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Dependence on assistantialism is a real phenomenon. Here in Colombia (and probably all over the developing world?) it has been well proven that permanent help d

Dependence on assistantialism is a real phenomenon. Here in Colombia (and probably all over the developing world?) it has been well proven that permanent help does create complacency and dependency. Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline.

cool_dude85 2y ago
Where was this proven in Colombia?
abeppu 2y ago
1. "permanent" help is not what's required during an famine due to crop failures, and not what anyone was demanding 2. focusing on the "assistance" without mentioning the circumstances which create the crisis is missing a big part of the picture. In the case of British policy in India, some important components leading up to that famine were: a. favoring a bunch of non-food cash crops, including opium production for export to China, tea for export to Britain, and materials for industry like jute and cotton. All of this diverted land away from food production which only set up for the famine to be a larger and more deadly crisis. b. of the food that was produced, as in the Irish context, the British exported a lot of it. And didn't stop exporting it when there was a local famine. c. in some areas imposing extremely high taxes, and in others switching farmers to owe taxes to be a percentage of land rents rather than as a percentage of their production -- i.e. if your crops failed you became insolvent and were pushed off the land, _preventing you from working_. The narrative that colonizers shouldn't "assist" the victims of a famine when the colonizers were the ones driving down food production and exporting grain is so mind-bogglingly backwards. This is only a step away from an arsonist setting fire to your house and preventing the fire department from responding because that would only teach you to become dependent on the state bailing you out of every crisis.
- lurk2 2y ago
  Blaming the British for the famines in India is like blaming Democrats for the forest fires in California; it only has an air of respectability about it because Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years.
  - ivell 2y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church... "Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion." On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.
  - leosanchez 2y ago
    > Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
    - lurk2 2y ago
      > Doing what? Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.
      - leosanchez 2y ago
        So british has nothing to do with the famine ? The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
        lurk2 2y ago
        > So british has nothing to do with the famine ? You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters. Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.
lurk2 2y ago
This also ostensibly occurred in New York in the 1970s, but the key thing to understand is that there is a significant historiographical tradition which views the Irish famine as a negligent (or intentional) genocide on the part of the British.
kergonath 2y ago
> it has been well proven that permanent help does create complacency and dependency Surely there are proofs, then? And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks or "it is known" pseudo-common sense.
- lynx97 2y ago
  [dead]
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  You have to be willing to entertain evidence from biased sources when you’re considering politically charged questions. By all means, consult evidence from various ideologies, but don’t hold out for unbiased scholarship that will never exist.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    “Does welfare make people less productive” is not a political question. We can measure welfare and we can measure many aspects of productivity and activity. We can make a quantitative answer to that question. Opinion and ideology is not evidence. Saying that we need to consider opinions on the same level as actual observations because “political” is fundamentally wrong. What is political, and must be, is how we act on those findings, the answer to the question “considering those facts, what do we do?” There are many possibilities that are worth discussion, from doing away with welfare entirely to UBI. But this must be based on facts, not ideology. Think tank opinion pieces belong here, in the political discussion.
    - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
      No one without some sort of ideological bias is going to do a serious study to address the question. That’s my point.
- rayiner 2y ago
  > And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?
graemep 2y ago
Is that because of the structure of the assistance? In the UK benefits are reduced as earnings rise, you then start paying taxes at an income (as an employee) of just over £1,000 a month (the employee NI threshold is £241/week). You lose 55% from the benefits reduction, then lose with taxes, then you lose various concessions such as lower rates of/exemption from the tax paid to your local government and help with utility bills, you may have to pay travel costs - so for some people working leaves them barely, if at all, any better off. Would you work under those circumstances? > Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline. So what do you do when people fail to meet that deadline? Let them starve?
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
What medieval gibberish is this? I have installed a ton of robots in my time- and they put a ton of people permanently and forever out of work. It just evaporates - and does not return. So what is your solution ? To smash the robot, so busy-work can be restored?
jlawson 2y ago
It's been proven in the developed world too. It's been proven with children of rich families who become dependent. It's been proven with poor communities who become dependent. Most people don't do anything productive if they don't have to, and as this goes on they lose the capacity to do anything productive.

cool_dude85 2y ago

Where was this proven in Colombia?

abeppu 2y ago

1. "permanent" help is not what's required during an famine due to crop failures, and not what anyone was demanding 2. focusing on the "assistance" without mentioning the circumstances which create the crisis is missing a big part of the picture. In the case of British policy in India, some important components leading up to that famine were: a. favoring a bunch of non-food cash crops, including opium production for export to China, tea for export to Britain, and materials for industry like jute and cotton. All of this diverted land away from food production which only set up for the famine to be a larger and more deadly crisis. b. of the food that was produced, as in the Irish context, the British exported a lot of it. And didn't stop exporting it when there was a local famine. c. in some areas imposing extremely high taxes, and in others switching farmers to owe taxes to be a percentage of land rents rather than as a percentage of their production -- i.e. if your crops failed you became insolvent and were pushed off the land, _preventing you from working_. The narrative that colonizers shouldn't "assist" the victims of a famine when the colonizers were the ones driving down food production and exporting grain is so mind-bogglingly backwards. This is only a step away from an arsonist setting fire to your house and preventing the fire department from responding because that would only teach you to become dependent on the state bailing you out of every crisis.

lurk2 2y ago
Blaming the British for the famines in India is like blaming Democrats for the forest fires in California; it only has an air of respectability about it because Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years.
- ivell 2y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church... "Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion." On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.
- leosanchez 2y ago
  > Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
  - lurk2 2y ago
    > Doing what? Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.
    - leosanchez 2y ago
      So british has nothing to do with the famine ? The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
      - lurk2 2y ago
        > So british has nothing to do with the famine ? You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters. Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.

lurk2 2y ago

This also ostensibly occurred in New York in the 1970s, but the key thing to understand is that there is a significant historiographical tradition which views the Irish famine as a negligent (or intentional) genocide on the part of the British.

kergonath 2y ago

> it has been well proven that permanent help does create complacency and dependency Surely there are proofs, then? And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks or "it is known" pseudo-common sense.

lynx97 2y ago
[dead]
ConspiracyFact 2y ago
You have to be willing to entertain evidence from biased sources when you’re considering politically charged questions. By all means, consult evidence from various ideologies, but don’t hold out for unbiased scholarship that will never exist.
- kergonath 2y ago
  “Does welfare make people less productive” is not a political question. We can measure welfare and we can measure many aspects of productivity and activity. We can make a quantitative answer to that question. Opinion and ideology is not evidence. Saying that we need to consider opinions on the same level as actual observations because “political” is fundamentally wrong. What is political, and must be, is how we act on those findings, the answer to the question “considering those facts, what do we do?” There are many possibilities that are worth discussion, from doing away with welfare entirely to UBI. But this must be based on facts, not ideology. Think tank opinion pieces belong here, in the political discussion.
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    No one without some sort of ideological bias is going to do a serious study to address the question. That’s my point.
rayiner 2y ago
> And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?

graemep 2y ago

Is that because of the structure of the assistance? In the UK benefits are reduced as earnings rise, you then start paying taxes at an income (as an employee) of just over £1,000 a month (the employee NI threshold is £241/week). You lose 55% from the benefits reduction, then lose with taxes, then you lose various concessions such as lower rates of/exemption from the tax paid to your local government and help with utility bills, you may have to pay travel costs - so for some people working leaves them barely, if at all, any better off. Would you work under those circumstances? > Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline. So what do you do when people fail to meet that deadline? Let them starve?

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

What medieval gibberish is this? I have installed a ton of robots in my time- and they put a ton of people permanently and forever out of work. It just evaporates - and does not return. So what is your solution ? To smash the robot, so busy-work can be restored?

jlawson 2y ago

It's been proven in the developed world too. It's been proven with children of rich families who become dependent. It's been proven with poor communities who become dependent. Most people don't do anything productive if they don't have to, and as this goes on they lose the capacity to do anything productive.