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> Maybe the iron roof they buy provides them a smaller benefit than deworming, but the guy who makes and installs the iron roof can now buy a cow from his neigh
by witty_username 10y ago
> Maybe the iron roof they buy provides them a smaller benefit than deworming, but the guy who makes and installs the iron roof can now buy a cow from his neighbor, who can now buy seed for next year's crops. Maybe eventually the money allows someone to get deworming medication for their kids, but now that money had benefited a bunch of people in the community first.
Then just directly give money to the guy who installs the iron roof and guy who buys seeds. This is a poor way of giving to those three people (it is hard to control the amount of money the three receive).
- robotresearcher 10y ago> it is hard to control the amount of money the three receive Since it's very hard to know how much that should be, we just inject some cash into the bottom of the market, and let the market distribute the cash. The debate about giving cash vs. medicine is that cash moves around the target community and stimulates lots of things, rather than going direct to a multinational pharma corp's Swiss bank. The risk is that too much of the cash is absorbed by bad actors. As usual, it's a complex trade off and maybe a bit of both would give best results.
- witty_username 10y agoThe market does not have charity in mind; it will allocate capital to maximize the total size of the economy.
- robotresearcher 10y agoThat's completely orthogonal to what I said. The local market moves money around locally, where it can be useful.