When Government Screws Up: Skid Row Syndrome

When the economy goes south, the result is very often a Skid Row, that Seattle claims for its Yesler Way that was once a hill down which loggers skidded logs down to waiting ships.

But now Skid Row refers to a district where unattached men spend useless lives eking out an existence in cheap flophouses and drink. Only now it's homeless shelters and drugs.

Skid Rows were notable in the Fifties, as the haunts of men thrown out of society by the Great Depression. Then in the 1980s Democrats made a big thing about the "homeless" resulting from Reaganomics -- but probably the economic disruptions of the 1970s when the Good Union Jobs of the Fifties got hammered by the rise of Japan Inc. and inflation changed the terms of trade for millions.

Obviously the Great Recession of 2006-08 resulted in another surge of homeless and people were thrown out of work by the unwinding of the real-estate bubble financed by liar loans and Fannie/Freddie.

And now the forced lockdowns of the COVID era are tumbling another generation of the marginal onto the streets.

Mostly, of course, these people that have fallen out of society are men. That is because, I assume, women are coded to find shelter: somewhere, somehow, they have someone that will give them a roof over their heads. Whereas men... yes what is it about men that they spiral out of the social structure and end up on the street, or living in a Hooverville, or Skid Row, or a homeless encampment around Seattle's Green Lake?

In part, these recurrent crises are the result of the constant economic revolution of the capitalist era: the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the steel revolution, the electric revolution, the auto revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution. All these revolutions tended to transform the labor market for men, and it seems that some men aren't very good at picking up new skills and reinventing their working lives.

But a lot of the problem has been government. Let's leave aside the economic impact of wars, which goes without saying. But we can say this:

• The Great Depression of the 1870s was the result of government deflation getting the dollar back to its pre-civil war parity. A lot of unions got started in the 1870s; I'm not sure how much good they did.
• The Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of government deflation after WWI leading eventually to a big stock-market bubble and government failure to act as lender of last resort in the subsequent credit crisis.
• The 1980s homeless crisis was probably a result of the Reagan administration fighting the 1970s inflation. You can call this Reagan cruelty or 1970s inflationary stupidity. Take your pick.
• The Great Recession of 2006-08 was the result of the government encouraging home loans to people that weren't creditworthy and whose loans weren't properly collateralized. All intended to help minority homeowners who were then hardest hit in the subsequent housing crash. And then Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, failed to act as lender of last resort in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Oh Ben!
• The homeless crisis of 2020 was caused by government lockdowns to prevent the spread of the COVID-10 virus that particularly impacted low-skilled workers that couldn't "work at home."

Let's admit that, from time to time, we moderns are going to experience economic dislocations in which marginal men will be hardest hit.

What is our 5-point plan for dealing with this recurrent problem?

Because right now, dealing with the problem of dysfunctional men is the last thing on the political agenda of our noble educated Gentry. To President Obama they were "bitter clingers." To Hillary Clinton they were "deplorables." To the wokerati they are "white supremacists."

See, I think that we've got our priorities completely backwards. I think that nine times out of ten women are pretty good at accessing the help that societies deal out. But men are too proud or too stupid to ask for help. They would rather molder away in drink and drugs than admit they have a problem.

And that has clearly been going on for hundreds of years, from the vagabonds and beggars of England in 1500 to the "waste population" that the Brits wanted to ship off to North America in 1600 and Australia in 1800, to the Captain Swing rioters in England right after the Napoleonic Wars, to the workhouse surplus population of the Dickens era, to the "shell-shock" victims of World War I and the "combat fatigue" of World War II and the PTSD of our current era.

Got any brilliant ideas? I certainly don't.