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"while there were large economic gains for recipients (targeted as the poorest), gains for non-recipients were so substantial that the gap between the poorest a

• colechristensen 4y ago
  But you can also say the opposite: handouts increase inequality and poverty. Who is going to suffer because of the enormous covid handouts and subsequent inflation? It was nice while it happened but a lot of rich people really benefited and a lot of poor people are going to go through the worst consequences of inflation and recession.
  • ArnoVW 4y ago
    Even if I also have a hunch that your attribution of inflation to handouts is true, I do not believe that it has been established. What is clear however, that increased prices for labor, wheat and energy, combined with post-covid logistics issues, have very clearly increased consumer pricing.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      Inflation is due to the amount of money (over $10 trillion? hard to find a solid number that doesn't end in bickering about small details) created by the US Federal Reserve, in no small part in order to pay for handouts to people in businesses.
  • chongli 4y ago
    handouts increase inequality and poverty. Or perhaps another way to say it is this: cash doesn’t matter. It’s all about capital. If you want to reduce inequality, give the poor some capital. Unfortunately, I think they’ll likely sell their capital to buy food or pay rent.
    • piva00 4y ago
      Capital is only valuable when your basic needs are met. If shelter, food, energy and transportation costs creep into you every week it's just logical you'd trade some capital for cash to meet those needs...
      • chongli 4y ago
        Yes, and unfortunately we’ve built a society where home owners have all the power to ratchet up shelter and transportation costs for everyone else.
        • pessimizer 4y ago
          And homeowners are increasingly becoming massive companies rather than individuals. That's going to end up being feudalism, right? The ownership of these companies is going to be passed down through families.
  • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    > But you can also say the opposite: handouts increase inequality and poverty. They didn't say anything that would let you conclude either of those things in the article, one they said the exact opposite of. Not read the whole paper yet though.
  • tpxl 4y ago
    > Who is going to suffer because of the enormous covid handouts and subsequent inflation? Don't know how it played where you live, but in my country, most covid handouts went to the rich, not to the poor. 1. Cash was given to companies they could then give to the people, instead of straight to the people. 2. Cheap/free loans were given to companies/rich people, not poor people, because poor people can't pay off loans so nobody gives them any. The insane stock market profits were the result of this - rich people getting excess money. If it went to the poor people, they'd buy food and shelter, not stonks.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      In the US 1 & 2 happened in a big way certainly, but there were also large direct payments to people below a certain income along with significantly bumping up unemployment benefits (to the extent that many were making more unemployed than they were when they had jobs)
      • remram 4y ago
        How large?
        • asdff 4y ago
          It was only like $1200 for individuals.
          • colechristensen 4y ago
            More for families, many state programs which added to this, hundreds of billions of federal funding to states for responses. And much expanded unemployment payments, +$600 and +$300 *weekly on top of normal unemployment for long periods, as well as significantly expanded eligibility for who could get it and for how long. Plenty of people made more money unemployed for significant amounts of time than they did with their jobs pre-pandemic. Something like 10% of the population was on unemployment for a good while.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    We use handouts to prevent revolutions and political instability. You don't recognize the absolutely massive benefits that those payments have to everyone because they get to ignore the poor.
• Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  If you can show people that yes this intervention will help the poorest but it will help you more then those concerned mostly with their own relative status might be more likely to back it. Folks have been trying this. When the poorest folks have enough money to spend on things, everyone tends to benefit - it isn't a new theory. But mostly, teaching folks this has failed. It is either that, or you need to settle on "people simply dislike giving others help, even if they reap rewards." I think part of the issue is that the rewards aren't nearly as visible or shockingly impactful as actually being given money to thrive.
  • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    The general trend of history seems to suggest this isn't true. Why do you think it is? I mostly see propaganda and lies directed at stopping this from happening rather than a basic human response to it. Like say the 'welfare queen' myth, or the trope that 'giving people money will just cause them problems or make them lazy', seems you have to really stretch to convince people that helping the poor is a bad idea and the standard human response is to help.
    • rayiner 4y ago
      > Like say the 'welfare queen' myth, or the trope that 'giving people money will just cause them problems or make them lazy', seems you have to really stretch to convince people that helping the poor is a bad idea and the standard human response is to help. In my experience, these attitudes are more common among those who live around poor people than among those who don't. It's my wife who taught me the difference between "people who are good at being poor and ones who aren't." Coming from a privileged background, I had no idea. It's a sociocultural adaptation to scarcity. Historically, whether you were in a Bangladeshi village or rural Oregon, even the rich don't really have sufficient surplus to help more than a few people. And there were no rich foreigners or central government to swoop in. In that scenario, anticipating and expecting help is maladaptive. Everybody in the village needs to be incentivized to work as hard as possible for themselves before relying on anyone else.
      • 4y ago
• beambot 4y ago
  Also seems to suggest that minimizing wealth gaps may not be the best objective function (by itself) relative to other possibilities. Curious.
  • em500 4y ago
    Let's imagine this in the most extreme form in a thought experiment. An identical twin is stranded in the desert. You have the means (water, transport) to save one of them. Is it better to save one (which one?) or leave both to die? (I have not settled on a firm answer so far.)
    • JoshTriplett 4y ago
      Any value system in which "save one person" is not obviously and objectively better than "save zero people", with no other tradeoffs or details present, seems objectively incorrect.
      • notahacker 4y ago
        tbf real world tradeoffs are usually more like "save one person with high degree of likelihood of success" vs "attempt to save two people with significant likelihood of failure"
        • imtringued 4y ago
          If there are 10^58 people in the second situation we call them longtermists.
    • beambot 4y ago
      The result from this study: Give one a glass of water, and the other may end up swimming in a natural oasis -- both live & have better lives.
  • yunohn 4y ago
    Supplying handouts does not affect the wealth gap - giving the needy some real capital like own housing, shops, etc would actually contribute to that goal. Handouts don't help enough because the money is spent on their necessities (which was the point), and obviously that means the money immediately flows to the rich ones that supply those items (housing, food, etc). Reducing the wealth gap is crucial, I think you're severely misunderstanding.
• martopix 4y ago
  "Trickling up" instead of "trickling down"!
  • xhkkffbf 4y ago
    Or trickling from the people who do nothing to the people who have to produce something nice for the lucky ones to buy. From the non-workers to the workers.
    • imtringued 4y ago
      For capital gains, doing nothing to earn them is the rule. The fact that economic activity doesn't appear out of thin air and that someone has to pay those capital gains either by foregoing income or through higher prices is usually forgotten. What really disappoints me is that Marxist don't follow a very simple idea, let profits and capital gains reach zero through market forces. That would fulfill the spirit but not the letter of communism.
• stormbrew 4y ago
  The problem is that the conservative perspective would largely rather go without these net benefits than see someone they think is undeserving, or worse "immoral" in some way, get any benefit. That's why we have means testing at all: not to prevent people from needlessly getting benefits, but to prevent those who are undeserving of them from getting them. A lot of things make more sense when you understand this imo, and stop trying to frame other people's views into your own moral framework (giving you the mistaken impression that they're hypocrites about it).
  • m_myers 4y ago
    The conservative perspective is not, and has never been, that poor people deserve to stay poor. It is that I can and will give my money to poor people, and you're free to do likewise, but we're not going to point a gun at old Steve and make him do the same. Now that gun-pointing redistribution programs are fully entrenched, some people are still trying to have some say - ANY say - in where their money goes.
    • notahacker 4y ago
      All allocation of property, including maintaining the status quo, involves the use of social convention backed by force. There are many people who would happily not live on the streets if a massive gun-pointing programme on behalf of property owners didn't evict them and deter them from finding another nice presently-unoccupied property. (Smarter conservative arguments focus on utilitarian claims that [forms of] redistribution reduce incentives to grow the economy and build houses, rather than dubious moral claims that Uncle Sam pointing his tax collectors at Steve is somehow more immoral than Steve pointing his bailiffs at tenants)
    • stormbrew 4y ago
      > The conservative perspective is not, and has never been, that poor people deserve to stay poor. It's a good thing I didn't say it was then, isn't it? I'll help you, if you really want to try to strawman what I said, it would be closer to: "the conservative perspective is that bad people deserve to be poor." But I do think "poor people stay poor" is the net effect of conservative policies, because they prioritize other things over lifting people out of poverty, as you're doing in this post. Instead they focus on lifting the "right people" out of poverty. Because that's the main reason to be able to pick and choose your charity: to make sure it goes to the people you think deserve it, or will use it right, or so on.
• theptip 4y ago
  It's interesting, this is the sort of thing that Angus Deaton suggested when he argued against the EA program in a Rationally Speaking podcast[1]. His premise is that cash transfers to the needy won't work in a country where an oppressive government can just take the cash for themselves. Perhaps this is part of the effect here? (Bribes, taxation, etc.) I'm a bit skeptical that this is a knock-out argument against the GiveDirectly program, but it's definitely something to keep in mind and explore further. [1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deaths-of-despair-effective-altruism-angus-deaton/id351953012?i=1000500036713 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deaths-of-despair-effe...
• cryptonector 4y ago
  Some years ago I was talking with a friend of mine about how things were going badly in a particular country that is culturally of interest to us. I was saying something about how it would be so much better if they had better economic growth so that people there could be less poor, and she said something like "but then they would consume more!". She's not rich, but she's definitely not poor -- she's a divorced professional, she works at home, and she has a wonderful, large house in midtown Austin (in a great location) that she owns outright. Her house is probably worth a lot of money, but she and her ex-husband bought it decades ago. I probed a bit and she was not embarrassed by what she said. She consumes a fair bit, but she doesn't want others consuming more than they do, even though they consume a lot less than she does.
• scarface74 4y ago
  This is common sense. When the government was handing out money indiscriminately to everyone right after Covid, we just put the money in the bank. That helped us. But it didn’t stimulate the economy. When they gave the same amount of money to some people we knew that lost their jobs, they spent it on necessities - helping the economy. Giving money to people who will spend it obviously helps everyone. But there have been plenty of studies showing that people will hurt themselves financially even if it will help other people. Especially if it helps “them”.