Responding to Beggars

This has been a huge problem for me. I recently moved to San Francisco after many years of living in the Midwest. I was born and lived the first 10 years of my life in Delhi where poverty was no big deal. It was accepted and not questioned. After living in the States and doing all the chores that someone else would normally do for me in India (dishes, laundry, etc.), it became difficult for me to see people as anything but people and I began to notice poverty.<p>After 3 months in San Francisco, I'm noticing the pendulum swinging again in the other direction. I don't see anyone paying attention to the homeless, and I know a few pennies here or there aren't going to solve the problem, so I am once again starting to become cold and removed.<p>I cannot stand saying no to people on the streets, but I have not found a way to get them off the streets either. I promise myself that right now is not the time, and one day I will make a difference.<p>It feels naive and stupid to think this way. I am 22.

I like to leave money (coins or notes) where someone who needs it may find it - under a bridge, down low where a child might find it, etc. Sure to brighten anyone's day :-)<p>"Donating" money directly is difficult to do with respect and pride for giver and givee... I try to get it right because I feel i could end up poor, old, and drunk on the street. Some beggars strike me as being somewhat entrepreneurial :-).<p>Try to treat each situation as unique.<p>Occasionally I will give a beggar money for no reason, occasionally pity, occasionally random, occasionally respect. I accept sometimes I am a chump, but I would rather err on being a chump than be a selfish thoughtless jerk.<p>When a traveller in poorer countries I become much more generous - the price of a beer at home, or a birthday card, can make a big difference for many. Any person who can fly to a 3rd world country can afford to be <i>very</i> generous. 1st world travellers with excuses for being tight piss me off.<p>The difficulty is giving without demeaning the receiver ... respect.

The situation is not much different here in Brazil. It's almost impossible to tell when a beggar is telling the truth or not - they have perfected their story-telling out of necessity.<p>Once I was walking up to a friend's apartment. Just a few meters from his door, a guy with a desperate face approached and asked me to borrow some money for gas/something, so that he could get to his wife who was in the hospital (red flag). I refused, and then he proceeded to tell me the exact address he was going to, handed me his license and car keys to check. I felt ashamed for being such a cold person, and gave him ten bucks. Just as he was turning around the corner, my friend who was leaving his apt saw him and said -"did you give that guy money? He is always around" :(<p>Never gave out money since. I try to make up for it by being very straight about taxes and civilization in general.

In the UK we have The Big Issue. It's a magazine only sold by homeless people, for £2.50 per magazine. The sellers buy each magazine for £1.25. The sellers are trained, sign a code of conduct and wear badges so you can recognise them easily.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Issue" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Issue</a><p>I like this approach because I know that they have some degree of control. For example, they can't spend all the money on booze/drugs because otherwise they can't purchase more stock. It's a start.<p>That said, I like Stallman's method. I might try that sometime.

For me it isn't a question of being duped or scammed. It's a question of whether the gift is really going to help them. It turns out this is a very difficult question. When you give money to a beggar, you are saying "great job! here's a bonus to encourage you to keep begging!". At the same time, these are usually people who are in need. I also know that substance abuse is close to certain. I don't have a good answer. Most of the time I give nothing. Occasionally I'll hand a guy a 20, without regard for his story or whether I'm being scammed. It's a gift given freely.<p>What I know for sure is that I can be polite to them. Recognize them as humans, not treat them as lepers. If they engage me in conversation ask their name, where they are from. But usually ignore them on the ask. Because I can't rationalize that it would help.<p>But it's not an easy question.

My experience trying to get a homeless person off the street:<p><a href="http://graceofgodmovie.com/" rel="nofollow">http://graceofgodmovie.com/</a><p>Available on iTunes:<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/but-for-the-grace-of-god/id469930988" rel="nofollow">http://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/but-for-the-grace-of-god/id...</a><p>If you watch it and like it please write a review.

I really don't understand why people care so much what the beggar uses the money for. Give him a dollar, or don't. If you do, don't worry that he might use it to buy booze; just feel good that you did something nice for someone. If you don't, don't try to justify it to yourself by saying he might be a liar. Just say "I have the right to not give beggars money because it's my money" and be done with it.<p>There, I solved all of your altruism problems. You're welcome.

I've always made this decision based strictly on whether I am feeling generous enough in the moment to give money to a stranger who asked for it. I personally find bothering oneself about what they are going to do with it to be extremely condescending, and I sometimes suspect it might be a cop-out for simply wanting to hold on to your money. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with wanting to hold on to your own money.

I don't think there's much you can do to help someone on the street in a way that gets them off the street. That's not to say that nothing can be done, just that the initiative has to come from the person on the street to get out of that pattern.<p>I can't remember where I got it from, but I carry a pack of cigarettes around. When I get asked for change, I remember to offer the person a cigarette instead. If you're on the street then lung cancer is the least of your problems, and it's a way of showing support to the person but in a way that doesn't contribute to their pattern.<p>Our culture has some strong messages about charity and a taboo about questioning it. People tend to give to things that are branded as charity in order to comply with this message. The result can often be an office full of people in a nice location, pulling down wages, and doing very little meaningful work towards the cause. It is itself a variation on the deceptive begging pattern, feeding on popular ideas about charity.<p>I think the best approach for helping people is to look out for things directly in your sphere where you can see how your action will lead to a goood result, and then act at that level.

For the most part, I only give money to homeless people who put out a cup or a hat and don't try to sell me on a story. I've been lied to so many times that I assume every story is a lie. I don't try to buy specific items like food or train tickets, either. I don't want to dictate what they ought to spend the money on. If they want to spend it on food or clothes, great. If they would prefer to spend it on drugs or lotto tickets, I'm not going to reverse a lifetime of bad habits by forcing them to get a sandwich. The money is theirs once I give it to them.

I was on my college debate team; the Nationals final round in 2003 was about this hypothetical ("Give a homeless person a dollar?") I was pleasantly surprised to recently find that it was taped and available online: <a href="http://www.parlidebate.com/recordings.php?id=36" rel="nofollow">http://www.parlidebate.com/recordings.php?id=36</a><p>I can't fairly condense the salient points, so I'll just encourage you to watch the video - it's long, but well worth it. I can honestly say it changed how I evaluate these sorts of situations (aside from being a very fine round of debate, but that's more of an acquired taste).<p>(Just to be clear: I was <i>not</i> one of the debaters, just happened to be lucky enough to be in the audience).

I never give, I pay, for example I'll pay to the one who play nice music. I don't pay to soften culpability either, I handle this myself. My preferred way to fix the poverty issue is to participate in this kind of economy: I prefer giving a good salary to a nanny coming from countryside than giving random bucks to those who earned a pithy price in the streets.

I never give money to beggars after having seen how they operate in Berlin. The standard ones are extremely pushy, and in areas like Ku'damm, there are organised gangs of women who bring their children with them. I've seen them converge and hand over money to a central man at the same spot day after day. He doesn't look poor.

I have tried this approach for a while and not once did a beggar accept the proposal. A couple of times when I didn't have cash on me I got cursed at and since then I stopped giving to them. I should also mention that I'm from the Netherlands and no one here needs to be homeless, it's always because of drug addiction.

I wonder if modern enterpreneurs are recruiting their marketing staff from the ranks of these street scammers. Many scammers are masters of the art of salesmanship: telling people what they want to hear in order to get them to part with their money.<p>I find it hard to distinguish between their methods, the only substantial difference being much larger turnover for the 'respectable' marketing and advertising experts.

I give money to Shelter, a British charity which helps homeless people. I figure they're the experts, and can put the money to the best use.

I have seen enough professional beggars who live well that I pretty much just assume that they're just about all like that. It seems that if you're good at it, you can make quite a bit of money. And this is hardly new: there's even a Sherlock Holmes story that revolves around a man who gives up his profession to become a beggar because the money is better.<p>If you feel guilty (and why wouldn't you? it's only natural), give money to charitable organizations which help the homeless. They know how to put the money to better use.

When someone asks me for money, I just give them money. I dont care what they do with it. I think people complaining about being deceived are just looking for excuses for being greedy. The end result is the same, no matter if the beggar is honest or not: i'm more happy because I feel generous, the beggar's more happy because he got money. The first time I relised that the story I got told was a lie I was upset, but I realised that it doesn't matter.

I think that in certain situations the moral question of doing or not performing an act is either a weak function of the entities we interact or is not a function of them at all. I think this is one of those cases: I would give a small amount of money (e.g. a quarter) to <i>anyone</i> who has to ask for it for <i>whatever</i> reason. I find Stallman's attitude to be condescending to extreme, i.e. "you lied to me", how can you judge that person?<p>A similar ethical question: Should we eat animals? Some people object to this citing the misery, pain, etc. that the animals have to endure. But suppose we create a certain pig/chicken/sheep clone that is incapable of thinking (or, as in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Pig-That-Wants-Eaten/dp/0452287448" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Pig-That-Wants-Eaten/dp/0452287448</a>, actually wants to be eaten): Would your attitude on this matter change? I think it should not.<p>The way I treat entities with less power than me (homeless people, animals) wholly depends on me and not inputs from them.

I know how important Richard Stallman is to the tech community, and I appreciate his tech-oriented stuff ... but I'm kinda getting bored with seeing his LiveJournal posts on the HN homepage.

Some panhandlers really need money, and some don't. There's no way to know for sure which is which, and I can't afford to give money to everyone who asks for it. So the only "rational" solution is to not give money to panhandlers at all.<p>Of course, I don't follow that rule perfectly because saying no or ignoring somebody makes me feel like a dick. But I'm not going to pretend that giving money to a panhandler is ever a rational act.

I used to do the same thing while I was commuting to San Francisco to do an expert system for PacBell. Lots of homeless people begging and the people I worked with lectured me on not giving them money. That was in my pre-vegetarian days and I had a serious hamburger addiction; occasionally when I bought a hamburger, I would buy a second one to hand to an apparently homeless person.

I think I'm going to apply this to my day-to-day life. I bet I'll give out less money overall, but more money to those that need it.

My mom taught me never to give money to beggars, only ever give them food. Seemed entirely logical.

I keep a couple of gift cards in my wallet and hand them out if someone's in trouble. I tell them there's money on it but not how much. Obviously, someone could still sell the gift card, but the buyer will have to take him at his word.

This is what my parents have taught me to do as well.<p>It's also a possibility though that the beggar wanted to be efficient and accumulate more money for other fares throughout the day, just trying to be efficient.

Tickets, food and anything else is always almost refundable, so in most cases, it would have been cheaper to have given them a quarter, even a dollar.

Is a beggar an analogy for a startup looking for funding?

In Thailand this situation is quite terrible. The Mafia collects people with missing limbs and other disfigurations, basically the people who will elicit the greatest sympathy, and forces them to sit on the same corners begging day after day, month after month and year after year - and turn all of the money they collect over to them. If they steal any, they die. In return they are provided with the bare minimum subsistence living one could imagine.<p>This situation is so bad that the country had to pass a law giving the death penalty to anybody dismembering children for the purposes of turning them into beggars - because people were doing that on a large scale.

In SF, I witnessed the classic: guy offers sandwich to 'hungry' homeless guy. Homeless guy responds, "what kind is it?" Apparently, beggars <i>can</i> be choosers.

Ask them to break a $20.<p>What happens if they naturally learn to collect money, and we record these activities through our hearsay? If we expect them to be able to break a $20?

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