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Optimal hammering time – Aceso Under Glass

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Last month I watched Home, a documentary about a charity offering homes to poor people (maybe just poor single mothers?) at a significant discount. It focuses specifically on one woman who applied for help and the case worker assigned to her. Watching it, I was struck by how much the case worker defined her goal as getting this woman this house, rather than helping her, or giving the house to the person to whom it would do the most good. I thought it was a case of cargo cult, another friend described it as a cultural fixation on helping the poor by making them middle class rather than making being poor bearable. Either way, it seemed to me like an example of misapplied charity. Last week I started training to volunteer for a crisis hotline. One of the things they drill into us is that most callers have a lot of problems we can’t solve. We have very few tools: occasionally we make referrals if they have certain specific issues (e.g. we’ll offer LGBTQ kids the number for the T

Last month I watched Home , a documentary about a charity offering homes to poor people (maybe just poor single mothers?) at a significant discount. It focuses specifically on one woman who applied for help and the case worker assigned to her. Watching it, I was struck by how much the case worker defined her goal as getting this woman this house, rather than helping her, or giving the house to the person to whom it would do the most good. I thought it was a case of cargo cult, another friend described it as a cultural fixation on helping the poor by making them middle class rather than making

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