Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to hear results in the field.

My question is how does that transfer to other environments? Do the results at $22 a month in Kenya translate to the results at $1000 a month in the US? There's a lot more interesting things to buy with a $1000 in New York than there is with $22 in a village in Kenya. It's also a different society, different people. Maybe more religious, etc.

Just throwing out a stupid idea: Kenya's population is 47 million. To give all of them $22 a month (ignoring age cutoffs), unless I'm doing the math wrong would be just under $13 billion a year. If some really wealthy people really want to test this, it's not impossible.

Unlike the article's repeated claim that this is the "greatest myth" (it's really annoying how news articles editorialize with untestable statements like that), the biggest issue is still cost. How do you realistically put together and pay for a program that can become policy in the US? It's the 3 trillion dollar question.

Interesting "stupid" idea there. Is there enough incentive on either side for a small nation to offer its entire population to scientific research for a large one that cannot afford the failure of a similar experiment on itself?

It'd be fair to assume that a successful experiment would eventually become self-funding and discontinued if unsuccessful. Your $13B number puts the budget in the same ballpark as ITER; smaller than half of the foreign aid donated by the US in 2013, an order of magnitude smaller than Project Apollo, and less than 10% the size of the Marshall plan.

However such a project will not be able to avoid wide publicity which would attract many "confounding factors" trying to ensure its success, or more likely its failure.

Interesting observation. One thing that people who are fans of donor-funded BI don't realize is that there are reasons for the minimal standards of living required to sustain a $22 a month budget.

a) Donor funding causes poorer members of society to turn a blind eye to inept leadership who misappropriate taxes and who don't really care about effecting sustainable change. The fact that they can live on $22 a month doesn't change the fact that their village has shitty schools, shitty hospitals, and non-existent public infrastructure... and the Kenyans responsible for fixing that get richer by the day.

b) Efforts by East African countries to build sustainable industries are curtailed by the same economies that purport to support them. Kenya had to back out of a plan to prevent the importation of second-hand clothing (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/world/africa/east-africa-...) because the States threatened to review Kenya’s eligibility to export textiles to the US.

I think it's nice that 3rd parties are so keen on being helpful... but I think that change will have to come from within.

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