Negative responses to today's column tend to focus on lot on CA's homeless problem, which I acknowledge. But I find myself thinking about our tendency to give too much weight to the misery we see, versus that we don't 1/ nytimes.com/2021/08/26/opi…
The homeless in CA are around 0.4% of the population 2/ endhomelessness.org/homelessness-i…
Texas, with cheap housing, has many fewer homeless. But almost a quarter of nonelderly lack health insurance, compared with 11% in CA 3/ kff.org/other/state-in…
The thing is, the tragedy of families that can't afford necessary health care takes place effectively off camera and doesn't offend one's eyes. Does that make it unimportant 4/
Overall, Texas life expectancy is 2.4 years shorter than CA. That means that there must be many invisible tragedies 5/ cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom…
Some of these tragedies involve children: CA has a low infant mortality rate, TX a high one, but again that's off camera 6/ cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom…
We should always acknowledge problems; the CA housing crisis is real, and is causing a lot of harm. But we should fight placing special emphasis on problems that happen to be visible to upper-middle-class eyes 7/
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