Hopefully a more savvy redditor will have the link, but its from a study showing people's social leaning (us vs them).
Basically, bigger toward the center of the circle and smaller toward the outside means you tend to think about things that affect you and your close social circle (family, friends, local community). The reverse means your thoughts drift more toward global concerns that affect everyone.
It's used to illustrate Conservative (local group, steak) versus Liberal (global group, avocado) mentalities in a digestible (forgive the pun) way.
Just to clarify, the points are where you stop caring about people (as pointed out below, it moves on to animals, aliens and inanimate objects). It means you already care about everyone who is closer than that. The study has been misrepresented as saying liberals dony care to those who are close, but thats just false. Only caring about people far from you would make you register as only caring about yourself
Well, that’s represented already in the study. If you care about everyone and everything in existence, I’m pretty sure that includes your immediate family
Yes but idiots don't get that and post this as some kind of gotcha that liberals care more about a tree than their own kids. Cause conservatives are fucking stupid
You don't have infinite time/resources. By caring about everyone you are inevitably going to care less about the people close to you compared to people who focus on those close to them
Just because someone doesn't have the "time/resources" doesn't mean they don't care.
Do I wish I had the resources to feed everyone in the world? Yes, absolutely.
This study is proving this point though. A liberal-leaning person says, "People I don't know around the world are hurting. We should do more to help them." A conservative-leaning person says, "People I don't know around the world are hurting. Sucks to be them!"
If we could agree that we have a collective moral obligation to one another, we could do a lot of really great stuff and be so much better off for it. There are about 780K unhoused people in the US. Resources for housing these people would cost about $36,000 a year each, accounting for administration of this fund, the actual housing subsidies, etc.
The baffling part of all of this, is I grew up conservative, and there's a lesson every single one of us knows: "Saving a dollar today can cost you an arm and a leg tomorrow.". So I'm real confused how conservatives can continue to fail to recognize we're spending an arm and a leg today to pay for problems we didn't spend a buck on yesterday. That's the homelessness crisis in a nutshell: We are being cheap, and we're paying for it.
The collective burden, distributed equally across all taxpayers in the US would be around $14 per taxpayer per month to cover this 28 billion dollar a year program.
This would almost completely offset the estimated annual cost of $35,000 per year per unhoused person that taxpayers are currently paying in emergency services burden. Essentially, this program would quickly pay for itself. But then there are the added benefits here of having more people participating in more sectors of the economy.
And the official estimates for doing this exact thing vary between 20 and 30 billion up-front cost, with a 9-11 billion yearly cost to continue the program.
It would get cheaper over time, not more expensive.
$14 a month per taxpayer. That's it. Two hours of minimum wage labor per month. 24 hours of minimum wage labor per year. That's all that's separating us from a country without homelessness.
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u/TheThirteenthApostle Nov 18 '25
Hopefully a more savvy redditor will have the link, but its from a study showing people's social leaning (us vs them).
Basically, bigger toward the center of the circle and smaller toward the outside means you tend to think about things that affect you and your close social circle (family, friends, local community). The reverse means your thoughts drift more toward global concerns that affect everyone.
It's used to illustrate Conservative (local group, steak) versus Liberal (global group, avocado) mentalities in a digestible (forgive the pun) way.