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This looks so shiny only because the experiment is low-scale. In a country with an acute shortage of access to capital, small money explainably gives huge retur

This looks so shiny only because the experiment is low-scale. In a country with an acute shortage of access to capital, small money explainably gives huge returns. If it was done to every, or even every poor, household in Kenya, it won't have resulted in anything but inflation and probably riots/genocide/burning of Give Directly workers for witchcraft. If everyone could buy that fishnet, fish in Lake Victoria will run out in a month, and almost everyone who did that will have simply lost that money. Further advancement will need a ton of capital AND education, and tradition of legal system to sustain complex companies that depend on intangible assets... Simply put, require a first world country to be done in. Handing out $22 a month to every Kenyan would do absolutely nothing for him - at least many times less than handing out $22 to 0.01% of Kenyans. It's not like i don't believe in UBI. There are few other visible solutions to the automation problem (other may be economic incentivizing - like through tax breaks - and cultural promotion of resurrection of personal servants as a mass occupation) - but it can't work as good as this example simply because it doesn't scale so well.

snarf21 10y ago
This is the thing that irritates me soo much. People come up with an idea that doing X will solve problem Y but they ignore the fact you can't just change one simple thing in a complex system and not expect other variations. Giving everyone in the country X dollars will just result in inflation like you said. Plus, it will take wealth away from those people who had wealth currently make up to a small multiple of this new income. Adding access to clean water, plumbing and electricity is enabling and the kind of investment that will have the most return. Returns can also be had by starting to give access to credit/loans to enterprising people. I liken this issue to Democracy. You can't give a country Democracy but you can help create conditions for its citizens to build it themselves. But there is also a chance that they don't want it.

snarf21 10y ago

This is the thing that irritates me soo much. People come up with an idea that doing X will solve problem Y but they ignore the fact you can't just change one simple thing in a complex system and not expect other variations. Giving everyone in the country X dollars will just result in inflation like you said. Plus, it will take wealth away from those people who had wealth currently make up to a small multiple of this new income. Adding access to clean water, plumbing and electricity is enabling and the kind of investment that will have the most return. Returns can also be had by starting to give access to credit/loans to enterprising people. I liken this issue to Democracy. You can't give a country Democracy but you can help create conditions for its citizens to build it themselves. But there is also a chance that they don't want it.