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It is insane to give money to people and expect that that will solve all their problems. Particularly if it is a one time thing (much like just handing a homele

It is insane to give money to people and expect that that will solve all their problems. Particularly if it is a one time thing (much like just handing a homeless person a dollar on the street). If you really want to help people it takes time, patience, and compassion. Poverty is a hard problem with no easy solution.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
That depends on the level of poverty. There's poverty and there's poverty. There's poverty where you grow up on one box of macaroni and cheese per day and your parents are never home but you have a roof over your head and at least free school lunches. You're not actually dying or being exploited into human impotence. You just lack avenues to grow into a full and complete person who can escape poverty. And then there's poverty once that same child grows up and the welfare system has been dismantled and there's no more public housing, so he/she is working two or three jobs just to afford a roof over their head, real food of any kind is unheard-of, and you'd kill for a good night's sleep or just one Sabbath meal -- if you had the energy to kill. The latter kind, you can solve just by giving people money. At the very least, it raises them up to the former kind, and from there, all you might need to really improve their life might be a decent library or a community center or a good source of stable jobs. There's no excuse for not contributing.
- Muzza 13y ago
  > There's no excuse for not contributing. My effective income tax rate is 50%, and then there is an additional 25% VAT on everything I buy. How much more of my income does the all-knowing Eli Gottlieb suggest I "contribute"? Perhaps I should give away the remaining 25% and go live on the streets as a declaration of solidarity?
  - cmsmith 13y ago
    Aside from the general tone of this, that's not how taxes work. You can only pay VAT on the 50% of your income that you keep (and that is presuming you spend all of it). So you have 50% * 75% = 37.5% of your income left to give to charity. I also find it a bit interesting that you are OK (presumably) with giving away 63% of your income to the government, where you have hardly any say in how it is spent, but offended at the idea that you should give anything else away when you can choose where it goes.
    - ahomescu1 13y ago
      I don't think he was OK with giving 63% of his income to the government. In addition, some part of that 63% is going to another form of charity: welfare. I can understand how someone, after seeing how a non-trivial part of their income is given away to local poor people, might not want to also give money to foreign poor people.
  - sgrove 13y ago
    Please keep it civil.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Trust me, if I was claiming to be all-knowing, I wouldn't even bother with taxes.
  - nnethercote 13y ago
    > My... I... my... I... I... Guess what? This story isn't about you.
nhaehnle 13y ago
Poverty is a hard problem with no easy solution. Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor. Now, for some reason, people tend to be averse to outright cash transfers, because they think that pre-tax income has a special significance in that it is somehow "natural". Matt Bruenig explains this better than I could, e.g. here: http://mattbruenig.com/2013/07/21/tm-scanlon-is-wrong-about-in-kind-benefits-and-you-might-be-too/ http://mattbruenig.com/2013/07/21/tm-scanlon-is-wrong-about-... The essence is that pre-tax income is not in any way "natural", but also results from more or less conscious decisions made by society. So the reason that you think solving poverty is hard is that you assign a specific significance to the difference between pre-tax and post-tax income.
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  > Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor. For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though. Let's say you give a poor man enough money to start a business. Starting a successful business requires some basic business/economics knowledge and insights, a market and a lot of work to make it succeed. In addition, they might have to struggle with local corruption and bureaucracy. Because of all these difficulties, you have no guarantee they'll actually break out of poverty. Also, they might just take the money and spend it on leisure (buy a car, TV, clothes). I think what helps people is education about economics and legal systems. If you have a free society in place with rule of law, people break out of poverty on their own.
  - nhaehnle 13y ago
    > > Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor. > For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though. You missed the point, though I have to admit that it is a subtle one and not well known. So let me continue playing devil's advocate. The not-poor are only not-poor because they receive money through some already existing mechanism of distribution. If that mechanism ceases to operate, they will likely become poor by spending all their money. So, yes, if you make the currently poor not-poor by changing the existing mechanisms of distributions, and then change those same mechanisms back to how they are today, then quite likely many of them will revert to being poor. That is not an interesting point, yet somehow people think it is. Why? Probably they think so because they have an unconscious and implicit belief that the currently existing mechanisms of distribution are somehow "natural". Frankly, that is a bizarre proposition. Just consider how many laws affect the distribution of wealth in society, many of them largely arbitrary. This holds for laws of commerce, laws governing corporations, it holds for a lot of regulation, it certainly holds for things like patent law and copyright law.
RoboTeddy 13y ago
Actually, in certain situations, it's not insane: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...
rumcajz 13y ago
Actually, the one-off nature of the thing may be very well what can makes this kind of charily work. If the donations were regular, a system of extracting the money (by usury, direct violence etc.) would quickly emerge.
nandemo 13y ago
It looks like you haven't read the article at all. The people involved in GiveDirectly never claim that their grants will "solve all their recipients' problems". Besides, the Kenyans that are getting those grants aren't at all like your average homeless person living in a developed country. These are completely different use cases.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

That depends on the level of poverty. There's poverty and there's poverty. There's poverty where you grow up on one box of macaroni and cheese per day and your parents are never home but you have a roof over your head and at least free school lunches. You're not actually dying or being exploited into human impotence. You just lack avenues to grow into a full and complete person who can escape poverty. And then there's poverty once that same child grows up and the welfare system has been dismantled and there's no more public housing, so he/she is working two or three jobs just to afford a roof over their head, real food of any kind is unheard-of, and you'd kill for a good night's sleep or just one Sabbath meal -- if you had the energy to kill. The latter kind, you can solve just by giving people money. At the very least, it raises them up to the former kind, and from there, all you might need to really improve their life might be a decent library or a community center or a good source of stable jobs. There's no excuse for not contributing.

Muzza 13y ago
> There's no excuse for not contributing. My effective income tax rate is 50%, and then there is an additional 25% VAT on everything I buy. How much more of my income does the all-knowing Eli Gottlieb suggest I "contribute"? Perhaps I should give away the remaining 25% and go live on the streets as a declaration of solidarity?
- cmsmith 13y ago
  Aside from the general tone of this, that's not how taxes work. You can only pay VAT on the 50% of your income that you keep (and that is presuming you spend all of it). So you have 50% * 75% = 37.5% of your income left to give to charity. I also find it a bit interesting that you are OK (presumably) with giving away 63% of your income to the government, where you have hardly any say in how it is spent, but offended at the idea that you should give anything else away when you can choose where it goes.
  - ahomescu1 13y ago
    I don't think he was OK with giving 63% of his income to the government. In addition, some part of that 63% is going to another form of charity: welfare. I can understand how someone, after seeing how a non-trivial part of their income is given away to local poor people, might not want to also give money to foreign poor people.
- sgrove 13y ago
  Please keep it civil.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Trust me, if I was claiming to be all-knowing, I wouldn't even bother with taxes.
- nnethercote 13y ago
  > My... I... my... I... I... Guess what? This story isn't about you.

nhaehnle 13y ago

Poverty is a hard problem with no easy solution. Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor. Now, for some reason, people tend to be averse to outright cash transfers, because they think that pre-tax income has a special significance in that it is somehow "natural". Matt Bruenig explains this better than I could, e.g. here: http://mattbruenig.com/2013/07/21/tm-scanlon-is-wrong-about-in-kind-benefits-and-you-might-be-too/ http://mattbruenig.com/2013/07/21/tm-scanlon-is-wrong-about-... The essence is that pre-tax income is not in any way "natural", but also results from more or less conscious decisions made by society. So the reason that you think solving poverty is hard is that you assign a specific significance to the difference between pre-tax and post-tax income.

ahomescu1 13y ago
> Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor. For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though. Let's say you give a poor man enough money to start a business. Starting a successful business requires some basic business/economics knowledge and insights, a market and a lot of work to make it succeed. In addition, they might have to struggle with local corruption and bureaucracy. Because of all these difficulties, you have no guarantee they'll actually break out of poverty. Also, they might just take the money and spend it on leisure (buy a car, TV, clothes). I think what helps people is education about economics and legal systems. If you have a free society in place with rule of law, people break out of poverty on their own.
- nhaehnle 13y ago
  > > Surprisingly, giving money to poor people makes them not-poor. > For a while at least. In many cases, they just spend that money and go back to being poor. It's not universal though. You missed the point, though I have to admit that it is a subtle one and not well known. So let me continue playing devil's advocate. The not-poor are only not-poor because they receive money through some already existing mechanism of distribution. If that mechanism ceases to operate, they will likely become poor by spending all their money. So, yes, if you make the currently poor not-poor by changing the existing mechanisms of distributions, and then change those same mechanisms back to how they are today, then quite likely many of them will revert to being poor. That is not an interesting point, yet somehow people think it is. Why? Probably they think so because they have an unconscious and implicit belief that the currently existing mechanisms of distribution are somehow "natural". Frankly, that is a bizarre proposition. Just consider how many laws affect the distribution of wealth in society, many of them largely arbitrary. This holds for laws of commerce, laws governing corporations, it holds for a lot of regulation, it certainly holds for things like patent law and copyright law.

RoboTeddy 13y ago

Actually, in certain situations, it's not insane: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...

rumcajz 13y ago

Actually, the one-off nature of the thing may be very well what can makes this kind of charily work. If the donations were regular, a system of extracting the money (by usury, direct violence etc.) would quickly emerge.

nandemo 13y ago

It looks like you haven't read the article at all. The people involved in GiveDirectly never claim that their grants will "solve all their recipients' problems". Besides, the Kenyans that are getting those grants aren't at all like your average homeless person living in a developed country. These are completely different use cases.