4 ms·

For the Angola example, can't you ask people to pay a little bit ahead of time, then use an apartment-wide generator, but stop the circuit breaker for the apart

• Inthenameofmine 10y ago
  Don't know about Angola, but in other developing countries what happens is that they bribe some electrician to put the wiring back. It's cheaper than paying the whole bill. Viewed in the larger context it makes total sense. If you don't have enough to survive you will do anything. Those anti-social behavioral patterns take years or even decades to un-learn, even when economic development has ticked up significantly.
• ISL 10y ago
  In some places, people do not trust the administrator of such a program. How will they know that the administrator won't abscond with the funds or toggle off the circuit breaker early? Trust, at the societal level, can take an extremely long time to build. For it to succeed, a sufficient number of people must transition from "knowing it's going to fail" to "believing it might work". An anecdote to illustrate the point: A friend served as a Peace Corps teacher in a small town. He was part of an effort to help a community effort to clear and farm a small plot of land. The night before the planned harvest, the fields were harvested by unknown actors, and the produce was available for sale all over town. Such an event can be both reasonable, "If I don't steal the food before someone else does, I won't get any at all" and patently corrosive to trust, as the event is evidence for the idea that, "collective efforts will always fail". Trust does succeed, though. It's worth the effort.