Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a famed British naval historian (I mean really, just try to make up a snootier British name) who died in 1993.
He is most noted for predicting with complete accuracy in 2024 the Denver metro area would have more homeless than ever.
Well, he might have used slightly different words, but lo and behold, the latest data release proved him right.
In 1955, after a career of watching governmental inefficiency, he published a satirical essay in The Economist magazine and introduced the world to “Parkinson’s Law.” You instinctively know and understand it.
It’s simple: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Now “work” here means pretty much anything that can be limited by time or space. For instance, you’re going on a trip and pull out your small suitcase, you’ll pack it to the gills using every last bit of space.
But if you pulled out your large suitcase instead, you’d also pack it to the gills. Your stuff expands to fill the space available.
Look around your home right now and compare it to the first apartment you lived in. The larger your living space the more furniture, paintings, and house plants you filled it with. And when you downsize your home, you get rid of most of the stuff to fit the new space. (So, did you need that stuff, or just want it?)
Parkinson’s law is most personally damaging when it comes to income. If you could go back and talk to your high school self and tell him how much money he’ll be earning at your age, he’d think he was going to be on easy street. But you’re not on easy street. Easy street isn’t even in your ZIP code. Every time you got a raise, your expenses magically increased to meet it.
A side note, the key to financial abundance is breaking Parkinson’s law. If every time you get a raise you only expand your spending by half of the raise amount and keep socking away the other half, you’ll be rich before you know it.
Living just a bit more modestly creates the millionaire next door. (I’m better at giving advice than taking it).
As every marginal columnist like me knows, if you have 10 hours to write a column, it takes 10 hours to write. If you have one hour, it takes one hour. Or, as Isaac Asimov once wrote, “In 10 hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.”
Coloradans passed a tax increase on wealthier folks to buy school lunches for any kid who wanted one. Yet, bureaucrats seemed surprised more than a third more kids as they expected showed up for free food, bankrupting the scheme in its first year.
People wanting free stuff expanded to more than fill the space available. How could anyone not expect that?
In the same way we expanded shelters for the homeless to a record high number. And, presto, as Parkinson predicted — and just like school lunches — we have record high number of homeless people. The number expanded to fit the space available. Again, who didn’t expect that!?And just like trading your small suitcase for a large suitcase and then a steamer trunk still not large enough, we will always have more people to be housed than places to house them.
The corollary is if we reduce the amount of housing for the homeless, and stop subsidizing them to stay on the streets, we’ll have fewer homeless.
Looking at the homeless numbers broken out by the seven counties that make up the Denver metro area begs a few questions: Namely, why does the city and county of Denver have six times more homeless than any other county it borders? In fact, Denver has nearly double the homeless of all other six counties combined.
Could it possibly be the city and county of Denver spends more of their taxpayers’ money on services and shelter for the homeless than any other?
Also worth noting Jefferson and Arapahoe counties saw increases in the homeless population while all other counties witnessed a decrease.
Why do I have a funny feeling those two counties increased the number of places for the homeless to stay?
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.