Nothing like smart commenters to straighten things up

Scott Alexander recently did a review, Book Review: San Fransicko.  The book is San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger.  I have not read the book and therefore have no basis to criticize the book on that front.  

However, both the book and the review address various urban ills, in particular homelessness about which I am marginally informed having been peripherally involved in helping homeless get their lives back on track and having done a lot of research on the issue as it pertains to my downtown neighborhood as we deal with rising crime, rising homelessness, depolicing, etc.

I have much respect for Alexander.  He is forthright about everything he does, is diligent in trying to seek the truth and absolutely open when he has made errors.  He is everything you might want in this respect.  Oh, and he has among the brightest, most articulate, and variously experienced of followers, making the comment section always almost as good as whatever the original piece might have been about.

In this review though, I felt Alexander had some definitional category errors, was far too trusting of very noisy data, and was perhaps overly harsh in his judgments.  In fact, he acknowledged the validity of many of Shellenberger's arguments but still seemed to have a negative reaction to the book greater than his criticisms would warrant.  

Homelessness is a chaotic issue (non-linear effects, evolving over time, contextually dependent, loosely coupled systems, noisy data, etc.) and it is easier sometimes to discern what does not work than to reliably identify what might reliably work.  There is plenty of room for respectful disagreement.

Still, I was uncomfortable how variant our interpretations were. What was I missing?

As is his wont, Alexander followed up with Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko. This is part of what makes him so invalauble.  He puts out a hypothesis or judgment.  His exceptionally bright readers come back with corrections, alternate interpretations, new data, etc.  

Many of the commenters make many of the concerns I had explicit.  Core homelessness is too serious an issue to be left to advocates or utopians.  It is a dreadful problem in select areas and for those who are its victims and it requires uncomfortable decisions to be made that do not accord well with the rosier hopes of some.  There are solutions which can work and which ought to be pursued but they are expensive, are not 100% successful and do not align well with the self-motivated ideologies of many of homelessness's advocates.