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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Have you lived in a state with liquor stores? It hasn't exactly done wonders for PA, and mostly was a money sink. The state loses money on a monopoly on alcohol. Never mind that it doesn't seem to do any good for other goals.

I see two main problems with your disordered behavior definition. The first is that crime is different than substance abuse, specifically that it harms others. (I am assuming you mean crime like theft, muggings, destruction of property, etc.) Crime is largely what people care about preventing; your neighbor being a drunk isn't a problem if he isn't beating his wife or smashing his car into your house, etc.

Which brings us to the second problem: when does acceptable behavior drift into disordered? Who gets to decide that? With crime it is easy: when you steal my car, that's obviously disordered. With homelessness... its a bit less obvious. When does drinking become substance abuse? Once you get into the realm of legislating that you very quickly get into fights about "stop liking what I don't like!" with no objective lines to draw.

If you break off actual crime from disordered behavior, it does get easier to recognize the difference between allowing behavior and enabling behavior like San Fran does. Banning sleeping on the streets is an easy "You don't own the sidewalk, the city does, so you can't camp here." Same with parks, defecating on streets or private property. Requiring people sleep in shelters or other private locations instead of public areas is a normal rule about how to use public property. San Fran goes out of their way to provide benefits to people with substance abuse issues, which is pretty non-libertarian. It would be more reasonable to say "It isn't our business what you put in your bodies, but that doesn't get you special treatment, and it certainly doesn't exempt you from following the laws." At the moment they have negated those last two clauses.

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Mike Maletic's avatar

You can stare at all of the sociological data and statics you want about San Francisco. The reality is, as someone who’s lived in or near the city for 25 years, the quality of life in the city has declined precipitously in the past 5 years or so.

I hear arguments that, e.g., the data don’t show that San Francisco is an outlier, or that crime isn’t really up (which, to be fair, Alexander addresses), homelessness is just about expensive housing and not addiction, etc. I also understand that oftentimes people from impressions and ideas about things based on limited experiential information and sometimes inaccurate heuristics, that data reveal to be untrue.

But sometimes it’s the data that’s lying. (Cue Mark Twain) There is something uniquely awful going on in San Francisco right now. If the data don’t capture that, then the data are missing something important.

Maybe the issue here is that the quality of life in a city *is defined* on heuristics and impressions and human emotions. Human impressions are actually the thing that’s important because that’s what is being evaluated.

Also, I have a real beef with the section drawing a best-fit line between cost of living and homelessness and concluding that they’re causally related. Again, it is obvious that the people on the streets in San Francisco – often filthy, sleeping in tents, half naked– are not going to all of a sudden have a home and turn into In-n-Out Burger employees if rents drop 15%. There is, again, obviously something else driving that correlation.

I usually really like Scott Alexander, and I have no particular feelings about Schellenberger other than that I’m glad there’s someone out there asking questions. But certainly this review exposes the limits of the “rationalist” approach.

(I too found the suggestion of state-run stores peculiar. State-run marijuana stores in California haven’t stopped the black market. The regulations themselves are so onerous that it’s still easier for many to continue to act illegally.)

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