Care Doesn't Scale

Maybe it doesn't in America. Nor here in Australia. Some European cities are showing that better is in fact possible by strongly supporting co-operative housing sectors which are better for residents. But that would break the American taboo against government intervening usefully in private markets for human rights (in this case, shelter).

More from a recent report by Australia's business council of coops and mutuals: https://bccm.coop/australia-urged-to-look-to-europe-for-solu...

Anyway, my advice to the author was that systems can enable care at scale. Not to say that our current systems do.

Edit: to be more explicit, I'm suggesting that some approaches to the housing sector in some parts of Europe amount to care that scales; society and governments have decided that housing is a right, and have enacted policies to approach that situation. Conversely, a "we don't care" approach also scales very well with the opposite outcome.

About housing: I have a few ideas as to why, weirdly none of which overlap with yours.

1) I think part of it is due to our ability to fine-tune the limits. Before, if a company wanted to pass an inspection, they had to be really confident. There were going to be some expenses that in theory they could have avoided if they were better capable of measuring where the line between 'safe' and 'unsafe' was. The end result was buildings that were more safe than strictly required. But now we can get closer to the line, and so buildings are engineered at the edge of safety.

2) Of course, survival bias plays a role here. Who remembers all the crappy buildings that just vanished? It's the same reason we look at old toasters or mixers or what-have-you and say things were so much better-made in the past - all the crappy cheap toasters, mixers, and houses are gone now.

3) Also, as extreme weather has happened more frequently, areas all over are seeing weather different than what they were designed for. Given that the average temperature in Oregon in July (the hottest month of the year) was typically around 65 degrees Fahrenheit[1]. For the past few years it has generally hovered in the upper 60s. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Oregon before 2021 was 107 degrees Fahrenheit[2], and typically there were one or two days a year that crossed one hundred degrees -- occasionally five, more often none. In 2021, it hit 116 degrees. Since 2021, there has not yet been a year without 4 or more days over a hundred. And, of course, this pattern is repeated all over the world. Houses are being built for one set of extremes and averages and getting another.

[1] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-gla...

[2] https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/

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 the world.

These services are also often underfunded, since they are not really a first class citizen for voters.

Voters today, are also deeply targeted by emotional campaigns and identity campaigns, since that is the current political state of the art.

The state can be efficient, but some things don’t scale unless they are also resourced correctly.

Such services will also be amongst the first to cut, since “X will render it obsolete”, is a promise as old as time, and aren’t directly tied to overall societal survival.

Compared to something like defense / emergency funding

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.

>We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person.

Absolutely. Society tends to assume that people are interchangeable units and that 'care' is a commodity which can be dispensed evenly as if from an industrial nozzle in a food factory. So we have 'care homes', 'daycare', 'care packages'. We are enjoined to be more 'caring'.

But the reality is that love, which is what we're really talking about, is dyadic.

i.e. between two individuals. That's how it works and how it effects its magic.

A patchwork of dyadic connections is what we may hope for and build.