Why you should carry dollar bills to give to homeless people.
I try to give homeless people money whenever I can, which now is virtually never, because like everyone I rarely carry cash.
The pandemic made everyone go insane—I think it’s the main reason you see more homeless people freaking out on the trains and streets in New York. But I’ve also been thinking, what if another aggravating factor is that panhandling is much harder now, because almost no one carries cash?
It’s not just about the lack of funds. When a desperate person asks for help and you give it to them, it’s also an opportunity for a positive social interaction (for them and for you). Homeless people universally say the hardest part is not being hungry or sleeping outside, it’s feeling invisible, or worse, the object of disgust. That kind of loneliness and rejection is literally encoded in our species as worse than death.
So, take 20 bucks out, buy a coffee, and get the rest in $1 bills. If someone asks you for help, smile and give it to them.
Common objections:
“I’m not made of money!”
I get it. But, in New York for example, you don’t have encampments where if you give one person money 20 more people will ask. On a normal day in the city you might encounter one or two people on the street or the train that are asking for money.
“But what if they spend it on alcohol or drugs!?!?!”
What do you spend your money on, cleft palate surgery for third-world children? Seriously though, who cares? If they happen to be alcoholic, they need to buy booze because withdrawal can be deadly. And maybe if you’re living on the street you need a beer or drugs to take the edge off.
“Your money goes further if you donate to a food bank!”
Yes. Do that too.
“Effective altruism says you do the most good by donating to humanity’s future robot descendants!” Ok…
Giving a homeless person money when they ask for it is actually the opposite of the freak show that’s “effective altruism”—currently a Silicon Valley craze. EA posits that you should suck all of the emotion out of philanthropy to maximize your resources in a way that objectively does the most good. It’s a great idea, except that in the hands of young, rich, white, male, arrogant tech nerds, it’s warped into longtermism:
The movement has become enthralled with something called “longtermism,” which boils down to prioritizing the far, far future. Letting thousands of children die from preventable, poverty-linked causes today is terrible, of course, but wouldn’t it be worse if billions of people never got to live because of the ravages of some as-yet-uninvented weapon? Yes, according to a certain kind of utilitarian logic. And money has followed that logic: Bankman-Fried himself put $160 million in a fund to address, among other issues, the dangers of synthetic biology, the promise of space governance, and the harm that artificial intelligence could inflict on humanity many years from now.
The main criticisms of EA are the above nonsense and also the fact that Bankman-Fried was a criminal who stole money from thousands of people. But I think its main premise is flawed. Humans are emotional. “I self-identify as rational,” is a statement driven by emotion: the emotion that you like to feel original, smarter than other people—float above the lumpen, etc.
If you give someone a dollar, yeah, that dollar could technically go further spent otherwise (though come on, you’ll probably spend it on takeout, drugs, or booze) but you can’t quantify how much it means to look at someone in the face and smile and say, “Sure! Here you go. Have a nice day!” And of course, you could do more, if you have the time and resources. You could offer to buy them a meal and if they’re amenable, share it with them. You could spend a few minutes asking them how they’re doing and listening. Much has been made of Jordan Neely’s mental illness. One of the witnesses was universally (ok on social media) mocked for suggesting the catastrophe on the F train could have been prevented if someone had given Neely a sandwhich. “Oh you cure psychosis with a sandwich?” the Internet collectively snarked. But like all illness, mental illness is holistic: it’s made better or worse by outside factors. Neely, in his own words, was hungry and thirsty. How pleasant would you be if you were hungry and thirsty and your pleas for help were met with indifference and disgust?
Other common objections:
5. "You're not helping them, you're enabling them!"
6. Any variant of the "don't feed the bears!" or "don't feed the animals!" meme about creating "dependency" on "handouts"
7. "You're treating them like zoo animals rather than actually helping them!" (Often said almost in the same breath as #6, without a hint of irony)
8. Any variant of "undeserving poor".
The best response to all of these:
At best, you are making the perfect the enemy of the good. You can't see the irony in your own beliefs, it seems. Also, define "undeserving". Go on, and spell out exactly what you are too craven to state openly. Then check your privilege, look in the mirror, and say, "There but for fortune, may go you, or I".
(Mic drop)
Amen, I try to keep some singles on me for just this purpose. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.