This seems like the kind of surprising result that the scientific method begs for. Instead of trying to understand it, or profit from its prevalence, the organization is attempting to reduce it.
It doesn't seem likely that this type of thing will be a long term concern, but perhaps something can be learned about how society adapts if a significant subset decline the payment.
To be blunt it shows how out of touch those involved are. Firstly they obviously had very little understanding of African / 3rd world culture, secondly they haven't considered what we do when people offer us free stuff.
Consider if somebody walked up to you and offered to pay you 6k/mo, you would be insane not to question it. And in a country where "free stuff" doesn't happen, where corruption and entrapment are common, you would also be insane to accept it.
Several of my friends have spent time in 3rd world countries. Most had the modern, egotistical, charity tour and I would suspect that their particular brand of experience is what the experiment used.
There are many well run charities and organisations operating in these countries which fully understand the problems of interacting with people there and would have seen this situation a mile off. Those that have spent time with these charities have rightly laughed at my naivety and false superiority when talking about problems those countries face.
The upshot is - this is not a surprising result, this could have been expected and appears not to have been due to the poor practice of the organisation running the experiment. They are jeopardising their own experiment and have dealt a blow to both its credibility and the credibility of other BI experiments which already suffer from accusations of low quality science and superiority complexes. This is the long term concern.
You seem to have some axe to grind with GiveDirect. They've already run many Basic Income experiments in many parts of Africa, with great success. The fact that they are hitting some snags in a few counties, doesn't diminish them as an organization in any way.
Assuming that this really is an experiment, they are being asked to possibly be subjected to negative results. Researchers get to walk away when subjects of an experiment can carry the consequences of an experiment with them for the rest of their lives.
It seems to me that it is a survival instinct to refuse new things you don't understand from untrusted sources. Damn right that I do. The fact that I have a Western education and many years of Western life experience may mean that the reasoning I come up with is quite a bit better than someone lacking that, but it doesn't over ride a desire to not radically disrupt my current lifestyle - for better or worse - on a blind bet.
What's your opinion on double-blind randomized medical trials where half the people are given placebos, and the other half are given treatments that have not been fully proven to be safe & effective.
How their local representative responds is troubling:
>They find it "hard to believe that a new organization like GiveDirectly would give roughly a year's salary in cash, unconditionally," Le writes. "As a result, many people have created their own narratives to explain the cash, including rumors that the money is associated with cults or devil worship."
Le creates his own narrative about the locals as less educated and less civilized than himself - why else would they refuse his charity?
It is clear that neither he nor his organization see the locals as equals.
I meant profit in non-monetary terms, but in terms related to the experiment. When you run an experiment, and you get a result you didn't expect, there may be a new discovery or a silver lining if it's an undesirable discovery.
"We've done a lot to try to understand what has led to this increase in refusals," Le wrote in the post.
From the blog post:
We’ve found that people typically refuse out of skepticism. Potential recipients find it hard to believe that a new organization like GiveDirectly would give roughly a year’s salary in cash, unconditionally. As a result, many people have created their own narratives to explain the cash, including rumors that the money is associated with cults or devil worship.
We’ve debated how much effort to expend trying to address the refusal issue. We considered leaving Homa Bay since working in an area with lower refusals would be better for efficiency targets and staff morale. However, ultimately we decided to stay because we are in the process of implementing a large scale research project in Homa Bay, and leaving the area would result in meaningful delays and cost overruns for our research partners. We also believe it’s important to try to address the issue here or else rumors could spread to other areas we’ve not yet been.
Yes, they've taken pragmatic steps to deal with it, given the current situation. It seems that there may be another aspect to basic income refusal that isn't immediately evident. Perhaps the suspicion that is prevalent here for reasons related to local culture and customs are actually more universal. Maybe there is a way that UBI can be tweaked to accommodate for that. I know that one of the cornerstones of UBI is unconditionality. However, it may need to be adjusted if this is a more universal phenomenon.
I'm speculating and have no evidence, but my thinking is that offering money with no strings attached is a threat to those that offer money (or other help) with strings attached. Spreading rumors would be a defense strategy to protect those interests.
Hi Rusanu, some people or subcultures have a higher propensity to magical thinking. In Kenya for example all kinds of conspiracy theories exist about the origin of AIDS.
There doesn't need to be an extra agency that intentionally spreads disinformation to explain this phenomenon. That there are agencies involved in this type of manipulations in general is a fact though, not sure who the parties would be that are threatened by this. NGO's would welcome reliable results I think
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This is not the only thing the government did, or continues to do, to destroy various peoples' faith in it.
As I understand it, this "quote" was provided second-hand decades after it happened, and only after Ehrlichman was no longer in a position to deny its accuracy (read: dead and in the ground). Harpers is probably one of the few places where that sort of thing that could get past editorial scrutiny. (Or, maybe not, maybe I'm just being insufficiently cynical.)
And yet between here and reddit, I think I see this pop up every other week.
Even if it turns out to be untrue, what does it say that it sounds so plausible/believable, so many people are quoting it?
Either way, it seems people don't have a lot of faith in the government, and there are plausible examples of things the government has done to put itself in this situation.
Another example from the same era, gulf of tonkin incident. It doesn't matter what it costs the people at the bottom if the people at the top get what they want, that's the impression I think many of us are left with.
> what does it say that it sounds so plausible/believable, so many people are quoting it?
I think you know the answer to this.
There's lots of things I'd like to believe, but don't because they are not true.
Outside of HN and other geek outposts, a great many people, maybe most have a flaky relationship to the truth on almost everything. We're not immune to that of course but I at least know with fellow geeks they will admit the possibility of being wrong instead of relying exclusively on waving their hands and feels. Geeks will change minds when presented with data. Often slowly and grudgingly, but still they are able to do it, it is in them, their identity is looser.
One thing I suspect most of us have very wrong about people is that being 'scientific' is strongly connected to personality, and so appeals to logic and reason are simply not going to resound with everybody in totality. It is not meaningful to them.
While magicial thinking is pretty universal, it's true that the US (where GiveDirectly comes from) has ridiculous amounts of it. For example, 42% believe "God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago." (http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...)
Even those who aren't climate change deniers still seem committed to running us off the cliff with climate change. Perhaps because they believe in an "invisible hand" of Providence.
The posted article is an example. They could've simply quoted what at least one Kenyan thought about it. Anyone operating within a culture which values rationality would've done so. But not these people.
GiveDirectly is an extremely transparent organization and there's nothing secret about the experience of people who have taken money from them in the past. For them to suddenly start demanding organs or labor or votes or whatever it is you are worried about would be way out of character and not in the best interests of the continued existence of the organization. This behavior would not by tolerated by GiveDirectly's unusually high-minded and picky donors.
My experiences of accepting free stuff is it is often followed by a salesperson trying to sell you on an iffy course, timeshare or a religion. Being wary may not be totally irrational especially given that many of the Kenyans will not have been following the basic income debate and so not know what it's about.
"Too good to be true" is a valid concern. When someone gives you something for free, this person could have further objectives that you don't see now, but will become evident later.
It is well know the drug dealer strategy of "The first dose is free, until you become hooked. This equally applies to a lot of products we use today.
For example when Facebook started giving a very good service for free it was a bargain. Basically a useful service for free with no strings attachment, no advertising, all paid with investor's money.
Then they started gradually monetizing the people to levels that a new participant in Facebook would consider obnoxious, but being gradual people has gotten used to it and consider totally normal. In some ways now you are forced to be in Facebook because your social circle is in Facebook, you are hooked now.
For a service like Facebook I certainly prefer to pay and my data or personal-social information be mine.
In the same way, making your income dependent on some external entity makes yourself lose your independence and your freedom from this entity.
Never forget that an entity powerful enough to give you most of your income has to be equally useful to take, steal, or seize the income of someone else, those who create the wealth.
This has been done and it is called "socialism". It is nothing new. Part of my family had to ask for a car or a house or a TV to the Government because "everybody had equal rights to it". Of course some were "more equal than others" and my family will wait for years for his totally shit car or house, but the people near power will get it instantly, and their houses, cars or TVs will be great because whatever excuse(like because you are in the Party's dome you need the best TV or car for your job).
For my family to have this "right" meant giving away most of their income in taxes and earn a misery compared to other West societies for equal jobs like being engineer or University teacher.
As an example today you can't earn more than 30 dollars or so in Cuba, that is the limit you have, you can be a doctor or engineer. The only rich people in Cuba are the Communist, but not officially of course, officially they earn 30 dollars like everybody else.
I consider this movement to "basic income" neosocialism. There are powerful entities like Central Banks that want to go back to a centralized economy, they being in charge of the new system, of course.
In my opinion, the way to face the "robots taking our jobs" is to share the ownership of the means of productions(the robots and computers), locally, but never globally.
Perhaps not the biggest reason behind the refusal but the fact that it is mentioned warrants discussion. Che Guevara is said to have travelled to the Congo to train Guerrilla militia there and stopped when instead of focussing on training, the people focused on voodoo magic to protect them. A similar phenomena was witnessed in South Africa with the Marikina massacre of 2012, where miners believed that herbs provided by a witchdoctor would make them invisible.
The best approach to such situations is, as the organisation is following, to educate the people. It might be hard with low literacy levels but it's possible, especially for a cash studded organisation such as theirs.
It's not 'reading and arithmetic' that's the problem.
It's a basic lack of intelligent social organization across the board.
It's the thousand little bits of behaviour that make you 'civilized' vis-a-vis other cultures. I'm weary of the using the word 'civilized' because it sounds a little colonialist, but when people turn to 'magic spells' for many things ... you know there really are some deep issues. And it goes far, far beyond magic spells.
People totally lack an understanding of human nature when they address these issues.
'Inequality' is not the problem in Africa.
Africa has ample natural resources, if they acted in an intelligent and organized manner, there's no reason they couldn't be as rich as anywhere else.
It's a million little things summarized in a very clumsy way by the word 'ethnicity' or 'culture'.
Again - trying to avoid a completely condescending perspective, but the only measuring stick we have for our degree of civilization is ourselves.
I don't know if GP meant civilization was a dirty word, just that it's an overloaded term, because it at least partially means, "ordered society" and partly it means "society ordered like ours". In this context, taking it to mean the second meaning could be incredibly arrogant, so I think it's reasonable to be careful about one's meaning.
> but when people turn to 'magic spells' for many things ... you know there really are some deep issues.
All across Europe and North America (especially the US), people regularly turn to magic spells (praying). These are the places that us westerners think of as the primary 'civilised' societies, but 'magic' is commonplace there as well.
No, there is no North American who would refuse lottery winnings because of black magic because both lotteries are ingrained in the culture; and you have to voluntarily opt-in to a lottery in the first place. Plenty of North Americans would refuse free money from a foreign company with unclear or suspicious motives.
There are, however, droves of North Americans who thing that things like homosexuality is an abomination against god. Or who think that babies are sinful before they draw their first breath, and have to be splashed with water or they'll burn forever in hell (baptism is another magic spell). There are places in the US where you are barred from office if you don't have a religion, which suggests that it's a bit more than merely 'giving hope'.
Also, have you never seen footage of the crazy shit that goes on at faith healing events, or heard of people so wrapped up in their religion that they impoverish themselves in fervor? Sometimes these people do so in the hopes of curing ailments that actual medicine would have worked for. I remember talking to someone who used to be into that stuff, and she said that when it failed to heal you, their excuse was that 'you didn't pray hard enough', which of course just made you feel worse.
> when people turn to 'magic spells' for many things ... you know there really are some deep issues.
People do this plenty in the USA. Alternative medicine, homeopathy, crystals, religion, fad diets, self-help programs, ...
The purveyors of “magic spells” I know in southern Mexico are also (1) incredibly careful and well trained observers of the human body, better than many western doctors, though obviously with differing gaps in their knowledge (2) experts in cures made from plants or other local materials, far beyond the knowledge of western doctors who just write prescriptions for pre-made drugs, (3) amazing storytellers, with deep knowledge of oral history/mythology, who bring hope and comfort.
You know what else we have in the USA, just like everywhere else in the world? Fraud, corruption, violence, child abuse, infidelity, broken relationships, drug abuse, misallocation of resources, propaganda, etc. etc.
Often our authority figures and institutions (police, doctors, social workers, clergy, teachers, government officials, newspapers, ...) can cause just as many problems as the quackiest witch-doctor.
I support this position, it is just not a very popular one with today's political thinking.
It is evident that different societies have different rates of things like social cohesion, trust, violence and about a million other variables.
There are some societies that have managed to emulate the success of Europeans, such as the Japanese and Chinese, so we know it is possible, that is the good news.
The bad news is that there is no evidence Africa is attempting a similar feat. That is the fact and it is as plain as day.
Think of the enormity of it. The richest people (Euros) trade with the East Asians across a terrific distance by land or sea. All those ships bypass Africa. It is incredible.
> It is evident that different societies have different rates of things like social cohesion, trust, violence and about a million other variables.
Of course...
> There are some societies that have managed to emulate the success of Europeans, such as the Japanese and Chinese, so we know it is possible, that is the good news.
Many culturally and technologically sophisticated societies existed in the ancient world outside of Europe -- in Asia, the Americas, and yes, Africa too. I have neither the time nor knowledge to list them all, but perhaps you should start by checking out what was happening in Egypt, China, Central America, and India long before golden age of European antiquity.
> The bad news is that there is no evidence Africa is attempting a similar feat. That is the fact and it is as plain as day.
Nairobi, Lagos, Luanda, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Cairo, Dakar, Harare, Kigali, Abidjan...
> Think of the enormity of it. The richest people (Euros) trade with the East Asians across a terrific distance by land or sea. All those ships bypass Africa. It is incredible.
What is incredible is how ignorant you are. The images above clearly demonstrate that trade is happening in Africa, though however I don't think trade is a meaningful measure of societal "success" in the first place.
> Many culturally and technologically sophisticated societies existed in the ancient world outside of Europe....
That is a fact.
However something else is also a fact. That growth over the last 3 centuries in almost every area catapulted Europeans to incredible, almost seemingly impossible levels of economic success with respect to previous history.
The truth is in the numbers. Look at a graph of economic change over the centuries, it is astounding. I'm no Kurzweil but I see where he gets his (misplaced) optimism from.
This success has also been incredibly specific geographically, with the Far East only coming up in the last few decades, a delay I attribute to the retardation that was Communism.
> What is incredible is how ignorant you are. The images above clearly demonstrate that trade is happening in Africa, though however I don't think trade is a meaningful measure of societal "success" in the first place.
I was an investor in the so called frontier markets. The statistics were, are, and continue to be, absolutely terrible. In many cases if you measure on a per [yes, including black] capita basis Africa is doing worse today than it was half a century ago.
Western media constantly harps on positive news from the frontier.
Western media has a very strong bias against negative news about Africa for political reasons.
Even the Chinese who are very frugal and exceptionally adept at business cannot make headway directly. They employ resource extraction, (expensive!) worker importation and bribery on a massive scale. What do you think the corollary to that is?
I suppose you'll dismiss this as something-ism but if you quit using evidence based on Tripadvisor photographs maybe we'd see eye to eye.
We have to call a spade a spade. Africa is the most backward place in the world. Most growth that exists is obviously non-organic, relying on extensive networks of foreign coordination and siloed off resource extraction. This is an entire Continent that has not experienced an agricultural revolution let alone an industrial one. The level of corruption is hard to comprehend because it is the norm and not the exception.
Did you know that the south of the Continent relies on electricity production from a single company that has plants which are past their lifespan, which have not been maintained properly or replaced for decades?
In the North, Egypt, the most advanced, is a standing joke with its high population and meager economic output. It is a canal that has a country, not a country that has a canal.
The economy, such as it is, of the entire system is extremely fragile and it is very likely to fail outright. The structural integrity is shot.
> however I don't think trade is a meaningful measure of societal "success" in the first place.
Over centuries it is indeed the physical, material success that matters. That and biology and ecology, but those are subjects for another day.
I agree that economic success is not the only factor in the world but without it supporting the bottom items in Maslow's Pyramid there isn't much else.
There exist people who disavow materalism, secular communists, religious monks, but to me this always seemed like the brain rejecting the feet in some futile metaphysical standoff, since those people with their lifestyle tend to be indirectly supported by the scale of the economic system, just as the existence of North Korea is tacitly because of the West and our competitors.
Intuitively it is hard to maintain human dignity and self respect when you're poor, and easier when you are richer.
> However something else is also a fact. That growth over the last 3 centuries in almost every area catapulted Europeans to incredible, almost seemingly impossible levels of economic success with respect to previous history.
Have you looked deeper into what fueled this "incredible/impossible" growth you're so proud of?
It was the disruption, colonization and then plunder of the resources of other societies around the world, which hit Africa the hardest.
The Europeans at the time invented the gun, which gave them lethal military advantage over other cultures that still used spears and swords for warfare.
This, coupled with their ruthless drive to amass wealth led to ridiculous situations where an army of just 50 gun totting soldiers could slaughter 1000 warriors in just 30 minutes.
And slaughter they did, and after the slaughter came the plunder. Not only their minerals and crops, but their people as well.
Many of their healthy, strong young African men and women were sold off into slavery in the middle east, Europe and Americas.
And lets be honest: this plunder and disruption was very easy for them to do, since the Europeans of the time did not really consider Africans human.
Maybe the Asians, but definitely not the Africans. Many were treated worse than horses or dogs.
Go read up on what king Leopold of Belgium did at the Congo.
If you still could not work hard or fast enough after all the whippings, your fingers, the hands and limbs would be chopped off.
This is called trauma. Whole generations of African communities were brutalized and traumatized just 100 years ago.
If you don't know untreated trauma does to the human psyche, or how it can be passed from generation to generation, go ask your local therapist.
And I'm sorry African society doesn't seem to be recovering fast enough for you, maybe they are not just as "strong/civilized" as you are.
> This success has also been incredibly specific geographically, with the Far East only coming up in the last few decades, a delay I attribute to the retardation that was Communism.
Really? What metrics are you using to measure this success? You seem to be using per capita income, which means you don't get simple economics. You're basically saying that someone earning 1000 US dollars in New York is on par with someone earning the same in rural Texas. The United Nations HDI index paints a very different picture, putting Africa more or less at par with Asia, and Europe on top. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev....
> Western media constantly harps on positive news from the frontier.
> Western media has a very strong bias against negative news about Africa for political reasons.
Hahaha! Don't make me laugh. Whats most likely happening here is the few positive stories you've stumbled upon have just blown your mind and worldview, so you think its happening evrywhere because those are the ones you remember. For every one positive, you'll find another 20 negative from that same western media outlet.
> We have to call a spade a spade. Africa is the most backward place in the world. Most growth that exists is obviously non-organic, relying on extensive networks of foreign
> coordination and siloed off resource extraction. This is an entire Continent that has not experienced an agricultural revolution let alone an industrial one. The level of
> corruption is hard to comprehend because it is the norm and not the exception.
Once again, whats the metric for measuring the backwardness of a place? If its the western way of life and values, I agree with you 100%. And I don't think it would be a good idea for Africans to wholesomely adopt all those values, just the ones that work. Understand this: in terms of natural and human resources, Africa is the richest most abundant planet on this continent. In terms of cons...
Broadly your position appears to be that Africa is not necessarily backward but that if it is definitely backward then this is the consequence of Europeans conquering their lands centuries ago and since there are no European colonies anymore we Europeans have been manipulating them in the present day through corporations as proxies, thus retarding their (already slow because colonization) progress.
Is that an accurate summation?
Because if it is then the following must be true.
1. There must be a strong relationship between colonization and poverty. After all, they are taking your things.
2. Nations or ethic groups that are conquered by aggressors take considerable time to recover, perhaps many generations.
> Broadly your position appears to be that Africa is not necessarily backward but that if it is definitely backward then this is the consequence of Europeans conquering their lands centuries ago
Centuries ago? Most African states got independence just 50 years ago!! Get your timelines right. Broadly, my position is that there is nothing superior about Europeans or inferior and backward about Africans, which is the main thrust of your argument, is it not? That the problems and state of Africa today is simply caused by the backwardness and faults of its inhabitants, right?
My position is that you are trying very hard to rationalize what are simply feelings good old fashioned prejudice, coupled with a lot of ignorance. I cannot
> There must be a strong relationship between colonization and poverty. After all, they are taking your things.
If the colonizers are racist taskmasters who view their subjects as some sort of sub-human species, the effects of colonization are devastating.
Not just economically, but socially and culturally. For example, where do you think the practice of militias chopping off victims hands came from? Do you think such barbaric practices existed before the arrival of the European colonizer?
> Nations or ethic groups that are conquered by aggressors take considerable time to recover, perhaps many generations.
If your aim is to be accurate, then ask precise questions. What is "considerable time"?! Who are the aggressors? How are they treating their subjects? What social and cultural structures did they find coming in, and what did they leave behind when going? Who did they hand power over to when they "left"? What resources did they plunder? Its very easy to be hand-wavy and prejudiced when thinking broad, general terms. So do your homework, get more specific and your ignorance, and hopefully prejudice will disappear.
I have read your responses. I think I understand your anger because I held similar convictions about ten years ago.
The problem I am having with this argument is that you are not actually addressing the ideas directly. To me it is all impressionistic what I'm hearing.
Accusations of ignorance/bias, semi-philosophical, perhaps conspiratorial musings and emotive language describing past horrors and diabolical events, none of this actually addresses the central question directly.
The central question is why is African so impoverished?
I ask you to summarize precisely and as concisely as you can your hypothesis.
I understand that you want Africa to be a better place than it currently is and feel passionately about that. I also want it to be a better place but for us to communicate without descending into stereotypes or hyperbole about the right or left we have to talk from first principals.
Otherwise I am forced to make assumptions about your position. Presently I assume you believe that white men came to Africa, blitzed it, and then secretly are still controlling it after independence. This is not actually a mainstream position, although it is popular among many US and British students.
This means I assume you think there exists one and only one reason why Africa is so improvised. Namely, white invaders. That Africans were, and are still, slaves.
Fortunately you are able to provide the accurate explanation that you believe to be true. Then we could build on that foundation. Then neither of us will have to attack strawmen. Or we could just call each other names. It is your call.
> A similar phenomena was witnessed in South Africa with the Marikina massacre of 2012, where miners believed that herbs provided by a witchdoctor would make them invisible.
Surely you understand the difference between middle class people taking some sugar and people believing unwaveringly that herbs will protect them from that shotgun.
> Surely you understand the difference between middle class people taking some sugar and people believing unwaveringly that herbs will protect them from that shotgun.
I don't understand it; please spell it out for me because all I see is magical thinking. If you think homeopathy isn't a matter of life and death, you might have not considered the people whose lives could have been saved had they turned to real medicine.
I don't believe in homeopathy, however I highly doubt it's being used in matters of life and death in any way that has the slightest veneer of respectability.
It may exist, I suspect, but only peddled by shady online gurus.
Sorry, I admit, it's not homeopathy. It's Reiki, which is one step less valid. At least homeopathy is actually interacting w/ your body in a physical manner, even if it just water; Reiki doesn't even do that.
People will hawk anything when the profit motive gets high enough.
So let's take South Africa. This country is often so successful in so many dimensions compared to other African countries that they are commonly excluded from statistics related to its continent...
Middle-class white folks taking sugar-water only want the sugar water as long as they're getting their chemo, because, "eh, it can't hurt." This type is, almost, every patient I've ever interacted with.
Believing herbs will protect you from a shotgun is rather more like the crunchy granola nutjobs that take sugar-water instead of their chemo, because "that stuff's just poison." These are a relative rarity, and the worst patients you've ever dealt with, because you get to watch them choose to suffer and/or die.
It's a difference in degree that amounts to a difference in kind.
Given the amount of generalised irrationnality I don't think that qualifies as an equality function when observing human behaviour.
One leads mostly to a lighter wallet (people with access to homeopathy are not particularily underexposed to medical coverage to begin with), the other to a missing limb. In terms of impact I'd argue there's a world of difference to the affected.
When I first read the headline, I saw "Many Keynesians refusing basic income experiment", which confused me because I thought Keynes fans would totally go for UBI.
But yeah, free money looks a lot like colonialism if you squint. I can see people avoiding it. You get $500 a month now, and then 3 months later, they come asking for a "favor" in return, and it would be a shame if something happened to your kneecaps. This is not reality of course, but let's just say I've been trained to avoid emails offering me free money in the past.
That is something I had never considered. If many people become dependent on UBI, they are entirely dependent on the state - to the point they can be taken advantage of if power is abused. UBI in some ways does take an element of freedom from people, granted it may provide other forms of freedom.
What is to stop the government from changing the laws to require everyone only on UBI (no job) to perform some form of community service for a set number of hours per year. What i to stop the government from increasing it further? So whilst you may gain security for the basic living needs, you may trade it for a less freedom.
The same thing that, presumably, stops government from doing those things now - voters.
That's not to say that system of checks works. Places like Florida have enacted mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, so there's obviously some political will to punish and regulate the poor.
It not the kind of thing that would happen suddenly, but gradually. A little change here, a little change there and after 10 years, its changed a lot.
All it would take is the right political climate and circumstances, combined with ad campaigns and lots of lobbying. Many arguments would be put forth to convince people a minor change is a good thing, that due to the current circumstances, its necessary. Many people would likely agree, despite the risk it opens up the potential for the system to be abused with another minor change in the future. And its voted through by popular demand.
A few years later, the political climate changes and the government isn't perhaps as trustworthy/predictable as it might have once been.
Now of course it could go the other way. However, power creep rarely goes backwards.
The same thing that, presumably, stops government from doing those things now - voters.
That's not to say that system of checks works. Places like Florida have enacted mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, so there's obviously some political will to punish and regulate the poor.
Not that it's a real deterrent... but if you have a requirement for UBI... it's not UBI. Attacks at the universal component of BI must be stopped else it is nothing more than a variant of today's arbitrary and maligned welfare.
>What is to stop the government from changing the laws
The citizens. The hope is citizens can be more active in community efforts(like protesting government actions) when their continual employment(and employment usually hinders midday government protesting) is no longer a necessity for continued life.
The world is not a zero sum game and handing out free money is a proven concept - as long as the recipients are big firms and banks... you already forgot the "financial crisis" and the entire last decade?
Money does not work in such simplistic ways except for on a tiny scale, for example within the circle of family and friends. Already when you take out a credit your sentence becomes untrue: Debt is created by commercial banks out of thin air - you yourself "pay" for it, because the "debt" promise you give is worth as much as the money you get (plus interest).
When a government hands out "free money" the promise is not direct but indirect but essentially the same: They think that the money will "pay for itself" in the end through economic activity that would otherwise never happen. This is the same thing that happens with every single credit, only that then the responsibility for "repayment" is only one step removed instead of an indefinite amount.
In this context (about the nature of modern money, not UBI), before anyone wants to tell me money for credit comes from other people's savings, I recommend reading "Money Creation in the Modern Economy" (2014) written by the Bank of England. I link to the Guardian article by Graeber, the actual PDF is linked near the beginning of that article though, but it has a summary on page one where it already supports the main points of the article.
> It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were
> a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money"
> to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public
> spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this
> week is that none of this is really true.
Any trade is non zero sum, infact it's beneficial for both people. If I trade one pepe meme for 1$, it's mutually beneficial and each person got something better.
Given the "gift in one hand, gun in the other" history of western actions in Kenya and other African countries over the last centuries, it's hardly surprising there's going to be the random pocket of paranoid skepticism, no matter how good the UBI marketing/education.
I'm personally confused as to why anyone would think it's a good idea to trial UBI in Kenya, as a sort of private charity initiative, given the sordid historical background. It cannot be feasible to get any meaningful data from such projects. There is so much background noise.
Put the funding into microloans or (unfashionable in the west and yet a vital layer in Africa's commercial middle class) labor organization (= unions). Protect the free media and lobby for laws against corruption in politics. Invest in documentation of the continuous crimes against the public interest. Help break the sociopathic power elites that run most African capitals and national economies. Invest in schools. Pay families that keep their children in school. Create demand for local high technology skills, by looking for local partners & experts before flying in foreigners. Name and shame organizations that don't do this. Name and shame national and international companies that overcharge for Internet, for transport, for medicines, for books.
There are surely so many ways to spend money to help Africans continue to break free of the grip of generations of thieves in power (as they are doing in many countries), and pull themselves out of poverty.
In this context, UBI seems... extraordinarily misplaced, and I can't fault people for refusing it.
There are surely so many ways to spend money
to help Africans
Give Directly works on the theory (and they have some studies that seem to back this up [1]) that the Africans know what they need better than you and I do; and that they have the incentive to see donations spent in the most effective way.
On the contrary, there are a large number of examples from e.g. South African shanty towns that if people living in tiny metal shacks with dirt floors get a bit more disposable income, many prefer to stay where they are and buy satellite TV and the latest iPhone rather than save that money to try and move to a better place.
That's exactly the point. The satellite TV is cost-effective, high-value entertainment. The iPhone is a supercomputer that offers information and vastly improved communication with family and friends. Yet outsiders who think they know better somehow believe that people are dumb to prefer an iPhone rather than moving out of the shanty. Maybe the iPhone is a better marginal buy than a better house.
That's right, and it reminds me of the people who scorn the homeless for owning a laptop or smartphone. The opportunities that are unlocked by being connected to the world's digital backbone are far more significant than the benefits one would get from moving into slightly nicer accommodation.
That would be an actual example of the parent's point. You think the utility of satellite TV and a phone are are lower than the utility of not living in a shack. The beneficiaries disagree. Only one of you can be right, and unless you intend to arrogate to yourself the right to define someone else's utility function, it's not you.
There is a great book on poverty called "Poor Economics" [1] which has a relevant point about why people choose to buy TVs:
We asked Oucha Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"
After spending some time in that Moroccan village, it was easy to see why he thought that. Life can be quite boring in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall, no place to sit and watch interesting strangers go by. And not a lot of work, either. Oucha and two of his neighbors, who were with him during the interview, had worked about seventy days in agriculture and about thirty days in construction that year. For the rest of the year, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. This left plenty of time to watch television. These three men all lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find work, and to give their children a good education. But they all had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone.
Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor.
I wonder if TV hinders economic growth and development. In so far as urbanization goes, the story that I was told in Urban Economics was that as farming productivity went up, the opportunity cost of time went down and so people took up other trades in addition to farming. When an hour less of farm work didn't mean starvation anymore, people had the time to sew, bake, build, etc. And over time, things which were probably hobbies developed from cottage industries to actual industries.
What entertainment does is drive the opportunity cost of time back up by increasing the pleasurableness of leisure time. Now, that probably isn't much of an issue for actual underdeveloped countries. I don't think anyone would prefer to sew their own clothes when they can buy perfectly fine ones for a lower price unless they're obsessed with self-reliance, and no one is missing out on these homemade goods either. But in a society where it's plausible that a hobbist might produce some really neat stuff on their own, encouraging passive entertainment might mean some less neat gadgets in the long run.
Among other reasons, GiveDirectly chose to operate in Kenya because of the widespread use of M-Pesa money transfer system which allows poor people to directly receive money by phone text message. This is a very efficient way to transfer money and eliminates opportunities for graft.
Some people say giving money directly to poor people is best. Some people say paying poor families to keep their children in school is best.
It seems to me that in this case a randomised controlled trial (RCT) would be an ideal way to determine who is right: A third of people get free money, a third of people get stay-in-school money, and a third of people get nothing. Then see which treatment, if any, is more effective at increasing the standard of living.
But you seem quite certain that data from such an experiment would not be meaningful. What kind of problems do you think would prevent an RCT from producing an accurate answer? Could we avoid these problems by instead running the trail in, say, South East Asia, or are RCTs doomed to produce unreliable data?
No single local action can increase the standard of living in any measurable way. To even think in those terms is to utterly misunderstand the scale and depth of the problems that face Africans as they work to construct a functioning economy and its institutions.
Do you even understand what creates a "standard of living"?
It is things like, "if I start a business, and people don't pay their bills, can I take them to court?"
If the answer is "no" then you are stuck with a cash economy, no credit, no trust. Everything becomes more expensive.
How do you create functioning courts? You need honest politicians. How do you get honest politicians? You build coalitions of power that boot out the thieves. How do you build such coalitions? You spend decades slowly growing your economy so the commercial middle classes get wealthy enough to become politically relevant and interested. How do you grow your economy? You cut the cost of transport and communications. How do you do that?
Etc. etc. I'm not giving a recipe, I'm giving examples of how complex this is.
The scale is such that you'd need absolutely staggering amounts of money and political will to run studies that would show useful data. I'm talking entire regions, even countries, changing policies. Cases like Rwanda focussing on the Internet. Give it a decade, then compare to Burundi, which focusses on (e.g.) child health and political stability.
Anyhow, there are no easy answers for this and forgive me if it sounds like I think there are.
Downvoting a comment you disagree with is not polite.
I've actually lived and worked in Africa for much of my life. I'm married to a Congolese and have been surrounded for a dozen years by that culture. My family has worked and works in Africa. I've spent years working for organizations that ran projects across Africa. My questions and cynicism doesn't fall out of the air.
If you take issue with points I've raised, good manners dictate that you reply to those points without trying to punish me for raising them, as some of you did, which is cool.
Different cultures have different attitudes towards gifts and favors: which the Basic income could be classified as one by the recipients. I suspect the researchers did not take this into consideration.
In some cultures, gifts are just that, and have no strings attached. Yet in others, gifts create an obligation to the recipient to 'return the favor' at a later date, so accepting a gift is a liability. A lot of research has been done in this area, comparing different cultures[1] or focusing on a specific one [2]
I have no desire to dump on UBI -- I want to see how these various experiments pan out -- but I am reminded of a thought experiment.
Imagine it's 10,000 years ago. You arrive in pre-history with all of the technology of today: electricity, communication, medicine, automation, and so on. Your mission? To destroy mankind.
Assuming infinite resources, how would you go about doing it? Sure, you could build out an infrastructure, create a robotic army, and begin hunting humans down. Or, you could build out about the same amount of infrastructure and just give people whatever they want: food, housing, warmth, and so on. After all, what would a bunch of hunter-gathers really want? It'd probably be easier than hunting them all down and fighting them. As long as you're not under any time pressure, what's the difference between killing them immediately and waiting four or five hundred years for them to stop breeding?
The premise of UBI is that this would not eventually eliminate the species, that individuals here and there would still learn new skills and advance knowledge. The main criticism of UBI (aside from the moral one) is that while stress and struggle for individuals can be a terrible thing, for the species as a whole it results in evolutionary survival.
It will be interesting to watch these populations over time to see how adaptive they are compared with control groups.
Oh come on, what is this crap? You are talking about people like they're almost subhuman. People more more adaptable than that. Maybe not everyone, but at least some will take any advantage they get and put it to good use, and the rest will follow.
"Primitive" people are most likely smarter and harder working than you. Surviving off hunting is not easy - you have to know a lot about the environment you're in.
Also, historically many scientists were well off people who did it as a hobby. By this theory they should have done nothing with their lives.
"...You are talking about people like they're almost subhuman...."
Anything but. The fact is, I am not looking at individuals. I am looking at the population. A population is not a human.
You make a good point. When we talk about UBI, the relevant examples should be the independently wealthy. Many have done great things with their lives. Some have destroyed themselves. Some have had positive effects on others, encouraging them to also do better. Some have had negative effects on others, causing despair or disillusionment.
Why the difference?
Beats me. So let's experiment.
On a personal level, we should always be kind and treat people with respect and love. But that doesn't make any of these population questions go away.
Aren't those basic income experiments kind of useless?
Giving people money for a limited time doesn't give them the notion, that they can rely on the money supply for the rest of their lives. They still have to earn an equivalent sum once the supply stops and make their decisions accordingly.
I just got an email from Shroud of the Avatar last night -- apparently the developers are worried about unequal SotA gold distribution and are implementing some sort of UBI-like scheme in that game. Would be interested to see how that works out, given the ideal virtual circumstances for enforcing such a law (ie, no cheating or corruption possible).
I'm not sure how representative this project is. I mean, if someone tried a pilot project in San Antonio, would the results of that project be taken as a representative outcome for Texas or the United States? Remember, this "sampling," such as it is, is different from the kind of sampling they do on opinion polls, why they query a small but representative sample of the population.
My guess as to why they're failing is that they're not clearly elucidating their purposes and intentions. For instance, I can confirm to you that if you came to Kenya where you gave, say, high milk-production breeds of cows to dairy farmers, or any other similar thing with a clear quid (if not pro quo), then the uptake would probably overwhelm you.
But with free basic income, it's a very counter-intuitive idea. What do you mean you're giving me free money? Where is it coming from? What's your intention? What do I have to do for it?
If they were to explain that they're conducting an experiment (I bet they're not clear on that point) where they want to see what people would do with their lives if they had a certain basic income guaranteed by someone (say, government), then Kenyans would take you up on the offer, I'm sure. After all, many Kenyans expect and often call upon the government to help in all kinds of areas, so if you took that basic-income-provided-by-government angle as your ultimate goal, I think people would listen.
That lack of clarity is what is most likely causing people to shun the money.
It's not that Kenyans don't want free money. We probably do. After all,we seem to be very keen, for example, on these churches where you "plant a seed" (give money to the church in exchange for "blessings"), and money given out during political campaign seasons (we have one coming up next year) always seems to be taken up very well. But in these cases, the financial logic is not clear.
Where is the logic with free basic income? If you don't clearly and understandably explain that to people, you're going to fail. Especially if when they ask you to explain and your response is something along the lines of "Why do you care? It's free money, you sucker living below the poverty line." (I'm not saying that's what happened. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was).
PS: Just because I'm Kenyan doesn't make me an expert, or even basic informed, on Kenya. Just because you live in a country doesn't necessarily mean you understand it. Exhibit A: Trump supporters. Exhibit B: Brexit.
This isn't the first time GiveDirectly has given Kenyans free money and they haven't had this much trouble before. It's probably not a beginner mistake. Something is different this time.
I agree on both points. First I think the headline is wrong because this only happened in one area of Kenya rather than reflecting the whole country. Also I think it is almost certain they did not successfully communicate the purpose and context.
Part of the context they might mention, since apparently it was only $30 per month, is the income difference in the United States where even some relatively lower-income individuals can afford to donate that. So to me a program like this could partly be about reducing the overall income inequality between countries. But at least if that income difference (how much money it actually is in rich countries) is part of the explanation it may seem like it is less likely to be an obligation.
We're only getting the organization's side of the story. Isn't it possible these people would rather work to earn their income instead of eating from a trough like an animal in a zoo? Concepts like dignity are alien to Westeners but not in other parts of the world.
Microloans and fair trade are the solutions to poverty in developing countries.
I think just as many Americans would refuse basic income too.
"experts say that Americans –- going back as far as Colonial times, when Elizabethan poor laws were in vogue — have never favored unlimited government handouts that are not contingent upon work."
Personally, I'd also be afraid to start something like that, since it's would end abruptly, and could easily end early if research funding runs out.
Plus, we're all conditioned to know there's no free lunch - someone who offers one is probably hiding something. There are probably strings attached, any reasonable person might be forgiven for thinking.
It doesn't seem surprising at all that people in Kenya or elsewhere are skeptical.
I can understand some skepticism because when people offer free money it's usually some kind of scam. But would you really refuse free money just because you don't think you could handle it responsibly? You couldn't even handle giving it away?
I understand why people don't want to take this money. Basically, here in Kenya we're brought up in a way that there is nothing for free, you have to work to get what you want. So someone giving you free money is very suspicious there must be something they want in turn.
Yes, it's understandable that people are suspicious. But before, GiveDirectly was able to convince them that it's not a scam so it's a bit surprising that it didn't work this time.
I think it's true anywhere poverty is a common economic status for folks. You live with less, so every thing you get you want to own 100% of. Gifts are just deposits (implicit) on favors in the future, so I always avoid them unless they're from family or good friends. Strangers and gifts aren't a good mix in my opinion here from the US side of things.
I think the fact that strangers are giving "free money" anywhere in the world results in rejection isn't surprising. I don't think the specific excuses aren't unusual either because how many times have we've seen similar scams in the US? I know as someone who's been poor I've had people try to give me supposedly "free money" only later on ask me a favor or try some other nonsense like proselytize me. It's just not worth the risk if you think about it. I hope the organization continues to improve how they inform people because I think UBI is a good idea. I just think you have to think like a poor person where every gift is just a deposit on a favor in the future.
One thing to note about these experiments is that they tend to paper over or ignore both the Universal and the Basic parts of Universal Basic Income. (Those are the hard parts.) They end up just experiments to see what happens if you give some people a little money. In this case, what if 6,000 out of 45,000,000 people get $1 per day (which is about 1/9th the GDP PPP per capita) for a limited time.
I don't know about the cost of living or employment situation in Kenya, but by GDP PPP per capita, that calculates to about the equivalent of $17.42/day in the U.S, or $522/month ($6,264/year). That's way below poverty level, and not likely to cover housing, utilities, food, and healthcare anywhere in the U.S. Of course, that would be helpful to anyone with low income, but it is not a basic income. The situation may be different in Kenya, but by the math it doesn't sound promising.
If it only affects 1/100 of 1% of the population, there is no way to observe the societal effects of a universal income. That's a long way from universal. Also, because it is an experiment rather than a social contract, there is no way to observe what people will do if they have it as a safety net, because they can't rely on it. To be fair, if it is going to run for 10 years, that's something, but still not representative of lifetime security.
---
Regarding the comments about poor people buying TVs and cellphones, etc. - there are many reasons for this, but it really is utility and value. These people aren't stupid. The economy works completely differently when you are poor. Thinking that they should invest their $300 tax refund in a diversified stock portfolio is nonsense. With fees of $10/transaction, they would lose 1/3rd of their money just buying into 10 cheap stocks, and an equivalent amount selling it. They would need > 100% return just to break even.
Likewise, money in the bank is a liability. It detracts from foodstamp allowances etc. But they don't send people around to appraise your TV when they're calculating your foodstamps. And in a pinch, you have things that you can trade, sell, or pawn. If you leave the money in the bank, it will be lost to bills, bank fees, etc. And sure, you could have caviar and shrimp instead of ramen and rice cakes, but it'd be gone as soon as the meal is done. A stereo will still be there tomorrow.
Generally speaking, if you are working poor, trying to save up to improve your position costs you and you lose. Buying things saves you money, maintains the status quo, gets you things which you can sell in an emergency, and makes your life better until then. Consider states of matter - solid, liquid, gas. Things work quite differently depending on the state of matter. Likewise, the economy works quite differently if you are lower class, middle class, or upper class.
Telling someone poor that they should spend their money more wisely is often like telling someone trapped in ice that they should just swim up to the surface. In the latter case, physics just doesn't work that way. In the former case, economics just doesn't work that way.
I'm curious at about how much freedom the Kenyans have after they accept it.If it's an experiment, there will be data collected. Having someone record every purchase you make and giving you constant interviews or more for ten years might be a lot of hassle.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadIt doesn't seem likely that this type of thing will be a long term concern, but perhaps something can be learned about how society adapts if a significant subset decline the payment.
Consider if somebody walked up to you and offered to pay you 6k/mo, you would be insane not to question it. And in a country where "free stuff" doesn't happen, where corruption and entrapment are common, you would also be insane to accept it.
Several of my friends have spent time in 3rd world countries. Most had the modern, egotistical, charity tour and I would suspect that their particular brand of experience is what the experiment used.
There are many well run charities and organisations operating in these countries which fully understand the problems of interacting with people there and would have seen this situation a mile off. Those that have spent time with these charities have rightly laughed at my naivety and false superiority when talking about problems those countries face.
The upshot is - this is not a surprising result, this could have been expected and appears not to have been due to the poor practice of the organisation running the experiment. They are jeopardising their own experiment and have dealt a blow to both its credibility and the credibility of other BI experiments which already suffer from accusations of low quality science and superiority complexes. This is the long term concern.
Your hyperbole really bothers me here.
It seems to me that it is a survival instinct to refuse new things you don't understand from untrusted sources. Damn right that I do. The fact that I have a Western education and many years of Western life experience may mean that the reasoning I come up with is quite a bit better than someone lacking that, but it doesn't over ride a desire to not radically disrupt my current lifestyle - for better or worse - on a blind bet.
>They find it "hard to believe that a new organization like GiveDirectly would give roughly a year's salary in cash, unconditionally," Le writes. "As a result, many people have created their own narratives to explain the cash, including rumors that the money is associated with cults or devil worship."
Le creates his own narrative about the locals as less educated and less civilized than himself - why else would they refuse his charity?
It is clear that neither he nor his organization see the locals as equals.
How on earth do you profit from people who won't take money because they think you are a cult/devil?
"We've done a lot to try to understand what has led to this increase in refusals," Le wrote in the post.
From the blog post:
We’ve found that people typically refuse out of skepticism. Potential recipients find it hard to believe that a new organization like GiveDirectly would give roughly a year’s salary in cash, unconditionally. As a result, many people have created their own narratives to explain the cash, including rumors that the money is associated with cults or devil worship.
We’ve debated how much effort to expend trying to address the refusal issue. We considered leaving Homa Bay since working in an area with lower refusals would be better for efficiency targets and staff morale. However, ultimately we decided to stay because we are in the process of implementing a large scale research project in Homa Bay, and leaving the area would result in meaningful delays and cost overruns for our research partners. We also believe it’s important to try to address the issue here or else rumors could spread to other areas we’ve not yet been.
Also read this: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427625/no-fbi-didnt-cr...
Nixon's Chief Domestic Advisor, quote:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This is not the only thing the government did, or continues to do, to destroy various peoples' faith in it.
And yet between here and reddit, I think I see this pop up every other week.
Either way, it seems people don't have a lot of faith in the government, and there are plausible examples of things the government has done to put itself in this situation.
Another example from the same era, gulf of tonkin incident. It doesn't matter what it costs the people at the bottom if the people at the top get what they want, that's the impression I think many of us are left with.
I think you know the answer to this.
There's lots of things I'd like to believe, but don't because they are not true.
Outside of HN and other geek outposts, a great many people, maybe most have a flaky relationship to the truth on almost everything. We're not immune to that of course but I at least know with fellow geeks they will admit the possibility of being wrong instead of relying exclusively on waving their hands and feels. Geeks will change minds when presented with data. Often slowly and grudgingly, but still they are able to do it, it is in them, their identity is looser.
One thing I suspect most of us have very wrong about people is that being 'scientific' is strongly connected to personality, and so appeals to logic and reason are simply not going to resound with everybody in totality. It is not meaningful to them.
The World is my anecdotal evidence for that.
Even those who aren't climate change deniers still seem committed to running us off the cliff with climate change. Perhaps because they believe in an "invisible hand" of Providence.
The posted article is an example. They could've simply quoted what at least one Kenyan thought about it. Anyone operating within a culture which values rationality would've done so. But not these people.
It is well know the drug dealer strategy of "The first dose is free, until you become hooked. This equally applies to a lot of products we use today.
For example when Facebook started giving a very good service for free it was a bargain. Basically a useful service for free with no strings attachment, no advertising, all paid with investor's money.
Then they started gradually monetizing the people to levels that a new participant in Facebook would consider obnoxious, but being gradual people has gotten used to it and consider totally normal. In some ways now you are forced to be in Facebook because your social circle is in Facebook, you are hooked now.
For a service like Facebook I certainly prefer to pay and my data or personal-social information be mine.
In the same way, making your income dependent on some external entity makes yourself lose your independence and your freedom from this entity.
Never forget that an entity powerful enough to give you most of your income has to be equally useful to take, steal, or seize the income of someone else, those who create the wealth.
This has been done and it is called "socialism". It is nothing new. Part of my family had to ask for a car or a house or a TV to the Government because "everybody had equal rights to it". Of course some were "more equal than others" and my family will wait for years for his totally shit car or house, but the people near power will get it instantly, and their houses, cars or TVs will be great because whatever excuse(like because you are in the Party's dome you need the best TV or car for your job).
For my family to have this "right" meant giving away most of their income in taxes and earn a misery compared to other West societies for equal jobs like being engineer or University teacher.
As an example today you can't earn more than 30 dollars or so in Cuba, that is the limit you have, you can be a doctor or engineer. The only rich people in Cuba are the Communist, but not officially of course, officially they earn 30 dollars like everybody else.
I consider this movement to "basic income" neosocialism. There are powerful entities like Central Banks that want to go back to a centralized economy, they being in charge of the new system, of course.
In my opinion, the way to face the "robots taking our jobs" is to share the ownership of the means of productions(the robots and computers), locally, but never globally.
The best approach to such situations is, as the organisation is following, to educate the people. It might be hard with low literacy levels but it's possible, especially for a cash studded organisation such as theirs.
edit: Fixed Gorilla to Guerrilla
It's not 'reading and arithmetic' that's the problem.
It's a basic lack of intelligent social organization across the board.
It's the thousand little bits of behaviour that make you 'civilized' vis-a-vis other cultures. I'm weary of the using the word 'civilized' because it sounds a little colonialist, but when people turn to 'magic spells' for many things ... you know there really are some deep issues. And it goes far, far beyond magic spells.
People totally lack an understanding of human nature when they address these issues.
'Inequality' is not the problem in Africa.
Africa has ample natural resources, if they acted in an intelligent and organized manner, there's no reason they couldn't be as rich as anywhere else.
It's a million little things summarized in a very clumsy way by the word 'ethnicity' or 'culture'.
Again - trying to avoid a completely condescending perspective, but the only measuring stick we have for our degree of civilization is ourselves.
All across Europe and North America (especially the US), people regularly turn to magic spells (praying). These are the places that us westerners think of as the primary 'civilised' societies, but 'magic' is commonplace there as well.
This is a false equivalence - clearly you do not understand what religion is.
There is no North American who would not accept a lottery winning for fear of 'Black Magic' and would 'pray to win the lottery' as well.
Praying is giving hope, or meditating. Very few people literally believe in prayers.
If you kids cannot grasp how backwards Africa is, you need to visit yourselves.
No, there is no North American who would refuse lottery winnings because of black magic because both lotteries are ingrained in the culture; and you have to voluntarily opt-in to a lottery in the first place. Plenty of North Americans would refuse free money from a foreign company with unclear or suspicious motives.
There are, however, droves of North Americans who thing that things like homosexuality is an abomination against god. Or who think that babies are sinful before they draw their first breath, and have to be splashed with water or they'll burn forever in hell (baptism is another magic spell). There are places in the US where you are barred from office if you don't have a religion, which suggests that it's a bit more than merely 'giving hope'.
Also, have you never seen footage of the crazy shit that goes on at faith healing events, or heard of people so wrapped up in their religion that they impoverish themselves in fervor? Sometimes these people do so in the hopes of curing ailments that actual medicine would have worked for. I remember talking to someone who used to be into that stuff, and she said that when it failed to heal you, their excuse was that 'you didn't pray hard enough', which of course just made you feel worse.
People do this plenty in the USA. Alternative medicine, homeopathy, crystals, religion, fad diets, self-help programs, ...
The purveyors of “magic spells” I know in southern Mexico are also (1) incredibly careful and well trained observers of the human body, better than many western doctors, though obviously with differing gaps in their knowledge (2) experts in cures made from plants or other local materials, far beyond the knowledge of western doctors who just write prescriptions for pre-made drugs, (3) amazing storytellers, with deep knowledge of oral history/mythology, who bring hope and comfort.
You know what else we have in the USA, just like everywhere else in the world? Fraud, corruption, violence, child abuse, infidelity, broken relationships, drug abuse, misallocation of resources, propaganda, etc. etc.
Often our authority figures and institutions (police, doctors, social workers, clergy, teachers, government officials, newspapers, ...) can cause just as many problems as the quackiest witch-doctor.
It is evident that different societies have different rates of things like social cohesion, trust, violence and about a million other variables.
There are some societies that have managed to emulate the success of Europeans, such as the Japanese and Chinese, so we know it is possible, that is the good news.
The bad news is that there is no evidence Africa is attempting a similar feat. That is the fact and it is as plain as day.
Think of the enormity of it. The richest people (Euros) trade with the East Asians across a terrific distance by land or sea. All those ships bypass Africa. It is incredible.
Of course...
> There are some societies that have managed to emulate the success of Europeans, such as the Japanese and Chinese, so we know it is possible, that is the good news.
Many culturally and technologically sophisticated societies existed in the ancient world outside of Europe -- in Asia, the Americas, and yes, Africa too. I have neither the time nor knowledge to list them all, but perhaps you should start by checking out what was happening in Egypt, China, Central America, and India long before golden age of European antiquity.
> The bad news is that there is no evidence Africa is attempting a similar feat. That is the fact and it is as plain as day.
Nairobi, Lagos, Luanda, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Cairo, Dakar, Harare, Kigali, Abidjan...
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/03/da/de/46/...
http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/lg...
http://imgs.sapo.pt/gfx/fc/67/591570.jpg
https://afktravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/dar-es-sala...
http://paradiseintheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/add...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/View_fro...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Dakar-In...
http://www.bradtguides.com/media/wysiwyg/destinations/africa...
https://jaredmworley.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/p1070303.jp...
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/66636928.jpg
> Think of the enormity of it. The richest people (Euros) trade with the East Asians across a terrific distance by land or sea. All those ships bypass Africa. It is incredible.
What is incredible is how ignorant you are. The images above clearly demonstrate that trade is happening in Africa, though however I don't think trade is a meaningful measure of societal "success" in the first place.
That is a fact.
However something else is also a fact. That growth over the last 3 centuries in almost every area catapulted Europeans to incredible, almost seemingly impossible levels of economic success with respect to previous history.
The truth is in the numbers. Look at a graph of economic change over the centuries, it is astounding. I'm no Kurzweil but I see where he gets his (misplaced) optimism from.
This success has also been incredibly specific geographically, with the Far East only coming up in the last few decades, a delay I attribute to the retardation that was Communism.
> What is incredible is how ignorant you are. The images above clearly demonstrate that trade is happening in Africa, though however I don't think trade is a meaningful measure of societal "success" in the first place.
I was an investor in the so called frontier markets. The statistics were, are, and continue to be, absolutely terrible. In many cases if you measure on a per [yes, including black] capita basis Africa is doing worse today than it was half a century ago.
Western media constantly harps on positive news from the frontier.
Western media has a very strong bias against negative news about Africa for political reasons.
Even the Chinese who are very frugal and exceptionally adept at business cannot make headway directly. They employ resource extraction, (expensive!) worker importation and bribery on a massive scale. What do you think the corollary to that is?
I suppose you'll dismiss this as something-ism but if you quit using evidence based on Tripadvisor photographs maybe we'd see eye to eye.
We have to call a spade a spade. Africa is the most backward place in the world. Most growth that exists is obviously non-organic, relying on extensive networks of foreign coordination and siloed off resource extraction. This is an entire Continent that has not experienced an agricultural revolution let alone an industrial one. The level of corruption is hard to comprehend because it is the norm and not the exception.
Did you know that the south of the Continent relies on electricity production from a single company that has plants which are past their lifespan, which have not been maintained properly or replaced for decades?
In the North, Egypt, the most advanced, is a standing joke with its high population and meager economic output. It is a canal that has a country, not a country that has a canal.
The economy, such as it is, of the entire system is extremely fragile and it is very likely to fail outright. The structural integrity is shot.
> however I don't think trade is a meaningful measure of societal "success" in the first place.
Over centuries it is indeed the physical, material success that matters. That and biology and ecology, but those are subjects for another day.
I agree that economic success is not the only factor in the world but without it supporting the bottom items in Maslow's Pyramid there isn't much else.
There exist people who disavow materalism, secular communists, religious monks, but to me this always seemed like the brain rejecting the feet in some futile metaphysical standoff, since those people with their lifestyle tend to be indirectly supported by the scale of the economic system, just as the existence of North Korea is tacitly because of the West and our competitors.
Intuitively it is hard to maintain human dignity and self respect when you're poor, and easier when you are richer.
Have you looked deeper into what fueled this "incredible/impossible" growth you're so proud of? It was the disruption, colonization and then plunder of the resources of other societies around the world, which hit Africa the hardest. The Europeans at the time invented the gun, which gave them lethal military advantage over other cultures that still used spears and swords for warfare. This, coupled with their ruthless drive to amass wealth led to ridiculous situations where an army of just 50 gun totting soldiers could slaughter 1000 warriors in just 30 minutes. And slaughter they did, and after the slaughter came the plunder. Not only their minerals and crops, but their people as well. Many of their healthy, strong young African men and women were sold off into slavery in the middle east, Europe and Americas.
And lets be honest: this plunder and disruption was very easy for them to do, since the Europeans of the time did not really consider Africans human. Maybe the Asians, but definitely not the Africans. Many were treated worse than horses or dogs. Go read up on what king Leopold of Belgium did at the Congo. If you still could not work hard or fast enough after all the whippings, your fingers, the hands and limbs would be chopped off. This is called trauma. Whole generations of African communities were brutalized and traumatized just 100 years ago. If you don't know untreated trauma does to the human psyche, or how it can be passed from generation to generation, go ask your local therapist. And I'm sorry African society doesn't seem to be recovering fast enough for you, maybe they are not just as "strong/civilized" as you are.
> This success has also been incredibly specific geographically, with the Far East only coming up in the last few decades, a delay I attribute to the retardation that was Communism.
Really? What metrics are you using to measure this success? You seem to be using per capita income, which means you don't get simple economics. You're basically saying that someone earning 1000 US dollars in New York is on par with someone earning the same in rural Texas. The United Nations HDI index paints a very different picture, putting Africa more or less at par with Asia, and Europe on top. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev....
> Western media constantly harps on positive news from the frontier. > Western media has a very strong bias against negative news about Africa for political reasons.
Hahaha! Don't make me laugh. Whats most likely happening here is the few positive stories you've stumbled upon have just blown your mind and worldview, so you think its happening evrywhere because those are the ones you remember. For every one positive, you'll find another 20 negative from that same western media outlet.
> We have to call a spade a spade. Africa is the most backward place in the world. Most growth that exists is obviously non-organic, relying on extensive networks of foreign > coordination and siloed off resource extraction. This is an entire Continent that has not experienced an agricultural revolution let alone an industrial one. The level of > corruption is hard to comprehend because it is the norm and not the exception.
Once again, whats the metric for measuring the backwardness of a place? If its the western way of life and values, I agree with you 100%. And I don't think it would be a good idea for Africans to wholesomely adopt all those values, just the ones that work. Understand this: in terms of natural and human resources, Africa is the richest most abundant planet on this continent. In terms of cons...
Is that an accurate summation?
Because if it is then the following must be true.
1. There must be a strong relationship between colonization and poverty. After all, they are taking your things.
2. Nations or ethic groups that are conquered by aggressors take considerable time to recover, perhaps many generations.
I repeat; is my summary accurate?
I'm not making a moral argument.
Centuries ago? Most African states got independence just 50 years ago!! Get your timelines right. Broadly, my position is that there is nothing superior about Europeans or inferior and backward about Africans, which is the main thrust of your argument, is it not? That the problems and state of Africa today is simply caused by the backwardness and faults of its inhabitants, right?
My position is that you are trying very hard to rationalize what are simply feelings good old fashioned prejudice, coupled with a lot of ignorance. I cannot
> There must be a strong relationship between colonization and poverty. After all, they are taking your things.
If the colonizers are racist taskmasters who view their subjects as some sort of sub-human species, the effects of colonization are devastating. Not just economically, but socially and culturally. For example, where do you think the practice of militias chopping off victims hands came from? Do you think such barbaric practices existed before the arrival of the European colonizer?
> Nations or ethic groups that are conquered by aggressors take considerable time to recover, perhaps many generations.
If your aim is to be accurate, then ask precise questions. What is "considerable time"?! Who are the aggressors? How are they treating their subjects? What social and cultural structures did they find coming in, and what did they leave behind when going? Who did they hand power over to when they "left"? What resources did they plunder? Its very easy to be hand-wavy and prejudiced when thinking broad, general terms. So do your homework, get more specific and your ignorance, and hopefully prejudice will disappear.
> Broadly your position appears to be that Africa is not necessarily backward but that ...
> Is that an accurate summation?
> I repeat; is my summary accurate?
I was repeating in my words your arguments, and I need to know whether I have it right or we shall descend into the weeds.
> Is that an accurate summation?
No. For an accurate summation... see/read/note/understand/grok/comprendez my last response above.
The problem I am having with this argument is that you are not actually addressing the ideas directly. To me it is all impressionistic what I'm hearing.
Accusations of ignorance/bias, semi-philosophical, perhaps conspiratorial musings and emotive language describing past horrors and diabolical events, none of this actually addresses the central question directly.
The central question is why is African so impoverished?
I ask you to summarize precisely and as concisely as you can your hypothesis.
I understand that you want Africa to be a better place than it currently is and feel passionately about that. I also want it to be a better place but for us to communicate without descending into stereotypes or hyperbole about the right or left we have to talk from first principals.
Otherwise I am forced to make assumptions about your position. Presently I assume you believe that white men came to Africa, blitzed it, and then secretly are still controlling it after independence. This is not actually a mainstream position, although it is popular among many US and British students.
This means I assume you think there exists one and only one reason why Africa is so improvised. Namely, white invaders. That Africans were, and are still, slaves.
Fortunately you are able to provide the accurate explanation that you believe to be true. Then we could build on that foundation. Then neither of us will have to attack strawmen. Or we could just call each other names. It is your call.
that's a hell of a freudian slip...
I'm sure there are many gorillas in Congo, but I doubt he was there to train a gorilla militia.
Guerilla, perhaps?
The US market for homeopathic products was $6.4 billion in 2013: http://www.pharmacytimes.com/publications/issue/2013/Septemb...
In Italy, post-earthquake survivors are being provided homeopathic products: http://www.ilpost.it/2016/08/27/regione-marche-terremoto-ome...
Credulous people are everywhere.
I don't understand it; please spell it out for me because all I see is magical thinking. If you think homeopathy isn't a matter of life and death, you might have not considered the people whose lives could have been saved had they turned to real medicine.
It may exist, I suspect, but only peddled by shady online gurus.
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/wellness/integrative-...
Sorry, I admit, it's not homeopathy. It's Reiki, which is one step less valid. At least homeopathy is actually interacting w/ your body in a physical manner, even if it just water; Reiki doesn't even do that.
People will hawk anything when the profit motive gets high enough.
So let's take South Africa. This country is often so successful in so many dimensions compared to other African countries that they are commonly excluded from statistics related to its continent...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manto_Tshabalala-Msimang
This is the Health minister recommending AIDS patient to stop retroviral drugs and take her magical garlic instead (!)
300000 victims.
It is not only in the government... I lived there few years, loved it but I really can't say that common sense is their forte.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria
Believing herbs will protect you from a shotgun is rather more like the crunchy granola nutjobs that take sugar-water instead of their chemo, because "that stuff's just poison." These are a relative rarity, and the worst patients you've ever dealt with, because you get to watch them choose to suffer and/or die.
It's a difference in degree that amounts to a difference in kind.
1. https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/south-africa-marikana/
But yeah, free money looks a lot like colonialism if you squint. I can see people avoiding it. You get $500 a month now, and then 3 months later, they come asking for a "favor" in return, and it would be a shame if something happened to your kneecaps. This is not reality of course, but let's just say I've been trained to avoid emails offering me free money in the past.
What is to stop the government from changing the laws to require everyone only on UBI (no job) to perform some form of community service for a set number of hours per year. What i to stop the government from increasing it further? So whilst you may gain security for the basic living needs, you may trade it for a less freedom.
That's not to say that system of checks works. Places like Florida have enacted mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, so there's obviously some political will to punish and regulate the poor.
All it would take is the right political climate and circumstances, combined with ad campaigns and lots of lobbying. Many arguments would be put forth to convince people a minor change is a good thing, that due to the current circumstances, its necessary. Many people would likely agree, despite the risk it opens up the potential for the system to be abused with another minor change in the future. And its voted through by popular demand.
A few years later, the political climate changes and the government isn't perhaps as trustworthy/predictable as it might have once been.
Now of course it could go the other way. However, power creep rarely goes backwards.
which is, ironically, the kind of Big Government bullshit the right-wing in this country claims to want less of. it's hypocritical.
That's not to say that system of checks works. Places like Florida have enacted mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients, so there's obviously some political will to punish and regulate the poor.
>What is to stop the government from changing the laws
The citizens. The hope is citizens can be more active in community efforts(like protesting government actions) when their continual employment(and employment usually hinders midday government protesting) is no longer a necessity for continued life.
Also it seems like the problem is assuming strings are attached, so more like survival instinct.
Money does not work in such simplistic ways except for on a tiny scale, for example within the circle of family and friends. Already when you take out a credit your sentence becomes untrue: Debt is created by commercial banks out of thin air - you yourself "pay" for it, because the "debt" promise you give is worth as much as the money you get (plus interest).
When a government hands out "free money" the promise is not direct but indirect but essentially the same: They think that the money will "pay for itself" in the end through economic activity that would otherwise never happen. This is the same thing that happens with every single credit, only that then the responsibility for "repayment" is only one step removed instead of an indefinite amount.
In this context (about the nature of modern money, not UBI), before anyone wants to tell me money for credit comes from other people's savings, I recommend reading "Money Creation in the Modern Economy" (2014) written by the Bank of England. I link to the Guardian article by Graeber, the actual PDF is linked near the beginning of that article though, but it has a summary on page one where it already supports the main points of the article.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-...
This is only true as long as there is economic growth.
I'm personally confused as to why anyone would think it's a good idea to trial UBI in Kenya, as a sort of private charity initiative, given the sordid historical background. It cannot be feasible to get any meaningful data from such projects. There is so much background noise.
Put the funding into microloans or (unfashionable in the west and yet a vital layer in Africa's commercial middle class) labor organization (= unions). Protect the free media and lobby for laws against corruption in politics. Invest in documentation of the continuous crimes against the public interest. Help break the sociopathic power elites that run most African capitals and national economies. Invest in schools. Pay families that keep their children in school. Create demand for local high technology skills, by looking for local partners & experts before flying in foreigners. Name and shame organizations that don't do this. Name and shame national and international companies that overcharge for Internet, for transport, for medicines, for books.
There are surely so many ways to spend money to help Africans continue to break free of the grip of generations of thieves in power (as they are doing in many countries), and pull themselves out of poverty.
In this context, UBI seems... extraordinarily misplaced, and I can't fault people for refusing it.
[1] http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/
Are you denying that particular people or even groups of them could have failure modes?
It seems like a reasonable proposition to me that humans have developed strengths and weaknesses.
Similarly they will have a TV but likely a cheap model, nothing too fancy.
We asked Oucha Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"
After spending some time in that Moroccan village, it was easy to see why he thought that. Life can be quite boring in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall, no place to sit and watch interesting strangers go by. And not a lot of work, either. Oucha and two of his neighbors, who were with him during the interview, had worked about seventy days in agriculture and about thirty days in construction that year. For the rest of the year, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. This left plenty of time to watch television. These three men all lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find work, and to give their children a good education. But they all had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone.
Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CI81IQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
What entertainment does is drive the opportunity cost of time back up by increasing the pleasurableness of leisure time. Now, that probably isn't much of an issue for actual underdeveloped countries. I don't think anyone would prefer to sew their own clothes when they can buy perfectly fine ones for a lower price unless they're obsessed with self-reliance, and no one is missing out on these homemade goods either. But in a society where it's plausible that a hobbist might produce some really neat stuff on their own, encouraging passive entertainment might mean some less neat gadgets in the long run.
It seems to me that in this case a randomised controlled trial (RCT) would be an ideal way to determine who is right: A third of people get free money, a third of people get stay-in-school money, and a third of people get nothing. Then see which treatment, if any, is more effective at increasing the standard of living.
But you seem quite certain that data from such an experiment would not be meaningful. What kind of problems do you think would prevent an RCT from producing an accurate answer? Could we avoid these problems by instead running the trail in, say, South East Asia, or are RCTs doomed to produce unreliable data?
Do you even understand what creates a "standard of living"?
It is things like, "if I start a business, and people don't pay their bills, can I take them to court?"
If the answer is "no" then you are stuck with a cash economy, no credit, no trust. Everything becomes more expensive.
How do you create functioning courts? You need honest politicians. How do you get honest politicians? You build coalitions of power that boot out the thieves. How do you build such coalitions? You spend decades slowly growing your economy so the commercial middle classes get wealthy enough to become politically relevant and interested. How do you grow your economy? You cut the cost of transport and communications. How do you do that?
Etc. etc. I'm not giving a recipe, I'm giving examples of how complex this is.
The scale is such that you'd need absolutely staggering amounts of money and political will to run studies that would show useful data. I'm talking entire regions, even countries, changing policies. Cases like Rwanda focussing on the Internet. Give it a decade, then compare to Burundi, which focusses on (e.g.) child health and political stability.
Anyhow, there are no easy answers for this and forgive me if it sounds like I think there are.
I've actually lived and worked in Africa for much of my life. I'm married to a Congolese and have been surrounded for a dozen years by that culture. My family has worked and works in Africa. I've spent years working for organizations that ran projects across Africa. My questions and cynicism doesn't fall out of the air.
If you take issue with points I've raised, good manners dictate that you reply to those points without trying to punish me for raising them, as some of you did, which is cool.
In some cultures, gifts are just that, and have no strings attached. Yet in others, gifts create an obligation to the recipient to 'return the favor' at a later date, so accepting a gift is a liability. A lot of research has been done in this area, comparing different cultures[1] or focusing on a specific one [2]
1. http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/socialquilts.pdf
2. http://www.japanintercultural.com/en/news/default.aspx?newsI...
I have no desire to dump on UBI -- I want to see how these various experiments pan out -- but I am reminded of a thought experiment.
Imagine it's 10,000 years ago. You arrive in pre-history with all of the technology of today: electricity, communication, medicine, automation, and so on. Your mission? To destroy mankind.
Assuming infinite resources, how would you go about doing it? Sure, you could build out an infrastructure, create a robotic army, and begin hunting humans down. Or, you could build out about the same amount of infrastructure and just give people whatever they want: food, housing, warmth, and so on. After all, what would a bunch of hunter-gathers really want? It'd probably be easier than hunting them all down and fighting them. As long as you're not under any time pressure, what's the difference between killing them immediately and waiting four or five hundred years for them to stop breeding?
The premise of UBI is that this would not eventually eliminate the species, that individuals here and there would still learn new skills and advance knowledge. The main criticism of UBI (aside from the moral one) is that while stress and struggle for individuals can be a terrible thing, for the species as a whole it results in evolutionary survival.
It will be interesting to watch these populations over time to see how adaptive they are compared with control groups.
"Primitive" people are most likely smarter and harder working than you. Surviving off hunting is not easy - you have to know a lot about the environment you're in.
Also, historically many scientists were well off people who did it as a hobby. By this theory they should have done nothing with their lives.
Anything but. The fact is, I am not looking at individuals. I am looking at the population. A population is not a human.
You make a good point. When we talk about UBI, the relevant examples should be the independently wealthy. Many have done great things with their lives. Some have destroyed themselves. Some have had positive effects on others, encouraging them to also do better. Some have had negative effects on others, causing despair or disillusionment.
Why the difference?
Beats me. So let's experiment.
On a personal level, we should always be kind and treat people with respect and love. But that doesn't make any of these population questions go away.
http://www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm
Giving people money for a limited time doesn't give them the notion, that they can rely on the money supply for the rest of their lives. They still have to earn an equivalent sum once the supply stops and make their decisions accordingly.
I'm not sure how representative this project is. I mean, if someone tried a pilot project in San Antonio, would the results of that project be taken as a representative outcome for Texas or the United States? Remember, this "sampling," such as it is, is different from the kind of sampling they do on opinion polls, why they query a small but representative sample of the population.
My guess as to why they're failing is that they're not clearly elucidating their purposes and intentions. For instance, I can confirm to you that if you came to Kenya where you gave, say, high milk-production breeds of cows to dairy farmers, or any other similar thing with a clear quid (if not pro quo), then the uptake would probably overwhelm you.
But with free basic income, it's a very counter-intuitive idea. What do you mean you're giving me free money? Where is it coming from? What's your intention? What do I have to do for it?
If they were to explain that they're conducting an experiment (I bet they're not clear on that point) where they want to see what people would do with their lives if they had a certain basic income guaranteed by someone (say, government), then Kenyans would take you up on the offer, I'm sure. After all, many Kenyans expect and often call upon the government to help in all kinds of areas, so if you took that basic-income-provided-by-government angle as your ultimate goal, I think people would listen.
That lack of clarity is what is most likely causing people to shun the money.
It's not that Kenyans don't want free money. We probably do. After all,we seem to be very keen, for example, on these churches where you "plant a seed" (give money to the church in exchange for "blessings"), and money given out during political campaign seasons (we have one coming up next year) always seems to be taken up very well. But in these cases, the financial logic is not clear.
Where is the logic with free basic income? If you don't clearly and understandably explain that to people, you're going to fail. Especially if when they ask you to explain and your response is something along the lines of "Why do you care? It's free money, you sucker living below the poverty line." (I'm not saying that's what happened. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was).
PS: Just because I'm Kenyan doesn't make me an expert, or even basic informed, on Kenya. Just because you live in a country doesn't necessarily mean you understand it. Exhibit A: Trump supporters. Exhibit B: Brexit.
Edit: typo.
Part of the context they might mention, since apparently it was only $30 per month, is the income difference in the United States where even some relatively lower-income individuals can afford to donate that. So to me a program like this could partly be about reducing the overall income inequality between countries. But at least if that income difference (how much money it actually is in rich countries) is part of the explanation it may seem like it is less likely to be an obligation.
Microloans and fair trade are the solutions to poverty in developing countries.
"experts say that Americans –- going back as far as Colonial times, when Elizabethan poor laws were in vogue — have never favored unlimited government handouts that are not contingent upon work."
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/why-do-american...
Personally, I'd also be afraid to start something like that, since it's would end abruptly, and could easily end early if research funding runs out.
Plus, we're all conditioned to know there's no free lunch - someone who offers one is probably hiding something. There are probably strings attached, any reasonable person might be forgiven for thinking.
It doesn't seem surprising at all that people in Kenya or elsewhere are skeptical.
I don't know about the cost of living or employment situation in Kenya, but by GDP PPP per capita, that calculates to about the equivalent of $17.42/day in the U.S, or $522/month ($6,264/year). That's way below poverty level, and not likely to cover housing, utilities, food, and healthcare anywhere in the U.S. Of course, that would be helpful to anyone with low income, but it is not a basic income. The situation may be different in Kenya, but by the math it doesn't sound promising.
If it only affects 1/100 of 1% of the population, there is no way to observe the societal effects of a universal income. That's a long way from universal. Also, because it is an experiment rather than a social contract, there is no way to observe what people will do if they have it as a safety net, because they can't rely on it. To be fair, if it is going to run for 10 years, that's something, but still not representative of lifetime security.
---
Regarding the comments about poor people buying TVs and cellphones, etc. - there are many reasons for this, but it really is utility and value. These people aren't stupid. The economy works completely differently when you are poor. Thinking that they should invest their $300 tax refund in a diversified stock portfolio is nonsense. With fees of $10/transaction, they would lose 1/3rd of their money just buying into 10 cheap stocks, and an equivalent amount selling it. They would need > 100% return just to break even.
Likewise, money in the bank is a liability. It detracts from foodstamp allowances etc. But they don't send people around to appraise your TV when they're calculating your foodstamps. And in a pinch, you have things that you can trade, sell, or pawn. If you leave the money in the bank, it will be lost to bills, bank fees, etc. And sure, you could have caviar and shrimp instead of ramen and rice cakes, but it'd be gone as soon as the meal is done. A stereo will still be there tomorrow.
Generally speaking, if you are working poor, trying to save up to improve your position costs you and you lose. Buying things saves you money, maintains the status quo, gets you things which you can sell in an emergency, and makes your life better until then. Consider states of matter - solid, liquid, gas. Things work quite differently depending on the state of matter. Likewise, the economy works quite differently if you are lower class, middle class, or upper class.
Telling someone poor that they should spend their money more wisely is often like telling someone trapped in ice that they should just swim up to the surface. In the latter case, physics just doesn't work that way. In the former case, economics just doesn't work that way.