DailyDirt: Charity 2.0
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
There seems to be an increasing number of discussions on how to end poverty using evidence-based methods. Obviously, no one has found the cure for poverty just yet, but applying some rigorous analysis for charitable performance might result in better outcomes (rather than relying on gut instincts and good intentions). Here are just a few approaches for reducing poverty that hopefully work out someday.
- Could we really reduce poverty by giving everyone a minimum monthly income? This concept isn’t exactly a new idea, but it’s making the rounds — but will any country (or town?) really try to implement a social welfare program that gives away money to everyone? [url]
- Bill Gates has been promoting his concept of “catalytic philanthropy” as a way to amplify charitable investments. Seed funding a lot of projects that could have a significant impact on global poverty might make more progress than putting a huge lump sum behind a handful of projects. [url]
- GiveDirectly is a charity that is experimenting with different ways to give money directly to the poor most effectively. They’ve found evidence that their stipends are not being wasted on drugs/gambling, but it’s still a bit unclear if there are real long-term economic benefits. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: bill gates, catalytic philanthropy, charity, evidence, givedirectly, income, money, poverty, welfare
Comments on “DailyDirt: Charity 2.0”
An increase of the minimum wage would be a good start. As someone who pays taxes, I am getting a bit tired of subsidizing the corporate welfare queens. It is time for these hypocrites to pay their workers a livable wage. If it were not for the generosity of the tax payers, these corporate behemoths would not be able to find anyone healthy enough to work at the wages they offer. The time to stop corporate welfare has long past.
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Umm… could you separate those two ideas, and maybe say a few words about what the first one (increasing the minimum wage) does to the unemployment rate, and what the second one (corporate welfare) actually means?
Bear in mind that the subject of the article is philanthropy, and philanthropy isn’t giving away someone else’s money.
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“does to the unemployment rate”
The topic is ending poverty, not unemployment. They are different, fyi.
“what the second one (corporate welfare) actually means”
Please educate yourself.
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WELL,
you have an idea..
What you dont see..
IS if’ you raise min wage, those 60% of USA workers, that work in the stores, get a raise..
WHICH means the store has to raise prices.
YOU CANT TAKE money from the rich and NOT FEEL IT at the bottom..
AS to CORPS..
That is a problem..and there is only a few ways around it. SIMPLIFY the tax codes..MAKE them as BASICALLY STUPID as you can..
MAKE corp Business designs that HAVE to be.. CUT this hide and sneak crap with the money.
Then there is 1 other thing that COULD make this all work.
MAKE the gov…the TOP of the corp. and ALL money goes to the TOP..(not the bank) to be distributed..
Sounds easy?? NOT ON YOUR LIFE..
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Funny because in the US that is already a reality, people already get a minimum wage already is just called different things but the principle is the same, give money to anyone who asks for it.
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“WHICH means the store has to raise prices”
Several studies say it does not.
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I’ve been hearing this a lot. “Raise the minimum wage to a livable wage” and my favorite “You can’t raise a family on minimum wage”. I have two questions for you.
1) Why does a 16 year old teenager who lives with his parents and has 0 bills require enough money to raise a family?
2) Why does a job that requires no special skills or any education what so ever require a pay that’s higher then what I made in a job that required an associates degree?
Oh, an I got a third one.
3) What do you do with those people who have earned that pay already? They worked hard, they earned that extra money per hour. Are you just going to leave them at minimum wage again?
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MAYBE A FEW ANSWERS?
1..WHO WHAT?? this has no meaning.
2..There is NO job that does NOT require some type of skill, even one that you learned in grade school..like counting change, IS A SKILL..(Iv seen some that didnt know how). And what do you consider EDUCATION? You should be learning something every day. Esp, in school. but you can learn much WITHOUT school also.
3.This is confusing, but let me say this.. CORPS like to hire 1 person in charge. And 20 people at min wage. the person in charge only over looks the jobs the underlings do. THEY generally, dont do much of the work. SO, who gets paid? The Person in charge is getting wages, equal to 4-10 timeS, THE wage slaves doing the work.
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LONG ago, and far away..
we USED to pay 1 company for 1 product..
Even the Grocery got Much of their stuff from 1 distributor for their products.
There is SO MUCH handling of the product from place to place NOW..that buying 1 product isnt paying 1 company. Its paying for 3-4 companies. Which means you arent PAYING for a few people to get your product. you are paying HUNDREDS..
Every extra penny added to the cost pays another person.
Its the SAME with WOOD for building and exporting.
Its the same with your MEAT..fruits/veggie/.. Everything.
Its NOT that you cant go DIRECT(to the first distributor, which CAN BE ILLEGAL) its where to find them.. I would love to go direct to SIMPLOTS and get my goods.
But something has happened to many of the states. IDAHO was one of the last states to be able to be independent and self sufficient.. meaning they could supply all the food they needed and ALL the minimum TYPES to keep people healthy. NOT any more. the Farmers land and crops are PURCHASED before he even grows them.. HE has to GROW what it TOLd to him.
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REALLY REALLY REALLY want to fix a few things..
aND piss off BANKS AND CORPS..
EVERYONE needs a home.
At least big enough for a small family. NOT A HOLE in the wall for $600+ per month.
If they move out, they MUST show a job..and they can have their OWN home.
IT cant be sold/taxed/rented out..They can SWAP with another home about the same.
THIS, alone, would fix alot of problems.And would put at LEAST $7000 per year in a person pocket.
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Non answers are not answers.
1) It has all the meaning. It’s why minimum wage is as low as it is now. Minimum wage was never for people to make a living off of. It is for people who need extra pocket change and job experience. For example: teenagers living with their parents. Raising the minimum wage raises it for everybody.
2) Splitting the hair mighty thin their aren’t you. OK, if you insist, why should the SKILL of flipping burgers pay more then a job that requires 2 years of collage?
3) Imagine if you were working at, say, Taco Bell. You worked hard, stood out from your peers. You came to work to work. You earned that extra money in your pay check. Now suddenly someone, who has no idea how the economy works, decides to raise the minimum wage. Now you’re magically on the bottom rung again. Not only are you on the same level as the kid who did the bare minimum, you have no chance of earning another raise. The money that would have gone to your raise is now paying the guy who didn’t deserve it.
Look, I get it. Corporations are “evil”, you want to get back at them for some imagined slight. But raising the minimum wage is just going to increase the gap between the poor and the rich. Prices will have to go up (just like they did the last time), people will get laid off.
You keep thinking about the big guys, McDonald’s, Microsoft, but you’re not thinking about the little guys. The companies that actually make this country run. The small shops that no one has ever heard of, that already run on a shoestring budget. They go away, what will you have left? The big guys that everyone hates so much and can weather the storm.
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Have you ever flipped burgers for 8 hours?
Is not that easy you waste years getting in shape to do it and survive at the end of the day and you learn how to conserve energy.
The cook there is the guy who allows you to save time, so you can do your work, he enables your efficiency, that individual is part of a system that if broken will make you have to do the work yourself, so ya he is important, you may not think so but he is, you may not see it or be able to respect it yet, but one day maybe you will.
3) Is it so bad to have the same chances as others? If you are more competent and work harder can’t you find a way to stand out? I know I can, given the same sets of resources I am sure I will find ways to wow everybody else.
Give some used paper, water and flour and I make airplanes out of it. Give me grass and I make compost, ropes, hammocks, even clothes, Give shit and I will transform it into black gold, give me piss and I will make gun powder and matches out of it, are you afraid others won’t respect you anymore?
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“The cook there is the guy who allows you to save time, so you can do your work, he enables your efficiency, that individual is part of a system that if broken will make you have to do the work yourself, so ya he is important, you may not think so but he is, you may not see it or be able to respect it yet, but one day maybe you will.”
Just to add to this:
Who is more important, a surgeon performing open heart surgery on you, or the driver of the delivery vehicle bringing you your new heart?
I think some of these people arguing here would say their stay at home mother, who raised and nurtured them, is useless, or did she help earn the money that is being brought into the house via the partner? Try doing that job without 6 years of University first!
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“Have you ever flipped burgers for 8 hours?”
Why yes, yes I have. I worked at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Eat n’ Park. I never once thought I deserved a living wage.
“Is it so bad to have the same chances as others?”
Then let’s give them the same chances, not just pay them more for less work. Do they need an education to get that better job? Then let’s help them do that. Do they have the education there just aren’t enough jobs, then let’s work on that. Paying them more for flipping burgers is a stopgap at best, the first step to them losing everything at worst.
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See there we agree, it probably will fail because is lacking a component.
Just giving money to others but not the knowledge necessary to use it efficiently most probably will lead to failure.
How to improve that scheme to make it work better?
Should applicants of that system have to work 4 hours in some assigned job? that will offset some of the cost and teach them something new?
Would it be possible to make available some form of center for retooling skills?
Are there any other similar social experiments going on?
What can we observe and learn from those?
What data we collected?
Also job markets expand and contract, when expanding is all roses life is good by in the contraction phase what to do with all those people and how to keep them up to date?
How to create a workforce reserve?
There are PhD’s without a job, right now, can they be used for something that would benefit everyone?
Can we teach everyone how to produce something they need?
Can teaching people how to survive improve security by making them less likely to loot and riot after a disaster?
There are many questions, the one thing I know for sure is that, there will never be jobs for everyone all the time, so people need to learn some basic survival skills(or we should build tools for it) to a) reduce their cost of living and b) have peace of mind so they can wait until things get better, the only shelter against economic downturns is learning how to live with less which is possible.
What to do with lots of people that have no work?
All of them need food, places to live, security and healthcare.
Can we use them to produce part of it for themselves?
Could we set places that they could use to learn and improve themselves?
What happens when things get rosier, would those things disappear? would we hold them vacant for the inevitable downturns of the future?
Are community gardens a way to reduce the cost of food for those who can’t afford them?
Are tooling workshops available for people to make things?
How others do it?
The Amish can live from the land is there any lessons we can take from them?
The Amazon Indians can live without money, how do they do it, is there anything we can use?
Ants and bees live without money how do they do it? how do they shelter everyone, feed everyone. I know that workers go out and some of them go feed the pupae which feeds them in exchange, is that a model?
There are so many questions.
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“I never once thought I deserved a living wage.”
You figured you should work 40 hours a week and still not be able to afford to live? Ok.
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“raising the minimum wage is just going to increase the gap between the poor and the rich.”
Minimum wage has nothing to do with the income gap.
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Well, there are things that need a PhD to be done but they are not necessarely fundamental for live to go on, should those people get less?
The price of work done today is based on scarcity not necessity.
Planting food is not necessarily rocket science it can be but the basics are not, should the people responsible for putting food on your table be considered lesser than you because you expend your time in problems that few can tackle? or are those people enablers, they enable you to not do the hard boring work so you can do other hard boring work for them?
Everyone believes that the work they do is important and in reality everyone is right without everyone working and doing a part of it the whole can’t be.
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I know a person that pretty well off..
And he has some good education and works in a building..
And HE thought he should get paid more money then the Janitor..
I asked him.
that the Janitors clean every room in your building.
And if you MISSED 1 day or 7..would the boss, others miss you?(or replace you)
What would happen if the Janitors MISSED 1 day?
by the THIRD day.. The BOSS would be looking for someone to CLEAN the toilet, dump the trash, mop the floors, Vacuum floors……
And I dont think much work would be happening until a few things got cleaned up..
AND if the BOSS asked you to do it..Even with your MIGHTY education..would you do it FREELY?? take a cut in pay to do it?? DEBATE a better wage then the JANITOR was getting?
OR just CLEAN YOUR ROOMS?? FREE..
Bill Gates is an enemy of human kind.
First there’s the criminal Microsoft corporation, a drain on people’s time and money that ranks among the worst disasters to ever afflict the world. Microsoft products are deliberately crap because they figured out a way to profit from bugs. — And by the way, MS-DOS was a copy of CPM-86, not even by Bill but a small company in Seattle: Bill just had the connections to get in with IBM and money to buy up the prior product, change all references to “Seattle DOS” to Microsoft, tweak a few hardware ports, and voila: MS-DOS 1.0 was marketed. The nauseating “success” of Microsof was due entirely to IBM and its PC, at best.
Gates was and is rewarded FAR beyond his value to society, by incredible luck. If his income is only one billion a year, then every day for doing nothing he gets more than you’ll earn in a lifetime. Just divide 1,000,000,000 by 365 if you don’t believe me. — And I’m not moved by envy and jealousy of unearned money, but to reasoned worries: societies simply cannot work with so great a disparity of income, it’s beyond feudal level. And certainly what we see in all of Europe and the former US of A is that actual laborers are being squeezed for every cent while petty tyrants are rewarded with excess upon excess. That trend will not end well for you kids.
The Gates foundation is just a tax shelter to keep that money from doing anything worthwhile. BIll still controls the money and gets an income from it, his expenses paid, his reputation whitewashed, and so on, standard foundation stuff since Carnegie and Rockefeller.
Now to the vaccine. Gates has said:
As pointed out in link, it’s difficult to see how improved health care reduces population, and to state it that way is more than odd. But pooh-pooh if you want: billionaire megalomaniacs couldn’t possibly exist, right?
http://www.naturalnews.com/029911_vaccines_Bill_Gates.html
“Bill Gates: ?Some days I wish we had a system like the UK? to give Obama more power [VIDEO]”
http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/14/bill-gates-some-days-i-wish-we-had-a-system-like-the-uk-to-give-obama-more-power-video/
Bill Gates’ $100 million database to track students
Corporations gaining access to grades, addresses, hobbies, attitudes
http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/bill-gates-100-million-database-to-track-students/
True humanism is against “re-distribution of the wealth”: what that should mean in practice is preventing The Rich from taking the greater part of what laborers produce. — And even if the takings were just a little from the many, concentration of wealth into few hands is evil in itself.
13:50:57[o-501-3]
RE:
So, OOTB, have you stopped beating your male lover yet?
Poverty is not what it seems
There are many causes for poverty. Some of these relate to unavoidable circumstances, some are related to greed and control, some are related to sheer unadulterated laziness.
There are times when someone gets caught up in circumstances beyond their control and they no longer have access the resources to pay for the day to day necessities.
There are those who will screw over others to get more of the available resources and cause others to become poor.
Then there are those who cannot manage themselves or who spend well beyond their means and become poor.
There are also those who expect others to support them because they believe the “world” owes them an existence and they can’t be bothered working for their daily bread.
So the question then is, how do you solve poverty and how do you determine who should be helped? This is a question that is not easy to determine.
I have been involved in helping those who are in difficulties and I have seen all the above as causes. The worst situation is when a person or family is outside the parameters used for determining eligibility for help and are in desperate need. There are very few who will help in such a time. I have also had the sob stories where people have come asking for money for fuel or food and then when you give them the item instead of money, they get unhappy.
As for point 1:
Could we really reduce poverty by giving everyone a minimum monthly income? This concept isn’t exactly a new idea, but it’s making the rounds — but will any country (or town?) really try to implement a social welfare program that gives away money to everyone? [emphasis added]
Australia already does this, it has a federally mandated minimum wage that MUST be paid to all employees for any job. The minimum wage is based on CPI and changes accordingly.
Australia already has a huge unemployment welfare system that gives a minimum ‘livable’ income to anyone who is unemployed and actively either looking for work, training, or cannot for whatever reason (medical, psychological, or hardship) look for work and is ongoing! (Currently for a single person over 25 approx $250 minimum per week + things like rent assistance etc)
The system isn’t perfect, there are always people who will try to defraud it but it works and with the social medical system already in place plus free public schooling and highly subsidized tertiary education (ie: IT degree will only cost approx $35K and paid back interest free using 4% of salary when a job is obtained that earns over $40K per annum).
I would state that yes point 1 is totally done by Australia.
Oh and what country had no problems and didn’t fall down in a huge economic craphole during the GFC???? hmmmm
Everything is possible, bees, ants, squirrels and even humans can live without any money at all why can’t everyone?
Reuters:
Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult
Vimeo: The man who quit money
Youtube: TEDxO’Porto – Mark Boyle – The Moneyless Man
If you have the knowledge to produce the things you need, it really doesn’t matter if you have money or not, if you can find a way to be happy with what you have you never be “poor”.
The war on poverty is largely a war on perspective. Which is harder, go fishing, plant your food or work a grueling 8 hour shift in a factory?
In the documentary Poor Kids from PBS, the mother of two was getting 3 thousand dollars and couldn’t make it, while Mark Boyle and others are living without any money at all, what happened? how is that possible?
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I don’t know where you live, but my government will not accept tree bark as payment of property tax.
You cannot live in a free country without paying the price.
Try going onto crown land and start cutting trees for shelter and fuel and let us know how that works out for you. It is well below freezing here today with the wind chill.
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You don’t need to cut a tree and please don’t, collect what it gives you.
Free broken branches and leafs. Use a carjack to press it into a log.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-cider/step6/
Five tons should do it.
Also use materials that are plentiful in your area, can you find plastic bags?
http://www.instructables.com/id/Useful-Rope-or-Cord-from-Plastic-Shopping-Bags/
Learn from others that already are doing it.
http://shine.yahoo.com/financially-fit/family-lives-without-money–by-choice–and-thrives–190436599.html
Life without money is not life without paying, you will pay for it all, just not with money.
Dumpster diving.
http://moneyless.org/dumpster-diving-tips
For property, well you don’t need to own it, just build a tiny house.
http://tinyhouseblog.com/
Can you find pallets somewhere?
http://palletfurnitureplans.com/
There are ways to live a comfortable life without money and what others are developing may come in handy in an economic downturn. What will the government do? say everyone needs to have a job and pay taxes when there is no job and no money anywhere? will put everyone who can’t do it in jail?
I prefer to transform those people into the other end of society, one that collects the things that others don’t need and make something useful with them, people who collect cans to smelt them into things they need, people who collect plastic bags to make ropes and threads to produce carpets and rain protection, people who use everything available to them to be able to live comfortably, they just will have to work for it like everybody else they want be able to pay for somebody else to make them a chair, a house or anything else they will learn to build all those things and live the life that they can until they can do better or just keep doing whatever they are doing, so they don’t have to steal from others, rob stores, get angry about their lifes, get piss drunk or worse.
What do you prefer?
As I said before, money is not the only way to realize things, money is the grease for social interaction, is not the fundamental part that needs to exist for things to work and some people just realized that.
Maybe the government start to tax people in working hours 🙂
I would love to see any government going in to take away the lifestyle of people who’s only crime is not being able to find a job or making enough money to pay taxes.
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Is this how you make a living? – link spam
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Can you get paid for that?
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“Lee Halpin, 26, died of a heart attack as he took part in the week long project, only making it to the second day.”
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/355505/Film-maker-dies-of-sudden-adult-death-syndrome-during-homeless-project
I’m almost twice his age.
Switzerland is also toying with the idea.
Reuters:
Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult
The US does the same although they don’t call all the programs that they set up as that but the end result is the same.
Could it work?
Could, will it? depends on how it is done.
GiveDirectly sounds like a really cool idea.
wrong paradigm
The corporation / worker model doesn’t work; both players exist at a loss. A corporation cannot pay the worker more than it sells. A worker cannot pay the corporation more than he is paid. After taxes from every angle, there’s nothing left to talk about.
Re: wrong paradigm
“The corporation / worker model doesn’t work; both players exist at a loss”
What? This is satire?
Maybe lite reading in the field of economics is called for.