Togo made a digital government stimulus system in two weeks
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
10 days from inception to rolled out. There was a slight hiccup with fraud, which was then handled almost instantly.
That kind of speed of development is absolutely possible, especially in richer nations. The key difference seems to be not the fraud prevention systems, but the desire to help those in need.
> “It’s a strong belief of mine that just because someone is poor doesn’t mean he’s irresponsible—he’s just poor,” she says. “So if you give him money, there’s no way he’s going to waste it. For me, it’s linked with dignity.”
That perspective isn't one you'll find popular in the nations that should be able to deploy programs like these, but don't. Their voters don't see them as helping the poor, and don't see the poor as likely to invest any protective income into survival. So the politician follows the culture of looking down on those with less, and perpetuates the cycle.
It's a self-inflicted cultural attack on the most vulnerable part of the population.
Who could be helped, in the space of weeks.
The key difference is the complete lack of regulation and data policies. The potential for malevolence in a country the size of Togo is limited, but I'd rather not have the same processes in my own country.
Alternatively we could accept the role of outsourcing and the effects of the broken social fabric and the system-wide problems that remain unresolved in the anglosphere countries.
The potential for building more advanced fraud protection systems also scales with the nation being discussed. Especially when you consider that the world's largest fraud protection experts are already operating within the borders of most of those richer nations.
Why not partner with MasterCard or VISA?
Because the problem domain is different for credit card transactions compared to covid stimulus?
Yet, somehow, the stimulus programs still require exorbitant amounts of their budget to verify known persons, and use this as a way to deny access to those who are most vulnerable.
The richer you are the easier it is to justify pissing away resources inefficiently catering to stakeholders way down the totem pole.
Compare/contrast pretty much any publicly funded endeavor in the US/Canada/rich western Europe vs similar projects elsewhere. Sure the rich places get 10% more but they pay 90% more to do it.
So what we now have in many western nations is a huge bureaucratic body to prevent fraud on social security systems which at the same time significantly increase hurdles to apply for the programs and what can be done with the help. On the other hand, the bureaucratic support to fight tax evasion especially by the super rich, is typically tiny.
This is the Just world hypothesis in action.¹
Without that reading Candide is akin to reading a serial killers' torturous fan fiction.
The (modern) meaning of this is hard to discern without knowing if "poor" means the same in the two contexts. Is it not possible someone in the US who is considered to be "poor" (by wealth or QoL) might not be in Togo?
> bureaucratic support to fight tax evasion
Do you mean actual (legal) tax evasion, or tax fairness?
Many tax schemes exist in a weired gray area and have not been tested in court sufficiently, because of how complex they are, how difficult they are to invetigate and expensive to prosecute
That political discourse is easy to explain: while it is certainly helpful to "give the fish" to the starving one, it's less clear when you give the fish to "the idle" one instead of teaching him to fish.
The main difference is the meaning of "poor". The meaning of "poor" in Africa is someone that may eat once a day or not even that. In the west, the poverty line is way above that.
The company mentioned that found cash programs work, GiveDirectly, works not only on a global scale, but within US borders, with similar results.
However, they have had previous programs of their own that ran in the US, such as their Hurricane Harvey relief programs. (Which haven't turned into research papers).
$11B is estimated to be fraud.
Your statement is quite trite to be honest.
89% of payments weren't considered fraudulent. I.e. it seems like you're suggesting that you'd rather sacrifice the well-being of the millions of people who received legitimate unemployment benefits just to prevent payments to a relatively small percentage of people who don't deserve them.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-25/californ...
A nation can just as easily 'accidentally help someone' to its own demise. What happens when you incentivize idleness on a national scale? What happens tax rates have to keep going up and up to fund the benefits of the idle? What about all the vast social welfare programs we already have in place here in America? What about the worker shortage that unemployment benefits caused just recently during the pandemic? A worker shortage I saw everywhere, first hand. Whatever country you're from, you're doing a bad job representing it.
Why "instead"? Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?
> Why can this person not both donate directly and wish that everyone else were obligated to do the same?
You are proposing the imposition of your ideals onto someone else, via theft, under the penalty of governmental violence/incarceration.
The poster suggested that you take on the personal responsibility for righting what you perceive as an injustice in the world. I agree with them.
Anything else would be tyranny, as others have pointed out.
I suspect we live in different nations, then.
> You are proposing the imposition of your ideals onto someone else, via theft, under the penalty of governmental violence/incarceration.
Is this your opinion of all taxes? If so, I'm surprised you manage to function day-to-day.
""" The American republic was founded on a set of beliefs that were tested during the Revolutionary War. Among them was the idea that all people are created equal, whether European, Native American, or African American, and that these people have fundamental rights, such as liberty, free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law, and freedom of assembly. America’s revolutionaries openly discussed these concepts. Many Americans agreed with them but some found that the ideology was far more acceptable in the abstract than in practice. """ https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/foun...
> Is this your opinion of all taxes? If so, I'm surprised you manage to function day-to-day.
I am of the belief that taxes are appropriate to fund the limited function that the government was designed to fulfill. Namely goods/services which are public, such as providing national defense and a legal system for enforcing the number one principle, "voluntary transactions okay. Involuntary transactions not okay."
I am fine with taxes so long as they are providing a public good which cannot be met by the private sector due to factors such as nonexcludability. The types of things that are covered by that statement include things like national defense and law/policing such that the state can arbitrate on enforcement of private contracts as well as provide punishment for involuntary harm caused on a 3rd party.
In fact, that is the primary reason the founders were specific in direct vs. indirect taxes. Such a distinction provides clarity around how much of a public good can be created and how they can be paid for in a relatively fair fashion. Excise taxes are primarily consumption based, and all indirect taxes are subject to apportionment. Hence the absurdity of the 16th ammendment.
I do not consider wealth redistribution a function of the government, especially on the national level, as it is specifically excludable.
This myth of the idle poor has to die. Poor people are overwhelmingly working, and the vast majority are working much harder than the upper middle class, and almost universally harder than the 0.01%.
Unfortunately, most poor people made the mistake to work on crucial jobs such as nursing, teaching small kids, cleaning up, maintaining infrastructure, building buildings and so on. All jobs that are not deemed inprotant enough to deserve a living wage.
This reads like hyperbole and cynicism. Americans as a whole donate a large amount to charity each year and the United States already has wide-ranging social welfare programs. I challenge the use of the word "accidentally", because there are legitimate concerns about dependency, freeloading, and quite frankly, fairness. It is easy to declare that some population is being "underserved" but the funds for that service need to come from somewhere. Why is it such a negative thing for I, as a contributor, to look at the system critically and with reservations?
The American military budget is so massively over-bloated its sickening. No only that, they made 35 Trillion dollars in adjustments in 2019 alone. The year before they made 30 Trillion dollars in adjustments.
In 2018 the pentagon failed its first ever independent audit, instead of releasing the report, they changed their own rules to hide the report under the guise of "national security".
I shudder to think how much money is being skimmed from the pentagon budget, but no one seems to care.
> Why is it such a negative thing for I, as a contributor, to look at the system critically and with reservations?
Its not, but I find it disturbing how, in general, even the smallest whiff of fraud from a social program, brings all sorts of regulations and cuts. But the Pentagon making 65 trillion dollars in adjustments to its budget in 2 years is meet with silence.
For me, I would rather every single person in this country go to bed with a full stomach, even if it meant some amount of fraud, then to let the pentagon piss away more money.
If people really cared about not wasting their tax dollars they would be outraged over the pentagon. Doing a proper audit of that would probably get back so much money any fraud in social programs would be statistically insignificant.
Personally, I am. And at large, just about any American will agree that we spend too much on the military industrial complex. The barriers to reducing military spending are different from the pressures put on politicians to manage social welfare programs.
That's not my experience, Can't tell you the amount of people I've meet that have no problem with the military having a blank check.
“It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another,” Clark explained to Task & Purpose. “So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back.”
However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon's 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.
Not a fan of the amount the US spends on defense, but I'm also not a fan of arguments that make claims without any proof.
I'm with you but in this case the Pentagon hid the results of its first independent audit. There is no proof, but the fact they changed the rules to hide the results of the audit says all I need to know. If the pentagon wants to prove me wrong I'm all for it. Release the results and prove me wrong.
I won't hold my breath.
Private, un-accountable entities deciding who deserves help and who does not is feudalism, not democracy. We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites.
Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to be available equally to all persons meeting the democratically decided criteria!
No, it isn't, it's freedom. Your definition of "democracy" is basically that if a 50.1% majority feels like it, they can commandeer your resources as they see fit. That is tyranny, not democracy.
> We already have this issue with religious/-associated organizations denying help to LGBT or nationalist organizations denying help to non-Whites.
If you think there are people who deserve help and are not being helped by existing organizations, you start an organization to help them. If a democratic majority agrees with you that those people deserve help and aren't getting it, you'll have no trouble getting donations.
> Government-ran operations may have their deficits, yes, but at least they are mandated to be available equally to all persons meeting the democratically decided criteria!
And if you think government-run programs actually do what the "democratically decided criteria" say they are supposed to do, I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you. Anyone who has actually had to deal with these government-run programs (as my wife and I have for years, both on behalf of friends who are constantly getting the runaround from bureaucratic screw-ups and from my wife's experience as a social worker) will tell you that they are terrible at actually helping people.
You know neither tyranny or democracy.
So is a dollar you pay in taxes, ostensibly to help the poor but in reality it won't (see my post elsewhere in this thread on government bureaucracies). At least if you spend the dollar directly on a poor person, you know it's going directly to that poor person.
> Directly incentivizing against individual action
The only thing doing that is the government--by taking away our money in taxes, whether we agree with how it's spent or not, the government is preventing us from spending it on things we believe are justified, such as charity.
> continued failure -- which is exactly what we observe
We observe continued failure because people think that they have already paid to help the poor, by paying taxes, but most of that money doesn't actually help the poor. If people understood that either they have to help the poor directly or the poor won't get helped, you'd see many more people actually helping instead of punting it to the government in the mistaken belief that the government will take care of it.
> This is a collective problem
This is the excuse every collectivist uses to commandeer other people's resources and then squander them. Basically, what you're saying is that you don't want to do the work yourself of helping the poor, so you'll outsource it to government bureaucrats. Who are even less motivated to actually help people than you are.
Can you explain how those who work in government are less motivated to help others than those employed outside of government?
Nope.
My neighbor has to pay it too, and it's my neighbor that I'm bidding against for assets.
The world is full of zero (or negative) sum games that can be overcome through cooperation.
> We observe continued failure because people think that they have already paid to help the poor
Yes, my parents keep giving money to their church. I grew up there, I've seen what their charitable efforts look like. That's why I so strongly prefer programs like food stamps.
> Basically, what you're saying is that you don't want to do the work yourself
I already do -- but statistics are a thing, I know that I'm atypical. You know what sucks most about writing that big check to GiveWell every year? It's not the idea of devoting some of my work to a good cause -- that part feels good -- it's knowing that others won't, and that they will have an advantage over me as a result. Working harder for a good cause is one thing, getting a kick in the nuts on top of that is something else, defending the idea of rewarding charity with a kick in the nuts is something truly special, in the extra-chromosome sense of the word.
I believe that incentives matter, and I believe that fixing incentives is how we get out of this. We fix the incentives by making sure that everyone puts money into the pot.
No, you're not. You're bidding against the government and all of the contractors the government hires to do things. And the government can print money; you can't.
> The world is full of zero (or negative) sum games that can be overcome through cooperation.
Yes, and one of them is called "special interest politics". The way to overcome that through cooperation is for people to cooperatively agree to not give governments so much power.
> my parents keep giving money to their church. I grew up there, I've seen what their charitable efforts look like. That's why I so strongly prefer programs like food stamps.
So basically, you don't think private charities, or at least churches, or at least churches like the one you grew up in, do a good job of helping people, based on your personal experience. Fair enough.
Next question: do you have personal experience with food stamp programs?
> I already do -- but statistics are a thing, I know that I'm atypical.
I'm not so sure, but let's assume for the sake of argument that you are. Then you have two choices:
(1) Since our country is a democracy, and since the majority of people don't actually want to help others (according to your hypothesis that we've accepted for the sake of argument), then you (and my wife and I, since we are atypical the same way you are) are outvoted. If the majority doesn't actually want to help people, their will should prevail and the government should stop doing it.
(2) If you want to argue that helping people is a good thing even if the majority doesn't want to do it, then you're admitting that you're willing to impose the will of a minority on the majority in a supposedly democratic country. In other words, you're basically saying that your will should prevail, on no other grounds than your personal opinion that helping people is a good thing.
Which do you pick?
Forcing people to contribute money in taxes is not "fixing incentives". It's just brute force.
The best way to increase people's incentive to help others would be to remove the illusion that they can outsource that task to the government.
And every time I say on HN that I can do something in a weekend, I get downvoted.
The US bureaucracies, federal and states, and the criss-cross between them, is extraordinarily large, complex and inefficient. The US Federal Government all by itself is a spending machine larger than Europe's biggest economy.
To pretend a system like Togo's could be implemented quickly in the US, one would have to pretend the US government system isn't presently constructed as it is. It would be necessary to invent an elaborate fantasy, where you start from a blank slate and have to deal with none of what presently exists.
Do you have any inside-information that this is true? Maybe there is a difference in cultural attitudes, but I'm sure there are lots of other differences too. Why is this the most important?
Tangentially, and moving a bit off topic, what was surprising to me is that biometrics wasn't mentioned (but I'm sure some influential people, companies and "banks" would soon push for it). In contrast, even though India has large (on paper) programs of direct cash transfers and subsidized food supplies, they're all tied to the exclusionary irrevocable/non-changeable biometric based number (called Aadhaar). That the poorest people would be living and/working in conditions that support destruction or rapid change in biometrics has been completely lost on all bureaucrats and politicians. On paper, alternative identifications are to be legally accepted, but practically nothing moves unless biometric authentication succeeds.
Iris scans can be used, but are rarely used in practice anywhere except enrollment due to the higher cost of devices, the "creepyness factor", and speed of usage.
The article is calling Togo “poor” but that’s from the perspective of the West. Poverty is the norm, not the exception in such countries, which means that everybody is in the same boat trying to use what they have to make it work.
I think in the US, there’s much more hesitation to dive into new things with a willingness of accepting potential failure ahead of time and pivoting if needed.
Put another way, if Togo tried this and failed, they can just say “well we’re back to where we started, let’s try another way”, whereas if that happened in the US it would be seen as a major fault and carry a lot of political consequences.
Put into a tech perspective, a new tech startup might be willing to live with their business logic running cheaply off clever “hacks” that suffice, but if you approached a big company with that solution there would be like 10 levels of managers all critiquing it and running CBAs to assess the risks firsts.
"evidence has accumulated that in many circumstances, cash improves the life of poor people more than equivalent spending on aid programs or goods."
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/09/how-america...
Poverty line is a published official statement.
Percentile of world incomes, PPP adjusted, are easily found. Find and compare them.
In India the cheapest new street legal car is the Tato Nano, around $2500 (maybe small electric cars from China even less). But the cheapest new car in the US is the Chevy Spark at $13-14k.
Building codes and zoning regulations mean there’s a minimum price you have to pay for housing in the US that’s around a factor of 10 higher than in much of the world (less than $100/month for a single bedroom apartment in a city in India vs around $1000/month in the US in a city… median is currently around $1200/month). And if you can’t afford that, and try to live in a tent even with the permission of a landowner, you can be arrested because sleeping in a tent is illegal and against code. It’s illegal to be poor.
Luckily we at least have some social programs. But we make people jump through hoops to get access to them. A time tax and something that becomes a lot harder or next to impossible if you have literacy problems or aren’t good at forms.
...
> Building codes and zoning regulations mean there’s a minimum price you have to pay for housing in the US that’s around a factor of 10 higher than in much of the world (less than $100/month for a single bedroom apartment in a city in India vs around $1000/month in the US in a city… median is currently around $1200/month).
That's a pretty incredible take. Somehow so many people live in an ideological bubble, that no matter how varied the situation their explanation of the cause of the problem is exactly the same.
In the US, where the minimum wage is 10x that of India, the real value is land likely more than 10x that of India the explanation for why housing is more expensive is because of building codes. The claim is that 90% of the cost of housing is due is building codes.
I really wish people on got out of their ideological bubble more frequently. Some mantras get repeated so much people start believing they are true no matter how contradictory the evidence. It's not good for long term outcomes.
(Also, the land density per person is actually MUCH higher in India than the US, over an order of magnitude higher, which OUGHT to bid up the price of land even more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... )
The reality is we make it illegal to be poor, whether intentional or not.
And then put meanstesting in social programs to target them, which has the perverse effect of making it harder for those who are poorest (ie least able to navigate bureaucracy) to get access to them.
And as far as ideology, both the left and the right seem to conspire to make this happen. It’s worse in cities than rural area due to obvious reasons, but within a city itself, both the mainstream left and mainstream right seem to back the regulations that make it illegal to be poor.
"Building codes" is used here in a very broad stroke. Yes, minimum wage is 10x that of India, which means the basic cost of construction labor is already 10x. If you're going to quibble the point, you make the point: 90% of the cost of construction labor is due to building codes insofar as you can't pay less than that, and that labor payment requirement exists deep into the supply chain. Insofar as minwage doesn't account for all the high cost, there are thousands of other laws edging up the price of housing. Insofar as that cumulative burden doesn't explain all the high price, there's more.
Having driven the price of housing up just thru laws directly & indirectly related to home construction (which can colloquially be referred to cumulatively as "building codes" for purposes of casual discussion), there's the psychological factor of "if I'm going to pay $X for that, I may as well pay a bit more and get more." Ergo the price bumps up further.
Having seen all that direct & indirect increase of price due to laws, we then get to the land. Again, psychology intervenes: if the price of the building itself has grown, the value of the land shifts too. One can casually assume that a house of some cost will typically be placed on land worth 1/10th that price. One is not inclined to put a $500,000 house on a $1000 property. Ergo, houses will tend to be built on land valued commensurate thereto - and housing & population growth will tend to get located on such property. There is "dirt cheap" land in the USA, but few are inclined to live there.
Further discussion would call for combing thru an itemized invoice for building a home, starting with land and labor, then similarly examining why each component is chosen vs legal requirements, and breaking each component similarly for legal and labor costs. I expect there'd be little surprise that, after analysis, US and other first-world homes cost as much as they do - given that the very starting point of labor is an obligatory 10x, and the same legal sensibilities permeate all of construction.
Consider that I could, tomorrow, buy a lot in my state for $1000 and put a new $10,000 camper on it. Instant home, owned outright. Can't do that because, broadly speaking, building codes.
If you're going to make the "bubble" accusation, please explain what's wrong with it rather than equally flippantly dissing the original assertion.
I currently live in a country where covid caused a shutdown and the government said they’d help and completely failed to do so.
We’re talking barely subsistence wages going to zero and the government promising relief but failing forcing people to beg and rely on charity.
The US social program for Covid were fucking generous.
I understand the sentiment, but I feel like this line of reasoning puts oneself into a catch-22. The first reaction would be to say "well, let's start slashing regulations". However, I suspect people who support the idea that there are regulations that "require you to be rich" would recoil at the idea of trimming things like ADA accessibility, needing GCFI outlets in homes, energy saving fixtures, mandating a certain level of green construction materials, et cetera.
In essence, the people who fear that our regulations require a certain level of wealth would not, in my mind, want to actually deregulate the market because they see the each regulation individually as being a positive thing.
"A $12,880 income in the United States has enough buying power to put you in the 84th percentile globally for per-person income" : https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...
That's not to say I don't give charitably or believe in it. I just don't think that anyone has to justify not giving money to some random when asked.
I don't believe it's the government's job to hand out money to people in need. I think private charities and churches do a lot better job of spending it than a bureaucratic government, and the auditability of where the money goes is way, way more transparent so long as you're not dealing with a shady organization (which you can easily vet).
There are many "popular" charities for which auditing is as far from transparent as can be, where the majority of their spending never reaches the target audience. To the point where this is the _norm_.
Government programs, on the other hand, are required to account for every dollar spent, and issue regular public reports.
How would one go about vetting the Salvation Army's spending, for example? They say they have regular independent audits, for none of those are public. So when they say 82% of donations go to the intended target, you must simply trust them.
There are many charities that exist solely to shelter tax money and give kickbacks to the administration. My recommendation would be to avoid those.
You could also determine to give to your local church if you have evidence they're trustworthy. You could also start your own and have direct control over how the money is gifted.
Although the government does provide reports as to how money is spent, the individual has very little influence over how that money is actually spent other than via voting or running for office. Being not forced to be a victim of theft allows power to be retained by the individual and exercised with each dollar spent.
It would appear, by your metric, that no such organisations actually exist. Hence the invitation to expand on the onus you require of individuals to prevent unnecessary deaths.
The utility of government exists to cater for the citizens, regardless of who they are. Referring to the underpinning mechanism for providing such utility as theft, is strongly indicative of either a lack of working theory, or a desire for anarchism.
This is more or less my point. Taxes used for food/housing of individuals is akin to wealth redistribution. It is not money going to a public good/service but rather to individuals via an involuntary transaction. While it may benefit the party receiving the redistributed wealth, it does not necessarily benefit the giving party (though it may).
Therefore the government is not catering to all citizens. In fact, it is actively harming some.
While the Salvation Army may be considered a great charity by many, it seems to fall short on transparency so you are correct in that I would recommend focusing elsewhere for giving.
Edit: it also leads to moral hazard in a variety of ways such as corporate subsidiaries for low wage positions because they know workers will qualify for government handouts and therefore the workers demand lower wages.
Easily overcome by simply having reasonable minimum wage laws. Whereby corporations are required to provide a living wage.
> Therefore the government is not catering to all citizens. In fact, it is actively harming some.
Failing to provide support for citizens _does_ actively harm citizens. The choice you're proposing is between "maybe harm" and "we know it harms". They're not equivalent.
> I would recommend focusing elsewhere for giving.
For the third and final time - Where?
You are proposing fixing a negative externality caused by government policy with more government policy, which also happens to actively harm citizens.
Minimum wage laws add barriers to entry into the labor market for citizens. It ensures that laborers whom cannot provide utility at or in excess of the minimum wage cannot get a job in the first place.
It also actively prohibits private citizens from making voluntary, private transactions that pose no harm to third parties.
> Failing to provide support for citizens _does_ actively harm citizens. The choice you're proposing is between "maybe harm" and "we know it harms". They're not equivalent.
My point was that there was harm induced, definitively, upon Peter when you rob him to pay Paul. The only "maybe" about it was in the event that Peter wanted to give Paul the money anyway. But we know that is a specific case and not general.
> For the third and final time - Where?
I don't have a good charity to recommend. I do most of my giving through the local church and it's partner organizations. They release spending profiles, and I can see the difference my dollars make in the local ccommunity.
It appears you are correct about SA, which I didn't know https://www.businesspundit.com/10-infuriatingly-greedy-chari...
> In 2009, when Michael Faye co-founded the New York-based nonprofit GiveDirectly, whose mission is to alleviate poverty by providing unconditional cash transfers, skeptical development experts and philanthropists told him the sums would be misspent. But in the following decade, evidence has accumulated that in many circumstances, cash improves the life of poor people more than equivalent spending on aid programs or goods.
Did you miss that the evidence from GiveDirectly's efforts isn't African-centric? They operate on a global scale, including programs that run within US borders.
> GiveDirectly is the leading global NGO specialized in delivering digital cash transfers. We’ve worked in challenging contexts across 9 countries, from Houston after Harvey to the most remote parts of Uganda, and launched 15 experimental evaluations (RCTs) with independent researchers documenting the impacts on recipients and on the local economy.
I still haven't seen a definitive article on how the Chinese are running Shenzhen. There are probably useful and general lessons there about how to make people wealthy at an indecent speed.
China also has a history of severe exploitation and other uncontrolled factors. They got wealthy with breathtaking speed. It is unwise to look past that to Togo.
Shenzhen seems to be an example of making a small number of extremely wealthy individuals and a large number of sweatshop-tier factory labourers; I wouldn't class that as an example to follow unless you only care about creating millionaires.
I'm not assuming it, but I think someone should make that argument given that the country was subject to over 300 years of brutal colonialism which included being the literal capital of the slave trade and later neocolonialism. China's a different story because they eradicated foreign ownership and interference before any of its success and still has pretty heavy capital controls and other mechanisms in place including local ownership requirement laws.
In any case, there are many other factors that could influence any countries development starting from simple geographic luck. To assume that it is a self-made problem (or isn't) without argument is not useful.
People like to act as though big economic crashes are random and unpredictable like a weather event. They aren't, they are generally a result of policy too.
For example, if you have a toll road, you can expect most people to bribe the guy at the toll booth instead of paying the fee, and the little that is collected will probably line the pockets of whoever is in charge instead of maintaining the road.
Having a government program that actually works is extremely impressive in these conditions. It is not about economic advise, it is about being able to build something under such adversity.
Note: I don't know about Togo specifically, maybe it is different, with poor countries, that's the general idea.
You should always looking at what others are doing and draw your own conclusions. I think one thing that may cause or is already causing problems for the US is the refusal to look at what other countries are doing, for example in health care, social programs or drug policy. You don't have to copy what others are doing but having a good understanding is very helpful.
EBT doesn’t have to be a disaster, and programs don’t have to be means-tested, they’re designed that way on purpose.
I think there's some injected subjectivity/interpretation here: You don't get the concrete option to "make something better", you get the option to "spend money on something" with the aim of making it better.
These aren't always the same, and sometimes reform (the implied power to change things that comes with new funding) can make things worse.
I did my very first class report in 5th grade in 1986 on Togo!
We had to pick a country in Africa to look up and do a report on, I chose Togo, and while sadly the Togo Ministry Of History will not be able to receive a copy of my report, as its been sealed in my archives which are under audit...
Every single time I see Togo, I think back on that report and learning about Togo.
Looks like I still have more to learn about Togo.