When if ever did "Throw Money at The Problem:" actually work? Instead of being about 75 percent useless?
2mon 16d ago by lemmy.world/u/Patnou in nostupidquestions
On a large scale, when has it not worked? All examples I can think of it not working tend to be things like a guy trying to fix a problem in his home, by himself, but has no idea how to do things and keeps spending money on better equipment and parts, but still has a problem because he has no ability to use any of them properly.
You put more money into roads, the roads get better.
You put more money into education, children get taught better.
You put more money into war machines, you get shit that can obliterate all the people in a city without destroying the infrastructure.
Corruption is probably the biggest thing that keeps it from working. Developed countries don’t have the slightest idea what corruption even is. We hear that word in the US and we think “oh dear, bribes!” But in many parts of the world the entire economy is basically spent on greasing every palm, high and low, to keep some regime in power. Whole generations of entire countries have basically gone up in smoke this way. It makes the army’s $400 hammer sound like an absolute bargain.
I'm of the mind that if corrupt people are misappropriating funds, then the money isn't even reaching the problem it is being thrown at. Money could resolve the original problem, but money likely won't resolve the new problem of corrupt people stealing the money.
You can impose that technicality if you want, but when corruption is perhaps the world’s top obstacle to funding solutions for things, I see little point except the joy of splitting hairs.
Education is a issue on which if fails repeatedly.
Flooding a school system with money does jack shit if that school is in a poor community where the students and parents don't value education. There are tons of examples of districts with massive per pupil spending that get horrible result compared to schools with less spending per pupil. Or if the district is full of corruption.
poor community
So the problem is still poverty.
you don't fix poverty by giving poor people money.
you fix it by providing them upward mobility.
Ok great. So give them upward mobility. That's going to cost money.
No it doesn't. It requires work ethic and community that rewards it. Those things can't be built with money.
One reason these polices fail is because clueless white rich people think you can just give people money and boom problem over. Poverty is a inter-generational series of behaviors, it takes generations to get out of. The biggest factor is not money, it's behaviour.
I grew up in a community with poverty. Some people made it out, most didn't. Money had nothing to do with it. I had friends who had more money than me who ended up in prison, and friends with less than me who also got out. And many who got out and came back and ended up back where they were. The difference was their attitude towards life, if they were living for the moment, or living for tomorrow.
And frankly as someone how go it out, the people who got left behind are intense bitter, nasty, and greedy towards you when you do. And they start yelling at you how 'if only they had what you had'... because they just refuse to take responsibility for themselves. The entire culture is a lot of bitterness, resentment, and trying to get rich quick and/or blowing money you do have on pointless luxuries. It is not a healthy culture that values education and financial responsibility, and often if you do take that path, as I did, your friends/family just HATE you for not being like them, for not wanting to blow your paycheck on booze and drugs every weekend like they do.
UBI pilot programs give a lot of evidence to the contrary
No, they don't.
Yes, there is empirical evidence that giving people money directly is effective, just denying it doesn't refute that: https://ubiadvocates.org/9-successful-ubi-pilot-programs-that-will-change-your-views-on-free-money/
As for why that is, poverty is partly about mindset and decision making, but all of that is strongly influenced by the effects of being in a financially precarious situation and being around others who are. Just knowing that you aren't at risk of your life falling apart because of relatively minor problems makes an enormous difference and allows people practically and psychologically to think beyond the short term and not get taken advantage of financially.
Throwing money at a problem works, when you are actually throwing money at the problem and not at a symptom.
For me currently, my car is a good example.
Problem: I need reliable transportation.
My car is almost old enough to vote here in the US and while it has been a reliable ride now things are starting to fail left and right. I could spend money replacing the parts that break as they break. Or I could simply replace the car.
My solution: Just replace the car. More expensive short term, but it'll be cheaper and far less headache long term.
IMO that's what the "throwing at" is meant to convey. The person doing the throwing is doing it at a distance and with low accuracy.
It works when money can purchase what is actually needed in detail, and the people on the receiving end are competent.
Im surprised nobody here mentions time. I can do alot of things myself. Like all the things that you can imagine. But my time is limited and I'd rather spend it with my family. So solving something by just spending some money saves me time and several headaches.
Throw enough money and THE expert comes to fix the problem.
Like, my fridge is broken – so I hired the entire engineering research and development department at [company] to solve the issue.
My renter complained that her dishwasher was broken. Bought her a new dishwasher. Complaints stopped because dishwasher works.
I feel like Tesla and SpaceX are examples. An idiot with a lot of money at the helm that buys top talent and can afford constant failures until success comes through. Tesla is back on the way down now but was a success story for this for a while.
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fixing (thing) that you've been half assed fixing for ages
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having the right tools for the job
Every moment of every day, money solves peoples problems.
It's kind of amazing how money realy is a problem solving superpower.
Money is like batteries of performed labour.
Money is spent to leverage people's labour.
Even heads of state - kings, presidents, dictators - need money as the lever to get people to do the work that HoS is directing them towards. Or thugs with guns, but they're in-turn leveraged via having money.
It's kind of important to me that people realise money isn't "fake", even when it becomes an abused and broken system. A currency can become worthless but money as a system will always be real.
Then why do so many rich people I meet tell me all their problems are much bigger and worse than mine?
Because their money already fixed all the kinds of problems you have. They have new problems now. They're also exaggerating those problems.
Weird, they tell me their biggest problem is they don't have enough money.
I don't have that problem!
Exactly. You need more money to have that problem.
And like I said, they're also exaggerating how much more money they need.
Rich people problems are stuff that can't be solved with money
- how do I fix my inter personal relationships? (Treating others more nicely and talking to others as equals, usually)
- how do I become more interesting? (Don't talk about money or fame so much)
- how do I get my subjects to forget my heinous crimes (sorry Mr President, no dice on that one)
Or problems we can have too, but they need some thought to solve. When you're used to throwing money at problems you make others solve your problems for you and stop thinking about them beyond surface level.
E.g recurring plumbing problems or vehicle problems. Problems we cause for ourselves.
That must be why they need so much more money than the rest of us.
A few months ago I met someone who told me their returns on their portfolio only being 6% last year was a far tragedy than my mother's prolonged death due to illness. It was glorious.
Social services. The programs that show that they save money - like rehabilitation instead of prison, that saves 4 dollars for every dollar spent. We should be funding those, but they're not run by private prison companies, so there's no political will to spend the money.
NASA
Sewer line always needed to be cleaned out, just replaced the whole line with a new pitch. Been great since then.
Finding employees.
Nuclear bombs, landing on the moon, for two.
I'm currently in the midst of throwing money at a problem - car's brakes corroded after I didn't drive for three months due to Reasons. I'm desperate to get back behind the wheel - a backlog of car-centric jobs has piled up.
When the problem is bills.
Never, because when the appropriate amount of money is used they don't call it 'throwing money at the problem'. It is a phrase that means something along the same lines as wasting money on a thing instead of doing what is really needed.
When I lived in a low CoL country, it was pretty convenient to throw money at problems like home maintenance (repairs, cleaning, etc.) instead of doing it yourself. Doing that in a high CoL country isn't feasible long term unless you're rich enough.
thats kinda how its supposed to work. people learn to do something well and you do the thing you are good at and hire someone to do the stuff you have not learned to do well. It still blows my mind the old tv shows with the milkman, mailman, tv repairman, phone repair man.
Yeah but what I meant was that it gets to a point that it’s already too expensive to throw money at it that it’s better to learn to do things yourself. For example, a floor tile detached in my kitchen and it pulled up the four tiles around it. Since the tilework existed before I bought the condo and it’s quite old, I instead had the entire living room and kitchen re-tiled, all for $200 (not including materials). If it was in the US for example, I probably would’ve just tried to replace just the 5 tiles by myself.
Works at my work. Something broken? Throw money at someone and it's either fixed or replaced.
They stopped throwing money so now when a fridge dies it's just no fridge for a week.
When the problem is lack of money it works everytime.
I was redoing the roof on my house, and I had some family over helping me do that.
For context, I live in a geodesic dome home, and so it's not as simple as scrape off old roof, slap on new roof, you also have to account for the angles of the hundreds of triangles that comprise the roof.
Further, instead of using a cedar shake, which was what was already on there, I decided to use an aluminum shake. The main reason was cost. Cedar shake was going to cost about $10 a square foot, whereas aluminum shake only cost me about $1 a square foot.
Even though my home is 2600 square foot and in a normal flat roof house that would mean you would have somewhere between 2600 and 3000 square foot to cover, because it's a dome, it curves, you have a lot more wastage and so I was looking at buying about 4000 square foot of shake.
Going aluminum extended the lifespan of the roof from a 25 year to a 50 year, which is nice, and also cut $30,000 out of the cost.
However...
Once we got the old roof off, my family members decided that they didn't want to do this anymore, and they left.
So I had to, all of a sudden, call around and find someone else to help me install the roof.
You remember that $30,000 I saved buying aluminum shake instead of cedar shake?
That's what it cost for me to get the aluminum shake installed after the old roof had been peeled off, not counting what I paid my family members for the help that they did provide in the interim.
Throwing money at the problem works when it's a money problem. It doesn't work when it's a social problem.
The issue is that people think money can fix social problems, it can't. It can sometimes help, but social problems need social solutions.
The issue is most people can't distinguish between money and social problems. Corruption, is not a money problem. Homelessness/drugs, is not a money problem, etc. etc.
No.
"Throwing money" implies that the solution was indeed 75% useless. It's why this expression exists.
It's like asking "When is failure a success?" It's literally not possible for a failure to be successful, that's why we call it "failure".
I mean that's how governments always solve problems.
Bro. If I had money I'd throw it at you.
Any problem that requires active work to solve will benefit from having money thrown at it. Of course, that's assuming the money is actually going towards solving the problem.
Where do you get the 75% useless?
What is a specific situation you've seen where it didn't work?
Serious, not trying to start trouble.
Major infastructure projects (in certain countries) tend to turn into infinitely deep money pits due to rampant mismangment and corruption that can swallow the entire budgets of smaller nations and still not get done. They tend to drag down the average.
I see what you're saying.
On the other hand, that's more about corruption than it is about actually solving the problem.
Hosting email and paying for a spam proxy.
I ask myself the same question every time a company raises its prices.
Works great when the money fire starts burning down!