If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.
When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done and certain things as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing.
You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much?
Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues?
This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership.
I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.
I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?
Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.
The real answer is that the electorate is vehemently opposed to providing paths like that if those paths feel even remotely like "unfair handouts". Votes hate that idea even if it would be empirically cheaper. We collectively preserve the problem of homelessness because we feel like people who can't/won't work deserve to be unhappy, because we believe that we need the threat of homelessness to coerce people into working, because we believe people on drugs/etc are undisciplined and immoral, because... well, you get the idea.
My state chose to outlaw homelessness [0] and to make it illegal for cities & counties to offer places to lawfully camp unless the campsites are basically enough to be KOA Campgrounds.
Actually solving homelessness is politically unacceptable, therefore it will be criminalized & preserved.
Notes:
0 - The crime is "unlawful camping".
It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.
It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.
And yes, I do think that individuals and departments feel threatened that they will be impacted if something like that actually happened.
This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at the margins so a borderline case that might have resulted in removal before now doesn't.
As you note it's unlikely that some problems can be completely solved. But our resource allocation is mostly fixed or varies based on circumstances beyond whatever problem is being solved.
"75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...
That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely
So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.
I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.
This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...
Spoiler: neither the commodity solution or the in-house solution will ever be perfect, and you should be really self critical of whether you're building something in-house to scratch your own itch.
If you can find a commodity solution with the right extension points that's often the best solution, failing that many times it's worth accepting the limitations, rarely it's worth investing in the totally bespoke thing (outside of your core domain/proposition).
- Avoidance
- Mitigation
- Transference
- Acceptance
Hire consultants about the problem
The better you are at the game the higher you climb!
“Inadvertently”? Seldom.
They look in the mirror and say “good job playing the hand you’re dealt - keep it up!” even while what they do is objectively terrible.
Humans have an incredible capacity for rationalizing their own behavior.
There are plenty of people who are motivated by hurting/harming their "enemies". You may have heard them brag "own the libs", or similar rhetoric, while doing something objectively terrible.
Everyone rationalizes their emotional responses. Hangry. Rush-hour impatience in traffic. If you can avoid it, never appear before a judge just before lunch or the end of the day.
It might not be intentional but it's not inadvertent
Not so directly, but I do think that a lot of people don't put any effort into being a good person.
Think of the shopping cart problem. Good people return their shopping carts to the store or a cart return. Many people can't be bothered to do that.
People think "oh I'm not bad for leaving my cart in a parking spot" they think "stealing or damaging a shopping cart is what bad people do"
But they're still kinda bad people for not returning their carts. They're certainly choosing not to actively be good people.
Weaponize it.
Study it.
Blog about it.
in any case, as a hard core problem solver who is currently overwhelmed with problems I am bieng forced into no choice paragmatic responses. where I have lost any reserve capacity, deflect, move, deny a problem and get some rest, eat, shave the yak, before rejoining the fray with enough energy to perform is just part of the routine now. ie: triage or go under, which may be habit forming
Denying that the problem is a “problem” would be.
In the first case, the affected do nothing because there is no problem.
In the second, it’s “not a problem” because they did a thing and moved it elsewhere.
My company is stifled by a bunch of engineers in leadership positions who always choose to defer up the chain rather than make a decision themselves.