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A poor village in africa has starvation. They do not produce enough food to feed themeslves properly. So they are given an aid of 10,000 U$S. So they turn to th
by conanbatt 9y ago
A poor village in africa has starvation. They do not produce enough food to feed themeslves properly. So they are given an aid of 10,000 U$S. So they turn to their own farmers and say "Behold the currency, we were dry of it before and we were dry of food because of it. Now take the money and transform it into abundance and plenty!"
The farmers put the bills in the ground, right next to the seeds, but it does not make the farm more plentiful. The villagers learnt the hard lesson: that plenty does not follow money.
- GavinMcG 9y agoThis is a really pat analogy that needs a lot of justification.
- zeth___ 9y agoThen the village chief said >You fucking idiots stop burying the money in the ground and use it as a medium of exchange. And lo, as everyone has more faith in the US treasury than the village tin roof hut a market was opened in the middle of the village and they exchanged the dollars for food grown by farmers less stupid then them. The villagers then became wealth investment managers and charged fees to the farmers to invest their money, which involved holes in the ground.
- imtringued 9y agoYour analogy is flawed because the larger issue is that poor villagers can only buy US products with US dollars which means they import food from the US which then displaces domestic production. This causes even more poverty because of the high percentage of subsistence farmers in africa. If you really wanted to help them grow their economy then you would try to offshore production into that country which leads to infrastructure investments and productivity growth.