Money for Nothing
April 18, 2016 6:19 PM   Subscribe

A Charity's Radical Experiment --Communities and governments have experimented with universal basic income in the past. GiveDirectly has demonstrated the benefit of placing money directly into the hands of those who need it. Now the charity is taking the idea to a whole new level.

Roughly 6,000 rural Kenyans will receive a guaranteed minimum income for at least ten years. Unlike other trials in Manitoba, Utrecht, or Uganda, GiveDirectly's project is large-scale and long term. It examines the effect of providing a basic income to all members of a community (and the effect of refraining from the same).
posted by ReginaHart (5 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm curious if there is a real possibility of people moving to these villages, and how eligibility works over the 10 year period. And will turning the villages into economic centers of immigration be a success for the program?
Also, the article doesn't seem to address one of the big reasons governments/charities might prefer an income payment to a grant - they also need to get the money from somewhere and may not have it all upfront.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 6:33 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm glad to see the basic income getting more attention, though I worry it fits a little too smoothly into the super-rich hero-entrepeneur mindset of the time (as if destroying job security and 'disrupting' workers is OK because we made money doing it, and throwing money at any problem we created will make it go away.)

Quibbles with the Vox article, which will make it sound as if I didn't like it (I did). I think they are overpromising here--if you're serious about an income guarantee (as opposed to most efficient use of charity dollars) calling 10 years a "long, long period" or 6000 people "universal" doesn't work if you want to know how it would work out applied to millions for generations. Success or (relative) failure it's not going to change my mind, though a success would be a nice talking point. Also the Vox article by the same author on the Finnish reads almost exactly the same in terms, so not buying the spin that this is more extra-special (though the FInnish article is good too.)

Here's the thing though--even if it "fails" it will have given 6000 people who live on around a dollar a day a steady income for 10 years. So the worst case outcome is improving the lives of thousands. I wish I could run an experiment that had that as a failure mode.

If interestested in the overall cost, Quiggin at Crooked TImber worked up a cost estimate for income guarantees and universal basic income in western economies a while ago.
posted by mark k at 10:39 PM on April 18, 2016 [5 favorites]


GiveDirectly is fantastic for one key reason.
They publish the studies about the efficacy of their "here is some cash" policy AND publish the raw data for those studies, right on the website.
Everything is evidence driven and provably effective.

In fact, paragraph 4 of the basic income page is "Where's the evidence"
And in that paragraph they say straight up, "well, we don't really know enough, so let's try it and find out".
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:49 AM on April 19, 2016


1) I think it's great that they are referring to this as an experiment. Direct transfers, and this one in particular, are still very much at experimental stage, and I think that's a fine thing and equaly fine they are comfortable calling that out.

2) I was hoping, given that Kenya is one of the most corrupt nations on Earth (139 out of 167), to see something about corruption in the article, but there wasn't, and I'm not overwhelmed with how they deal with it on their blog. Yes, their supply chain sounds pretty good (though I wonder, the ingenuity of Kenyan graft knows no bounds. Their figures are so good it actually makes me skeptical! E.g. I wonder if they are writing off other payments and fees that actually include bribes and corruption). However, they don't discuss how much of the money these people get is spent on graft and if that figures goes up if they are perceived as having a regular income.

3) That all said, they are also very good about recognising the limits of direct transfers and trying not to position them as a universal aid panacea. and universal aid transfer do have a very limited scope and it remains to be seen how they stack up against other aid initiatives in the long run.

4) Having said that, it doesn't stop the media from ejaculating all over it - just as they have every frigging aid fad from the last seventy years, without stopping to critically reflect on how this modish, "silver bullet" approach to aid damages, distorts and in some cases destroys communities and people. Different aid works in different contexts. This should be viewed positively - lots of aid methods and orgs make a difference, but it's usually viewed that they are all useless, which is unfair.

5) I also bridle at the not-entirely-coincidental fact that a lot of givedirectly's support comes from neoliberal capitalist running dogs, imho, heavily aligned with a tech sector that has a bit of a record of aligning with often utopian and simplistic aid solutions. Cash transfers can be, comparatively, easy to measure, and tech entrepreneurs and business types often love easy-to-measure things. This does not render more-difficult-to-measure aid initiatives ineffective. Indeed, rigor and metrics are important but focusing on a particular type of metric produces a particular kind of aid - we can see how this distortion has played out in the sector with the effect of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the type of projects they fund. I should note, all this says more about the reaction to GiveDirectly and unconditional cash transfers, rather than the transfers themselves, but so it goes in the aid sector, hey? It's always a fucking competition.

6) And, if it is a competition, there is cause to look a little more deeply into givedirectly's results and results of unconditional cash transfers more broadly. Once they are put on a more level playing field to traditional aid, revolutionary benefits are a lot harder to see. I agree wholeheartedly with the conclusion of that article: "GiveDirectly -- whose own claims are more modest than what we see in the media -- should continue its investigation of how, when, and for whom unconditional cash transfers will have the most impact. What we've seen so far, though, leaves us skeptical, and the hype remains well ahead of the impact."

6) and thus, I wish them well in this experiment, and hope it proves useful in refining an interesting aid model. I hope in vain that its results will not be exaggerated by credulous media; myopically championed by wealthy donors who love the ideology; widely and wrongly applied to every aid situation.

PS another interesting case study about this from Namibia.
posted by smoke at 4:56 AM on April 19, 2016 [6 favorites]


I'm tickled to see the discussion thus far. I shared the Vox piece because I am very interested in (what I view as) progress toward widespread universal basic income.

Aside from the economic aspects of the study, as an anthropologist I'm especially interested in the social outcomes of this experiment. I'm curious how far beyond the original families the wealth will be shared. I suspect that familial obligations will mean that income recipients will be expected to share a portion of the wealth with kin in communities outside of the study area.
posted by ReginaHart at 9:01 AM on April 19, 2016


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