The Economics of Street Charity
I've spent a fair amount of time in cities, living, working, learning, hanging out, you name it. As diverse as the cultures, economics, and opportunities of cities across the world may be, however, they always share one thing in common: the street beggar.
This person comes in many forms and may even not be noticed as a beggar at first glance. The messy drunks sitting on dirty sidewalks while wearing torn clothing are probably the easiest to spot, but I've also been approached by a guy who made up a freestyle rap involving my name and occupation, a migratory South African with a story about being held at gunpoint and forced to give up all his cash, and a lady who thought her shoes might have been in Montana. Those odd things happened in Portland, Buenos Aires, and Seattle, respectively.
A New York City hot dog vendor. Image borrowed from hu:User:Totya at WikipediaA bit more than a month ago, Stephen Dubner wrote a blog entry about street charity over at The New York Times. To some friends of his, who include Mark Cuban (and whose succinct response is my favorite), he posed the following question.
You are walking down the street in New York City with $10 of disposable income in your pocket. You come to a corner with a hot dog vendor on one side and a beggar on the other. The beggar looks like he’s been drinking; the hot dog vendor looks like an upstanding citizen. How, if at all, do you distribute the $10 in your pocket, and why?
The article, titled Freakonomics Quorum: The Economics of Street Charity, is very interesting and definitely worth a read.
The situation of concern is far more academic than it is a practical treatment of reality (since both beggars and hot dog vendors are everywhere in New York City, for example), but I provide my answer to it here, nonetheless. Four years ago, I gave a $20 bill to a beggar to eliminate any future moral objection I might have to walking past a beggar without so much as a glance. Thus, I feel my "street charity" work is complete, and if, at any point during the remainder of my life, I feel the need to further assist the impoverished, uneducated, war-stricken, or neglected, I will write a large check and send it to an aid organization that operates in Africa. As such, if I were in the situation described by Dubner, I might buy a hot dog (with chili, cheese, and onions, thanks), but I would not give $10 or any portion thereof to the beggar.
Also, in a peculiar twist of fortune, it should be noted I found his article by searching for information on the nutrition of vendor-bought hot dogs.
Comments
I've been thinking about the article for a while and what I would do if faced with that decision. I usually assume beggars use money to buy alcohol or drugs. I have never once seen a beggar that I thought was really in need of money for food, probably because I've never seen a beggar holding anything but a bottle of an alcoholic beverage. I also believe giving money to a beggar is positive reinforcement to make him beg more.
When this topic is brought up, I think about my humanities professor. He told us a story about a friend of his. His friend was an author and wrote a couple of books and the publisher planned book tours for him after each book. The author felt so stressed and overwhelmed by all of the pressure to write another book and travel around on his book tour, he decided he'd become a beggar and live on the street. He virtually disappeared. My professor spotted him one day begging and decided to speak to him. He finally talked his friend into going to his house to at least get a shower and a real meal. The author/beggar stayed the night and when the professor woke up the next morning, the beggar was gone.
The author in the story obviously didn't want to deal with the responsibility of life and decided it would be easier to live on the street. This changed my view about beggars greatly.
So, if I were faced with the choice of giving $10 to the beggar or giving it to the hot dog vendor, I might buy a hot dog, if I were hungry, but I would not give money to the beggar. When I see a beggar and assume he's going to buy alcohol or drugs with money, I also assume he chose to be a beggar and live on the streets. Ten dollars from me will not change his mind and he will not become a productive part of society.
Posted by: hmh | September 22, 2007 10:49 AM
I have had several very interesting conversations with beggars and find that the most of the responses to this question (save hmh's) tend to ignore the basic fact that a majority of beggars have CHOSEN to be free of the responsibility of normal citizenship. What the beggar would or would not do with the money is quite irrelevant to the discussion of the morals of giving the money. The morals of the situation also have very little to do with what most people actually do. The hot-dog vendor is only going to get my money in very rare situations. The beggar actually gets more of my money through government programs than the vendor will ever get out of me. More importantly, for most of my life, the average beggar has actually made more than I have. Even though that is no longer the case, I chose not to participate in the particular economics in which asking for something ENTITLES you to it. Especially if you have chosen to make "your living" off of that entitlement.
Mostly, I would do my best to ignore both the beggar and the vendor. Now if we were talking about goods, rather than money, I would more than likely give any extra goods (e.g. cigarettes, bottles of water, etc.) to the beggar - and the vendor if he seemed in need as well.
Actually, come to think of it I have in the past shared many goods, but never given money. In return, for the most part, I have been rewarded with interesting conversations and, on one occasion, a very fine walking stick.
Posted by: tlt | September 22, 2007 04:12 PM
Oh, the ode to the street beggar, that bum of the boulevard, that vagabond of the borough. I, too, have had my chance encounters with the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of the roadway, from which no society can escape.
Picture it...it was a cold November morn back in 1993, and there I was, an impressionable young 17-year-old, walking with my father down a wind-blown street in Washington, D.C. My father and I came across a most foul piece of human garbage, devoid of consciousness, living only day to day on the handouts given by the government. Just beyond this Congressman, we saw a homeless person, sitting on the ground, leaning up against a building, looking like life had defecated on him one too many times. I looked at him for a long while and decided that it was my moral obligation to give this man the $5 bill that I had on me at the time. So I walked over to him and said "Here", thrusting the $5 bill toward him. He reached up, as if instinctively, to take the money, and then grunted in my general direction. I didn't receive so much as a heartfelt thank you, and as I walked away, confused, back to my father, $5 lighter, I wondered what he would do with the money. Disappointed by the lack of a thank you, I vowed from that moment on that that $5 would be the last bit of money I would ever give directly to a homeless person. And so has the been the case ever since.
Posted by: arc | September 25, 2007 09:45 AM