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Care Doesn't Scale

stevenscrawls.com

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Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#111

Post by hardlianotion »

intended wrote: post #100
hardlianotion wrote: post #55

Care does scale and the human race is evidence of that. It is centralisation that doesn't scale well.

This comes across as a comment on the headline and not the article. The article had a very specific circumstance it built upon - how much human time time it takes to help kids. This doesn’t scale, in the context of the article. Your statement would translate into a point on economics and organization, than individual care. This still obscures the fact that many critical functions don’t scale. I would add that these t…

The comment comes from reading the article, then wondering how can societies make things scale? We make things scale by delegating our concerns to people who know and care more about specific outcomes, and helping them to make the differences that are required. Scale comes from people learning that things around them matter and that they are responsible for making them good.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#112

Post by tehabe »

intended wrote: post #105
tehabe wrote: post #2

This is one reason why we have a state, which collect taxes and can provide those services.

This is not the same thing. The state is ideally suited to manufacture public goods, more efficiently than private enterprise. That means armies, judiciaries, policing municipalities, governance amongst others. They address issues like management of the commons. This does not translate into scaled care - care for orphans (from the article) still needs large numbers of skilled manpower, which is in short supply across…

My argument is, that care is a public good. There will never be a situation in which care can fund itself. To fund care is a political decision and when the decision is made to to not fund it or leave to a market or private enterprises it will fail, because private enterprises need something which will eventually scale.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#114

Post by moolcool »

fieldcny wrote: post #28

The premise is wrong, you can care for more than one other person at a time. People have children, in this world we can only care about our spouse or one child? Hardly.

Did you read the article? He addresses this point specifically.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#115

Post by rileymat2 »

k__ wrote: post #107

I assumed the opposite. Knew a women who worked 100% as foster mom. Had 3 children at a time, age 6 to 13. Everything was well organised. It seemed to me, child care can work pretty well of it's your main job and you get paid by the state.

Working well with a three one ratio does not scream scaling to me.

The when you have more need than care workers it falls apart, with no way to scale it besides hiring more out of a pool that may not exist at the price you were paying the previous ones.

If you think in terms of supply and demand, if they are already have the curves met, additional demand is going to scale more than linearly because you need more people at a higher pay.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#116

Post by AnimalMuppet »

avhception wrote: post #61
Tade0 wrote: post #46

> But I wonder if part of that smaller focus comes from a deep realization that care doesn’t scale. My experience (and I believe it to be common) is that I'm really, really, really out of spare energy to care about anyone or anything else. Mind you, I'm in my best shape in years and I've explored my limits to find out they're actually way further than I originally thought, but still.

There was a story on HN a while ago that I can't seem to remember the title of. It was something along the lines of "The optimal amount of slack in an organization is not zero", or something like that. The argument was that, since it's impossible to plan for every eventuality, you need a certain amount of slack capacity in order to retain some flexibility. And that by always using 100% capacity, we end up dysfunction…

I found the book Margin by Richard Swenson to be helpful.

TL;DR: Pretty much what you said, but he labeled it "margin" instead of "slack". But yeah, you need some.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#119

Post by crabmusket »

NBJack wrote: post #106
crabmusket wrote: post #54

> There was some pain in that realization. So many of my utopian dreams—what if we could live in a society where everyone can get the food, the housing, the healthcare, the opportunities for growth that they deserve—come from a place of wishing that we could live in a world where people are cared for. I'd like to offer some comfort to the author on this score. Food, housing, healthcare broadly... while these are all…

Often, it's the act of preparing the meal by hand rather than pressing a button on their hypothetical Food-o-matic that makes the biggest impact. We can certainly scale the provision of needs otherwise. I agree with the author on their assertions about what it means to care and actually connect with people.

I'm not talking about food preparation, but food systems. E.g. look up the concept of a food desert. Preparing a meal by hand is one thing; having access to quality affordable ingredients is another. A food desert is what you get when the system that would enable care is deficient.

And even in a "food oasis" with adequate quality, yes, if you yourself cannot prepare a meal, or have nobody to do that for you, that's a failure of a different kind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#120

Post by tehabe »

dannyobrien wrote: post #21
tehabe wrote: post #2

This is one reason why we have a state, which collect taxes and can provide those services.

well, except for the fact that, as the article states, it doesn't scale. Or rather, it scales poorly: the quality of care provided by a nation state is going to differ in degree and quality compared to the 1:1 care that humans probably need (and certainly traumatised humans). I'm not sure this comes as a surprise to anyone except for those who have had no interaction with state-provided social services. I'd also say…

Just because the government does something, doesn't mean it has to be centralised. Eventually the care has to be given from one human to another human. On the other hand, it shouldn't matter where you live to receive care or how good the care is.

And the week in which private companies will be able to provide this, is the same week which has two Tuesdays.

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