We often do not realize how many layers of wealth we had to stand on to possess our current wealth.
I wish there were a simple way to participate as an individual. You don't have to be rich to cover one (or more) people's basic living expenses at this rate.
Edit: Here's the link to donate: https://www.givedirectly.org/give-now
You can even send money via Venmo to avoid the credit card processing fee.
For instance, the people in the village were paying to get iron sheets for roof covers, and if you expense the cost over it's lifetime, it comes out to maybe an extra $1 a month. In the US, you pay $400-2000 a month in rent per person but you get a building that has central air, a solid roof, comes with a kitchen & bathroom with modern plumbing, fulfills building safety codes, and probably a lot more.
The people in the village were also buying access to wealth generation. One person went to invest in a fishing net and hired labor. He went from receiving $20 a month to potentially making $20 dollars a day. It underlines to me that investment is needed to unlock more productivity and better growth. It is sustained periods (decades) of this kind of continual investment that allows leap frogging from one income level to the next that turns a village into a modern city.
That is, at least partially, because it can't cover someone's basic living expenses for a year. According to the World Bank, the global poverty line was US$1.90/day in 2015, after adjusting for purchasing power.[0] This amounts to $694/year or roughly $57/month. Of course, while it is possible that, after adjusting for purchasing power, those 2280 shillings amount to $60 or more of purchasing power.
I think most Western grocery bills amount to more than $60/person/month; never mind shelter and clothing. And yet, for all of our society's wealth, I wouldn't be surprised if the average Kenyan had a greater net worth than the average American. Without much wealth to speak of, access to debt is likely to be greatly limited.
[0] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/wo...
> The nonprofit is in the process of registering roughly 40 more villages with a total of 6,000 adult residents, giving those people a guaranteed, 12-year-long, poverty-ending income. An additional 80 villages, with 11,500 residents all together, will receive a two-year basic income. With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income.
Young people and whole villages can use it to bootstrap: things like proper cell service, internet, and healthy food become affordable where before they were not.
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GiveDirectly is my charity of choice right now. I have a $1000 monthly recurring with them.
The difference in cost of living between San Francisco and rural Kenya is vast. The upshot is that an amount that many of us here on HN can handle is life changing for a lot of people on the other end.
I live in a co-op, so I save more than that every month compared to many of my friends in rent alone, and still we all have ridiculously comfortable lives.
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Poverty exists here too, but a lot of it's entrenched and intractable. It has complex causes like bad urban design, bad schools, and political gridlock. It's hard to create improvement with a donation. It requires creative activism.
Rural Kenya and Uganda, on the other hand, have lots of communities full of bright young people where the main thing holding them back really is just an abject lack of resources.
That means there's an opportunity, and I think GiveDirectly is the best organization right now to take it.
- They are effective. They don't do virtue signaling. They don't helicopter in, build a cinderblock schoolhouse, and then pose for photos with smiling kids. They measure outcomes.
- They are efficient. They stick to cash transfers, the most direct way of giving. They track and advertise the fraction of their income that they lose to corruption and overhead. Most charities are worse on those metrics and don't talk about them.
- They are rational. They don't do sob stories. They don't spam. They are run like a startup, by economists.
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Be an activist locally. Be a donor globally. Many of us are extremely lucky and, by global standards, powerful. Wield it well :)
[0] http://www.nation.co.ke/newsplex/counties-purchasing-power/2...
I didn't see the specific region named in the NYT article.
2280 shillings is about 28-38% of the amount needed to get above the (absolute) poverty line, with the true number likely being closer to the middle or lower end of that range. It likely brings the people whom they chose out of poverty and around on-par with their just-above-poverty neighbours but not much more. I'm inclined to believe that they chose a region of Kenya where there was a good mix of people living just below the poverty line and people living just above the poverty line for exactly this reason.
I'm not sure about the distinction between extreme poverty, regular poverty and a national standard poverty line (in Kenya). When so much of your population is in absolute poverty, I don't think that a national standard line makes much sense. It does, of course, make more sense in the developed world where shelter alone will cost more money than the median Kenyan spends in a year; the median Kenyan is not below the global poverty line.
From the NYT article:
Kogelo, where Obama’s father was born, is just 20 miles from the village, which lies close to the banks of Lake Victoria. (This is the first village mentioned)
We took off at dawn from Kisumu, a bustling industrial city on the banks of Lake Victoria, and followed a two-lane highway to Bondo, a small trading city filled with cattle, bicycles and roadside food stands. From there, we turned inland from the lake and drove into a lush agricultural region. (This is the second village mentioned)
All across the villages of western Kenya, it was clear to me just how much aid money was wasted on unnecessary stuff.
There is? You give money to GiveDirectly. They even take Bitcoin (I've done it).
I've donated, thank you! Seems like a great charity.
While the lifestyles of people in those countries probably are unfathomable to wealthy westerners, don't forget the cost of living is way lower too. Comparing the converted to dollars incomes is not enough to give one the right perspective on how much they can buy. On 264/year in the US one might literally starve to death; clearly the millions of citizens of those countries are not all starving to death. The cost of food, shelter, etc. are all lower in dollar terms in those countries. They are still impoverished in terms of material quality of life though, of course.
Editors don't just change headlines. In technical stuff I've written using feminine pronouns I've had editors change to masculine.
Editors will do anything they think makes a piece more ready for contemporary mass consumption.
Speaking as someone who has had to write headlines, there can be very strict guidelines we have to adhere to. Masculine is still the default neutral in professional English, in a number of places I've worked at.
In fact, what seems to be a common story in the article is that giving money directly in a way that is sustained over time allows people to plan long-term, stand on their feet and find better work or start businesses, making better long-term financial decisions to reverberate to the whole of the community.
The easy resistance to BI is to say that it will remove incentives to work, and that is what the headline seems to imply. The content of the article seems to suggest the opposite.
The modern anomalous rise in wealth is directly correlated to an increase in the use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the 20th century. So if you want to talk about giants, you should mean to say you're standing on the shoulders of trillions of carbon lifeforms condensed into coal, oil and natural gas over hundreds of hundreds of millions of years.
What people have accumulated in wealth between when life arose and 1850 is entirely insignificant than what was built in the last 167 years (roughly).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
This is essentially describing charity to poor communities. That's not new. The article's connection between it and "basic income" is tenuous. To be fair, that's not the fault of the article as much as the program itself.
How is charity to poor rural communities with collectivist leanings a test of the vague notion of basic income? Or what will this program tell us about basic income in the US with 300 million people and a much higher standard of living?
Admirable social program, yes. A test of the viability of basic income worldwide? Not so much.
This program will tell us what the next test should look like.
With this initiative, GiveDirectly — with an office in New York and funded in no small part by Silicon Valley — is starting the world’s first true test of a universal basic income.
As you stated, there have been other attempts, so I don't know what the definition of "first true test" is.
A universal basic income has thus far lacked what tech folks might call a proof of concept. There have been a handful of experiments, including ones in Canada, India and Namibia. Finland is sending money to unemployed people, and the Dutch city Utrecht is doing a trial run, too. But no experiment has been truly complete, studying what happens when you give a whole community money for an extended period of time — when nobody has to worry where his or her next meal is coming from or fear the loss of a job or the birth of a child.
The Mincome experiment was 5-years. Why was it not "truly complete"?
http://www.marketplace.org/2016/12/20/world/dauphin
Back to the article:
That, surprisingly, worked well enough to give them the confidence to start a threadbare randomized control trial the year they graduated. It found that the recipients, who received an average of $500, saw excellent outcomes: Their children were 42 percent less likely to go a whole day without eating. Domestic-violence rates dropped, and mental health improved.
Not trying to be argumentative, just not sure what this is testing. What is it controlling for? What is it doing different from previous experiments? What does giving money to every person in a poor community tell you that giving money to poor people in a wealthy community doesn't?
These are very rural and impoverished communities by developed standards. Giving money to the poorest of the poor seems like an obvious improvement for them. What it doesn't say is how you can do it anywhere else.
GiveDirectly gives everyone in the community who registers $22 month. The amount doesn't go down if the person starts to independently generate income. It will be universal, not means-tested.
This isn't necessarily a better experiment, but it is a different one.
What does giving money to every person in a poor community tell you that giving money to poor people in a wealthy community doesn't?
Well, we don't know. Hence this experiment. Mincome, however successful, was basically a deluxe "welfare" program with all the negative baggage that comes with it. If we're giving a supplement to the poor, and taking away that supplement if they become wealthy, some argue it functions as a 100% tax on work, hence functioning as a disincentive. (That's in addition to the "disincentive" of not forcing poor people to work to meet their basic needs.) If you're in Mincome, why take an $8,000 yr. side job? It would be like working for free. But a person on GiveDirectly, if they get a $10/month side job, their total income will be $32. Side work will continue to be a financially productive investment. It's a different type of experiment.
Average incomes in the US are much greater, for sure. But there are places in the US where average income is just as small, relative to the national average. And what will happen when trucking is fully automated? What would prevent parts of the US from becoming as impoverished as this area in Kenya?
Edit: typo
There's the classic problem of the leaky bucket, meaning that overhead drains some resources before they reach the problem itself. Cash is about as efficient as it gets.
There's no universal definition of basic income and it certainly won't be so straightforward once it goes through the meat-grinder of legislation.
It's cash on the barrelhead to the poorest of the poor from outside organizations. That's charity.
I understand your concern about messy legislation but is that an argument against it? I see your point, though. I'm guessing, possibly wrong, that the people involved in this have considered or at least will consider how this will be implemented and will fund lobbying to try to get this done as cleanly as possible. I realize I'm making some assumptions here but people aren't going to invest boatloads of money in testing a concept than just let it fail during deployment.