i beg to differ

Does the market dictate?
People asking for money from passers-by on the street engage in various strategies. There is the story about being stranded in town after visiting a relative in the hospital and needing bus fair; there is the foreigner with an index card shoved into your face; there is the jingling cup; the god bless you; the display of being crippled.

After dropping a quarter in a cup tonight and being downright uplifted by the cup-holder's warm greeting and 'take it easy brother,' I got to thinking about the men and women that ask for change around my whereabouts. Much unlike my home of Chapel Hill, and really much unlike almost anywhere else I've been, there is a strange pleasantness that these people, that I see about every day display. But I don't know them and they do not know me. I have begun to wonder if that pleasantness is a very smart strategy for winning in the market.

Surely the word of what does and does not work, in pursuit of change, passes in some medium. Even individually, there must be some rational copying of tactics used in the past that achieved a fuller pocket of change.

And the more I thought of it tonight, the more I wondered whether such panhandled tactics are any less elaborate, any less developed, and any less ingenious than anything we would read in the coursework of Harvard Business School. I shall search out a paper entitled, "From the Street to the Board Room."

Location. Understanding what the market will bear. Honing in on a target.

Really, what is the difference between a man asking for my change and a man, clad in tie, huddled over a desk figuring which celebrity's legs might make a twenty-something buy Deodorant X?


Crazy
Poverty, desperation, and un-cared-for crazy people. These are all massive difficulties that deserve frank and honest thought.

I have no idea which item breeds the next. It seems entirely plausible that extreme poverty can lead to physical and mental failings. Desperation eased by passing out drunk or drugged seems entirely plausible. Likewise, it seems fully likely that a crazy person, without any help and unable to function in our normal society, will fail in our norms, hold no job, and live in no home.

I don't think a person's lot in life is entirely attributed to factors beyond that person; but it is purposefully ignorant bliss to think a person self-determines that lot. We need to address insanity, drug use, honesty, laziness, crookedness, and pitifulness on equal and unassuming terms if we are to squarely deal with homelessness.

In the meantime, some decent write-ups.

Poor Magazine,
some efforts at local government efforts,
and
the straight dope.