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How Postcards Solved the Problem of Disappearing Rice
- manicdee 8y agoShould do the same thing for immigrants on various work visas, to make sure they are aware of what salaries and conditions they are entitled to.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThere's some charities operating here in Europe that do just that, making sure the employees know their rights - which includes minimum wage, and not to have their passports taken from them.
- nieve 8y agoUnfortunately some groups (and governments) in Europe are now trying to criminalize providing information to immigrants.
- mistermann 8y agoDo you have a citation for this claim?
- snaily 8y agoI believe the GP refers to Hungary's "Soros Law": https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/world/europe/hungary-stop-soros-law.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/world/europe/hungary-stop... "Under the terms of a new law, helping migrants legalize their status in Hungary by distributing information about the asylum process or providing them with financial assistance could result in a 12-month jail term."
- fjsolwmv 8y agoIt's the "Stop Soros Law", not the "Soros Law". Also you (accidentally?) Glossed over the part that it's targeting illegal immigrants.
- macintux 8y agoLaws like that tend to spill over into the legal migrant community. When someone asks for help, it now becomes your onus to verify their legal status lest you break the law, making people less likely to help out at all.
- mistermann 8y ago> Laws like that tend to spill over into the legal migrant community. If / when that happens, OP would then be correct in his claim. Until then, he is incorrect.
- mistermann 8y agoDownvoting based on differences of opinion is fine, and in accordance with HN guidelines. Downvoting on matters of fact is something else entirely. I'd love to know how people justify this intellectual dishonesty in their minds, "the ends justify the means"? Be careful of the precedent you are setting, normalizing fact-free judgement in society might someday turn on you.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Glossed over the part that it's targeting illegal immigrants. It's specifically targeting potential asylum seekers that are “illegal immigrants” only to the extent that they are unaware of the proper asylum process by criminalizing correcting that deficiency.
- mistermann 8y agoMigrants, not immigrants. There is a difference.
- tiatia123 8y agoYeah. Like the people who hire ships and basically offer a taxi service from Europe to Africa. The migrants sit on tiny boats, let the boats drift a few miles into the sea, send an emergency signal, get picked up and instead of getting brought back 5 miles to Africa, they are shipped to Europe. Then, let other people pay for health care, food, shelter, pocket money.
- dang 8y agoIf you continue to use HN for ideological and national battle, we are going to have to ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 394549 8y ago> There's some charities operating here in Europe that do just that, making sure the employees know their rights - which includes minimum wage, and not to have their passports taken from them. In America, it's required by law to post notices of employee rights in some common area of the place of employment. My current job has about 20 pages of notices posted just inside a secondary entrance, I doubt anyone's read them. I think that system is pretty flawed. I like the idea of the government sending people periodic notices of their employee rights, and maybe regular reminders that focus on one particular right at a time (as a big packet given around your start date is unlikely to be read completely or remembered when a relevant issue arises).
- manicdee 8y agoThis possibly points to a need to homogenise the programs so that there is only one contract for doing one type of work, regardless of whether the person doing that work is citizen, resident, work visa, sponsored visa, etc.
- m348e912 8y agoThis kind of exists already. Job information for H1B candidates is public information. https://h1bdata.info https://h1bdata.info
- matthberg 8y agoUnfortunately, as the article mentions, the problem isn't with the availability of the information it's with the actual knowledge of the information. That's why the post cards matter so much, the program had a publicly available website for seven years, yet the solution lay in actively distributing the information instead of passively distributing it.
- digi_owl 8y agoThe opening joke in hitchhikers about the highway plans being behind the "beware of tiger" door in the basement comes to mind...
- creshal 8y agoSo it took Indonesia 20 years to rediscover the concept of "ration cards"? Really? That's worth praising?
- emmelaich 8y agoThe thing to take away from this story is that it is the asymmetry of information that is usually the problem.
- coldcode 8y agoThis is universally a common problem. You have an account on some social site, the owner and the advertisers know everything about you and you know nothing about what they know. You may not even know that people know. How can you make a valid decision to use the service? It's also true of governments, they make decisions that affect you in secret, and then tell you whatever they want; you have no idea what is being done in your name, and you are powerless to affect these decisions. Knowledge is power.
- degenerate 8y agoI haven't looked at it this way until just now, but GDPR addresses exactly this. You are entitled to know what data exists about you. I just wish the EU wasn't so overly bureaucratic in how it's managed or explained.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoOr food stamps, to give it another name.
- rtkwe 8y agoThe program itself is like food stamps (kind of, US food stamps/EBT doesn't subsidize the cost of food) but the issue is still getting people to know the benefits they're entitled to and to get the officials to give it out properly.
- 8y ago
- hrktb 8y agoDealing with corruption and misuse of public resources is hard in any country. Finding an elegant yet financialy viable and low trade-off solution is not trivial and the article seems to be underselling the thoughts that went into that for comedic effect. The sad part is it only improves the situation by 26%.
- rtkwe 8y ago> The sad part is it only improves the situation by 26%. That's pretty good though going from 50% to 63% with just a simple postcard is a huge reward for a tiny investment. That's before they did any other efforts like the common knowledge campaign talked about later in the article.
- pvaldes 8y agoIs an interesting history but the best part is the web having a plain text option as alternative to the "I agree on you taking my info" button. Saying readers that other options are possible is a very good example of the "common knowledge" referred in the article.
- fifnir 8y agoIt would be great if it worked, but it forgets the link to the article and redirects you to the home page in plain text instead which is completely useless...
- teddyh 8y agoHere is the article on the text-only site: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954
- _carl_jung 8y agoI just realised how absolutely fine I would be to read articles in that manner.
- gumby 8y agonot useless but you do have to record the article ID and use it to get the article you actually want, if it's not in the list. For example this article's text-only version is https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954 I vastly prefer the text-only site and am glad NPR has it. The photos and other page crap never help with the article anyway, just slow down reading.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- _Microft 8y agoIn Uganda, only 20% of the money allocated to schools (the amount differed depending on the number of pupils they have) was actually ending up at the school. Over a few years, the problem was fixed by publicizing the amount for each school in newspapers, so parents could check with the school what they got and what the schools did with it. A few years later, 80% of the money actually reached the schools. (An example taken from Trial and Error by Tim Hardford)
- digi_owl 8y agoAn informed citizenry is the bedrock of democracy?
- PakG1 8y agoThis is interesting. By making things more transparent, you have obvious and measurable positive effects. Here's my question. What happens when someone moves up a social class such that they're no longer in poverty? I suppose then that they're no longer eligible for the program. How do you administrate the program so that those people are no longer given rice? I suppose then that the lists held by the distribution centers need to be regularly updated. But then when someone is on the margin (or perhaps for everyone above the poverty line), they can have incentive to say, "Look, here's my card, I'm eligible!" Then the distribution center says, "Nope, says here that you're not poor anymore." Those disputes would need to get resolved, and I can imagine that they can get bogged down in bureaucracy. Worse still, for cases on the margin, distribution centers may have ability to let corruption decide that recipients should be ineligible when they're eligible. I think that the idea and results are great. I'm just curious how they deal with the cases on the margin. Or does resolution just wait until the next year's income taxes get filed and everyone gets reprocessed accordingly to check for status changes?
- azinman2 8y agoQuestion is, how often does that happen? You can also send these cards yearly, and mark then as such.
- 394549 8y ago> You can also send these cards yearly, and mark then as such. And send the village head a paper saying so-and-so is no longer eligible this year, and also post that info in the local newspaper, etc. The system depends on common, widespread knowledge to prevent people from cheating. If it depends too much on a single proof like the postcard, it's vulnerable to forgery.
- frostwhale 8y agoI think the difference is that there are other safety nets in place to prevent people from taking too much. Those are most likely still in effect with the postcards, the only difference is people now know when they can escalate their issues with not getting rice from a local official and succeed. The local official never wants this since the official knows what the citizen is actually due and escalating the issue will confirm this. If someone is demanding too much from the local official, they will have no worries about the complaint running up the chain because they are doing their job correctly.
- bluedino 8y agoWithout reading, I first thought the postcards would be in the bags of rice, and then by going on which postcards were (or weren't) returned, they could see the areas where corruption was preventing people from getting their rice.
- kd0amg 8y agoThat was my initial guess as well, but I was a bit confused -- unless bags of rice were getting destroyed without being opened, it would be pretty easy for corrupt distributors to send back the ACK postcards anyway. This out-of-band checksum should be harder to compromise.
- code_duck 8y agoEssentially, they started mailing a statement to recipients of public benefits, whereas previously they assumed that recipients knew what they were entitled to and duly received it.
- khazhou 8y agoInteresting solution. Also interesting: there are people for whom a kilo of rice is meaningful. Holy f'ing hell, this world is imbalanced.
- washadjeffmad 8y agoThis is the same Banerjee of "Poor Economics"[1] fame. Really fascinating work. [1] https://www.pooreconomics.com/ https://www.pooreconomics.com/
- sudouser 8y agonice, checking
- ta76567656 8y ago"Sigh. I guess now we have to cut the local Post Office in on the graft."
- pmontra 8y agoText only no tracking version https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954
- lurquer 8y agoInstead of mailing postcards, mail rice.
- kbart 8y agoLogistics of such scale is not trivial and sending kilo of discounted rice can easily cost more than the rice themselves. I'm quite sure that the end-mile delivery was delegated to the village heads just for this reason.