I'd like to start with a simple question. Why do the poor make so many poor decisions? I know it's a harsh question but take a look at the data. The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and eat less healthily. Why?
Well, the standard explanation was once summed up by the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. She called poverty a personality defect, a lack of character basically.
Poverty is a personality defect. - Margaret Thatcher
I'm sure not many of you would be so blunt. But the idea that there's something wrong with the poor themselves is not restricted to Mrs. Thatcher.
Some of you may believe that the poor should be held responsible for their own mistakes and others may argue that we should help them to make better decisions. but the underlying assumption is the same.
There's something wrong with them. If we could just change them; if we could teach them how to live their lives; if they would only listen.
And to be honest this was what I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.
It all started when I accidentally stumbled on a paper by a few American psychologists who did a fascinating experiment with sugarcane farmers in India.
You should know that these farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means that they're relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. And the researchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest.
What they subsequently discovered completely blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the test before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty in turns out corresponded to losing 14 points of IQ. That's comparable to losing a nights sleep.
Eldar Shafir, an American behavioral scientist, and the co-author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much was one of the researchers in this study which I can sum up in only two words. Scarcity mentality
Scarcity Mentality
It turns out that people behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. And what that thing is doesn't much matter; whether it's not enough time, money, or food.
You all know this feeling when you have too much to do or when you break for lunch and your blood sugar takes a dive. This narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the sandwich you've got to have now, to the meeting that's starting in 5-minutes, or the bills that have to be paid tomorrow. In those moments, your longterm perspective goes out the window.
You could compare it to a new computer that's running ten heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower making errors and eventually it freezes, not because it's a bad computer but because it has too much to do at once.
The poor have the same problem. They're not making dumb decisions because they are dumb but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.
Suddenly I understood why so many of our anti-poverty programs don't work. Investments in education, for example, are often completely ineffective.
Poverty is not a lack of knowledge. A recent analysis of 200 studies on the effectiveness of money management training came to the conclusion that has almost no effect at all. This is not to say that the poor don't learn anything, they can come out of those programs wiser for sure, but it's not enough.
Or as professor Shaffir says;
"It's like teaching someone to swim then throwing them in a stormy sea."
I think we could have figured this out years ago, I mean, these psychologists didn't need any complicated brain scans. They only needed to measure these farmers IQ's and IQ tests were invented 100-years-ago.
I realized I've read about this psychology before. George Orwell, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, experienced poverty firsthand in the 1920s. The essence of poverty he wrote back then is;
"Poverty annihilates the future"
And he marveled at how people take it for granted that they have the right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level. Those words are every bit as resonate today.
The big question is, of course, what can be done? modern economists have a few solutions up their sleeves. We could help the poor by sending them a text message to remind them to pay their bills. This type of solution is hugely popular with modern politicians mostly because the cost is next to nothing.
These solutions are, I think, a symbol of this era in which we so often treat the symptoms but ignore the underlying cause. So I wonder, why don't we just change the context in which the poor live? Or going back to our computer analogy, why keep tinkering around with the software when we can easily solve the problem by installing some extra memory instead?
Why don't we just hand out more money to the poor to eradicate poverty? They do it in Amsterdam and other countries, but many people think this wouldn't work in other parts of the world.
Is this really a leftist idea? I remember reading about an old plan, something that has been proposed by some of history's leading thinkers. The philosopher Thomas More first hinted at it in [his book Utopia]{https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/utopia.pdf} more than 500-years-ago. It's proponents has spread the spectrum from the left to the right, from civil rights activist Martin Luther King to the economist Milton Freidman.
It's an incredibly simple idea. Basic income guarantee.
Basic Income Guarantee
What is basic income guarantee? It's a monthly grant, enough to pay for your basic needs; food, shelter, education. It's completely unconditional. No one is going to tell you what you have to do for it and no one is going to tell you what you have to do with it. The basic income is not a favor but a right. There's absolutely no stigma attached.
As I learned about the true nature of poverty I couldn't stop wondering, is this the idea we've all been waiting for? Could it really be that simple?
In the years that followed I read everything I could find about basic income and researched the dozens of experiments that have been conducted all over the globe and it didn't take long before I stumbled upon a story of a town that had done it and actually eradicated poverty, but then nearly everyone had forgotten about it.
This story starts in Dauphin, Canada. In 1974 everybody in this small town was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. At the start of the experiment, an army of researchers descended on the town.
For 4-years all went well but then a new government was voted into power and the new Canadian cabinet saw little point to the expensive experiment. When it became clear there was no money left to analyze the results the researchers decided to pack their files away in some 2,000 boxes.
25-years went by and then Evelyn Forget, a Canadian professor found the records and for 3-years she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis and no matter what she tried the results were the same every time.
The experiment had been a resounding success. Evelyn Forget had discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of kids in school had improved substantially, the hospitalization rate had decreased by as much as 8.5%, domestic violence incidents were down as were mental health complaints.
And people didn't quit their jobs. The only ones who worked a little less were new others and students who stayed in school longer. Similar results have since been found in countless other experiments around the globe from the US to India.
Here's what I've learned. When it comes to poverty, we, the rich, should stop pretending we know best. We should stop sending shoes and teddy bears to the poor, to people we have never met. and we should get rid of the vast industry of paternalistic bureaucrats when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor they are supposed to help.
Because the great thing about money is people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need.
Imagine how many brilliant scientists, entrepreneurs, and writers like George Orwell are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we get rid of poverty once and for all. I believe that basic income would work like venture capital for the people.
Venture Capital For The People
We can't afford not to do it because poverty is hugely expensive. Just look at the cost of child poverty in the US for example. It's estimated at $500 billion each year in terms of higher healthcare spending, higher dropout rates, and more crime. This is an incredible waste of human potential.
But let's talk about the elephant in the room. How could we ever afford a basic income guarantee? Well, it's actually a lot cheaper than you may think.
What they did in Dauphin is they financed it with a negative income tax. This means that your income is topped up as soon as you fall below the poverty line. In that scenario, according to economists best estimates, for a net cost of $175 billion, a quarter of US military spending or 1% of GDP, you could lift all impoverished Americans above the poverty line. You could actually eradicate poverty.
That should be our goal. The time for small thoughts and little measures is past and I really believe the time has come for radical, new ideas. Basic income is so much more than just another policy. It is also a complete rethink of what work actually is and in that sense, it will not only free the poor but also the rest of us.
Nowadays, millions of people feel that their jobs have little meaning or significance. In a recent poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries found that only 13% of workers actually liked their job. Another poll of British workers found that they think their job doesn't even need to exist. It's like Brad Pitt says in Fight Club, Too often;
"We're working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need"
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about the teachers and the garbage man and the care workers here. If they stopped working we'd be in trouble. I'm talking about all those well-paid professionals with excellent resumes who earn their money doing strategic transactors peer-to-peer meetings while brainstorming the value add-on of disruptive co-creation in the network society. Or something like that.
Just imagine again how much talent we're wasting simply because we tell our kids they'll have to "earn a living". Or think of what a math whiz working at Facebook lamented a few years ago:
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
If history teaches us anything it is that things could be different. There is nothing inevitable about the way we structured our society and economy right now. Ideas can and do change the world. And I think that especially in the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that we cannot stick to the status quo, that we need new ideas.
I know that many of you may feel pessimistic about a future of rising inequality, xenophobia, and climate change. But it's not enough to know what we're against. We also need to be for something.
Martin Luther King didn't say, "I have a nightmare." He had a dream. So, here's my dream.
I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give.
I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job but for a life well-lived.
I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege but a right we all deserve.
So here we are. We've got the research, we've got the evidence, and we've got the means. Now, more than 500-years after Thomas More first wrote about basic income, and 100=years after George Orwell discovered the true nature of poverty, we all need to change our world view, because poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
Mannabase is an online platform for the world’s first Universal Basic Income cryptocurrency.
Manna is distributed by the People’s Currency Foundation as a basic human right that every person in the world is eligible to receive, for free. Founded in 2015, Manna has achieved milestones in the cryptocurrency movement, as the first blockchain-based currency to be created and distributed by a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, and the first digital currency to implement a Universal Basic Income as its primary method of distribution.
Mannabase is the place to sign up for and receive Manna UBI, and a simple web-based platform to transact the currency with other users. Mannabase will also be developing a system for targeted direct giving, enabling users to donate Manna currency to specific groups of people based on criteria such as geography, age, sex, and economic condition. Mannabase users will also be able to give Manna to charities through the platform.
The vision of Mannabase is to empower the people of the world by making cryptocurrency accessible and available to everyone, and to provide a tool for effective altruism to reduce poverty and inequality.
Luzcypher's Announcement For Steem Witness
