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Poverty-Fighting Startups

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Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#51
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that t…

They were successful by the late 30s (after lots of misery), but the Russian economy had been growing for a long time. I'm not sure the imperials or republicans couldn't have pulled it off, Russia had lots of natural advantages, especially after winning WW2. GNP: Country 1890 1900 1913 1925 1938 Russia/USSR 21 180 32 000 52 420 32 600 75 964 Germany 26 454 35 800 49 760 45 002 77 178 Britain 29 441 36 273 44 074 43 7…

  The economy crashed after the revolution 
The loss of the war with Japan didn't help, either.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#52
post #16

Is it... a "startup"? Do they make money? Is Propel even a for-profit company?

> Is it... a "startup"? Do they make money? Is Propel even a for-profit company? A startup is a newly established business - that is to say, just starting up.

I'm a fan of PG's view: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#53
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USSR tried doing exactly that with the planned economy and trying to distribute the wealth more or less evenly and failed miserably. Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty, electrifying the country, and really eliminating a lot of the abject poverty that was most of the country at the time of the revolution. Changes that t…

> Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty Depends on in what column you put the ~10% of the population they murdered. I would think of them as "not raised out of poverty".

I believe America had it's own similar human liquidation program leading up to industrialization as well.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#54

I'm not from Silicon Valley, so the only sampling I have of SV culture comes from this site[0]. From what I see, the article has a refrain that being anti-libertarian goes against the SV gain, but I see political opinions from across the political spectrum here, and my leftist opinions are often upvoted. So, while I can see investors being skeptical, would the tech community as a whole be anti-welfare? I don't necess…

I think SV culture tends to be politically extremist, or to be more accurate fundamentalist, in whatever ideology it pursues. I see more hard-line libertarians, but also more hard-line socialists, than in other subcultures.

There's a long tradition of political extremism among engineers in cultures around the world; something to do with seeing society as a system simple enough that a single human being can understand the solutions to its problems. Hayek (who I disagree with on many points) even wrote a whole essay on it, with this very lovely point:

"It is this awareness of being part of a social process, and of the manner in which individual efforts interact, which the education solely in the sciences or in technology seems so lamentably to fail to convey. It is not surprising that many of the more active minds among those so trained sooner or later react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar."

https://mises.org/library/engineers-and-planners

Gambetta and Hertog tried to quantify this, and found that engineers were over-represented (drastically) in Islamist terrorist networks, and (less drastically) in Western right-wing extremism; and that Western left-wing extremists tended more towards a humanities education. I've read lots of newspaper write-ups of the book, but haven't gotten my hands on a copy, so I don't know their speculation on the causes of the left-right split they observed in studies.

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10656.html

They also have older scholarly write-ups, which I should probably take a look at, e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-...

EDIT: So, looked at that paper at last, and it seems the right-wing stereotype of SV people is likely true. They looked at Westerners to try to make comparisons, and while they found no overrepresentation in violent groups, they did look at surveys of political views of educated people by degree. The best data they could find was about faculty members from 1984, so keep the age and restricted subset in mind.

"The results are startling (Table 7). The proportion of engineers who declare themselves to be on the right of the political spectrum is greater than in any other disciplinary group: 57.6 % of them are either conservative or strongly conservative, as compared to 51.1 of economists, 42.5 of doctors and 33.5 % of scientists, 21.4 % of those in the humanities, and 18.6 % of the social scientists, the least right-wing of all disciplinary groups. Only 1.4 % of engineers are on the left, as opposed to 12.9 % in the social sciences and 16.7 % in law. Perhaps this is an uncanny coincidence, but the four fields at the top of the conservatism scale – engineering, economics, medicine, and science – are the same four secular fields we found at the top of our main jihadist sample."

They also cited a more recent Canadian study (1999) with similar results.

Anyway, there are many other interesting findings in that paper; highly recommended.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually if you look at where they started and where they got, they did a pretty good job in raising the very poorest our of poverty Depends on in what column you put the ~10% of the population they murdered. I would think of them as "not raised out of poverty".

I believe America had it's own similar human liquidation program leading up to industrialization as well.

I presume you're referring to the ab original inhabitants? Sadly, quite effective.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#57

Fighting poverty is a social and political problem. It is simply a question of will. We have enough wealth on earth to provide food, clothing, and housing to every single human being. Why don't we do it? That's a political question. The technology is trivial. >“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel. His company makes a mobile app called FreshEBT t…

> I read "we're here to somehow insert fees between you and your food stamp money". The self delusion of these people is incredible.

There’s already an enormous number of fees. Check out midway through [1] where it lists out the various fees JP Morgan got in their 2014 EBT management contract with New York State (it was the first example I came across, there may be a newer contract publicly available).

The federal portion alone (there’s a state-level component as well) of the cost to administer EBT services in 2017 were $4.2 billion [2], so there’s plenty of fees between recipients and food stamp money already.

That said, iirc it’s illegal for a third party to insert a fee related to EBT services. In fact, most of the fees that are charged aren’t directly visible to the recipient, but are rather charged on the backend as part of the administration costs.

Looking at the screenshots for the FreshEBT app, there’s a coupon section and the ability to find stores that accept SNAP benefits. It’s more likely that they’ll monetize via retailers and manufacturer promotions rather than via recipients themselves. Plus the marketing analytics components of being able to track EBT spending habits and tie it into all the other type of data you can collect by having an app installed on people’s phones. Not that there isn’t potential qualms about that monetization strategy, but that type of data is already available to the largest retailers and isn’t a new level of monitoring. And it shows the company’s incentive isn’t actively detrimental or predatory to the users like inserting fees, as you suggested.

[1] http://prospect.org/article/how-big-banks-are-cashing-food-s...

[2] https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsu...

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#58
post #48
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eh, You can have a very strong welfare state that provides minimal food, shelter, medical care and clothing to everyone who needs it without having a planned economy. They really are different issues. there's a big difference between a welfare state and full out socialism; the difference is largely about power... Socialisim is about giving the workers control over the means of production. The welfare state is merely…

Socialism is state (in some sense the public if it is also a democracy) owning the means of production. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Workers owning the means of production is syndicalism.

I think I agree that you are more correct, especially as I specifically said 'workers' and not 'people' - syndicalism, as I understand it, is mostly about the workers in a particular industry (or factory) controlling said industry (or factory) however, it doesn't really change my point;

Either way, socialism is about control of the means of production, and my point is that you can have a welfare state without changing the control of the means of production, as long as you have a means of significant taxation, which we have in place in the US already.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#59
post #4

>“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel. This app has some short-term benefits, but it’s hard to see long-term benefits. What if every government aid program was super easy to sign-up for and instantly check whatever you need. What would change? Less taxes from all the gov workers we’d no longer need?

To make the most simplistic possible point, having a society where everyone is adequately fed is a longterm benefit. Perhaps you'd be interested in the history of the American school lunch program.

Re: Poverty-Fighting Startups

#60
post #6

At first blush it would seem that coordinating or collaborating with cooperative government agencies might be of benefit as many of these apps seem to streamline and make processes more effective for the ultimate beneficiary of the programs. Obviously this is a benefit for both the recipient and the government organization which wants to serve its pop as well as possible. As someone mentioned in the thread, efficienc…

Wait til you hear about the manufacturing industry using machinery!
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