Following my post on sugar daddies, Aveek points me to this latest, intuitively alienating and exploitative capitalist phenomenon.
It’s hard not to feel queasy about the whole situation, but Yglesias makes a compelling case for there being nothing dreadful here that isn’t intrinsic to and constitutive of homelessness itself:
[This] offends our sense of human dignity, but the real offense is that people were languishing in such poor conditions that they would find this to be an attractive job offer. The sin they’re being punished for is less any harm they’ve done to homeless people than the way they broke decorum by shoving the reality of human misery amid material plenty into the faces of convention-goers. The polite thing to do is to let suffering take place offstage and unremarked-upon.
