To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1 million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a better life. That million dollars per person could have otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had a better positive affect on the population. You can't just say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so it's worth it" with no other thought given.
There is a cost that can be measured in money. There is an outcome that can be measured in a variety of ways. And then there is also different ways of how we think about something, that definitely informs what we do and how.
Is it effective?
Why is it right for you that the starting point should be "we spend nothing", and then "we spend on one action only if it is proven it is effective", and not "we spend everything to help others", and then "we stop spending only if it is proven it is ineffective"?
(And before anyone makes a reverse Godwin point by shouting "communism!", reminder what the taxation rates in Nordic countries are: Denmark 55.56%, Finland 51.25%, Iceland 46.22%, Norway 47.2% and Sweden 57%. And these are not khmer-rouge hellholes where nobody can be rich and people are beaten into submission by an overwhelming state.)
To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's already killed!?
There's a reason why the average S&P500 is still 7% year over year. Why does Coca Cola have a 3% dividend yield? Why does Google still have a 50% yoy ad revenue growth?
Why does health insurance get priced at 10% annual income, no matter how high your income seems to be? Why does mortgage / rent inevitably go up to 28% of income, no matter how high an income you seem to get?
It's because to make the numbers go up for corporations at the ROI they promised to their stakeholders, they have to make it from somewhere, and that somewhere is the consumers.
As long as we hold sacred the 7% ROI dream, that 7% ROI on assets is going to continue to leech all the excess prosperity and wealth our predecessors have enjoyed. You cannot have an infinite wealth printing machine - news flash - that money comes from society. The house that once costed 200k, and now costs 1.6 million? That 1.4 million went into funding the 7% ROI money printer. The 126k/yr Masters degree? It's also funding the 7% ROI money printer.
That's where all the money is going.
No it didn't.
Giving without taking is (Keynesian) only useful when it "greases the gears of the economy" enabling productive people to trade with consumer, in which case the inflation is cancelled out by the increased real productivity.
Not really sure causality is being poor -> being more expensive
Could go the other way, behaviors that make people more expensive -> being poor
Different hot take: if we took schooling more seriously this would be less of an issue. Which is on the one hand a government problem, on the other hand a cultural problem (compared to, say, Japan)
Just throwing money at a problem without attaching strings or directing how it's used is administrative complacency
But for stuff that requires actual care like your counterexample, yeah it's 100% a government problem
Maybe for crime, diet, civic engagement, it's more of an education problem
I don't think that's the topic at all.
I grew up in a high-ACE environment. Money was mostly not the problem, and to the extent that it was, relatively small amounts were what made the difference.
If anything, tackling these problems would result in massive savings. One of the core points of this is that Alex's childhood resulted in life-long impairments: lower education, lower economic productivity, higher personal and societal costs. That costs us both directly (lower output, lower taxes) and indirectly.
So the question I'd like everybody to sit with: If it would be cheaper long-term, why aren't we already solving these problems? Who benefits, and how, if we keep creating Alexes?
But of course, it's important to help people who are down; but being poor does not absolve you of all self responsibility.
>Give a job or a good life to anybod
This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't even have any idea what you are thinking of.
>Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to
Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food. But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is simply nonsense.
Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves that the others should have made it too (survivor bias)...