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GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

givedirectly.org

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Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#131

Post by jjawssd »

kogepathic wrote: post #40

Interesting concept. I'll be interested to see if it works. I worked with a company building AC mini grids in East Africa. They connected around 130 households in each village to a 220V grid. The expectation was that people would use the electricity for basic needs (e.g. light, cell phone charging) but also for productive uses (e.g. grinding grain to flour, air compressors, saws, etc). The expectation was that as peo…

You are being downvoted because your real world experience does not align with the idealism of the HN readers in question.

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#132

Post by maaku »

ultramancool wrote: post #67
dragonwriter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why wouldn't I just let someone else figure out how to automate jobs? I've got my income. Empirically, people often expend effort to increase their income when there are opportunities available, even if their current income meets basic survival needs. I don't see why that wouldn't continue to be the case with basic income. What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

> What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries? Not sure about you, but most of the luxuries I own, I've basically only bought because I had money for them. If I didn't have money to blow on them, they really don't bring me that much joy, relatively basic items would suffice. So many things I think of as the real luxuries these days are free or basically free. I can spend hours watching youtube or playing games fo…

> Basically, I'd drop out of the workforce in a heartbeat if I could afford living and a few minimal luxuries. $15-20k/year would do the job to split a cheap apartment with a friend and keep the rest under control. This is half of what some people have proposed as a UBI.

By the way this might be very doable for you on a short timescale, if you pull in the kind of salary most people do on HN. Studies show that if you retire and pull only <4% of your starting balance each year to live off, you can live off it for 30+ years, if not indefinitely. If you were earning $120k, but only spending $20k/yr, you'd have enough wealth to live off after only 7.5 years.

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#134

Post by jjawssd »

EGreg wrote: post #50

Basic income is inevitable. Wages have been lower relative to inflation, real estate etc because demand for human labor has been dropping. Consumer goods come down in price but real estate, gold and other limited resources are a reference for how low demand for human labor is falling. Technology enabled outsoucing, and automation, to erode the demand for human labor. Luddites were 150 years too early. The capabilitie…

> Already, most full time jobs are just make-work.

Wow this is quite a bold statement! How can you be so sure and generalize so much?

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#135

Post by maaku »

lintiness wrote: post #38
maaku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't I just let someone else figure out how to automate jobs? I've got my income. Let someone else figure that out.

that other person was a lot more likely to figure it out anyway.

I suppose he is also more likely to clean the public toilets too?

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#136

Post by mwambua »

dluan wrote: post #129
mwambua wrote: post #124

I'm a Kenyan and I can tell you that this will do more harm than good. NGO money has been distorting our economy for years now... giving people livelihoods they can't sustain, making job opportunities that create no value and making our government vestigial. The poor people that you're supporting elect the same corrupt politicians every year because they have no idea that the government is supposed to be supporting t…

Curious what you think about more independent schemes like microfinance or loans for education. Have you noticed any difference between that and outright aid?

Yeah, those schemes tend to work a little better. If the recipients of mircro-financing are subject to the risks associated with taking credit, they tend to invest it better. For instance, the mobile micro-loans given by Safaricom (http://www.safaricom.co.ke/personal/m-pesa/do-more-with-m-pe...) are actually given by a bank and defaulters are black-listed for loans as little as Ksh. 500 (~ 5 USD).

These schemes create opportunities whilst reminding people that poor decision-making has consequences. The only reason that this works is because these schemes are run by banks rather than non-profits. Perhaps there's a little room for more regulation around the margins these institutions should make off of these loans... but at the same time they're opening up credit lines to people who would have never had them.

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#137

Post by home_boi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #55
maaku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't I just let someone else figure out how to automate jobs? I've got my income. Let someone else figure that out.

> Why wouldn't I just let someone else figure out how to automate jobs? I've got my income. Empirically, people often expend effort to increase their income when there are opportunities available, even if their current income meets basic survival needs. I don't see why that wouldn't continue to be the case with basic income. What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

>What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

Yes, check out /r/financialindependence

There's thousands of people living frugally to retire early with ~1-2 million which is basically UBI over a lifetime

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#138

Post by home_boi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #55
maaku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't I just let someone else figure out how to automate jobs? I've got my income. Let someone else figure that out.

> Why wouldn't I just let someone else figure out how to automate jobs? I've got my income. Empirically, people often expend effort to increase their income when there are opportunities available, even if their current income meets basic survival needs. I don't see why that wouldn't continue to be the case with basic income. What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

>What, people are going to stop wanting luxuries?

Yes, check out /r/financialindependence

There's thousands of people living frugally to retire early with ~1-2 million which is basically UBI over a lifetime

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#139

Post by skunkworks »

mwambua wrote: post #124

I'm a Kenyan and I can tell you that this will do more harm than good. NGO money has been distorting our economy for years now... giving people livelihoods they can't sustain, making job opportunities that create no value and making our government vestigial. The poor people that you're supporting elect the same corrupt politicians every year because they have no idea that the government is supposed to be supporting t…

How are poor people supposed to find innovative solutions to their problems and elect governments that create sustainable wealth while they're steeped in desperate poverty? I believe that education is the tip of the spear, but are there any examples where a poor majority has pulled itself up by its bootstraps?

Re: GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa

#140

Post by skybrian »

dragonwriter wrote: post #83
skybrian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The donations will likely be in local currency (via mobile phone payments), but the charity needs to exchange dollars for local currency. So it helps somewhat with the exchange rate if the country is short on foreign currency, but I'd guess the scale is not nearly enough to have any significant effect. 2. It doesn't increase the amount of currency in the country as a whole. Locally, if the economy is doing better,…

I don't understand your responses here: this is a western charity putting in 10 million USD and soliciting (and not exclusively soliciting in the target country, which hasn't even been identified ) another 20 million USD for the effort. Where do you get the idea that the donations would "likely be in local currency"?

I don't know, but I've been watching GiveDirectly for a while and assume they'll handle this similarly to how they have before. This basic income experiment looks like a minor variation on what they already do.

From https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income

"Location: To be finalized, but likely East Africa, where we have existing operations."

They've paid people before using mobile phone networks and it's worked well for them.

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