Want to help the poor and transform your economy? Give people cash.
chrisblattman.com
chrisblattman.com
I think this is potentially a big step forward in our understanding of development. It challenges the assumption that the main thing holding back development is a lack of investment in human capital (training) rather than a lack of access to physical capital.
The only issue I have is whether you can expect the same results from one-off payments, as an ongoing basic income, and whether we can expect the same results for the whole population as the group that was selected, who seem to form a very specific group.
This form of welfare has been supported by people on the right (Friedman, Hayek) and left (Russell). I'm really disappointed it isn't used to greater effect. Voters and tax-payers have simply no faith in those damned poor people to make the right decision it seems.
Here's a great story from in Canada, where it was referred to as Mincome [2]
BIG also works well in India, where women, in particular, benefit[3]. A further benefit is it is highly corruption resistant. There are no tests, forms, etc. If you're a citizen, you get cash. Done.
Please, anyone, show me some research that shows BIG doesn't work well. Cheers
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
[2] A town without poverty? http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100
You may personally believe that this is part of a general phenomenon that applies to highly developed countries, to all groups of people in that country, and in the long term not just the short term, but you have presented little evidence for the claims in your first paragraph (I read all the links).
You seem to view BIG as somehow unique, when in fact it is functionally equivalent to progressive taxation plus welfare, when welfare is only conditional on income. It is also hard to argue against because it treats redistribution, which is a sliding scale, as something absolute: it suggests an (imaginary) bar for "basic" income.
I personally believe systems where welfare is primarily conditional in income, but weakly conditional on searching for work or getting training (such as Australia's) are optimal for developed countries. The government can be far more generous when it adds some strings to welfare, than when it is simply giving out money. The only issue is whether countries with different governmental frameworks can copy Australia's model.
In short, you seem to be overlooking what I consider the real interest of this study, which is its specific relevance to developing nations.
>Please, anyone, show me some research that shows BIG doesn't work well. Cheers
That's a very asymmetric way to think about the evidence for and against a particular policy.
edit: The specific problem with your evidence, is that on a such a broad topic, I would expect to see an academic review of the literature. What you provided was [1] wikipedia, [2] an interesting example with no control, and [3] something that wasn't an actual academic study, but a description of a program and it's alleged benefits without any peer-reviewed study demonstrating these benefits.
I expect this is why you're seeing downvotes.
But that was the point I was making in the first place: you cannot cite three sources and then claim to have the evidence on your side, when these three sources don't provide the evidence that would be needed.
But like the GP-- It's something I want to believe, it's very well-credentialed, and I've seen some encouraging but inconclusive evidence. So naturally as a skeptic the main thing I'm looking for now is the strongly negative evidence, if such a thing can exist. Do you have any leads?
The main problem is that the BIG is an unnecessary and unhelpful concept. I believe the sociology is that people like to believe in causes, rather than fine grained facts or principals, and so BIG is attractive as a cause in spite of not being a useful concept.
First, BIG confuses the issues around redistribution. Assuming welfare is only conditional on income, the sum total of taxation, welfare, BIG and others, can be thought of as a negative taxation system. BIG obscures this because it implies there is something special about redistribution through a "guaranteed" income. E.g. economists are very concerned about the incentive effects of welfare, because every dollar you earn results in less welfare. BIG obscures this by focusing on the flat portion (the guaranteed income) and drawing attention away from the more progressive income taxes that would be needed to pay for it.
Second, BIG is different from many current welfare systems because it is unconditional on being part of a special group (e.g. a parent, farmer, elderly) or certain actions (e.g. education, training, looking for work in good faith). I consider this to be a bad thing, in that it is too extreme in the direction of being unconditional, at least for the developed world. Both in terms of ethical fairness, political feasibility, and economic incentives, giving away money for nothing has strong limits on it. Adding a few conditions, like ensuring people are really looking for work, strikes a much better balance. So again, BIG takes a sliding scale decision (how much should welfare be conditional on certain actions, and should it be conditional on things other than income) and makes it seem like a binary decision by only providing one extreme as an alternative to the status quo.
btw, below I give a well argued article which claims BIG is a useful concept.
www.usbig.net/pdf/manyfacesofubi.pdf
The unconditional aspect of a basic income allows individuals to accumulate capital. Many welfare systems require recipients to sell their cars, property, and maintain bank accounts at a near zero balance. They also clawback employment earnings at punitive tax rates of 50-100% (often higher than the top-marginal rate). Since welfare is often very low, those supplementing their income are often driven to working under-the-table for cash. This creates a welfare trap that keeps poor people poor.
Means checking requires an expensive bureaucracy, is paternalistic, and I think unnecessary.
If you read the research results for the Canadian and US experiments you will find that people want to work, even with a basic income. The slight negative incentives that were discovered can be attributable to two basic factors: 1. some women chose to stay home to care for children or elderly family members -- this has an obvious societal benefit, and 2. if the experiment is conducted in a non-saturation site (i.e. one fraction of the population gets a basic income while the other does not) then there will be an economic distortion affecting low income workers. Employers are driven to employ those without a basic income, who are more desperate for work. The same would happen if you tried to enforce a minimum wage on half the population. Employers would hire those without a minimum wage.
If you are looking for the real problems with the basic income, it is easy to find. The cost to raise everyone above the poverty line is _very_ high. One would have to consider the size of the family unit receiving funds and adjust for economies of scale. Nevertheless, it could be done. By contrast, a basic income at the rate of many existing welfare systems would be very affordable and would result in many collateral savings such as reduced health care and administration costs.
Also, despite the cost of a basic income, it has the support of many Nobel-prize winning economists because it increases utility. I have not yet seen a model for optimal income taxation that does not point to a negative tax / basic income. See, for example, textbooks on public economics or the classic paper by Mirrlees,
http://www.econ.yale.edu/~dirkb/teach/pdf/mirrlees/1971%20op...
You don't seem to have addressed anything I wrote past the first two paragraphs (which were a kind of introduction). E.g. I explained precisely what I meant by the concept being "unhelpful".
My friends, generally speaking, spent a lot of money on a very good education that's not valued by the labor market. To put that another way: My friends are wildly overqualified for what they do, and many of them are poorer than broke.
Those without a lot of ambition are pretty much the millenial layabouts you imagine. They're working median-wage retail jobs to pay the rent, smoking a lot of weed, and just generally hanging out. They don't want to work more, and they couldn't really work any less, but they seem pretty happy.
Those with ambition aren't living much different. They're working median-wage retail jobs to pay the rent, working second jobs to try to pay down their debt faster, smoking a lot less weed, and using the rest of their time trying hard to find a job in their field of expertise that wouldn't pay much more even if it did exist. These people could easily work a lot less if they wanted to, but they don't. They want to work more, and work harder, but they cannot find work to do. They seem like they're struggling.
So say we gave them all an unconditional grant which erases their debt and provides some capital. (A year's income wouldn't do this for most, but set that aside.) Most of the first group, maybe it wouldn't affect that much. They might quit their jobs or cut down on hours, but actually they don't mind their jobs that much. They might smoke more weed, but that's probably not possible. More likely they'll spring for a car or a house or a home theater and just keep on keepin' on.
For those in the second group, though, this changes everything. They've instantly jumped a decade into their own future. They'll quit their jobs the same day, immediately start planning a move to where they really want to live. They'll immediately open small businesses. They'll collaborate on epic works of art. Some of them will buy boats; some of them will buy farms. They'll travel, volunteer, teach, research, write, direct, design, produce, and make things. And you know what? They'll probably smoke even less weed.
It's just a wishful thought experiment, but it does seem plausible the overall economic effect would be massively positive. The argument against basic income seems to be basically that it would move people from the second category into the first category. Maybe that's the case for people in general, I don't know, but for the poor young people I know it seems far more likely to do the opposite.
- Most basic skilled services already have many providers.
- The startup costs for these services are significantly higher in first world countries.
- The expectations of consumers are also (probably) much higher.
My friend who works at Macy's does have clean water coming out of her tap, and that's something to be very thankful for, but that by itself doesn't make her free.
The first experience is of being rich. I'm not actually rich, mind you, but I've experienced what it's like to be rich because in early 2009 my good friend opened up an IT school in Ghana and I stayed there for a month to teach a database design course. There's a range of emotions and situations that arose that contribute to the fact that "I now know what it's like to be rich" but one situation really stands out and is, I think, pertinent to your post.
I had been hanging out with a guy and he showed me around a little. When I was leaving he wanted me to buy him a laptop. He thought that getting a laptop would somehow improve his situation. He had seen people with laptops achieve success (somehow) and wanted the same, so he asked me for one. Of course I had the means to provide it, but I knew for a fact it would change nothing. I didn't get him one.
Secondly I was in #startups a couple of years ago and some guy came in talking about his idea for a startup. It was a wikipedia for everything or something ridiculous and he was really excited about it. I've been through this before so I wanted to maybe talk some sense into him about the realities of business and the tech startup world that I wish someone had relayed to me when I was young and stupid.
In a private chat, he said that he just needed $800/month to build this thing, for 6 months. During our discussions I had mentioned I run a software consultancy and do some online marketing for folks and he said "I don't have a consultancy behind me" like as in "I don't have that luxury". I actually laughed out loud. As if I were the model of carefree success. Like I was so blessed to have this thing "behind" me (nevermind I'm in debt up to my eyeballs and only managed to actually start making some money after like 7 years of fumbling about failing left, right and centre).
It was preposterous to me, but seemed perfectly logical to him. I was somehow in a position of advantage, and all he needed was a big break. Again, I was perfectly capable of providing him with everything he thought he needed, but declined.
I went to college with two people. (More, maybe!) Not people I knew that well, but it was a very small school. They were both written up ("infracted") for marijuana use-- I forget if as part of the same incident or just very close in time. One of these people was a girl from a wealthy family that paid cash in full; the other was a boy from some impoverished corner of the country who had earned a full-ride-plus scholarship. You know how this ends.
Now, marijuana use is not a crime in Massachusetts, so the institutional punishment was as draconian as it was mild. They had both used up their one warning on previous, unrelated infractions, so they both got the same deal: A hundred-dollar fine, a letter to the parents, and social probation.
Well, that's what the wealthy one got. The poor kid also had to deal with the fact that his scholarship had a clause indicating that being placed on probation, being cited for drug use, or some combination of the two (I don't recall preicsely) made him ineligible.
Yes, it was a very expensive school-- It was a very good school, and he had worked hard to prove he deserved to be there despite not being able to pay for it. But it wouldn't really have made a difference if it had been half or a quarter as much. And for all that we who could afford to be in debt were wealthy on paper, it gave us no ability to help him. In fact we were all servants of the same patron; he was just a little closer to going home.
So the slap on the wrist was de facto expulsion. This kid couldn't even afford to go home for the holidays-- somebody had to drive him to the airport. Somebody had to pay for his ticket home. And when he got home...
Well, to be honest, I don't know what happened. I haven't seen him on Facebook lately.
When I think of first-world poverty, I think about the difference between these two people. If one of them is free, the other must be something else.
Incidentally I wonder how many of your college buddies would vote in favour of healthcare or education funding reform? (My guess is very very few but that's beside the point).
This is a completely different problem from what the original article is discussing. The original article is talking about the fact that in areas where the poverty is so absolute, giving people things like access to schools or social programs has virtually no impact, but giving them access to a tractor and a herd of cows generates a huge economic benefit, and creates a position from which they can later do things like build schools and run their own social programs. In other words the people have skills, are willing to work and have a plan to make money and feed themselves predictably and reliably. Giving them cash makes sense.
Now I agree that giving this guy free access to education and not having a double standard for students who pay versus those who don't (which has, incidentally, crept into the Australian system too since Howard fucked everything up) is a good idea. But giving him cash isn't.
First world poverty can and should be solved institutionally, because it is an institutional problem.
Why weed itself? Well it's an analgesic, euphoric, prosocial, psychedelic, stimulating, sedating, relatively non-addictive plant that will grow in most parts of the world, may actually be healthier for you than not using it, and to top it off has been a cornerstone of youth culture for fifty-odd years. One's mileage may vary, but it is hard for one not to see the appeal.
"On January 14th 2013, the European Commission accepted our European Citizens’ Initiative hence triggering a one-year campaign involving all countries in the European Union."
"If we collect one million statements of support for Basic Income from the 500 million inhabitants of the European Union, the European Commission will have to examine our initiative carefully and arrange for a public hearing in the European Parliament."
You know, as opposed to low-level employers just having to raise wages and automate more?
To be clear, though, I advocate for evidence-based policy, and I've seen encouraging but not conclusive evidence. I've got a hunch on this one, and some notable economists seem to agree with me, but if we're wrong and it would hurt our society then... we shouldn't do that.
You can't pay down a debt, you can't buy shoes for that interview, you can't get a phone number, move to a better job market, afford first month/lastmonth/security on an apartment on a bus route, etc. And what is and isn't allowed is a constant political issue.
The point is cash lets some one target their own pain points while cutting down the inefficiency of needing a bureaucracy to define the aid packages.
Also a years wage from some shit retail job isn't 30k, it's more like 15k.
In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United States [1]
[1]: http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.ht...
My point is that we aren't even providing minimal life support to everyone yet, so to say that it has failed is premature.
Show me a system where healthy food is accessible and free, and safe housing is also accessible, convenient and free where people are still struggling to invest and improve their situation and then I will believe that it doesn't work.
I went with the "bare minimum" thing because a sub-living wage is a dying wage.
If they're jobs that need to be done, wages will rise until they're sufficient to either convince labor to allocate itself to the problem or convince capital to be substituted for it.
What will happen to price levels? It depends on the exact level of the basic income, but here's a likely scenario for my preferred level (around $10k-$12k per adult citizen).
The effects are much more strongly seen for things that require low skilled labor than high skilled: those low skilled workers now have an alternative, of not working. Some extra number of them over today would take that option, but most still will work: everyone still has the same incentive--more money!--to work. The big difference would be everyone has a pile of so-called "fuck you" money, which helps eliminate any monopsony power employers at the lower end of the market have.
So those costs would rise, because costs on the supply side have risen. Products and services provided by highly skilled workers would see nary a change in their cost structures: most of us get paid enough in a year to consume a decade at minimum income levels, but we choose not to do that.
The pattern of consumption would also be altered, depending on how the funding tax was structured. A reasonable proposal (perhaps a flat tax on all income over the basic guaranteed one) you'd expect to result in luxuries to be demanded compared to necessities.
Overall you get higher prices and higher consumption of basic necessities, and lower prices and lower consumption of luxuries.
(This is all secondary, in my view, to the core of what a basic income would allow: a grand infusion of both market entrepreneurship and non-easily-monetizable value into the economy. )
Don't forget that the real value of garbage removal to me is not what defines the fair market price. It is the combination of what it is worth to me, and what someone will do it for. In the case of garbage removal, it is likely the latter is lower than the former, and thus where the market settled.
Otherwise, you're not talking about bargaining in a fair market but about the religion of arbeit macht frei or karoshi, the worship of self-immolation through work.
(For those surprised by my turn of phrase, yes, this is in fact what "Arbeit macht frei" meant prior to WW2.)
Basically it works pretty well, people want to feel like productive members of society and do something for a living, and employers end up having to treat employees with more respect since the threat of unemployment isn't so terrifying.
This is about the best news I've heard all week. Thank you VERY much for pointing us to this.
The costs of Basic Income test programs in the third world are SO damn low that I've been thinking for a while that it's possible to run some fairly credible privately-funded trials. Really pleased to find someone else doing it so I don't have to try to learn the NGO side of things :)
Most "grants" that the world bank gives are usually as a supplement to some loan that they are giving to a country.
Think of it as Ford/World Bank funds a loan for a new road so they can sell cars. The world bank gives a loan for the road, Ford sells the cars. And on the side the world bank sets up a little side thing to show statistics by training existing motor mechanics how to fix Fords by giving them money for parts/tools and minimal support. The money is given out piece meal to ensure they spend it on the right things, like Ford parts.
World bank builds the road, Ford sells the cars, some small figure is given to keep the mechanics happy and help fudge figures. The road builders are from a foreign country and get a tax break as does Ford.
Some years down the track, after the professors go home, the road falls into disrepair. The government/people owe money for the loan for the road, and the Ford/Car owners are in debt to the banks for their vehicles. Poverty cycle starts again.
The only part of the road that is kept in good shape is the road from some mine to the port/market, if at all.
The figures presented in the article look at a small part of the larger picture. The countries that "fund" the world bank benefit as they use it prop up their own industries to the detriment of the developing country.
The long term figures on most of these "aid" programs are mostly awful. Most countries would be better off accepting no aid and building what they need.
I have spent too many years working with shit like this. The world bank and the IMF are much the same.
Note: Ford is an example, please replace it with any car company.
Edit/update: The author of the article is Chris Blattman; He is most likely going to say great things about any project that he writes about. If you write bad things you don't get invited back to write again/get paid more money.
Fixed that for you
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/21/185801589/episode-...
Ergo, you don't necessarily need to own the means of production, you just need access to meaningful, productive and well-compensated positions. Owning your own production is one way to achieve this.
(since I don't think this should be means-tested, I guess you could argue it is a form of basic income, although usually basic-income is paid in some form of cash).
While you may think that handing out a bunch of stuff to people (even if that stuff is the bare minimum) would provide incentive to move off of such assistance it doesn't. It strips people of any interest in agency and has them believe they don't control their own well-being. This is exactly what the development sector has gotten wrong for several decades and until things change, not much good will come out of it.
If you want growth, you need enterprise, not subsistence.
If it's saving money you're worried about, just giving them the money is probably a lot more efficient. Whatever that crap you listed is worth? Give them the cash instead, let them handle the logistics of buying it (or buying something else they need, a determination they're in a much better position to make than you are), and save the substantial amount of money involved in having an entire apparatus for handing out crap.
The problem is that people don't even attempt an objective assessment of the impact of doing things one way versus the impact of doing things another way. It's more common to assess a plan based on "how does this jive with the ideology I've taken on for myself?" or to use a simple judgment based on aesthetics.
However the benefit isn't necesarilly what we care about, in this case at least I am much more interested in avoiding the failure mode where they stay on wellfare because it is nicer than getting a job.
Or perhaps many local ones. But yes, exploit the capitalist system and let the cheapest provider win.
Who will decide what goes into it?
The political system. Basically, there will be a public itemized list of what people gain from the welfare system. Periodically, progressive types will say "oh no, the poor lack XXX", and XXX will be added to the list of items. Conversely, conservative types can read the list and point out "WTF, why are we paying for YYY", and get such items removed.
It's far better than the current system, in which basically no one has any clue what goods and services the poor have access to. This enables progressive types to say "oh noes, the poor are barely surviving" and conservatives to say "they all drive cadillacs", and neither side can refute the other without reading obscure Census reports (and obviously no one does that).
I need a PC, internet connection, VPS server, appstore developer account, and smartphone.
Your list doesn't have any of those.
In a developed country like the USA, if you gave a person on welfare a pile of cash, they'd most likely just go mad with it until it was all spent, then revert to their prior welfare lifestyle. This has been studied, though I can't find the citation I'm specifically thinking of. People who live in long-term poverty in the USA see money as something to be spent for immediate gratification. The idea of saving it and investing it is foreign to them.
Some people surely will. The question is, are those the outliers, or the mainstream? And, even if people do that, is that a cheaper way than the current social welfare provider industry structure to keep them out of prisons or emergency rooms or other expensive institutions?
This is partly because they don't have enough money to take care of their immediate needs and save for something better, and partly because nobody they trust has shown them any other way of living.
Imagine you have a choice between paying for a flat screen TV and starving, and eating high quality food for a month. You have no social connections outside your economic class, thus no evidence that any action you can take will lead to your situation changing. If you are poor, you will choose the TV because it guarantees a baseline level of pleasure indefinitely, while the food will run out after a month and you'll be back where you started. Since you're constantly coping with the stress of being on the edge of survival, your willpower is continually depleted. Congratulations, you're now stuck.
Can you define the assumptions / beliefs that make you think they don't work, in a testable fashion? (Ideally in a fashion which would be testable on as small and cheap a scale as possible.)
I'm not asking this because I'm planning to rubbish those assumptions or beliefs. I'm asking because this is an area of enough interest to me that I may look into organising fundraising for trials in the future, and it'd be useful to know what the most compelling hyphotheses to test would be.
The promises of the vast european welfare systems were similar to those of the basic income guarantee proposals: That people's morals are fundamentally wired to be ashamed of idleness and eagerness to contribute to society, so if you just remove the negative spirals of poverty, everything will fix itself.
The lessons from the european welfare systems, however, shows something quite different: Plenty of people are happy never to lift a finger, either for themselves or anyone else, and a culture of entitlement has blossomed.
Nothing we can do about that. They will continue to do so no matter what the system is. So, we can either keep going as we are, or we can have a basic income.
Keep going as we are; these people who won't lift a finger continue to do so. All the people who would use a basic income to better themselves and thus improve society are also still screwed. Society does not benefit.
Have basic income; these people who won't lift a finger continue to do so. All the people who would use a basic income to better themselves and thus improve society do so. Society benefits.
Is it fair? No. Given the choice between more fair, or less fair and a better society (by which I mean an actual opportunity for people to build themselves better lives, because no matter what propaganda we hear about "American dream" the evidence clearly indicates it's just that - a dream), which should we pick? That's a personal choice, but I know which I'd go for.
1: The possibility that some people that are currently contributing (by having a job, even if it's not a great job, and takes care of themselves) choose a life of no positive activity. I don't know what the calculus is, but they're not balanced out by just any >0 number of people choosing to improve society.
2: That when at least some of those people on long term passive income receive a good, solid kick in the butt (in terms of expiring benefits), they are, in fact, able to turn their lives around and become contributing members of society.
It's my understanding that it looks good. Seems that more people are caught in the benefits trap than choose to actually be there.
I just struggle to think that's the only thing keeping so many people passive for so long.
Assumptions: most people prefer not to work, and most people gain diminishing marginal utility from income. A lot of people will be satisfied to relax and produce nothing while enjoying merely the BI.
Evidence in support of this hypothesis: poor Americans already have a BI [1] and choose not to work. See some numbers here: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_wor...
In contrast, poor folks in many other nations (e.g., India) have a much lower BI and choose to work.
Wealth does not come from human work. It comes from machine work. Business is no longer in recession. It produces as much as before 2008 but with much less people. Manufacturing just used the recession to shed off unnecessary workers.
Put another way, my government spends ridiculous amounts of money (as much as 20% of the salaries of the earners) on "people," and all they get in return is an unmotivated nation. The only people that are truely motivated are the demographic that are excluded from the government assistance (and I think that they would stand to be unmotivated in the event that they government gave them money instead).
The only way to transform the economy would be to give money to people that are deeply motivated; people who do what they do because they believe it is what is needed (religeous for want of a better word). The problem is that those people need to be identified.
Instead of discussing "give everyone money," I think it's better to instead discuss "identify who deserves gratis money." Universities play a pretty big role in our current grant system; unfortunately they are broken beyond all hope - they are doing a terrible job at it.
it may seem like a tautology to say this but this only works where the root cause of poverty is lack of capital.
In cases where the root cause of poverty is deeply entrenched social disadvantage, mental illness, substance abuse or corruption then handing out cash will do little to solve poverty.
The main benefit is that the people doesnt want to earn this money from govern, so they stsrt to look at job opportunities.
How Much do I give? I frequently hand out $5s, $20s, on the principle that at that given time, given what is in my pocket and on my (spontaneously emerging) schedule, this cash would better service this chap, bloke, schizo, street-ranter, street-cryer, snot driveling, moaning, wailing, decaying, wasting -- stop me when you get my point.
Whence cometh Jesus?
On every occasion I give large sums, thinking "not too large" because well -- [insert tangent:] Today I stopped for a BIT too long to hand a bloke on the street a cigarette. I'm wearing my usual dapper attire. A second person accosts me. Then a third. Before I knew it, I had half a pack of cigarettes. I was handing out the first as a romantic gesture, latent in capitalism: "Here's yr last cig, mate." We all do it. Are you ready to buy a pack, walk out, hand them all out, and sleep without absurdity?
Are you calling for decentralized, anarchism liquidation? If you are, fucking say so. Because I've been fucking waiting for this day. If you tell me to fucking burn down a bank, don't leave it to my imagination to make out that you're trying to say that. This is becoming infuriating the way we programmers are writing.
I dropped a street violinist a $20. He MOANED at me, and STOPPED playing. I had to REMIND him that I listened to him from a hotel room from which I was staying for 45 minutes. He kept me sane, as a programmer isolated and stranded in a remote city. I could not communicate this to him.
Do you think green bills with "God" printed on them are the solution? This is NOT mature thinking. I just don't care.
Are you telling me I need a GTD strategy to liquidating my hard-earned, mentally crippling, psychologically and socially handicapping means for a living through this computer such that everyone on my street gets the average? Should I become a servant to the masses, when I'm already working for them in my own form of labor that I know?
Not to mention the opportunities for factionism and favoritism. Perhaps it's time for this. Perhaps this is what you are saying. But do I still have to accept that anarchism only works on paper? If I hand someone a bill and say, "Thank Anarchism, not God. Thank the realization of postscarcity."
I'll get slapped by mothers and gang members alike. It's just going to get spun as a hand out.