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Given the "gift in one hand, gun in the other" history of western actions in Kenya and other African countries over the last centuries, it's hardly surprising t

by PieterH 10y ago

Given the "gift in one hand, gun in the other" history of western actions in Kenya and other African countries over the last centuries, it's hardly surprising there's going to be the random pocket of paranoid skepticism, no matter how good the UBI marketing/education. I'm personally confused as to why anyone would think it's a good idea to trial UBI in Kenya, as a sort of private charity initiative, given the sordid historical background. It cannot be feasible to get any meaningful data from such projects. There is so much background noise. Put the funding into microloans or (unfashionable in the west and yet a vital layer in Africa's commercial middle class) labor organization (= unions). Protect the free media and lobby for laws against corruption in politics. Invest in documentation of the continuous crimes against the public interest. Help break the sociopathic power elites that run most African capitals and national economies. Invest in schools. Pay families that keep their children in school. Create demand for local high technology skills, by looking for local partners & experts before flying in foreigners. Name and shame organizations that don't do this. Name and shame national and international companies that overcharge for Internet, for transport, for medicines, for books. There are surely so many ways to spend money to help Africans continue to break free of the grip of generations of thieves in power (as they are doing in many countries), and pull themselves out of poverty. In this context, UBI seems... extraordinarily misplaced, and I can't fault people for refusing it.

michaelt 10y ago
There are surely so many ways to spend money to help Africans Give Directly works on the theory (and they have some studies that seem to back this up [1]) that the Africans know what they need better than you and I do; and that they have the incentive to see donations spent in the most effective way. [1] http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/ http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  On the contrary, there are a large number of examples from e.g. South African shanty towns that if people living in tiny metal shacks with dirt floors get a bit more disposable income, many prefer to stay where they are and buy satellite TV and the latest iPhone rather than save that money to try and move to a better place.
  - massysett 10y ago
    That's exactly the point. The satellite TV is cost-effective, high-value entertainment. The iPhone is a supercomputer that offers information and vastly improved communication with family and friends. Yet outsiders who think they know better somehow believe that people are dumb to prefer an iPhone rather than moving out of the shanty. Maybe the iPhone is a better marginal buy than a better house.
    - SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
      That's right, and it reminds me of the people who scorn the homeless for owning a laptop or smartphone. The opportunities that are unlocked by being connected to the world's digital backbone are far more significant than the benefits one would get from moving into slightly nicer accommodation.
      - internaut 10y ago
        Going from the specific to the general. Are you denying that particular people or even groups of them could have failure modes? It seems like a reasonable proposition to me that humans have developed strengths and weaknesses.
    - skybrian 10y ago
      Agree except it's unlikely to be an iPhone. Probably a cheap Chinese Android phone. Similarly they will have a TV but likely a cheap model, nothing too fancy.
  - stevetrewick 10y ago
    That would be an actual example of the parent's point. You think the utility of satellite TV and a phone are are lower than the utility of not living in a shack. The beneficiaries disagree. Only one of you can be right, and unless you intend to arrogate to yourself the right to define someone else's utility function, it's not you.
  - MarkMc 10y ago
    There is a great book on poverty called "Poor Economics" [1] which has a relevant point about why people choose to buy TVs: We asked Oucha Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!" After spending some time in that Moroccan village, it was easy to see why he thought that. Life can be quite boring in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall, no place to sit and watch interesting strangers go by. And not a lot of work, either. Oucha and two of his neighbors, who were with him during the interview, had worked about seventy days in agriculture and about thirty days in construction that year. For the rest of the year, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. This left plenty of time to watch television. These three men all lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find work, and to give their children a good education. But they all had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone. Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CI81IQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1#nav-subnav https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CI81IQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
MarkMc 10y ago
Among other reasons, GiveDirectly chose to operate in Kenya because of the widespread use of M-Pesa money transfer system which allows poor people to directly receive money by phone text message. This is a very efficient way to transfer money and eliminates opportunities for graft.
MarkMc 10y ago
Some people say giving money directly to poor people is best. Some people say paying poor families to keep their children in school is best. It seems to me that in this case a randomised controlled trial (RCT) would be an ideal way to determine who is right: A third of people get free money, a third of people get stay-in-school money, and a third of people get nothing. Then see which treatment, if any, is more effective at increasing the standard of living. But you seem quite certain that data from such an experiment would not be meaningful. What kind of problems do you think would prevent an RCT from producing an accurate answer? Could we avoid these problems by instead running the trail in, say, South East Asia, or are RCTs doomed to produce unreliable data?
- PieterH 10y ago
  No single local action can increase the standard of living in any measurable way. To even think in those terms is to utterly misunderstand the scale and depth of the problems that face Africans as they work to construct a functioning economy and its institutions. Do you even understand what creates a "standard of living"? It is things like, "if I start a business, and people don't pay their bills, can I take them to court?" If the answer is "no" then you are stuck with a cash economy, no credit, no trust. Everything becomes more expensive. How do you create functioning courts? You need honest politicians. How do you get honest politicians? You build coalitions of power that boot out the thieves. How do you build such coalitions? You spend decades slowly growing your economy so the commercial middle classes get wealthy enough to become politically relevant and interested. How do you grow your economy? You cut the cost of transport and communications. How do you do that? Etc. etc. I'm not giving a recipe, I'm giving examples of how complex this is. The scale is such that you'd need absolutely staggering amounts of money and political will to run studies that would show useful data. I'm talking entire regions, even countries, changing policies. Cases like Rwanda focussing on the Internet. Give it a decade, then compare to Burundi, which focusses on (e.g.) child health and political stability. Anyhow, there are no easy answers for this and forgive me if it sounds like I think there are.
PieterH 10y ago
Downvoting a comment you disagree with is not polite. I've actually lived and worked in Africa for much of my life. I'm married to a Congolese and have been surrounded for a dozen years by that culture. My family has worked and works in Africa. I've spent years working for organizations that ran projects across Africa. My questions and cynicism doesn't fall out of the air. If you take issue with points I've raised, good manners dictate that you reply to those points without trying to punish me for raising them, as some of you did, which is cool.

by PieterH 10y ago

michaelt 10y ago

There are surely so many ways to spend money to help Africans Give Directly works on the theory (and they have some studies that seem to back this up [1]) that the Africans know what they need better than you and I do; and that they have the incentive to see donations spent in the most effective way. [1] http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/ http://blog.givewell.org/2012/12/26/the-case-for-cash-2/

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
On the contrary, there are a large number of examples from e.g. South African shanty towns that if people living in tiny metal shacks with dirt floors get a bit more disposable income, many prefer to stay where they are and buy satellite TV and the latest iPhone rather than save that money to try and move to a better place.
- massysett 10y ago
  That's exactly the point. The satellite TV is cost-effective, high-value entertainment. The iPhone is a supercomputer that offers information and vastly improved communication with family and friends. Yet outsiders who think they know better somehow believe that people are dumb to prefer an iPhone rather than moving out of the shanty. Maybe the iPhone is a better marginal buy than a better house.
  - SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
    That's right, and it reminds me of the people who scorn the homeless for owning a laptop or smartphone. The opportunities that are unlocked by being connected to the world's digital backbone are far more significant than the benefits one would get from moving into slightly nicer accommodation.
    - internaut 10y ago
      Going from the specific to the general. Are you denying that particular people or even groups of them could have failure modes? It seems like a reasonable proposition to me that humans have developed strengths and weaknesses.
  - skybrian 10y ago
    Agree except it's unlikely to be an iPhone. Probably a cheap Chinese Android phone. Similarly they will have a TV but likely a cheap model, nothing too fancy.
- stevetrewick 10y ago
  That would be an actual example of the parent's point. You think the utility of satellite TV and a phone are are lower than the utility of not living in a shack. The beneficiaries disagree. Only one of you can be right, and unless you intend to arrogate to yourself the right to define someone else's utility function, it's not you.
- MarkMc 10y ago
  There is a great book on poverty called "Poor Economics" [1] which has a relevant point about why people choose to buy TVs: We asked Oucha Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!" After spending some time in that Moroccan village, it was easy to see why he thought that. Life can be quite boring in a village. There is no movie theater, no concert hall, no place to sit and watch interesting strangers go by. And not a lot of work, either. Oucha and two of his neighbors, who were with him during the interview, had worked about seventy days in agriculture and about thirty days in construction that year. For the rest of the year, they took care of their cattle and waited for jobs to materialize. This left plenty of time to watch television. These three men all lived in small houses without water or sanitation. They struggled to find work, and to give their children a good education. But they all had a television, a parabolic antenna, a DVD player, and a cell phone. Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CI81IQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1#nav-subnav https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CI81IQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

MarkMc 10y ago

Among other reasons, GiveDirectly chose to operate in Kenya because of the widespread use of M-Pesa money transfer system which allows poor people to directly receive money by phone text message. This is a very efficient way to transfer money and eliminates opportunities for graft.

MarkMc 10y ago

Some people say giving money directly to poor people is best. Some people say paying poor families to keep their children in school is best. It seems to me that in this case a randomised controlled trial (RCT) would be an ideal way to determine who is right: A third of people get free money, a third of people get stay-in-school money, and a third of people get nothing. Then see which treatment, if any, is more effective at increasing the standard of living. But you seem quite certain that data from such an experiment would not be meaningful. What kind of problems do you think would prevent an RCT from producing an accurate answer? Could we avoid these problems by instead running the trail in, say, South East Asia, or are RCTs doomed to produce unreliable data?

PieterH 10y ago
No single local action can increase the standard of living in any measurable way. To even think in those terms is to utterly misunderstand the scale and depth of the problems that face Africans as they work to construct a functioning economy and its institutions. Do you even understand what creates a "standard of living"? It is things like, "if I start a business, and people don't pay their bills, can I take them to court?" If the answer is "no" then you are stuck with a cash economy, no credit, no trust. Everything becomes more expensive. How do you create functioning courts? You need honest politicians. How do you get honest politicians? You build coalitions of power that boot out the thieves. How do you build such coalitions? You spend decades slowly growing your economy so the commercial middle classes get wealthy enough to become politically relevant and interested. How do you grow your economy? You cut the cost of transport and communications. How do you do that? Etc. etc. I'm not giving a recipe, I'm giving examples of how complex this is. The scale is such that you'd need absolutely staggering amounts of money and political will to run studies that would show useful data. I'm talking entire regions, even countries, changing policies. Cases like Rwanda focussing on the Internet. Give it a decade, then compare to Burundi, which focusses on (e.g.) child health and political stability. Anyhow, there are no easy answers for this and forgive me if it sounds like I think there are.

PieterH 10y ago

Downvoting a comment you disagree with is not polite. I've actually lived and worked in Africa for much of my life. I'm married to a Congolese and have been surrounded for a dozen years by that culture. My family has worked and works in Africa. I've spent years working for organizations that ran projects across Africa. My questions and cynicism doesn't fall out of the air. If you take issue with points I've raised, good manners dictate that you reply to those points without trying to punish me for raising them, as some of you did, which is cool.