How do cash transfers impact the people who don’t receive them? (2019)

In my experience, these attitudes are more common among those who live around poor people than among those who don't. It's my wife who taught me the difference between "people who are good at being poor and ones who aren't." Coming from a privileged background, I had no idea.

It's a sociocultural adaptation to scarcity. Historically, whether you were in a Bangladeshi village or rural Oregon, even the rich don't really have sufficient surplus to help more than a few people. And there were no rich foreigners or central government to swoop in. In that scenario, anticipating and expecting help is maladaptive. Everybody in the village needs to be incentivized to work as hard as possible for themselves before relying on anyone else.

Personally I view the two major factors to be post pandemic shipping costs and the Ukraine. A meaningful response from government could have headed this off but instead we're seeing energy producers hit record profits while large parts of society are going to be unable turn their heating on over the winter and on top of that rising interest rates are going to see every other aspect of their budget become even more expensive as well.

The same may not happen on a national scale if you’re circulating inside it.

Way more effective would be caps on rent, but for some reason politicians don't want to use this tool....

Wealth gaps are a sign of wealthy societies — the question is wealth distribution, not distance from the lowest to highest.

What really disappoints me is that Marxist don't follow a very simple idea, let profits and capital gains reach zero through market forces. That would fulfill the spirit but not the letter of communism.

(Smarter conservative arguments focus on utilitarian claims that [forms of] redistribution reduce incentives to grow the economy and build houses, rather than dubious moral claims that Uncle Sam pointing his tax collectors at Steve is somehow more immoral than Steve pointing his bailiffs at tenants)

It's a good thing I didn't say it was then, isn't it? I'll help you, if you really want to try to strawman what I said, it would be closer to: "the conservative perspective is that bad people deserve to be poor."

But I do think "poor people stay poor" is the net effect of conservative policies, because they prioritize other things over lifting people out of poverty, as you're doing in this post.

Instead they focus on lifting the "right people" out of poverty. Because that's the main reason to be able to pick and choose your charity: to make sure it goes to the people you think deserve it, or will use it right, or so on.

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Seems like reverse "trickle down" in another respect too: the poorest recipients got better off but the gap between rich and poor still widened, presumably because the poor spent much of their increased budget buying things from the rich.

Imagine someone who sewed things by hand, given (or even loaned) the money to purchase a sewing machine, making them many times more productive. Now the community can have things sewn faster and more easily with less effort, with tons of downstream effects (more sails, better clothing, stronger soft goods, etc) and it's easy to see how the net improvement to that community can far exceed the price of the machine.

Another way to ask that question is "does there exist tools whose price is less than the total amount of increased economic activity they enable", which when phrased that way, it seems clear that the answer is "yes".

If you would like to argue that people earning more money is always and everywhere a negative outcome aid agencies should do everything in their power to avoid, that's a bold argument you're perfectly entitled to make, but it doesn't change the fact that it is not - by itself - price inflation. If the paper has computed price inflation wrongly that's another matter, but it won't be because they haven't created a new definition of price inflation which includes wages (or profits or units sold or unfilled vacancies or speculator activity or anything else which isn't price inflation, no matter how often it correlates with it or causes it).

Put another way, academics should continue to use definitions correctly, and not add fake caveats to stuff which is tautological to pander to the sensibilities of people who (i) don't understand the basic definitions (ii) assume that a reasonable starting point is to assume that if their view on what the basic definition should be conflicts with the academic's understanding, it is because the academic is acting in bad faith.

As I read your quote above, it sounds to me like "increased spending on labour" refers to an increase in the quantity of labour demanded, more than an increase in the hourly wage. That's consistent with both economic improvement and low inflation.

A charitable read of their comment interprets it as you do, but starting a criticism like this is not a good way to engage readers. I personally stopped reading reflexively and skipped to the replies to see if other people found anything worth engaging with, much like I do with clickbait titles.