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Comment by tow21 | Hacker News Reader

I'm astonished by some of the reactions here.

Giving money to the people who need it, means that the power to use that resource is directly in the hands of the people who have the most interest in using it well.

Frankly, their incentives are much more aligned with their long-term wellbeing, than are the incentives of a faceless charity committee in a Washington office somewhere. Plus, you don't have to pay for the endless decision-making - and the unavoidable inefficiencies in decision-making far removed from the action.

It's one of the reasons free markets win out over statist command economies - making much better use of information local to the decision.

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Generally, it's better to give women the money than to give men the money. (I'm happy for polite discussion about this - especially if there's better research showing that I'm wrong)

But sometimes economies of scale and lack of education and other things come into play. For example, a charity can buy very many mosquito nets and distribute them for cheap, while individuals may not want to buy a net because they don't know just how important those nets are. (See also claims of people using mosquito nets other things (and those claims may not be true (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...)

There are also fears about money being diverted through corrupt officials, or being stolen by bandits.

The problem is that it's a lot easier to misuse/abuse money than abuse, say, water or food.

For example, a nonnegligible number of poor people end up using the little money they make on drinking or gambling as soon as they possibly can, while staying just as poor as before afterward. You could say it's OK if it's money they earned themselves, but I think it makes sense for everyone to think twice about letting charities donate money directly when those in need end up misusing/abusing it.

Giving food/water/other necessities instead of money prevents this, while at the same time giving poor people a chance to worry about finding a job, etc. without having to constantly worry about where to find water, etc.

>The data fights conventional wisdom: Money spent on alcohol and cigarettes either decreases, stays constant or increases in the same proportion as total other expenses (approximately 2% to 3%).

The article contradicts your assumption.

The article is also referring to the poor in third world countries living on less per day than either of us would spend on a pack - or a stick - of gum.

Raise someone's income from $237 a year to $500 a year and I'm not surprised there isn't a marked increase in "sin" consumption, because they're still living on peanuts even by those standards.. Raising someone's income from $15,000 to $20,000 is not the same thing and it's a much bigger assumption.

That's true, but I think it's just as dangerous of an assumption to assume that poorer people would waste money given to them. It portrays poorer people as seperate from society and it makes it easier to mistreat them. When Florida proposed drug testing welfare recipients, it was noted that welfare recipients actually had a lower rate of drug use than the general public. Part of the rhetoric used to deny social services to people feeds into the easy assumption that poor people are not like us and that they are poor because they deserve it.

Edit: Anyone who wants to have a real discussion is welcome to respond instead of just downvoting because I said something you don't like. Grow up.

I don't think anything I said could be construed to mean that poor people are "lesser," "other," or anything else. It's probably a safe bet that regardless of socioeconomic status, the more money you have, the more likely you are to spend money on "dumb stuff," whether that means a pack of cigarettes, a 40 or at the casino.

Using the Florida example, is it relevant what the proportion of drug users was compared to the general public? The argument was whether or not welfare funds were being used to purchase drugs. If memory serves it wasn't even about saving money (because it cost more to administer the program than it saved), it was about making sure those who society is holding up aren't simultaneously breaking that society's laws.

But everyone benefits in some way from different parts of society, that's what a society is. Should we drug test people who drive their kids to a public school in a subsidized hybrid car on public roads? Why the focus on welfare recipients?

> it's just as dangerous of an assumption to assume that poorer people would waste money given to them

I wasn't saying all poor people do this (only some do), and I wasn't saying they behave differently from rich people! I was just saying that when you're running a charity, you think twice before donating money directly, because _some_ poor people end up abusing it -- and it's a lot harder to abuse food and shelter than it is to use money.

For all I know, I think poor people would probably make better judgment calls than rich people, but that's orthogonal to what I'm saying (re-read the above if that doesn't make sense).

Routinely handing out water/food/necessities also inhibits innovation in local people starting businesses and efficient services to provide that for themselves. You could give someone water, or give someone a few thousand dollars to build a well. Even if you go in and build a well for them, it discourages someone starting their own self-sustaining enterprise or organization to do that on their own, locally.

Let's revise this old cliche: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Give him money to start a fishing school, feed the village forever. Give him money to do whatever he wants, and he might start an institution more beneficial than a fishing school.

The article explicitly says they studied this and found it wasn't true:

"The data fights conventional wisdom: Money spent on alcohol and cigarettes either decreases, stays constant or increases in the same proportion as total other expenses (approximately 2% to 3%)."

Where is your data contradicting their findings?

Note that the sentence you quoted is rather quite vague (it almost seems deliberately phrased that way) as it says nothing other than "the money spent on alcohol and cigarettes is upper-bounded by the proportion of other total expense". Well, it could certainly be worse, yes, but that doesn't make it great.

It's kind of like saying "up to 90% off" in a store... a 10% price cut would certainly qualify under that description, so the description is pretty useless.

Also, note that alcohol and cigarettes are only 2 of many such examples.

My data is all the laws that exist (and are still constantly changing) to prevent some poor people from misusing the welfare money they get.

Quite obviously, they wouldn't be there if this wasn't an actual problem.

See, for example, the second page of this article (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2012/07/26/who-...), where it says:

> In Massachusetts – and my own state of Pennsylvania – proposals are being floated to ban [...]

There's a reason those proposals are there, and no, it's not that lawmakers are bored.

> is directly in the hands of the people who have the most interest in using it well

That has no relation to whether or not they know how to use it well.

Improving someone's well being involves improving their well being through hands-on, interactive problem solving.

Throwing a fist full of dollar bills at someone does not directly improve their well being.

If you have, by some measure, 'low well being', there is a reason for that that is likely to be outside your direct control, otherwise you would change it. If it is inside your control, you need help to discover how - application of cash is useless without direction. If it is outside your control the help needs to be applied at a higher level, community, town, borough.. country.

It is demonstrably not the case that cash solves problems unless it is applied in meaningful, sustainable ways, which are not known or understood by many people in difficult situations, unless you are talking about people who are about to starve to death and who will buy food.

But doesn't giving away money make the poor less interested in finding a job? Sooner or later they will get addicted to the free money.

How does a poor person find a job when they don't have the money for basic necessities that include resources that help find and acquire a job?

Charity, not welfare.

When it's welfare, you have one monopolistic "service" provider, which ends up getting managed by bureaucratic means (to ensure low graft and wastage, leading paradoxically to a specific and growing amount of wastage as the bureaucracy expands, but that's a different point).

With charity, you have multiple providers, and they compete for funding from contributors so are incented to be as maximally efficient as the charitable services market allows.

And quite frankly, I'd rather live in a charitable society than a welfare society.

I'm pretty sure that the context here isn't about providing people with a constant income, but simply taking your comments at face value:

Why would that be so bad? Why is it essential for everyone to have a job?

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