Homelessness
Homelessness is a big problem in capitalist societies. I'm not sure if it's an issue in China or Russia. One of the supposed advantages of free market capitalism is that it's good at allocating resources. Homelessness is a glaring example of how bad the market is at allocating resources.
What the market is good at is providing stuff like luxury houses for people with lots of money. To state the obvious, not everyone has lots of money. Capitalism is very competitive and not everyone succeeds. Though everyone needs housing, not everyone can get it.
And it's not an unreasonable thing to prefer to sleep in a tent on a sidewalk if the only 'housing' you can get is dangerous and invested with vermin.
There are lots of homeless people in my neighborhood. There are camps in parks and lots of people camped along sidewalks on main streets. There are also people with nothing but the clothes on their backs curled up on the sidewalk. I notice that they cluster together in groups. I speculate that that's an almost instinctive behavior - safety in numbers.
There is a 700 lb gorilla in the room when we talk about homelessness that nobody wants to talk about. That is, a lot of people aren't properly housebroken. Mental illness is a big part of that but I've known quite a few people who wanted nothing to do with the restrictions that housing imposes that most of us don't even notice. Those people don't gather in homeless camps. They do their best to be well hidden.
One guy showed me where he lived. He set up a plastic shelter hidden in a wild zone between some railway tracks and a busy road. He was well organized. He had recyclable stuff sorted - scrap metal over here, refundable containers over there. The thing that struck me was that he'd made his shelter into a home by putting up pictures.
When I rode my bike across Canada I met a woman in a campground one night who was a migrant agricultural worker who travelled by bike. She had places from Alaska to California that she would visit each year for seasonal work. She certainly didn't want to be tied down to a house with a lawn to mow.
One solution to homelessness is to expand the sort of housing options that society offers.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.