Many Kenyans refusing basic income experiment
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
But yeah, free money looks a lot like colonialism if you squint. I can see people avoiding it. You get $500 a month now, and then 3 months later, they come asking for a "favor" in return, and it would be a shame if something happened to your kneecaps. This is not reality of course, but let's just say I've been trained to avoid emails offering me free money in the past.
What is to stop the government from changing the laws to require everyone only on UBI (no job) to perform some form of community service for a set number of hours per year. What i to stop the government from increasing it further? So whilst you may gain security for the basic living needs, you may trade it for a less freedom.
That's not to say that system of checks works. Places like Florida have enacted mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, so there's obviously some political will to punish and regulate the poor.
All it would take is the right political climate and circumstances, combined with ad campaigns and lots of lobbying. Many arguments would be put forth to convince people a minor change is a good thing, that due to the current circumstances, its necessary. Many people would likely agree, despite the risk it opens up the potential for the system to be abused with another minor change in the future. And its voted through by popular demand.
A few years later, the political climate changes and the government isn't perhaps as trustworthy/predictable as it might have once been.
Now of course it could go the other way. However, power creep rarely goes backwards.
which is, ironically, the kind of Big Government bullshit the right-wing in this country claims to want less of. it's hypocritical.
>What is to stop the government from changing the laws
The citizens. The hope is citizens can be more active in community efforts(like protesting government actions) when their continual employment(and employment usually hinders midday government protesting) is no longer a necessity for continued life.
In some cultures, gifts are just that, and have no strings attached. Yet in others, gifts create an obligation to the recipient to 'return the favor' at a later date, so accepting a gift is a liability. A lot of research has been done in this area, comparing different cultures[1] or focusing on a specific one [2]
1. http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/socialquilts.pdf
2. http://www.japanintercultural.com/en/news/default.aspx?newsI...
Also read this: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427625/no-fbi-didnt-cr...
Nixon's Chief Domestic Advisor, quote:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This is not the only thing the government did, or continues to do, to destroy various peoples' faith in it.
And yet between here and reddit, I think I see this pop up every other week.
Either way, it seems people don't have a lot of faith in the government, and there are plausible examples of things the government has done to put itself in this situation.
Another example from the same era, gulf of tonkin incident. It doesn't matter what it costs the people at the bottom if the people at the top get what they want, that's the impression I think many of us are left with.
I think you know the answer to this.
There's lots of things I'd like to believe, but don't because they are not true.
Outside of HN and other geek outposts, a great many people, maybe most have a flaky relationship to the truth on almost everything. We're not immune to that of course but I at least know with fellow geeks they will admit the possibility of being wrong instead of relying exclusively on waving their hands and feels. Geeks will change minds when presented with data. Often slowly and grudgingly, but still they are able to do it, it is in them, their identity is looser.
One thing I suspect most of us have very wrong about people is that being 'scientific' is strongly connected to personality, and so appeals to logic and reason are simply not going to resound with everybody in totality. It is not meaningful to them.
The World is my anecdotal evidence for that.
Even those who aren't climate change deniers still seem committed to running us off the cliff with climate change. Perhaps because they believe in an "invisible hand" of Providence.
The posted article is an example. They could've simply quoted what at least one Kenyan thought about it. Anyone operating within a culture which values rationality would've done so. But not these people.
It doesn't seem likely that this type of thing will be a long term concern, but perhaps something can be learned about how society adapts if a significant subset decline the payment.
Consider if somebody walked up to you and offered to pay you 6k/mo, you would be insane not to question it. And in a country where "free stuff" doesn't happen, where corruption and entrapment are common, you would also be insane to accept it.
Several of my friends have spent time in 3rd world countries. Most had the modern, egotistical, charity tour and I would suspect that their particular brand of experience is what the experiment used.
There are many well run charities and organisations operating in these countries which fully understand the problems of interacting with people there and would have seen this situation a mile off. Those that have spent time with these charities have rightly laughed at my naivety and false superiority when talking about problems those countries face.
The upshot is - this is not a surprising result, this could have been expected and appears not to have been due to the poor practice of the organisation running the experiment. They are jeopardising their own experiment and have dealt a blow to both its credibility and the credibility of other BI experiments which already suffer from accusations of low quality science and superiority complexes. This is the long term concern.
Your hyperbole really bothers me here.
It seems to me that it is a survival instinct to refuse new things you don't understand from untrusted sources. Damn right that I do. The fact that I have a Western education and many years of Western life experience may mean that the reasoning I come up with is quite a bit better than someone lacking that, but it doesn't over ride a desire to not radically disrupt my current lifestyle - for better or worse - on a blind bet.
>They find it "hard to believe that a new organization like GiveDirectly would give roughly a year's salary in cash, unconditionally," Le writes. "As a result, many people have created their own narratives to explain the cash, including rumors that the money is associated with cults or devil worship."
Le creates his own narrative about the locals as less educated and less civilized than himself - why else would they refuse his charity?
It is clear that neither he nor his organization see the locals as equals.
How on earth do you profit from people who won't take money because they think you are a cult/devil?
"We've done a lot to try to understand what has led to this increase in refusals," Le wrote in the post.
From the blog post:
We’ve found that people typically refuse out of skepticism. Potential recipients find it hard to believe that a new organization like GiveDirectly would give roughly a year’s salary in cash, unconditionally. As a result, many people have created their own narratives to explain the cash, including rumors that the money is associated with cults or devil worship.
We’ve debated how much effort to expend trying to address the refusal issue. We considered leaving Homa Bay since working in an area with lower refusals would be better for efficiency targets and staff morale. However, ultimately we decided to stay because we are in the process of implementing a large scale research project in Homa Bay, and leaving the area would result in meaningful delays and cost overruns for our research partners. We also believe it’s important to try to address the issue here or else rumors could spread to other areas we’ve not yet been.
The best approach to such situations is, as the organisation is following, to educate the people. It might be hard with low literacy levels but it's possible, especially for a cash studded organisation such as theirs.
edit: Fixed Gorilla to Guerrilla
that's a hell of a freudian slip...
I'm sure there are many gorillas in Congo, but I doubt he was there to train a gorilla militia.
Guerilla, perhaps?
The US market for homeopathic products was $6.4 billion in 2013: http://www.pharmacytimes.com/publications/issue/2013/Septemb...
In Italy, post-earthquake survivors are being provided homeopathic products: http://www.ilpost.it/2016/08/27/regione-marche-terremoto-ome...
Credulous people are everywhere.
I don't understand it; please spell it out for me because all I see is magical thinking. If you think homeopathy isn't a matter of life and death, you might have not considered the people whose lives could have been saved had they turned to real medicine.
It may exist, I suspect, but only peddled by shady online gurus.
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/wellness/integrative-...
Sorry, I admit, it's not homeopathy. It's Reiki, which is one step less valid. At least homeopathy is actually interacting w/ your body in a physical manner, even if it just water; Reiki doesn't even do that.
People will hawk anything when the profit motive gets high enough.
So let's take South Africa. This country is often so successful in so many dimensions compared to other African countries that they are commonly excluded from statistics related to its continent...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manto_Tshabalala-Msimang
This is the Health minister recommending AIDS patient to stop retroviral drugs and take her magical garlic instead (!)
300000 victims.
It is not only in the government... I lived there few years, loved it but I really can't say that common sense is their forte.
Believing herbs will protect you from a shotgun is rather more like the crunchy granola nutjobs that take sugar-water instead of their chemo, because "that stuff's just poison." These are a relative rarity, and the worst patients you've ever dealt with, because you get to watch them choose to suffer and/or die.
It's a difference in degree that amounts to a difference in kind.
Giving people money for a limited time doesn't give them the notion, that they can rely on the money supply for the rest of their lives. They still have to earn an equivalent sum once the supply stops and make their decisions accordingly.
I have no desire to dump on UBI -- I want to see how these various experiments pan out -- but I am reminded of a thought experiment.
Imagine it's 10,000 years ago. You arrive in pre-history with all of the technology of today: electricity, communication, medicine, automation, and so on. Your mission? To destroy mankind.
Assuming infinite resources, how would you go about doing it? Sure, you could build out an infrastructure, create a robotic army, and begin hunting humans down. Or, you could build out about the same amount of infrastructure and just give people whatever they want: food, housing, warmth, and so on. After all, what would a bunch of hunter-gathers really want? It'd probably be easier than hunting them all down and fighting them. As long as you're not under any time pressure, what's the difference between killing them immediately and waiting four or five hundred years for them to stop breeding?
The premise of UBI is that this would not eventually eliminate the species, that individuals here and there would still learn new skills and advance knowledge. The main criticism of UBI (aside from the moral one) is that while stress and struggle for individuals can be a terrible thing, for the species as a whole it results in evolutionary survival.
It will be interesting to watch these populations over time to see how adaptive they are compared with control groups.
"Primitive" people are most likely smarter and harder working than you. Surviving off hunting is not easy - you have to know a lot about the environment you're in.
Also, historically many scientists were well off people who did it as a hobby. By this theory they should have done nothing with their lives.
Anything but. The fact is, I am not looking at individuals. I am looking at the population. A population is not a human.
You make a good point. When we talk about UBI, the relevant examples should be the independently wealthy. Many have done great things with their lives. Some have destroyed themselves. Some have had positive effects on others, encouraging them to also do better. Some have had negative effects on others, causing despair or disillusionment.
Why the difference?
Beats me. So let's experiment.
On a personal level, we should always be kind and treat people with respect and love. But that doesn't make any of these population questions go away.
"experts say that Americans –- going back as far as Colonial times, when Elizabethan poor laws were in vogue — have never favored unlimited government handouts that are not contingent upon work."
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/why-do-american...
Personally, I'd also be afraid to start something like that, since it's would end abruptly, and could easily end early if research funding runs out.
Plus, we're all conditioned to know there's no free lunch - someone who offers one is probably hiding something. There are probably strings attached, any reasonable person might be forgiven for thinking.
It doesn't seem surprising at all that people in Kenya or elsewhere are skeptical.
It is well know the drug dealer strategy of "The first dose is free, until you become hooked. This equally applies to a lot of products we use today.
For example when Facebook started giving a very good service for free it was a bargain. Basically a useful service for free with no strings attachment, no advertising, all paid with investor's money.
Then they started gradually monetizing the people to levels that a new participant in Facebook would consider obnoxious, but being gradual people has gotten used to it and consider totally normal. In some ways now you are forced to be in Facebook because your social circle is in Facebook, you are hooked now.
For a service like Facebook I certainly prefer to pay and my data or personal-social information be mine.
In the same way, making your income dependent on some external entity makes yourself lose your independence and your freedom from this entity.
Never forget that an entity powerful enough to give you most of your income has to be equally useful to take, steal, or seize the income of someone else, those who create the wealth.
This has been done and it is called "socialism". It is nothing new. Part of my family had to ask for a car or a house or a TV to the Government because "everybody had equal rights to it". Of course some were "more equal than others" and my family will wait for years for his totally shit car or house, but the people near power will get it instantly, and their houses, cars or TVs will be great because whatever excuse(like because you are in the Party's dome you need the best TV or car for your job).
For my family to have this "right" meant giving away most of their income in taxes and earn a misery compared to other West societies for equal jobs like being engineer or University teacher.
As an example today you can't earn more than 30 dollars or so in Cuba, that is the limit you have, you can be a doctor or engineer. The only rich people in Cuba are the Communist, but not officially of course, officially they earn 30 dollars like everybody else.
I consider this movement to "basic income" neosocialism. There are powerful entities like Central Banks that want to go back to a centralized economy, they being in charge of the new system, of course.
In my opinion, the way to face the "robots taking our jobs" is to share the ownership of the means of productions(the robots and computers), locally, but never globally.
Also it seems like the problem is assuming strings are attached, so more like survival instinct.
Money does not work in such simplistic ways except for on a tiny scale, for example within the circle of family and friends. Already when you take out a credit your sentence becomes untrue: Debt is created by commercial banks out of thin air - you yourself "pay" for it, because the "debt" promise you give is worth as much as the money you get (plus interest).
When a government hands out "free money" the promise is not direct but indirect but essentially the same: They think that the money will "pay for itself" in the end through economic activity that would otherwise never happen. This is the same thing that happens with every single credit, only that then the responsibility for "repayment" is only one step removed instead of an indefinite amount.
In this context (about the nature of modern money, not UBI), before anyone wants to tell me money for credit comes from other people's savings, I recommend reading "Money Creation in the Modern Economy" (2014) written by the Bank of England. I link to the Guardian article by Graeber, the actual PDF is linked near the beginning of that article though, but it has a summary on page one where it already supports the main points of the article.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-...
> It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were
> a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money"
> to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public
> spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this
> week is that none of this is really true.This is only true as long as there is economic growth.
I'm not sure how representative this project is. I mean, if someone tried a pilot project in San Antonio, would the results of that project be taken as a representative outcome for Texas or the United States? Remember, this "sampling," such as it is, is different from the kind of sampling they do on opinion polls, why they query a small but representative sample of the population.
My guess as to why they're failing is that they're not clearly elucidating their purposes and intentions. For instance, I can confirm to you that if you came to Kenya where you gave, say, high milk-production breeds of cows to dairy farmers, or any other similar thing with a clear quid (if not pro quo), then the uptake would probably overwhelm you.
But with free basic income, it's a very counter-intuitive idea. What do you mean you're giving me free money? Where is it coming from? What's your intention? What do I have to do for it?
If they were to explain that they're conducting an experiment (I bet they're not clear on that point) where they want to see what people would do with their lives if they had a certain basic income guaranteed by someone (say, government), then Kenyans would take you up on the offer, I'm sure. After all, many Kenyans expect and often call upon the government to help in all kinds of areas, so if you took that basic-income-provided-by-government angle as your ultimate goal, I think people would listen.
That lack of clarity is what is most likely causing people to shun the money.
It's not that Kenyans don't want free money. We probably do. After all,we seem to be very keen, for example, on these churches where you "plant a seed" (give money to the church in exchange for "blessings"), and money given out during political campaign seasons (we have one coming up next year) always seems to be taken up very well. But in these cases, the financial logic is not clear.
Where is the logic with free basic income? If you don't clearly and understandably explain that to people, you're going to fail. Especially if when they ask you to explain and your response is something along the lines of "Why do you care? It's free money, you sucker living below the poverty line." (I'm not saying that's what happened. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was).
PS: Just because I'm Kenyan doesn't make me an expert, or even basic informed, on Kenya. Just because you live in a country doesn't necessarily mean you understand it. Exhibit A: Trump supporters. Exhibit B: Brexit.
Edit: typo.
Part of the context they might mention, since apparently it was only $30 per month, is the income difference in the United States where even some relatively lower-income individuals can afford to donate that. So to me a program like this could partly be about reducing the overall income inequality between countries. But at least if that income difference (how much money it actually is in rich countries) is part of the explanation it may seem like it is less likely to be an obligation.
I'm personally confused as to why anyone would think it's a good idea to trial UBI in Kenya, as a sort of private charity initiative, given the sordid historical background. It cannot be feasible to get any meaningful data from such projects. There is so much background noise.
Put the funding into microloans or (unfashionable in the west and yet a vital layer in Africa's commercial middle class) labor organization (= unions). Protect the free media and lobby for laws against corruption in politics. Invest in documentation of the continuous crimes against the public interest. Help break the sociopathic power elites that run most African capitals and national economies. Invest in schools. Pay families that keep their children in school. Create demand for local high technology skills, by looking for local partners & experts before flying in foreigners. Name and shame organizations that don't do this. Name and shame national and international companies that overcharge for Internet, for transport, for medicines, for books.
There are surely so many ways to spend money to help Africans continue to break free of the grip of generations of thieves in power (as they are doing in many countries), and pull themselves out of poverty.
In this context, UBI seems... extraordinarily misplaced, and I can't fault people for refusing it.
There are surely so many ways to spend money
to help Africans
[1] http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/
Are you denying that particular people or even groups of them could have failure modes?
It seems like a reasonable proposition to me that humans have developed strengths and weaknesses.
Similarly they will have a TV but likely a cheap model, nothing too fancy.
We asked Oucha Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"
After spending some time in that Moroccan village, it was easy to see why he thought that. Life can be quite boring in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall, no place to sit and watch interesting strangers go by. And not a lot of work, either. Oucha and two of his neighbors, who were with him during the interview, had worked about seventy days in agriculture and about thirty days in construction that year. For the rest of the year, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. This left plenty of time to watch television. These three men all lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find work, and to give their children a good education. But they all had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone.
Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CI81IQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
What entertainment does is drive the opportunity cost of time back up by increasing the pleasurableness of leisure time. Now, that probably isn't much of an issue for actual underdeveloped countries. I don't think anyone would prefer to sew their own clothes when they can buy perfectly fine ones for a lower price unless they're obsessed with self-reliance, and no one is missing out on these homemade goods either. But in a society where it's plausible that a hobbist might produce some really neat stuff on their own, encouraging passive entertainment might mean some less neat gadgets in the long run.
It seems to me that in this case a randomised controlled trial (RCT) would be an ideal way to determine who is right: A third of people get free money, a third of people get stay-in-school money, and a third of people get nothing. Then see which treatment, if any, is more effective at increasing the standard of living.
But you seem quite certain that data from such an experiment would not be meaningful. What kind of problems do you think would prevent an RCT from producing an accurate answer? Could we avoid these problems by instead running the trail in, say, South East Asia, or are RCTs doomed to produce unreliable data?
Do you even understand what creates a "standard of living"?
It is things like, "if I start a business, and people don't pay their bills, can I take them to court?"
If the answer is "no" then you are stuck with a cash economy, no credit, no trust. Everything becomes more expensive.
How do you create functioning courts? You need honest politicians. How do you get honest politicians? You build coalitions of power that boot out the thieves. How do you build such coalitions? You spend decades slowly growing your economy so the commercial middle classes get wealthy enough to become politically relevant and interested. How do you grow your economy? You cut the cost of transport and communications. How do you do that?
Etc. etc. I'm not giving a recipe, I'm giving examples of how complex this is.
The scale is such that you'd need absolutely staggering amounts of money and political will to run studies that would show useful data. I'm talking entire regions, even countries, changing policies. Cases like Rwanda focussing on the Internet. Give it a decade, then compare to Burundi, which focusses on (e.g.) child health and political stability.
Anyhow, there are no easy answers for this and forgive me if it sounds like I think there are.
I've actually lived and worked in Africa for much of my life. I'm married to a Congolese and have been surrounded for a dozen years by that culture. My family has worked and works in Africa. I've spent years working for organizations that ran projects across Africa. My questions and cynicism doesn't fall out of the air.
If you take issue with points I've raised, good manners dictate that you reply to those points without trying to punish me for raising them, as some of you did, which is cool.
I don't know about the cost of living or employment situation in Kenya, but by GDP PPP per capita, that calculates to about the equivalent of $17.42/day in the U.S, or $522/month ($6,264/year). That's way below poverty level, and not likely to cover housing, utilities, food, and healthcare anywhere in the U.S. Of course, that would be helpful to anyone with low income, but it is not a basic income. The situation may be different in Kenya, but by the math it doesn't sound promising.
If it only affects 1/100 of 1% of the population, there is no way to observe the societal effects of a universal income. That's a long way from universal. Also, because it is an experiment rather than a social contract, there is no way to observe what people will do if they have it as a safety net, because they can't rely on it. To be fair, if it is going to run for 10 years, that's something, but still not representative of lifetime security.
---
Regarding the comments about poor people buying TVs and cellphones, etc. - there are many reasons for this, but it really is utility and value. These people aren't stupid. The economy works completely differently when you are poor. Thinking that they should invest their $300 tax refund in a diversified stock portfolio is nonsense. With fees of $10/transaction, they would lose 1/3rd of their money just buying into 10 cheap stocks, and an equivalent amount selling it. They would need > 100% return just to break even.
Likewise, money in the bank is a liability. It detracts from foodstamp allowances etc. But they don't send people around to appraise your TV when they're calculating your foodstamps. And in a pinch, you have things that you can trade, sell, or pawn. If you leave the money in the bank, it will be lost to bills, bank fees, etc. And sure, you could have caviar and shrimp instead of ramen and rice cakes, but it'd be gone as soon as the meal is done. A stereo will still be there tomorrow.
Generally speaking, if you are working poor, trying to save up to improve your position costs you and you lose. Buying things saves you money, maintains the status quo, gets you things which you can sell in an emergency, and makes your life better until then. Consider states of matter - solid, liquid, gas. Things work quite differently depending on the state of matter. Likewise, the economy works quite differently if you are lower class, middle class, or upper class.
Telling someone poor that they should spend their money more wisely is often like telling someone trapped in ice that they should just swim up to the surface. In the latter case, physics just doesn't work that way. In the former case, economics just doesn't work that way.