I thought this was a pretty interesting article. That said, the reported effect size of 11.8 SD for the intervention seems suspiciously high. But I could certainly imagine it being comparable to giving cash. Another question I have is how well cash works when repeated. Maybe the second of third $1,000 given to someone has a much smaller impact on well-being. In that case, this mental health approach might be a good complement to direct giving.
>“Our goal was to build resilience among people who were at risk for more knocks from life than usual. We reckoned that people who were poor and had few buffers would need extra skills to deal with unfortunate events such as poor harvests, loss of jobs, death in the family and so on.”
It's truly a sign of our times that the imagined answer to bad harvests and loss of jobs in Ghana is to sell individuals stoicism as a service. Instead of thinking about the material conditions that lead to systematic psychological stress and insecurity, let's pathologize it as a symptom of individual brains.
Imagine if a company pours lead into the river and everyone in the town gets wrecked we sold them mental anti-lead resistance behavioral therapy
This is the problem with our system in general. The solution of "thinking about the material conditions" isn't tenable because it requires the removal of many existing companies and investments, while hawking psychological snake oil like this is an actual product with "tangible results". Our capitalist system is additive, unless you can somehow sell mental stability and happiness in Ghana on the international market, morals aren't actionable
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 23.2 ms ] threadIt's truly a sign of our times that the imagined answer to bad harvests and loss of jobs in Ghana is to sell individuals stoicism as a service. Instead of thinking about the material conditions that lead to systematic psychological stress and insecurity, let's pathologize it as a symptom of individual brains.
Imagine if a company pours lead into the river and everyone in the town gets wrecked we sold them mental anti-lead resistance behavioral therapy