Friday, September 13, 2024

From a Train Window


Whenever I travel the length of the East Bay via Bart to the last station on the line, which is in San Jose., along the route I see homeless encampments here and there, little clusters of tents with clotheslines, shopping carts, bicycles, and people cooking over campfires.

There have been many attempts to explain homelessness. There have been many ideas about what to do about it. But it persists and in some places seems to be getting worse. 

Some write it off to a combination of mental illness, drug addiction and other pathologies, but I can’t help considering the uncomfortable possibility that it may be a logical outcome of the American way of life. What economists might call an externality, a social cost of doing business as usual.

Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, the competitive pressures for housing and jobs are as severe as anywhere in the land. You can see and feel it when you're around young people, even pre-high-school students in moderately well-off families.

These kids are well aware that there are billionaires in the neighborhood who live in mansions, drive cars almost as expensive as mansions, and ride private rockets into space for fun.

The average 12-year-old could be forgiven for assuming that these guys (they are almost all guys) aren’t like them. They probably out-performed everyone else in school or anything else they tried. They probably never stumbled, screwed up, or made a mistake — they must have been supermen, close to perfect.

These myths are just that — myths, of course — but that fact rarely penetrates the insular worlds of youth culture. In fact, if the homeless can be written off as externalities, I’d argue that billionaires should be as well. They are a social cost of business as usual, plus a few billionaires can do far more harm to the planet than all the homeless people in history have done collectively. 

(To be fair, some billionaires do a lot of good things by giving away some of their money, but it is the process by which they acquire such extreme wealth that is the problem.)

In our time, these extreme outcomes are inextricably linked. A few people can only become absurdly rich if many people become absurdly poor. So what kind of social reforms could be implemented that help us avoid this fate? 

The answer is a society that strives for a reasonable balance, for an equitable distribution of resources, a society committed to its middle class. And that's the kind of society I'd like my grandchildren to inherit, not one of such extremes.

These are 760 billionaires and over 653,000 homeless people in the U.S. 

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