I am sitting in Ebenezer's Coffeehouse near Union Station in Washington, DC. I just attended a presentation on how to best help the homeless, put on by several DC-based Christian organizations. Also present were two formerly homeless men who have been helped by these organizations to get off the street and into stable lives and employment.The one consistent theme was the admonition not to give homeless people money. Many of them are struggling with drug addictions that are keeping them on the streets and giving them money helps them feed their addiction. They also said that in a place like DC with all the services for the homeless, food is not a problem for any of them (although buying them food can help them avoid a long trek to get some).
One of the take-aways I got from the session is that the best way to help the homeless with your finances to support the organizations that provide services to them and then inform the homeless about these organizations. To meet more immediate needs, you can also do what I used to do and carry around McDonald's gift certificates to give to them.
Here is an excellent on-line directory of resources to help the homeless in DC including day shelters, emergency food, medical services, shelters, and soup kitchens.
Question: What is the best way to help the homeless in a way that enables them to get off the streets and into a more stable life? Many of them are drug addicts, have serious financial management issues, or suffer from mentally illness.
7 comments:
The *best* way? Take them into your home and treat them like a child. Few of us are willing to do this, and probably would be opposed to treating adults like children anyway. But that's essentially what you are doing when you give them in-kind gifts instead of cash. I will work on more indirect routes (like ending the drug war).
I disagree. I understand what a utility analysis would say about maximizing their utility, but that’s from the perspective of their present self, not necessarily their future self. I think you could argue that addiction may distort discount rates faced by individuals. Doesn’t your logic imply that no one should ever try to help a drug addict break their addiction? That doesn’t seem to fit very well with the reality lots of addicts face.
If you were talking about government policy, I’d be more sympathetic to your argument, but when you’re talking about voluntary transactions and donations between two parties, I can’t. No one is forcing a person to help or the homeless to accept help. If the giver wants to target his aid, where is the harm in that? No one is treating them like a child, but they are treating them like someone who cannot be trusted to make good decision with the resources entrusted to them. Their homelessness is both the motivation to help and evidence of poor choices from the perspective of the giver.
Just because a gift is not utility maximizing doesn’t mean it’s not utility increasing for the recipient. It seems implicit in your argument that the giver “should” get the highest utility from maximizing the short-term utility of the recipient. I would submit that they are trying to maximize the long-term utility of the recipient in what they think is the best way.
There are important values beyond only utility maximization and economic efficiency.
"No one is treating them like a child, but they are treating them like someone who cannot be trusted to make good decision with the resources entrusted to them."
I would argue that, from an economic point-of-view, "someone who cannot be trusted to make good decision[s] with the resources entrusted to them" would be a great definition of a "child."
Also, I never mentioned utility, and I'm not so convinced about addiction in general.
Thanks for the comment, Jeremy.
Don’t forget to quote the rest of my statement: “Their homelessness is both the motivation to help and evidence of poor choices from the perspective of the giver.”
From the perspective of the giver, they view the homeless person as having a high probability of making what they consider to be a poor choice with the resources. Are you saying no one ever makes poor choices or that no one has the ability to have an opinion that another person has made a poor choice? I don’t think you are, but I am trying to get a better understanding of what you’re saying.
From your perspective, what’s the economic distinction of giving targeted aid to a homeless person and an organization like the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) subsidizing research and/or travel for a student? Shouldn’t HIS just give students cash instead and let them spend it as they wish? Same thing with grants for research. Why give researchers or colleges specifically targeted research funding instead of just giving them cash? I don’t think I’ve ever heard an economist criticize either of these, but I don’t see the analytic distinction between this and giving targeted aid to the poor. Are all of these people and donor organizations treating recipients “like a child”?
If you’re not basing your comments on utility analysis, what are you basing them on?
Good article on addiction, by the way. It brings up some good points and some good food for thought. I will have to look into this further. Gary Becker and Kevin Murhphy have also done some good work on “Rational Addiction”.
"From the perspective of the giver, they view the homeless person as having a high probability of making what they consider to be a poor choice with the resources."
I do not doubt that "the giver" sometimes believes this statement, but if that is not a perfect definition of paternalism, I do not know what is. Again, substitute child for "homeless person."
I also do not doubt that individuals sometimes will make poor intertemporal choices, even from their own perspective. We generally think children will do this quite often, and thus give them in-kind gifts.
Maybe the homeless also behave like children in this intertemporal respect. But again, I refer to my original suggestion: take them into your home (or church, or state-institution) and restrict their consumption, until they "grow up" (presumably overcome their addiction, poor financial planning, or whatever).
Giving targeted aid seems like a much, much, weaker version of this method, but also fails in an important respect: a homeless person can not save up McDonald's gift certificates and eventually use them to attend a trade school or start a business. (side note: have you read "The Invisible Heart"? Your method reminded me of the guy that carries around tomato juice.)
As for donor institutions, the analogy fails, in my view. IHS or whoever is trying to advance a particular agenda, such as promoting classical liberalism. They are not trying to help grad students get out of poverty. The student is merely the vehicle for promoting this end, not the end in themselves. Making homeless people non-homeless is the goal.
You asked for the *best* (presumably direct) solution, and I think that I gave it. If your question was instead "What is the best method to appear that I'm helping a homeless person, for less than $5, so I can keep walking and feel better about myself?" I would have given a different response.
Paternalism is something I typically associate with government behavior. If you want to define in-kind aid as paternalism, then you cast a very wide net, including over the donor institutions I mentioned before.
I would still argue that most of the homeless shelters (and other forms of targeted aid) are akin to the donor institutions. They are trying to advance a particular agenda, such as promoting self-reliance, non-addiction, and financial stability of those who struggle with it. Just as the donor institutions, homeless shelters give subsidized, targeted aid to those who are willing to engage in the behavior they are subsidizing. Both groups do so in order to make the behavior they prefer to see cheaper for their targeted recipients. This of course increases the occurrence of that behavior. (Be it feeding someone, getting them “off the street”, or into a graduate seminar.) I don’t see a distinction.
Analytically speaking, both homeless shelters and donors give targeted gifts. Pursuing different types of goals doesn’t negate the fact that both give targeted gifts. The economic analysis works out the same in both cases. Economic criticism of one equates to economic criticism of the other. If one is paternalistic, so is the other.
If you want to use $5 to do the most good you can for the homeless, I’d recommend donating it to a group that engages in long-term, relational support to the homeless. (Not so different from what you recommend about “taking them in”.) The organizations that do this seem to have the highest success rate at helping the homeless make long-term changes.
BTW, I did read “The Invisible Heart” and take the point on the tomato juice guy. However, I thought that was one of the places the book was at its weakest. You’re right that you can’t save up the McDonald’s gift certificates to attend a trade school or start a business. But you also can’t use them to buy alcohol or drugs. Which do you think is more likely for a homeless person? If the gift-giver has a moral concern with what a homeless person does with what’s given to them, targeted aid is better than no aid at all and more acceptable than cash. Other than lowered economic efficiency, what’s wrong with this? In what way does it make the homeless guy worse off? How does it fail to make him better off?
I also take your point about trying to appear like you’re helping a homeless person and think it’s a strong one. Thomas Sowell criticizes that type of motivation brilliantly in his book “The Vision of the Anointed”. This is something I have written about on this blog several times. If you really want to help someone (or a group of people), it’s important to follow-up with them to make sure your help actually works. Too often, people engage in activity that makes them feel better about themselves without making any meaningful impact on the goal the ostensibly were trying to pursue. This is most pernicious in the political arena, as correcting harmful programs becomes exceedingly difficult. See my post on Why Altruism Matters for more on this.
Government is composed of individuals, so it follows that individuals can be paternalistic both inside and outside of government. Government may be a more effective means of this activity, but not the only one.
There is another group that regularly engages in paternalism: parents! But we generally don't see this as a bad thing. I never said treating homeless people like children was a bad thing, we should just be honest about what we're doing.
I believe you are missing the distinction between aid to homeless people and aid to graduate students. If IHS gives me money, it is not to get *me* on board with their agenda. If you give a homeless person money, it *is* to get them on board with your agenda.
IHS is not selling classical liberalism to me, they are "investing" in me in a production function sort of way, so that I can promote their ends.
I never defined paternalism as in-kind aid (to my knowledge). Rather, it is in-kind aid for specific reasons, specifically, because you think otherwise the money would be spent unwisely (from the individual's long-term perspective).
IHS is not interested in me, per se. They do realize that I will benefit from the aid, but this is merely the incentive to turn me into a production function for them.
You could say that the homeless person is also a production function, and the goal is "ending poverty" in some cosmic sense. But the individual homeless person is also the source of poverty, and you are really only trying to end their poverty.
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