Love this.
A vast majority of aid — 94 percent — is noncash. Donor resistance is one reason for this; it is not easy to persuade American oligarchs, British inheritors and Japanese industrialists to fork over their money to the extremely poor to use as they see fit. “There’s the usual worries about welfare dependency, the whole ‘Give a man a fish’ thing,” said Amanda Glassman, a public health and development expert at the Center for Global Development. “It’s so powerful. It’s really a basic psychological feature of the landscape. You’ll start drinking. You’ll start lying around at home because you’re getting paid.”
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If cash transfers flourished, “the whole aid industry would have to fire itself.”
The number seems low to me.
I wonder if this $66b is for those who are below $1/day. Looking at the plot in [1], we can guess that the number at $1/day is much lower; $66b would give 181 million people a dollar a day.
The OP article noted the amount needed in the village in the beginning was $22/month, so $.75 a day, give or take 10c.
You still have the problem of regional thugs that will come round every "pay day" for their taste. Or beat you up. A pretty simple variation a protection racket, but I'm not sure how to protect against it.
700m × $2 = $1.4b. What am I missing?
For an anecote on PPP vs real dollars, I remember that in the eighties in soviet-ruled Poland, an average monthly salary amounted to about $20. At the same time, the average standard of living was not that bad: most families had flats with central heating (no air-con though), education up to university level and healthcare were free, most families didn't have cars but public transport was cheap.
Can't say that explains it all but presumably there are other things like that.
Most people are poor because of their government. Either through corruption, lack of property rights, or wars both internal and external. We cannot fix poverty in this world until people are guaranteed freedom and safety of person and their property.
I don't know where you live but I'm in the U.S. where it's obvious the number of jobs is going to decline relative to the number of people who need them. Resources won't necessarily decline along with the jobs so I see this as not just applicable to the developing world and not just to solve poverty but to act as a stabilizing force.
On what do you base your claim this is a dumb attempt to guilt people? You're suggestion that's the motivation of those who are backing and implementing this test?
I don't really understand the idea that no action should be taken unless these conditions are met and these conditions are always outside the reach of those who want to act so they shouldn't act because conditions aren't perfect?
I don't think anyone's claiming that testing UI's objective is to see if it will lead to a utopia, otherwise it's a no-go. No, we can't fix poverty if you define fix as a perfect solution that works always and everywhere but if perfect conditions had to be met before anyone acted nobody would do anything productive or useful.
I guess I find your line of argument strange because it does not appear to be founded on anything at all that's coherent, though I'm hoping you can alleviate that problem by explaining it coherently.
Let's work through an example.
North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, and many people starve there every year. It's also a ruthlessly oppressive totalitarian state; the government decides who can enter and leave the country. The government also runs the entire economy, and directs most of it toward military spending. This is all because the country is essentially under the total control of a single person whose father and grand father decided they like things this way, and the geopolitical situation happened to work out in their favor from 1950 to the present.
Suppose you've got an infinite pile of money to give to North Koreans to solve their problems with not having enough food to eat. It's illegal for you to enter that country without permission and illegal for the North Koreans to accept money from foreigners. So how do you give them the money?
Let's assume you can give them the money; that you have a big cargo plane you can fly over North Korea and can throw money out the back of and be certain that a deserving poor starving person will receive it. Where is the deserving poor starving person going to go to buy food? There's no private farm to shop at. The government run stores aren't going to take this foreign money. They're stuck with whatever the government dictates will be produced, which is obviously not enough food.
Ignore that problem and assume the shopkeeper or the farmer would take the money. What are they going to do with it? Private property is basically illegal in North Korea, so it's not like the farmer is going to save his money to make a better farm that can feed more people. He can only spend money in state run enterprises, which all feed directly into the government, and the government spends it all on Kalishnakov rifles, nuclear weapons programs, and weird foreign assassinations. These things are not great for solving the problems of starvation and poverty.
North Korea is the most extreme example, but lots of poor countries have problems like this that cannot be solved by simply throwing money out the back of a cargo plane. Poor societies often need to change to become not-poor.
You can't expect a microeconomics proposal to solve an international political crisis.
> someone gave you enough money to eat, that would be a solution regardless of how corrupt your government.
is obviously not a solution. NK is the most extreme example, but there are others which are less extreme and don't rise to the level of "international political crisis."
Looks like they only paid $90 for the assassination (and materials I guess)).
Given that, do you toss the whole idea or do you think it could work in places like Kenya and the United States?
It's too easy for someone to say "Group X needs additional support for Reason Y" and end up with something just as expensive and complex as what we have now. I know, because I've managed to bait people on both the left and the right into doing it for different values of X and Y.
By "correct implementation", I mean one that replaces all welfare, social security, and probably some parts of the tax code. Healthcare maybe you can get away with treating separately.
I don’t know enough about Kenya to say one way or the other.
As you suggest, it's difficult to imagine this shoehorned in with the tangle of programs administered by multiple agencies.