Normally charity organizations would not give away money without any condition because they think poor people could not manage the money well. Instead, they give them education, medicine or food which is believed can help the poor in long term. But, is it true that give money to the poor will be a waste? According to “Is It Nuts to Give to the Poor Without Strings Attached?” by Jacob Goldstein, some organization think opposite.
GiveDirectly, an organization that choose to do charity in the poorest town in Kenya by giving them money with no string attached, found that two months after the money was given, almost everyone spent their money productively such as fixing houses and improving their business while only a few people didn't. The idea of giving money directly to the poor became popular after it was done Mexico which was proved to be successful according to research.
I always do not trust anything that is for free. Although there are evidences showing that poor people will not blow off the money on nothing, I still doubt whether it is a good way. From the article one person started their business being motorcycle taxi in the village and the other one bought mill and charge other villagers for using it. That's probably good for them for a while but what if there customers, which also the villager in the town, ran out of money? Do we have to keep giving them money? Goldstein said that at least it help them to at least being a little less poor. But, might there be any other way to help them in longer term?
This reminds me of Thai government's project many years ago. They give away one million bath to every village. I remember some news report that many villages did not spend there money wisely such as buying new car or gambling but I have not seen any actual research on this project and what was the outcome. From what I experience visiting poor villages I don't see much significant change from this project compares to royal project which aim to help people in long term. I went to a remote village in North of Thailand last June. People there benefits from both projects. Headmaster of the school in the area said that the villagers spent their million mostly on building houses and buying motorcycles and did not really make the money grow while the royal projects help them greatly in improving agriculture. The royal projects train people to improve soil, advise them to plant various vegetable and fruit in one crop to let the plant support each other, give them seeds, manage water resource and introduce them to plant winter vegetable that can be sold in a good price. I think the latter make better sense since it helps people to live by themselve and the knowledge will be with them all their lifetime.
__________
Reference
Goldstein, J. (2013, August 13). Is It Nuts to Give to the Poor Without Strings Attached?. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved August 14, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/is-it-nuts-to-give-to-the-poor-without-strings-attached.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=magazine&
Wednesday 14 August 2013
3 comments:
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Another thoughtful and thought provoking post from My.
ReplyDeleteI like the emphasis My puts on needing solid evidence for our opinions about the way things work in the world: we might, as her example here notes, think that giving money without conditions attached is not useful, but unless that belief is backed up with some solid evidence, it is a nothing more than a belief that sounds plausible but might be totally wrong. In this case, I don't know either - I don't have the necessary factual support either way. An excellent point, and one always worth bearing in mind: do we have solid support for our opinion about what happens in the world, or is it only something that sounds reasonable? Worse, is it only something others (teachers?) have constantly repeated without giving solid support?
And then I got thinking about the reasons why Thai farmers have for decades remained so very poor despite every Thai government and other institution "helping" them. I suspect that the problem might be the "help", which in fact retards development and keeps them poor and under the control of unjust elites who like having a lot of poor people to take advantage of and treat as slaves. For example, Thai farmers are not legally free to buy and sell land as they wish, which means that they cannot make free decisions about this basic commodity, but worse, since the market is not free and open, the price is artificially very low, which allows wealthy Thai people to buy land from farmers for much, much less than its true value, and then use it for selfish reasons. And it is Thai governments, every Thai government for decades past, that have used the law to control and restrict the options open to Thai farmers to improve their condition.
Aiding and abetting this economic despotism to benefit a tiny elite is an educational system that has been a failure for decades. The statistics are clear: Thai performance on basic skills such as mathematics, science, English, and the like are appalling, with nations such as Cambodia rapidly progressing, and most in the region doing much better. I think this must mean that since they have failed so totally for so long to actually teach, the teachers do not deserve respect - why should we respect continuous failure?
But worse, how could this be an accident? Might it be deliberate, like the unjust and anti-free market land laws that seem intended to keep the farmers poor? As the legal profession asks: cui bono?
I was just reading an article in the Bangkok Post which seems relevant here. In "Cure for ailing farmers worse than the disease", the Post's editorialist Wichit Chantanusornsiri describes an alternative to pledging schemes to helping farmers and national economies. He reports that with support from the Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Co-operatives, farmers in Tak are planting a larger variety of traditional Thai plants along with trees, which appears to ensure a more consistent, if modest, income.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of farmers diversifying and generally trying out different things. But I'm not so sure about the writer's attitude: he seems to be preaching that the simple, sufficient life of contentment with very little is better than the stress of seeking a wealthier life for self and family. This is all very well, and sounds nice, but the writer is conspicuously not practising what he preaches himself - I can't imaging him for one moment being content to actually live like a poor Thai farmer, nor should he be telling them to be content with the scraps they have when he is so very much wealthier and greedily keeping his wealth to himself. This smacks of an unpleasant hypocrisy.
However, his ideas that prudence is a sensible economic virtue are very good. But in his opposition to capitalism, he apparently forget to honestly credit his source for this idea that prudence and living within one's means, with self-sufficiency, are highly desirable virtues. The credit for these ideas rightly belongs to the great Adam Smith, the father of modern economics and a great ... capitalist theorist and advocate.
References
Chantanusornsiri, W. (2013, August 15). Cure for ailing farmers worse than the disease. Bangkok Post. Retrieved August 15, 2013 from http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/364675/cure-for-ailing-farmers-worse-than-the-disease
Although neither the Bangkok Post nor The Nation are on my list of publication sources to blog, they are both very good sources for domestic news, in which I assume we are all interested. I read both every both every day, or at least skim the headline titles for articles that might be of interest.
DeleteSome of their writers do write excellent English, and many can reason well, but the quality of both the writing and critical thinking is a bit variable, as wonderfully illustrated in "Rethinking the Rice Subsidy" (Arunmas, 2013), which I would have given a grade no higher than D for the appalling failure of critical thinking and messy organization, even though I happen to agree with what I think was the writer's main point: that the rice pledging scheme is an economic disaster not only for the Thai economy as a whole but also, ultimately, for the rice farmers it claims to help.
What grade would you have given it?
Of course, the Post's writers are not writing for a critical academic audience, but are, more like the BBC News, writing for readers for whom they assume a high school education, but perhaps not more. For similar reasons, although the BBC News and NPR are good starting points, we are also aspiring to read on a regular basis things more like The Economist, The New York Times and such, whose language and writing style is more like the academic versions of English that we want to practise on a daily basis.
Reference
Arunmas, P. (2013, August 13). Rethinking the rice subsidy. Bangkok Post. Retrieved August 15, 2013 from http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/364294/better-ways-to-spend-the-rice-subsidy