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To help poor people, give them money

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Re: To help poor people, give them money

#61

Post by pharrington »

thedevil wrote: post #4

This article seems naive, at best. Time after time, when I've helped family members with cash, it winds up getting wasted horribly and helping them less than it hurt me to give it to them. When I help them with what they need, their situation improves. And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor. Yet the article asks me to abandon reason and experience because there's some "a gro…

Without counter measures, wealth tends to pool into smaller groups of ownership. If this is a reasonable observation, start reasoning from there. Your family is not representative of macroeconomics.

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#62

Post by thomasluce »

ianferrel wrote: post #13

The best way to help poor people who make reasonably good decisions is to give them money. People who make bad decisions often end up poor. Giving them money will not help them make better decisions, and may make them worse off. How you think those two effects interact, and how much you value efficiency of donation vs. enabling people with poor decision making skills to waste probably determines where you stand on th…

The problem with that line of reasoning is that it has an inherent assumption of rightness through selective observation. You believe that if a person in the abstract, "makes good decisions" then they will do well with more money. However, you believe this because you (presumably) are yourself not poor, and a person is disinclined to think of themselves as a bad decision maker. If you do think of yourself as a poor decision maker, then we would have no reason to take your argument with any degree of seriousness; you yourself would reject the premise on the axiom that you don't think rightly.

How well a person manages money is only partly determined by their ability to observe, reason through abstractions about their observations and make rational decisions. It is mostly determined by circumstance outside of their control which oftentimes has a negative feedback loop (living paycheck to paycheck, get sick, have hospital bills, can't buy good food, get sick again, etc. etc.)

Given that, from the outside we can't say weather or not a person is poor because of choice or chance, and can't make a value judgement about their... well, judgement. Certainly even if you could in the individual, you couldn't institutionalize such judgements. So the only way to know if they will do well is to give them money and see how they do with it, or to give them nothing and see if they rise above circumstance (which if they are a candidate for free money, the answer is likely already answered.)

The efficiency of donation is almost irrelevant. They will either do well with the money and uplift themselves, or they will do poorly with it and the money will return to the economy through normal means.

A better way to think of this kind of reasoning is that some non-zero percentage of recipients of the money will have a better life for it. With a better life for them, comes a better set of circumstances for their local (and diffusely, the rest of) society through more able members. Given that, giving money to the poor is more correctly thought of as an investment in quality of life and societal health.

From that perspective, we can avoid ad-hominum value judgements of individuals and look at the social impact as a whole and see that the statement, "the best way to help the poor is to give them money" is, in fact, correct.

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#63

Post by thedevil »

pa5tabear wrote: post #35
thedevil wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "as a group" I meant most. Most poor people I know are poor because of their choices or because of the place they live. Neither of which are fixed with cash.

Some poor people are just born into bad situations and stay that way. You can't extrapolate your limited experience onto all of them.

My experiences are limited but consistent. If you can provide even more evidence pointing consistently the opposite direction, I'd not only be convinced, but I'd be thankful. However, I don't think that's easy to do.

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#64

Post by pdeuchler »

mangeletti wrote: post #60
pdeuchler wrote: post #54

Giving money to the poor merely elevates those who received the money over a new generation of "poor" and does nothing to actually stop the systems that create poverty in the first place. If you would like to actually reduce the net amount of "poor people", instead of simply creating a revolving door for individuals, you give money to the middle class. Or, phrased differently: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.…

+1, and if some of that discretionary income is saved, he can lease it out for rent (make loans). This trend can continue for generations until the snowball effect is such that majority of the world's wealth has been accumulated by about .001% of the population; but then, people will start talking about things like transfer payments[1] and basic income, etc. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_payment

I get what you're saying, but you are also ignoring my point about bolstering the middle class.

A large and healthy middle class not only precludes unhealthy amounts of poverty (please keep in mind there will always be a "bottom 16%" [aka falling below EDIT: replied before you finished your edit, I see we're actually in agreement. Carry on...

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#65

Post by dllthomas »

thedevil wrote: post #58
kstenerud wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of basic income is to provide a baseline level of stability. There are many things that lead to poverty, but it is the inherent instability that traps people there. When there is a monthly stipend that someone knows they can rely on no matter what happens (getting sick, losing their job, family emergency), they are suddenly capable of thinking beyond immediate needs. Many people caught in the poverty trap k…

I wonder, do you know about countries that have done serious experiments with basic income? It seems interesting although risky.

There have been a number of experiments with basic income and similar things (I am typing this from a phone, or I would dig up links), but nothing at a national scale anywhere. I would guess the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend among the closest things currently running, though of course it's not nearly as high as BI proponents would want.

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#66

Post by thedevil »

pharrington wrote: post #61
thedevil wrote: post #4

This article seems naive, at best. Time after time, when I've helped family members with cash, it winds up getting wasted horribly and helping them less than it hurt me to give it to them. When I help them with what they need, their situation improves. And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor. Yet the article asks me to abandon reason and experience because there's some "a gro…

Without counter measures, wealth tends to pool into smaller groups of ownership. If this is a reasonable observation, start reasoning from there. Your family is not representative of macroeconomics.

I don't know about the macroeconomics part. My family is pretty big.

Joking aside, the concentration of wealth is a different issue than poverty. They're only distantly related.

Also, I'm for progressive taxation schemes.

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

Shivetya wrote: post #8

Have to chastise you for one example, giving them money so they can buy a cell phone? Why? To be further in debt with monthly fees? There are programs for poor people to get a limited cell plan for free and government offices keyed to assisting the poor do direct them there. I would never give them cash. While you certainly cited all sorts of needs; this is not hard and runs along the lines of "for the children, no o…

> Cash cannot be tracked, it can also be easily stolen, meaning its near impossible to verify it used as intended

One of the major motivations cited by many proponents of Basic Income is that a lot of the cost of existing poverty aid programs -- which they see BI replacing -- is tied up in administrative overhead verifying that aid is "used as intended", which does a lot to support a bunch of administrative government (and government-contracting) professional jobs -- which I guess is a kind of anti-poverty program for the college educated -- but really reduces the efficiency of actually getting the money where it is intended, as well as paternalistically assuming that the government knows how people should spend money to improve their situation better than they do.

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#68

Post by pdeuchler »

taurath wrote: post #27
ianferrel wrote: post #13

The best way to help poor people who make reasonably good decisions is to give them money. People who make bad decisions often end up poor. Giving them money will not help them make better decisions, and may make them worse off. How you think those two effects interact, and how much you value efficiency of donation vs. enabling people with poor decision making skills to waste probably determines where you stand on th…

Poor decision making skills? I don't think you understand what it is to be poor. People are more rational than you think - when people experience long term problems and generally a very inconsistent world (food/money/resources come by sporadically), they make decisions that help them in the short term, because to their experience there is unlikely to be a long term. If someone below the poverty line wins $10,0000 in…

>>> "they make decisions that help them in the short term, because to their experience there is unlikely to be a long term."

This is also known as "poor decision making skills". Granted, it's very understandable in many situations, but let's call a spade a spade

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#69

Post by gesman »

When some people ask money to buy the food and you give them food - they are quite often disappointed and turn away.

When some people ask money and you give them some money - they are quite often disappointed because you are not giving them enough.

Re: To help poor people, give them money

#70

Post by brandonmenc »

pdeuchler wrote: post #54

Giving money to the poor merely elevates those who received the money over a new generation of "poor" and does nothing to actually stop the systems that create poverty in the first place. If you would like to actually reduce the net amount of "poor people", instead of simply creating a revolving door for individuals, you give money to the middle class. Or, phrased differently: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.…

> Giving money to the poor merely elevates those who received the money over a new generation of "poor" and does nothing to actually stop the systems that create poverty in the first place.

If "the system" is giving people money to raise them out of poverty, how can it simultaneously be a "system that creates poverty?"

Your logic implies that there is enough work to go around, and that's increasingly seeming to be not the case - if there's not enough good paying work, that's not anyone's fault.

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