know if anyone has really quantified how much damage or potential damage Bezos has done in his lifetime, and I would be surprised if it was actually net negative. What honest to god damage has he done? Some people have rough working conditions and are underpaid ( these people are not forced to work at Amazon). I agree that is bad and think they should be paid more and treated better. What did the world benefit though? Everyone gets generally good cheap stuff reliably within a few days to their doorstep, saving millions in man hours yearly.
> What's up with the critical comments in here? How many of the judgemental and jaded posters here donated anything close to this to a charitable cause?
I mean it's much easier to donate to charitable causes when you have more than enough for yourself and your family so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but he's also donating less than 1.5% of his wealth. Have I donated that much? No but I think I'm close and I still don't even have enough for my own emergency fund.
>>I mean it's much easier to donate to charitable causes when you have more than enough for yourself and your family so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but he's also donating less than 1.5% of his wealth
So he should donate 99% on that cause and today? No tomorrow, no other worthy causes? Bezos, alone, cannot solve all the world's problems. He should be commended for his donation and willingness to help solve the problem. Haters gonna hate...they can't sleep well at night unless they do that.
Because he's contributed much to the problem, especially with the wages he's paid to his warehouse employees. We'll see if he's actually able to contribute to the solution.
I donate much more than 1.2% of my net worth to charity, and every 2 weeks to boot. Somehow I also manage to do it without publicizing it on dozens of media outlets every time or blowing tens of millions on a disgustingly wasteful luxury lifestyle. But where's my army of loser internet sycophants?
I'm one of the people being critical. My definition of "better" is hardly made up randomly on the spot.
If someone intentionally gave people AIDS, then volunteered to cover the cost of their pain meds, would you say "Ah, what a great guy!" Or would you go "Oh, really now? Puh-leez!"
As someone who sees the systemic problems that cause homelessness because I have studied it for many years, I'm going "Oh, puh-leez!"
Your framing of the issue is incredibly hard to engage because it presumes those years of study do not exist, aren't a valid basis for my opinion etc.
(Or a slightly more accurate metaphor: They have AIDS, they keep screwing people and refusing to hear they shouldn't and are generously offering to pay for pain killers, but absolutely refuse to stop screwing people.)
Jeff Bezos, for once in his life, gives away a money and all anyone has to say is that he's a monster for not doing something else. He doesn't have to. It's a free country and he follows the laws.
I work most days inside Amazon Fulfillment Centers. No one is forced to be there and most are happy they have the jobs they do because every other company out there treats them as bad or worse. If they don't want to be there, they can quit at any time. The problem isn't Amazon, it's a society that doesn't give a shit about the lower class and won't pass any laws to help them. Not if it would mean higher prices. Not if it's the demonized 'socialism'.
Complaining about Bezos feels great, but it doesn't do anything. Lobby your congressman and senator for law changes that force all companies to treat their lowest-paid employees better. Tell them to support Sander's "stop Bezos act" too if you like- I think it's a great idea.
Fight the root of the problems, not the symptoms. And don't complain when someone actually tries to do good for once.
And of course, bias note: I work for Amazon but I don't speak for the company in any capacity. These opinions are my own.
Finally someone realizes that there is a problem. There is no justification in the biggest economy of the world to have this much poverty and homelessness. I am amazed every time I travel to Europe, how few homeless people there are, despite their economic growth lagging the US. And it is inherently a solvable problem with adequate resources. We have $1 trillion for the military. Surely, we can spare a few billions and house the downtrodden and provide mental care for those who can't take care of themselves.
I think Bezos probably realized when he paid a bunch of money and shut down construction of Amazon buildings in order to strongarm the Seattle government into killing a tax that was specifically to go towards reducing homelessness.
If you include all DoD spend include VA, it is well over 20%. Why this portion ? Because it is mostly unnecessary and just needed to foster faux nationalism
> I am amazed every time I travel to Europe, how few homeless people there are, despite their economic growth lagging the US.
This. I grew up in Eastern Europe where middle-class people would make and eat every single meal at home, but I have never seen such level of poverty as I saw in the streets of the US.
Agreed 100%. I live in California which has the same massive homelessness issues as Seattle. I also travel to Europe frequently and have noticed the same stark contrast where they seem to do much better at this.
To try to understand why homelessness feels so much worse an California than in Europe, I did some very basic research (which I also posted on a similar thread once before). The numbers are shocking:
San Francisco population: 884,363 (2017/Wikipedia)
San Francisco unsheltered population (conservative): 6,600 (7,499 SF self-reported homeless count * 88.2% HUD estimated unsheltered rate)
Unsheltered population rate (conservative): ~0.75% of residents (my calculation) - nearly 1 in 100!
Compare that with London, a city also experiencing a homelessness epidemic due to explosively rising housing costs:
London population: 8,825,000 (2017/Wikipedia)
London unsheltered population: 1,137 (homeless.org.uk)
Unsheltered rate: ~0.01% of residents (my calculation)
Homelessness rates in SF are absurdly high. In fact, there are more unsheltered homeless people in SF than the entire country of England(!):
San Francisco unsheltered population: 6,600 (2017)
England unsheltered population: 4,751 (2017)
They are not equivalent situations obviously, but somehow a country with a population greater than the state of California manages to have fewer homeless people than one relatively tiny city in California. Something is very wrong.
Homelessness is a complex issue with lots of intertwined causes and no single solution. Not only is affordable housing an issue, but mental health treatment is an equally important problem. I don't have the answers. But I do know that it is a public health crisis and we are currently completely failing to solve it. We need big changes if we actually care about addressing it and we as a country definitely have the resources to do it.
There is no political will to fix homelessness in San Francisco and it’s actually a big business and money maker for certain people. It’s just a way to funnel tax payers money to those groups. As usual, follow the money.
No matter how you slice the numbers (SF, Oakland, San Jose, all of them combined, etc), the homelessness numbers for the bay area are terrible and way beyond London.
Curious if you've accounted for issues like metro area vs. city limits. It could very well be the case that the London contains more of it's metro area within city limits than San Francisco, thus increasing the divisor vs. the numerator.
SF has more unsheltered homeless people than the entire country of England according to these numbers. So even if SF's per-capita homeless rate is lower when you include some surrounding SF suburbs, it's still absolutely terrible and far worse than London.
And if you consider the whole Bay Area (which is closer to London in size), the homelessness rate remains very bad overall because homelessness is also very severe in Oakland and San Jose. Some of the smaller cities of course fair a lot better than others, but the total numbers of unsheltered homeless is very high across the whole Bay Area region.
Even Palo Alto has a high homelessness-per-capita rate when you count people living in vehicles as homeless. It's not nearly as bad as SF, but it's not good either.
I'm wondering why homelessness is not as large in NYC? The prices here are as high as in SF. Is it due to the slower rate of a price increase? Colder weather?
NYC shelters nearly 95% of it's homeless population. SF only manages to shelter about 11% of it's homeless population (about the worst rate in the country). Thus there are more homeless people on SF's streets despite a much smaller total homeless population than NYC (and NYC is of course also a much more populous city).
My recollection: when I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU, the number of homeless in San Francisco was similar to the number in New York in spite of it being a much smaller city.
The most current stats I have indicate that California has about 25 percent of the nation's homeless:
Yes, exactly. The point is that in a warm climate there may not be more homeless people, just more visible homeless people.
NYC now shelters most of its homeless mainly because state law requires it. We’re spending a ridiculous amount of money putting homeless people up in hotel rooms because the process to get new shelters built is stalled and we can’t even build enough market-rate housing to account for population growth, let alone affordable housing.
> Where are you getting the information that New York's problem isn't as bad?
He must have visited the city and walked around. The population might be larger, but the problem is less egregious in NYC; we don't just let them camp out in the streets and rule the city.
This is very misleading and doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.
NYC has a homeless population of 76,501, but according to HUD, only 5.1% of NYC homeless are unsheltered. In SF, the unsheltered rate according to HUD is almost 90% - nearly the worst in the country. That means NYC actually has fewer unsheltered people than SF on the streets despite a much larger homeless population.
So while NYC has a big issue with housing affordability and homelessness, they are actually doing a much more effective job of keeping people off the streets and reducing the rate of the kinds of severe public health issues you will see everyday in downtown SF.
NYC has a harsh climate in the winter. You do see a fair amount of homeless junkies hanging out in the summer in places like the East Village (don't let your kid run around barefoot in Tompkins Square Park!). The difference is with San Francisco's climate, it's possible to just be permanently homeless in the streets 365 days a year.
I've also noticed a different mentality people have when dealing with homeless between the two cities; in NYC there was once a guy camped out on the stoop of my building. I reported it and my landlord immediately called law enforcement and got him off the stoop. He was gone by the afternoon. In SF, there are homeless people sleeping _everywhere_, even in front of luxury stores like Prada. I once saw a guy laying on the grass at a playground in Chinatown, doing what looked like a cross between a seizure and masturbation. Nobody even looked at him, they just completely ignored him. It left me stunned. For some reason, people in SF just tolerate it...
Do you really think the problem is at the realization phase?
I'd say we all know this to be true, but whether we care enough is another question. There's a fair amount of people in this country that see homelessness as "lazy".
To those afflicted by the Just World Fallacy, the agony of the homeless is a pleasing reminder of one's own moral superiority: they suffer because they're terrible people, while I'm successful because I am virtuous.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread1. Contribute early on little by little 2. Contribute nothing to very little for a while amassing huge fortunes (and compound interest magic), then donate big.
Pretty much the same question as lump sum vs dollar cost averaging in investing.
Have there been studies on this?
Worst part IMO is that it's not to be a money sink. I deeply believe that homelessness is mostly emotional, these guys need deep moral support and a bit of material support. But you can't buy moral support. Having someone drop 2B might help motivate society and finally realize how to fix the problem, even if not all the money is spent.
1: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
2. (Especially if establishing a foundation.) Will outlive you and continue on for potentially hundreds of years into the future. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Endowment_for_Interna...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation
Either way, it's good to figure out how to contribute back to a country who created your wealth, by allowing you to operate a business for two decades without being subject to the sales taxes that the long-shuttered businesses who previously employed your desperate applicants were required to pay.
So donate to politicians early so you don't have to pay taxes, donate to charity to avoid taxes later, buy a newspaper somewhere in between.
They are maniacally obsessed with growing their companies as much as possible, and everything they do works towards that goal. They don't have time for philanthropy, or worrying about social issues, while they're doing that.
Gates was able to give so much away because he shifted focus after leaving Microsoft. Hopefully others like him will follow.
It's more important to know how you give and whom you give it too. I'm of the opinion that given $5 to a homeless person is much more effective than giving $5 to a charity.
This post does a good job of listing some of the trade-offs and includes several links to more discussion: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/4e/giving_now_vs_later_a_su...
Progressives make all kinds of noise and virtue signal for people outside our care, but where the rubber meets the road, they fall short on helping fellow Americans—this is a nice start. Let’s see where it goes.
Wonder if he’ll get Bernie to contribute (tongue in cheek)
Which is more economically efficient:
1. Pay workers above-market wages
2. Pay workers market wages, but use taxes and some sort of welfare to bring the workers effective income up to where it would be had you paid them above-market wages.
Presumably the taxes used to fund Option 2 would be something like a wealth tax (including corporate wealth).
My non-economist intuition is that Option 1 could have weird effects on the economy due to paying non-market-based wages.
#2 is an issue because government transfers nearly always have terms attached. people get food stamps for food, housing assistance for housing, etc. so demand gaps can still occur because people still don't have the "right" kind of money. plus, it's less efficient because the government has to be involved.
i'm in favor of a wealth tax, however. implementation issues aside, it's the most realistic chance we have of making businesses pay up.
Can you expand on this?
A nit, but this is still a little like dominoes fixing pot holes in the city so their drivers can actually deliver. Sure it's great, but it would be better to pay a more fair share of taxes and provide a safety net for our people and the money needed to maintain common infrastructure.
I don't doubt this will be a more efficient endeavor than a government one, but it's also not really accountable to anyone. And bezos can actually just hire two PR people and shut the rest of it down. He has no obligation to homeless people, and no obligation to see this to the end. I'm sure he will, but it's pretty fucked to think that companies will be less self interested in their charity than in their business, or a government.
The idea that we should just make a few mega rich then depend on their kindness to address societies woes is really toxic.
That's pretty presumptuous of you, isn't it?
For one, it ignores that the system and actions that give Bezos the ability to do this, i.e. accumulation of wealth, are a contributor to problem itself. Second, he'll use this as both a distraction and tax write-off. Third, rubber meeting the road isn't just about money. I spend many, many hours each month doing service within my community - from youth groups, to after-school programs, to community cleanup, etc. As do many of my friends, both conservative and progressive.
Trust me, he isn't special. $2 billion is LESS THAN 2% of his net worth!!
So, yeah, he's still a scourge, but I'll happily encourage him to distribute the wealth he builds off of the exploitation of average people.
Funny that you say this in a pejorative sense on Hacker News, a bastion of venture capital.
"Margins = opportunity" is just an observation of economic reality. Not some strip mining concept that he invented.
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-takes-walmarts-spot-w...
Addition: the same is true for funding something like a computer lab at a school. Lots of good PR for funding a new one but nothing for keeping an existing one funded for the next few years. Although I think it's more valuable to make sure existing infrastructure stays funded.
Crazy thought but are we incentivizing this behavior?
I haven’t seen any math on this, but if I pay workers more I still pay the same tax rate on profits and profits will be lower.
OTOH if I pay them less, profits are higher, my stock goes up. I donate stock to my charitable fund and get a personal tax break.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
Still, I'd also like to see Amazon pay its employees better...
But, no, that he won't do. Which means there's actually a hidden agenda here.
Actions speak louder than words. You can charitably argue that he needs a good therapist to help him root out subconscious bias, but you aren't going to convince me he's somehow doing a good thing here.
I was going to comment about the preschools and how that idea came from ideas solicited by the public because everyone was just assuming it was just arbitrary helicopter money exclusively for PR
The other two big issues: inadequate income and lack of affordable housing. Bezos is directly responsible for his employees lack of adequate wages, an issue he won't fix.
No, he is going to build preschools in poor neighborhoods so that poor kids can get properly educated and break the cycle of poverty 2 decades from now when they grow up.
Conveniently kicks the can down the road and does nothing to solve homelessness in the here and now, plus comes with all kinds of plausible deniability. "Just wait 2 decades! You'll see! It will help them... Eventually!"
"The beatings shall continue until morale improves." and all that.
You realize that if Bezos gave all the Amazon employees 'adequate wages' that you would then still be blaming him for inadequate housing? Or at least different people in Seattle would.
> No, he is going to build preschools in poor neighborhoods so that poor kids can get properly educated and break the cycle of poverty 2 decades from now when they grow up.
The horror. Setting up lower socioeconomic statuses for long term success.
Would it help if the article didn't masquerade this effort as a cure all?
Poor children live with enormous daily stress and chronic lack of adequate nutrition sets up permanent problems that tend to be unreasonable. Children with stunting earn less wages over the course of their lives and have many other intractable problems.
There is always some hoop to jump through for the poor as to why adequate money must come someday down the road - just not today.
A la President Clinton famously announcing that he didn't want to give a tax cut because poor people would just spend their money foolishly and he was more qualified than them to spend their money wisely.
Would it help if the article didn't masquerade this effort as a cure all?
It would help if you would drop the sarcasm and contempt and take me seriously as a subject matter expert.
You came out of the woodworks because Jeff Bezos is doing something with money and the PR engine is masquerading this as a panacea to chronic homelessness. You want the world to know that "something" isn't enough and isn't holistic enough. And I'm right here in the middle saying "huh preschools thats kind of interesting"
I know plenty of people that do things for schools, Jeff Bezos doing things for more schools (or at least on the subject of schooling) at once is nice. I support that. Its not the only thing he might do, not the only thing he has to do, or plans to do, yet it is interesting that he's being held to a separate standard solely from the announcement alone.
If he just said "yo I'm making preschools its gonna be lit", a wild Doreen Michele would have never appeared. But because it was billed as a solution to homelessness and impoverished areas, here comes college educated Doreen Michele to let everyone know its totally wrong and misguided!
Its preschools
a wild Doreen Michele would have never appeared. But because it was billed as a solution to homelessness and impoverished areas, here comes college educated Doreen Michele to let everyone know its totally wrong and misguided!
That's incredibly dismissive.
For one thing, I'm simply here a lot. I didn't "come out of the woodwork" like some lurker who normally keeps my mouth shut.
For another, I comment on lots of different subjects, not just homelessness. I'm well known for my views on homelessness, but long before that I was a homeschooling parent and Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. It isn't at all unusual for me to comment on education and related subjects.
I'm not a big fan of the idea out there that poor families are helped by good preschool education. One of my sons went to preschool and he really benefited tremendously because he had specific issues I wanted addressed. So I'm well aware that preschool can be a good thing and I would rather see more money spent on preschool than on prisons and there are studies that show that spending more on preschools reduces how much we spend on prisons.
But I would much, much, much rather see parents make enough money that they can make choices like whether or not they want one parent to be home full time. I think we really, seriously undervalue full time parents.
(Please note that I am saying parents, not mothers. I get a lot of BS off of people who like to imagine I mean only mothers should be at home with kids.)
I've thought long and hard about a lot of subjects that happen to intersect here and even studied some of them formally.
I'm also medically handicapped and I happen to spend more time on HN on days when I am short of sleep or not feeling so hot, like today. That is a much, much bigger factor in me leaving multiple comments in this discussion (as well as others) than the topic per se.
Though I will say this comment is evidence that your opening line is probably not entirely disingenuous. You are taking me seriously enough to apparently view me as some kind of threat (to what? I have no clue) and thus feel some need to try to shoot me down personally.
Glad to hear more about your background in this area though
Jeff Bezos says his action was guided by something akin to a public comment period. Not sure how anyone would have known that in advance but maybe thats something you can contribute to in the future, or push for more billionaires and well funded organizations to take suggestions from the public
> Aid [to Africa] is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123758895999200083
Alas.
EDIT: For comparison, 50k USD is approximately 65k CAD, which makes higher than the median starting salary for a mechanical/electrical engineer in Canada. I would be surprised if they are paying their lowest-paid employees that much.
As another said, "color me unimpressed". He could double that and still be the richest man alive. He could triple that. He could quadruple that...
These people needed government support, and Bezos is giving them a job, so now they need less government support than they did before. Bezos is helping to give money to people who would have otherwise been totally on welfare.
Destroying jobs is a good thing. It means that Amazon can pass on the savings to consumers. I know that Amazon is disliked in Seattle & the bay area, but if you go around the rest of the country, people love amazon.
Can you not assign blame to someone abusing a broken system? Surely you can. They are still abusing the system.
They also put in massive amounts of effort to avoid unionization.
If you work full-time and you do a good job, then you should earn a wage that you can live on.
Should Amazon workers only barely be able to afford rent and food. Should they have $0 left over after rent+groceries? $1? What amount is reasonable, vs what amount becomes excessive? What if they have a child? Or an elderly parent? Or student loans?
> but it has now extended to so many other things that I wouldn't really call necessities.
What ridiculous lavish spending do you think Amazon warehouse workers are capable of buying with their (on average ~$12/hr) wages?
The general argument is that a living wage should cover life. All people are entitled to enough money that they can pay for rent, pay for food, pay for healthcare, pay for basic transportation, and have some amount of discretionary money to spend anyway they want (like say, raising a family, or continuing their education, or having a hobby, or volunteering for a cause their passionate about, or whatever)
Democracy is not working? Whats the alternative.
If I use roads or public parks, or my social security, does that mean that my employer never paid me enough, then?
And we already have a concept that covers this. It is called the minimum wage. It makes no sense to talk about government services that people are using when you should instead just raise the minimum wage.
Here's part 1:
https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-so...
And here's part 2:
https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-46-the-not-so...
Is a business owner that only requires part-time work supposed to hire full-time workers for some arbitrary reason all of a sudden?
"...even as they give back, American elites generally seek to maintain the system that causes many of the problems they try to fix — and their helpfulness is part of how they pull it off. Thus their do-gooding is an accomplice to greater, if more invisible, harm."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/wealth-phi...
While Bezos' wealth has skyrocketed in the last year, the portion of that wealth that actually came out of the Amazon ledgers was under $2 million in 2017. [1]
Since it is the responsibility of the company to compensate employees, at most Bezos' cut is taking $2 million out of the pie, which divided across the several hundred thousand Amazon employees would give each worker less than $20 per year. Not exactly life changing.
Regardless of whether or not Amazon should pay employees more, basing that argument on the CEO's capitol gains on long-standing investments is ridiculous.
[1] https://www1.salary.com/Jeffrey-P-Bezos-Salary-Bonus-Stock-O...
Specifically with regards to homelessness, the problem seems to be the critical shortage of housing for people in general, leading to a total crisis of affordable housing, rather than a specific problem of insufficient services exclusively for “the homeless.” Certainly there are people who need support above and beyond affordable housing, but isn’t the bedrock of this whole crisis the shortage of homes in the places where people are trying to live and work?
That said, one has to wonder how maintaining the homeless population would be beneficial to Amazon.
AKA the Shirky Principle
https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/
Also interesting to find out that there aren't any vacant homes anymore.
That's why surgeons always leave a little cancerous tissue, to maximize their chances of getting paid to do another operation.
(Since HN probably won't get that: it's a satirical joke meant to point out some flaws in the commenter's argument. There's no evidence at all that the people involved in, say, providing services for the public have any desire to see the public suffer more so that they can roll in that awesome $30K/year social worker salary for a little longer. Pretty sure that the folks that run soup kitchens would be very happy to close up shop if the need disappeared. Etc. The idea that this is some initiative of Big Homelessness to rake in the gravy is..... sad.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/05/bernie-sa...
The 2B are less costly than losing the whole shebang. I would not be surprised in the least if he ends up still controlling the 2B and this ends up as just a headline.
from the article: > Bernie Sanders
Popular by who's standards?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/bernie-sanders-...
https://morningconsult.com/july-2017-senator-rankings/
Earlier this year, under pressure from Amazon and other large employers, Seattle’s City Council repealed an employee head tax designed to provide housing and services for the homeless. In a statement, Amazon called the vote “the right decision for the region’s economic prosperity. We are deeply committed to being part of the solution to end homelessness in Seattle and will continue to invest in local nonprofits” that work with the homeless.
Oligarchy?
I read somewhere that Amazon's explosive growth raised the property values in Seattle, which in turn caused a surge in homelessness. Is that true?
- exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues
- Seattle does a remarkably crappy job of assigning the low income housing we build and/or contract for. Too many people get it who shouldn't qualify. Too many non-profits cherry pick their clients. Etc, etc.
- It's super hard to get coherent services out of the system. Which makes it self-selecting in the sense of concentrating the worst cases.
Amazon, to a certain degree, was/is part of running up the price of apartments and homes. Some homelessness is a consequence, but mostly that pushed people further (or totally out) of the area.
I'm not at all convinced that if we raise 2x the money, we'll spend it intelligently enough to make a difference here.
(1)My partner worked in the area homeless system and I'm getting a lot of my info from that.
I think cause and effect are backwards here. Low wages and high housing prices seem like they'd naturally lead to homelessness and rates of drug addiction and mental illness among the homeless, although very high compared to the general population, are nowhere near as high as people would like to think.
Mental illness - may be. But one needs to know if it's the cause, or simply an exposing factor.
Probably because nobody notices the clean, sane person living out of their car. We probably need better terminology, like functional vs. dysfunctional homeless, or something.
Unless there's another reason we would expect mental health issues to increase I don't see why this would lead to more homelessness.
I also talked to one of the people in charge of a non profit for providing housing to the homeless and he was saying how the longer people stay homeless, the less likely it is that they will ever be able to integrate with society again.
I am much more inclined to believe homelessness is causing the mental health issues than vice versa. Or at least I don't see why Seattle's homeless problem would be caused by greater rates of mental illness than previously seen and compared to that of other cities.
https://medium.com/@15kwhm2a/a-brief-history-of-seattles-ant... is very good. The Mises Institute has come to similar conclusions. When those guys and leftists agree, you gotta think there's something to it.
> A relatively small percentage of all homeless people nationwide — 13% to 15% — are mentally ill, but their symptoms — paranoia and delusions — draw attention and mislead others into thinking their numbers are greater, Culhane said.
> However, Los Angeles’ homeless population skews heavily to single adults who have lived in the streets a year or longer — a subgroup with a high incidence of mental health issues. Local authorities estimate that 30% of the county’s homeless people have serious mental illness.
I don't think the problem is REALLY Amazon's fault per se, since they are just paying people more than other companies in the area which I think most people would agree is a good thing.
I think the problem is more that we in the US treat housing as an investment which makes people more willing to pay higher prices and to borrow money to buy a house. When people see the housing prices increase then that further raises housing prices.
The issue is that housing prices, and subsequently rent, increasing is not a good thing for society. Even though the value of the house has changed, the house itself hasn't changed at all, and yet people now have less money to spend on other things. The only thing it really does is make banks and people who were already well off enough to buy a house wealthier.
Sadly I have no idea what we can do to solve this that isn't communist.
My take: If you isolate and fixated on one variable being the only cause of a problem, it's pretty easy to create a narrative, but the answer is probably more complicated and the solution is probably even more complicated.
The head tax was suboptimal and, yeah, stupid. Nobody would have proposed it if Seattle didn't have a regressive tax system. Compare us to Texas, another state with no income tax -- our property taxes are substantially lower. Seattle's infrastructure problems will continue because the city is underfunded to deal with them.
Anyhoo, I'm glad Bezos is spending this money on the homeless. I would recommend that he divert some of it to a deep dive into Seattle's problems. I think that committing to solve the problem in one city would yield insights that would be very valuable when he expands the program elsewhere.
He did; Amazon was among the primary opposition (if we're talking about the same tax):
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/technology/seattle-tax-am...
- 2017 - Seattle approved an income tax for high incomes, but was removed six months later after a court dispute - https://www.mossadams.com/articles/2017/december/seattle-inc...
- earlier years - there have been Washington state income taxes proposed over the years, which have been usually shut down. googling shows the last might've been Senate Bill 6559 in 2016 - https://www.theolympian.com/news/politics-government/article...
The inability to pass a city income tax or a state income tax has been part of the arguments for why a head tax was proposed in 2018 - it's not ideal, but everything else in the past has been rejected.
Yanis Varoufakis (fmr greek minister of finance) gave a talk in Seattle a few months ago talking about the head tax: https://youtu.be/Z0M24CEEMFk?t=2m16s
Prop 1 is an initiative to "help educate the children of Olympia", using a little tax to help pay for college tuition. So noble!
Except: it proposes a levy on households of $200K or more (not constitutional in Washington), is an income tax, also not constitutional in Washington, requires the city of Olympia to fund the administration with no enforcement clauses, and multiple groups have already announced that they intend to sue the City if it's passed (which it will, because it's a 'think of the kids' measure), and the City knows it won't win but could not get the measure struck off so is already budgeting for constitutional lawyers. Hell, the City doesn't have the authority to see these people's tax statements, so it'd rely entirely on self-reporting. It's just a mess.
So you look a bit closer, and who is pushing this bill? A group of locals just concerned about local education?
No. A bunch of multi-millionaires from Seattle who want to use this as a proving ground for their challenges to state taxation law. Of the top ten donors, not one has ever lived in the County, let alone the City, nor does any of them have any children who attended school in either. (Olympia, like most state capitals, is far smaller than the largest city in the state), which makes you wonder why they're not pushing this in Seattle/King County - probably because they don't want their own taxes going to fund the defense of a proposition that's very specifically unconstitutional.
"Think of the kids" at its worst.
It was about 2% of a minimum wage salary per employee. I need more evidence that's unaffordable to a business that does 20+M in revenue.
The only thing that bill illustrated to me personally is how ineffective and ridiculously bad Seattle government officials are. Passed with a 9-0 vote, repealed extremely shortly after with 7-2.
Seattle subreddits are extremely right-wing/libertarian and pro-business.
They aren't neutral. They spread massive lies.
> Passed with a 9-0 vote, repealed extremely shortly after with 7-2.
after a massive campaign by Amazon and Starbucks, among others.
All hail the ever increasing stock and housing market, the savior of the boomers, the one true political goal.
Amazon paid no federal income tax in 2017: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may...
In France we prefer to let homeless people die by freezing than assign them to a female shelter bed. That’s how far we go to protect women from the risk of being raped. Die, men, die.
If the state had more money? They’d simply assign it to the sexism campaigns. Or to one of the 2000 battered woman shelters in USA (and only one for men – hence homelessness?).
Source: I’m a volunteer for a suicide hotline.
"This ceremony being concluded, a company of heralds came forward before the king, and proclaimed 'a largesse,' as it was called. The ceremony of a largesse consisted in throwing money among the crowd to be scrambled for. Three times the money was thrown out, on this occasion, among the guests in the hall. The amount that is charged on the royal account-book for the expense of this largesse is one hundred pounds."
Bezos is a great creator of poverty. He is the wrong person to try and fix it. We need to just make these oligarchs pay taxes and living wages, full-stop.
[1] https://www.philanthropydaily.com/gates-philanthropy-failure...
There's plenty of room to throw rocks at billionaire philanthropists, but Gates is more knowledgeable about the areas in which his foundation operates than the heads of most well-known non-profits and relief organizations.
This is laughably absurd. Come on.
Edited because I was still thinking about this
Who do you think knows more about Malaria, Bill Gates (who is incredibly knowledgeable about Malaria) or Dr. Pedro Alonso who runs the WHO's malaria program?
> His professional career began in The Gambia in the 1980s. A study on the validation of verbal autopsies was followed by the scientific assessment of the efficacy of Insecticide Treated Nets (ITNs) as a preventive tool against malaria. The utility of such nets was, at the time, controversial, and the publication of new results in The Lancet[1] was critical for the launching of subsequent studies confirming first evaluations. Based on this evidence, WHO recommended the universal use of ITNs as a vector control tool, since a pillar in the fight against malaria. It is estimated that extensive distribution programs of ITNs can claim responsibility for 69% of the 663 million of averted malaria cases in Subsaharan Africa between 2001 and 2015.[2]
..
> With the support of the Hospital Clínic and the University of Barcelona, he founded in 2006 the Barcelona Centre for International Health Research (CRESIB). In this institution he accomplished one of his most renowned works, the contribution to the clinical development and impact assessment of a new malaria vaccine: RTS,S. In collaboration with the Manhiça Health Research Centre in Mozambique, he implemented two proofs of concept that established for the first time the efficacy of the vaccine in infants[3] and children aged 1–4 years.[4] These results opened the door to subsequent assessments and to a Phase 3 clinical trial performed in 11 African research centres. Ultimately, this vaccine received a positive assessment by the European Drugs Agency, in 2015,[5] while the highest expert committees at WHO have recommended that it starts to be utilized, as of 2018, in pilot programs in three African countries.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_L._Alonso
I was thinking of your example (and others in the WHO) as exceptions when I said "most". I more had in mind people who run organizations like the Red Cross.
Anyways, did not mean to denigrate the non-political / non-figurehead appointments.
So where as I've often sneered at Russia for it's oligarchs we clearly have the same issue. Perhaps the Western oligarchs have earned their money more transparently, but they're still oligarchs.
Also one of the human universals is that we admire generosity in leaders, so these grandiose gifts are what oligarchs love.
Good deeds must be applauded, not shamed for not being better. Especially if the definition of "better" is made up randomly on the spot.
OP can clarify if necessary.
In case you don't care to read an article they're just coming off an effort to kill a tax that would have affected them and which was specifically designed to combat homelessness.
[0] https://www.zillow.com/seattle-wa/home-values/
If I could make a genie wish, it would be that there was a bunch of luxury condo&apt construction for the new residents so that none of the old residents would have any pressure to move. But, I can’t blame the lack of construction on Amazon.
The alternative is that no one gets raises. That's would be loss for a large number of families and no change for others.
It's not strictly zero-sum because the gains and losses may not exactly offset each other, but one agent's gains still come at the expense of another.
> One family gets a large raise. Another gets a slightly harder time finding affordable housing.
is something to avoid, not strive for.
Seattle has had the most cranes in the country for 3 years now [0] and so much new housing has been built prices recently went down [1].
[0]: https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/Seattle-three-...
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/smallest-s...
Wow! "Play a role" has an amazing undertone here; It's Amazon's fault for offering good salaries in Seattle; a better company would offer fewer jobs, at lower salaries, spread out (oh that's what's happening at the warehouses).
Local and State Governments (and the people they represent who are profiting from real estate in San Francisco and Seattle) should not be the distant second you're pointing at here!
Indeed, Amazon HQ2 is considered by many cities to be a giant opportunity for economic growth.
And this is to ignore that Amazon Seattle is located where a previously blighted community was.
Nay, I say, I've considered Seattle as having a higher cost of living since 'You've Got Mail' came out.
The large Seattle companies also work in discount deals for housing, which is far from ethical or fair:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/is-it-hou...
People are critical because Amazon has rarely given to charity, or when they do it's something like letting a charity temporally use an existing building before they renovate it:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/amazons-donating-a-buil...
I mean, maybe we shouldn't be so critical if Bezos is legitimately concerned and they're doing something, but I can understand why people are skeptical based on their track record.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-creating...
Disclosure: i work at Amazon.
It's hard to take charitable giving seriously when someone has run their company in a cutthroat manner for years at the expence of some of the poorest workers.He could do better with his own businesses first.
I hope it works out and does some good but I hope this explains to you why people are cynical.
A poor person giving half their bread to a sick neighbor should be applauded, however, the Church of old providing charity from the king while still promoting the king's divine right to indiscriminate rule should not be.
A second question is whether or not this makes up for how Bezos has gotten his money and the potential damages on society that has. If I burn down a house and then donate to the rebuilding it's still a net negative. The systems that allow people to amass this much wealth need to be looked at critically to see if they really are benefitting society or are just causing increased problems.
As a final note Bezos is getting a lot of negative attention because he's made comments before about how hard it is to get rid of his wealth while seemingly ignoring a lot of really good ways for him to do so. It took years of negative attention to get him moving on causes like this.
Specifically, I donate money to (and this is not in any particular order)-
* ACLU * EFF * NAMI * NAACP * BLM * NPR (local affiliate) * Between $40 and $100 a week directly to homeless people.
I also try to volunteer time as well.
What charities do you donate to, and more importantly why is that even relevant to a conversation about what responsibilities people with obscene amounts of wealth should have?
1.2% is not some lofty, unrealistic amount if you are financially secure. The median net worth of Americans by age 55 peaks at $85,000 [1], which comes out to just under $20 per week. If you exclude home equity from net worth, half of Americans under 55 could donate 1.2% for less than $6 per week.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-net-worth-...
Secondly, I don't know if anyone has really quantified how much damage or potential damage Bezos has done in his lifetime, and I would be surprised if it was actually net negative. What honest to god damage has he done? Some people have rough working conditions and are underpaid ( these people are not forced to work at Amazon). I agree that is bad and think they should be paid more and treated better. What did the world benefit though? Everyone gets generally good cheap stuff reliably within a few days to their doorstep, saving millions in man hours yearly.
I mean it's much easier to donate to charitable causes when you have more than enough for yourself and your family so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but he's also donating less than 1.5% of his wealth. Have I donated that much? No but I think I'm close and I still don't even have enough for my own emergency fund.
So he should donate 99% on that cause and today? No tomorrow, no other worthy causes? Bezos, alone, cannot solve all the world's problems. He should be commended for his donation and willingness to help solve the problem. Haters gonna hate...they can't sleep well at night unless they do that.
If someone intentionally gave people AIDS, then volunteered to cover the cost of their pain meds, would you say "Ah, what a great guy!" Or would you go "Oh, really now? Puh-leez!"
As someone who sees the systemic problems that cause homelessness because I have studied it for many years, I'm going "Oh, puh-leez!"
Your framing of the issue is incredibly hard to engage because it presumes those years of study do not exist, aren't a valid basis for my opinion etc.
(Or a slightly more accurate metaphor: They have AIDS, they keep screwing people and refusing to hear they shouldn't and are generously offering to pay for pain killers, but absolutely refuse to stop screwing people.)
I work most days inside Amazon Fulfillment Centers. No one is forced to be there and most are happy they have the jobs they do because every other company out there treats them as bad or worse. If they don't want to be there, they can quit at any time. The problem isn't Amazon, it's a society that doesn't give a shit about the lower class and won't pass any laws to help them. Not if it would mean higher prices. Not if it's the demonized 'socialism'.
Complaining about Bezos feels great, but it doesn't do anything. Lobby your congressman and senator for law changes that force all companies to treat their lowest-paid employees better. Tell them to support Sander's "stop Bezos act" too if you like- I think it's a great idea.
Fight the root of the problems, not the symptoms. And don't complain when someone actually tries to do good for once.
And of course, bias note: I work for Amazon but I don't speak for the company in any capacity. These opinions are my own.
You are fooling yourself if you think this 2 billion comes anywhere close to correcting the level of homelessness amazon generates.
This. I grew up in Eastern Europe where middle-class people would make and eat every single meal at home, but I have never seen such level of poverty as I saw in the streets of the US.
He can keep his charity.
To try to understand why homelessness feels so much worse an California than in Europe, I did some very basic research (which I also posted on a similar thread once before). The numbers are shocking:
San Francisco population: 884,363 (2017/Wikipedia)
San Francisco unsheltered population (conservative): 6,600 (7,499 SF self-reported homeless count * 88.2% HUD estimated unsheltered rate)
Unsheltered population rate (conservative): ~0.75% of residents (my calculation) - nearly 1 in 100!
Compare that with London, a city also experiencing a homelessness epidemic due to explosively rising housing costs:
London population: 8,825,000 (2017/Wikipedia)
London unsheltered population: 1,137 (homeless.org.uk)
Unsheltered rate: ~0.01% of residents (my calculation)
Homelessness rates in SF are absurdly high. In fact, there are more unsheltered homeless people in SF than the entire country of England(!):
San Francisco unsheltered population: 6,600 (2017)
England unsheltered population: 4,751 (2017)
They are not equivalent situations obviously, but somehow a country with a population greater than the state of California manages to have fewer homeless people than one relatively tiny city in California. Something is very wrong.
Homelessness is a complex issue with lots of intertwined causes and no single solution. Not only is affordable housing an issue, but mental health treatment is an equally important problem. I don't have the answers. But I do know that it is a public health crisis and we are currently completely failing to solve it. We need big changes if we actually care about addressing it and we as a country definitely have the resources to do it.
London is a large city.
SF is just a tiny part of a larger metro area.
Do you know what the 'homeless' rate in 'The City of Foster City' is? Probably near 0.
I think a better comparison would be Bay Area to London.
SF to London is not a good comparison because SF is a small part of the greater city.
And if you consider the whole Bay Area (which is closer to London in size), the homelessness rate remains very bad overall because homelessness is also very severe in Oakland and San Jose. Some of the smaller cities of course fair a lot better than others, but the total numbers of unsheltered homeless is very high across the whole Bay Area region.
Even Palo Alto has a high homelessness-per-capita rate when you count people living in vehicles as homeless. It's not nearly as bad as SF, but it's not good either.
The most current stats I have indicate that California has about 25 percent of the nation's homeless:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...?
NYC now shelters most of its homeless mainly because state law requires it. We’re spending a ridiculous amount of money putting homeless people up in hotel rooms because the process to get new shelters built is stalled and we can’t even build enough market-rate housing to account for population growth, let alone affordable housing.
Where are you getting the information that New York's problem isn't as bad?
[0]: https://www.wnyc.org/story/more-homeless-people-live-new-yor...
He must have visited the city and walked around. The population might be larger, but the problem is less egregious in NYC; we don't just let them camp out in the streets and rule the city.
NYC has a homeless population of 76,501, but according to HUD, only 5.1% of NYC homeless are unsheltered. In SF, the unsheltered rate according to HUD is almost 90% - nearly the worst in the country. That means NYC actually has fewer unsheltered people than SF on the streets despite a much larger homeless population.
So while NYC has a big issue with housing affordability and homelessness, they are actually doing a much more effective job of keeping people off the streets and reducing the rate of the kinds of severe public health issues you will see everyday in downtown SF.
I've also noticed a different mentality people have when dealing with homeless between the two cities; in NYC there was once a guy camped out on the stoop of my building. I reported it and my landlord immediately called law enforcement and got him off the stoop. He was gone by the afternoon. In SF, there are homeless people sleeping _everywhere_, even in front of luxury stores like Prada. I once saw a guy laying on the grass at a playground in Chinatown, doing what looked like a cross between a seizure and masturbation. Nobody even looked at him, they just completely ignored him. It left me stunned. For some reason, people in SF just tolerate it...
I'd say we all know this to be true, but whether we care enough is another question. There's a fair amount of people in this country that see homelessness as "lazy".