<story><title>GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa</title><url>https://givedirectly.org/basic-income</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scottrogowski</author><text>While I find UBI to be a fascinating idea worthy of consideration, I vehemently disagree with running this experiment in East Africa. The proposal seems to either be blind-to or minimizing the potential for unintended consequences. Decades of trying to alleviate poverty in Africa have taught us, more than anything else, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Giving food tends to act as “dumping” and weaken the agricultural industry. Providing foreign aid tends to empower corrupt governments. These consequences only became clear after years of hindsight. Who knows what unintended side effects of UBI will be?&lt;p&gt;If we are going to try UBI, a fundamentally Western idea, it’s only right that it should be tried in the West. I’m not saying it won’t work - just that we don’t really know what will happen. East Africa has suffered enough from our neo-colonial experiments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ppereira</author><text>There is quite a bit of anger and little fact in this comment. GiveDirectly has been running UBI programs in East Africa for years now. They have an all-star cast of economists examining their performance. Their pilot programs were very successful, which is why they are scaling out further.&lt;p&gt;East Africa, and Kenya in particular, was carefully chosen for two reasons. First, Kenya has a mobile phone network that makes it easy to transfer funds electronically to individuals and then for those individuals to get cash from the funds at local stores. I wish we had this in the West, but we don&amp;#x27;t because of banking regulations. Second, poorer households in certain communities tend to use natural roofing materials rather than aluminum, which makes it easy to target funding by satellite.&lt;p&gt;The UBI is a political football in the West. The Mincome experiment was cancelled because of a change in government. 
The potential utility benefits from a UBI are so great that it would be a shame to think that we have to wait for it to be politically palatable in the West before we can get any data on its effectiveness. Also, as far as poverty relief is concerned, money really does help.</text></comment>
<story><title>GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa</title><url>https://givedirectly.org/basic-income</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scottrogowski</author><text>While I find UBI to be a fascinating idea worthy of consideration, I vehemently disagree with running this experiment in East Africa. The proposal seems to either be blind-to or minimizing the potential for unintended consequences. Decades of trying to alleviate poverty in Africa have taught us, more than anything else, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Giving food tends to act as “dumping” and weaken the agricultural industry. Providing foreign aid tends to empower corrupt governments. These consequences only became clear after years of hindsight. Who knows what unintended side effects of UBI will be?&lt;p&gt;If we are going to try UBI, a fundamentally Western idea, it’s only right that it should be tried in the West. I’m not saying it won’t work - just that we don’t really know what will happen. East Africa has suffered enough from our neo-colonial experiments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thescriptkiddie</author><text>Unconditional cash transfers (what is being proposed here) have proven to be more effective than the &amp;quot;dumping&amp;quot; of material aid you&amp;#x27;re protesting. If you give a village shipments of rice their rice farmers go bankrupt, if you give them cash they can spend it at local businesses or start businesses of their own or import things they couldn&amp;#x27;t get otherwise. It&amp;#x27;s also hard to give too much cash (as long as you are distributing it equitably), because if there is excess capital in one place that will only encourage trade.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.poverty-action.org&amp;#x2F;study&amp;#x2F;impact-unconditional-cash-transfers-kenya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.poverty-action.org&amp;#x2F;study&amp;#x2F;impact-unconditional-cas...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>