Works at my work. Something broken? Throw money at someone and it’s either fixed or replaced.
They stopped throwing money so now when a fridge dies it’s just no fridge for a week.
My renter complained that her dishwasher was broken. Bought her a new dishwasher. Complaints stopped because dishwasher works.
I’m currently in the midst of throwing money at a problem - car’s brakes corroded after I didn’t drive for three months due to Reasons. I’m desperate to get back behind the wheel - a backlog of car-centric jobs has piled up.
Social services. The programs that show that they save money - like rehabilitation instead of prison, that saves 4 dollars for every dollar spent. We should be funding those, but they’re not run by private prison companies, so there’s no political will to spend the money.
Where do you get the 75% useless?
What is a specific situation you’ve seen where it didn’t work?
Serious, not trying to start trouble.
Major infastructure projects (in certain countries) tend to turn into infinitely deep money pits due to rampant mismangment and corruption that can swallow the entire budgets of smaller nations and still not get done. They tend to drag down the average.
I see what you’re saying.
On the other hand, that’s more about corruption than it is about actually solving the problem.
When I lived in a low CoL country, it was pretty convenient to throw money at problems like home maintenance (repairs, cleaning, etc.) instead of doing it yourself. Doing that in a high CoL country isn’t feasible long term unless you’re rich enough.
thats kinda how its supposed to work. people learn to do something well and you do the thing you are good at and hire someone to do the stuff you have not learned to do well. It still blows my mind the old tv shows with the milkman, mailman, tv repairman, phone repair man.
When the problem is lack of money it works everytime.
Never, because when the appropriate amount of money is used they don’t call it ‘throwing money at the problem’. It is a phrase that means something along the same lines as wasting money on a thing instead of doing what is really needed.
Throwing money at a problem works, when you are actually throwing money at the problem and not at a symptom.
For me currently, my car is a good example.
Problem: I need reliable transportation.
My car is almost old enough to vote here in the US and while it has been a reliable ride now things are starting to fail left and right. I could spend money replacing the parts that break as they break. Or I could simply replace the car.
My solution: Just replace the car. More expensive short term, but it’ll be cheaper and far less headache long term.
IMO that’s what the “throwing at” is meant to convey. The person doing the throwing is doing it at a distance and with low accuracy.
Bro. If I had money I’d throw it at you.
I was redoing the roof on my house, and I had some family over helping me do that.
For context, I live in a geodesic dome home, and so it’s not as simple as scrape off old roof, slap on new roof, you also have to account for the angles of the hundreds of triangles that comprise the roof.
Further, instead of using a cedar shake, which was what was already on there, I decided to use an aluminum shake. The main reason was cost. Cedar shake was going to cost about $10 a square foot, whereas aluminum shake only cost me about $1 a square foot.
Even though my home is 2600 square foot and in a normal flat roof house that would mean you would have somewhere between 2600 and 3000 square foot to cover, because it’s a dome, it curves, you have a lot more wastage and so I was looking at buying about 4000 square foot of shake.
Going aluminum extended the lifespan of the roof from a 25 year to a 50 year, which is nice, and also cut $30,000 out of the cost.
However…
Once we got the old roof off, my family members decided that they didn’t want to do this anymore, and they left.
So I had to, all of a sudden, call around and find someone else to help me install the roof.
You remember that $30,000 I saved buying aluminum shake instead of cedar shake?
That’s what it cost for me to get the aluminum shake installed after the old roof had been peeled off, not counting what I paid my family members for the help that they did provide in the interim.
When the problem is bills.
No.
“Throwing money” implies that the solution was indeed 75% useless. It’s why this expression exists.
It’s like asking “When is failure a success?” It’s literally not possible for a failure to be successful, that’s why we call it “failure”.
It works when money can purchase what is actually needed in detail, and the people on the receiving end are competent.
Throwing money at the problem works when it’s a money problem. It doesn’t work when it’s a social problem.
The issue is that people think money can fix social problems, it can’t. It can sometimes help, but social problems need social solutions.
The issue is most people can’t distinguish between money and social problems. Corruption, is not a money problem. Homelessness/drugs, is not a money problem, etc. etc.
