Once unheard of: Homeless beggars on a New Zealand street. Photo/file
Once unheard of: Homeless beggars on a New Zealand street. Photo/file
From time to time we whinge, moan and generally expostulate on how civilisation as we know it is going to hell in a handcart. But, by and large, it's only in a caring and sharing way.
Deep down we know that, all in all, you've got to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time, as the moptops once dittied. By the time the planet collapses through climate dysfunction, we should all be in pretty good shape.
Take schooling. Globally, 50 years ago nearly half of kids didn't ever get to go to school. That's now down to only about 10 per cent. Mortality? Fifty years ago, 20 per cent of all kids didn't make it past age five. Now, it's only one in 20.
In the last half-century, too, the share of the global population consuming less than 2000 calories daily has plummeted from about half to just a few per cent now. According to the World Health Organisation, those suffering from extreme hunger are now outnumbered by the burgeoning battalions of obese.
While many challenges remain — as they always will — most are in the realm of the relative, as opposed to the absolute.
Issues of poverty and homelessness were major campaign planks of the new Government, but as current "issues" they are of another magnitude compared to a few centuries ago. And yesterday's society had its own ideas about how to crack the poverty nut — some not all that savoury.
For instance, various versions of the Poor Laws dated from Queen Elizabeth I's reign, and in the early 1800s august Royal Commissions decided that just giving people handouts encouraged moral turpitude and that recipients should be obliged to do something — anything — for their bowl of thin gruel, even if it was just pounding away on a treadmill.
Happily, spectacular advances now see standards of living and conspicuous consumption as far removed from the Victorian workhouse as Elon Musk's rocket ship from a stone-age catapult.
This allows those with disposal time and sufficient income for extensive lycra wardrobes and space-age trainers to slip down to the gym for a spot of ... pounding away on a treadmill. Now that's progress.
But, in this present era of supposed prosperity, the spectre of a new generation's homeless is certainly with us to a degree not apparent when times were supposedly harder. Perhaps the problem's always been with us, but now is just more visible.
The usual stock media image of homelessness now is families parked up in vehicles, legs sticking out of windows amid mounds of sleeping bags. Yet not long ago any sort of vehicle was a luxury item, and homelessness was sleeping under a bridge, or in someone's woodshed. Vehicles hardly featured, because if you were skint you couldn't afford one.
Whatever, there's a welter of schemes out there trying to address the problem. From London to Utah to Kenya, initiatives have achieved remarkable results by — instead of making recipients jump through bureaucratic welfare hoops — simply handing out modest amounts of dosh with no strings attached.
Frank Greenall
Contrary to the Jeremiahs, in most cases the recipients haven't blown it on drugs or booze, but judiciously used it to acquire essentials or services that have helped turn their lives around. The real hard part is changing the economic and social environment that produces the homelessness and poverty in the first instance.
What is indubitable, though, is that no-strings stipends can pay off in spades as kick-starters to change. Conventional welfare invariably ends up costing a goldmine through gaggles of government and community agencies expensively trying to mitigate impossibly complex situations.
Costs of meaningful long-term anti-poverty programmes? Well, they ultimately pay for themselves anyway, through reduction of bottom-of-the-cliff social casualties, but it's estimated that eliminating poverty in, say, the United States would cost about $175 billion.
That's less than 1 per cent of GDP, or about a quarter of annual US military spending. Talk about a bargain.
