At at the city, state, or national levels we sometimes "help the poor" via initiatives to "develop" this or that region, but what we mostly have is "welfare" benefits that go directly to individuals. After all, development funds have a poor track record, and are often diverted by corrupt officials, while direct benefits are the prototype of charity to help those less fortunate than ourselves. At the international level, however, we mostly have "development aid", even though its track record is just as bad there. Why don’t we give more benefits directly to the world’s poor?
A world ID card and the associated databases of citizens is not a 'minimal' requirement. The closest we will probably get is systems like Tribler that provide new identities(defined on general purpose computing machines that are increasingly ubiquitous, but which were certainly not in 2008) to start with a default amount of trust, but where they are expected to interact with the rest of the world system in some way to maintain that status.
But a perfect example of why this is problematic is the Disqus comment system. Disqus has been slowly turning the tap off of the ability to make comments that challenge the prevailing prejudices of the day. System after system of discussion(facebook, google, twitter, disqus, gab...), and economic transactions(patreon, paypal, ..) is being coopted by those who would seek to use those systems to control what is said, and how money is spent. You should expect those very politically motivated entities to take hold of whatever system you propose and to exclude those who do not match their politics. The more automated we make these systems, the easier this process becomes for them.
A global system of ID that determines who gets their bread is one step away from being a way to slowly and silently starve all on the Blues (or Greens) at the flick of a switch.
i want yo say that do u have any idea about third world nations. i belong it .so say whats idea about it . this is not a controversial matter this is a burning problem my friend. so tel what is the resuscitation say say say.how u can solve this problem.
Mike, it's whatever we can get away with with regards to incentive pay. You've uncovered the infinite footnote problem of blog comments. I wasn't able to add infinite nuancing footnotes to that comment.
How about the type of incentive pay Bloomberg experimented with in NY? Bonuses to further your education, your kids education, etc. In some countries we'd have to avoid reproductive choice incentive pay for religious reasons. May have to avoid female education incentive pay too. But I like incentive pay better than blind garunteed income.
You're imposing on them the idea that education is the right and proper solution to their problems, but do not wish to impose the idea that reproduction should be a choice, or that women should be as educated as men - why?
Also, i don't think welfare dependency would be a major issue. Its unlikely that the lifestyle supported by such a global welfare state would be high enough that people would lose incentives to work hard and improve their lot. Since we basically ensure the poor in the US a warm bed, indoor plumbing and food, we are ensuring them a paradise compared to what our bodies evolved to expect (sleeping outside on rocky earth, regularly starving, fighting cave-bears, etc.). A global welfare state might ensure malaria medicine and a cup of rice, but not much more.
I'm all for it. It doesn't make sense to help out people who are upper middle class by global standards just because they are closer to us. Its very myopic.
The idea is kind of like microlending, but instead we just acknowledge that we aren't going to get the money back. Couldn't we just send a wire transfer to a poor person in Cambodia, or wherever?
I would guess that the poor folks here voted for direct payments rather than development schemes; and that the poor folk overseas would too, if they could.
The question is interesting because it suggests that U.S. voters decided to distribute foreign aid thru development schemes because they "know" that that approach gives the best results; and did not choose the approach giving the best results for themselves. I think there is a common type of bias here. A pilot may "know" that, in a given situation, an autopilot is much less likely to crash than a pilot; and yet choose to turn the autopilot off if he is the pilot. I've heard people explain, about similar situations that I can't now quite recall, that in a matter of life and death, they would choose the riskier option that gave them "control" over the less-risky option that did not give them control.
The US constituency in favor of overseas aid may be different than the constituency in favor of welfare here. My recollection is that Americans overwhelmingly think we spend too much on foreign aid, so the forces keeping it in place are probably different from the forces keeping welfare in place.
Where's William Easterly when you need him? Has anyone checked out www.globalgiving.com. It perhaps offers a workable solution to (some of) Robin's points.
the problem isn't money and has never been money. the problem is making people self sufficient. development programs that help out people in poor rural areas with agricultural education and financing of farm equipment/livestock have done well.If you supply the means to become self sufficient to a people and they don't improve? not your problem anymore.teach a man to fish...if he refuses to learn? personally I'd kick him out of my society.
How is such an idea not another example of love for 'victimology'? Once again, this idea of a 'world welfare state' is postmodernism's elevation of "helplessness" as the supreme virtue.
This is similar to the idea that welfare in the existing welfare states would be more effectively provided by a voluntary organisation, or organisations, funded by donations (in cash or kind, including personal services) from all the people who think it is ok to pay taxes to the governement to provide welfare.
That would sort out the people who really want to help the poor from the people who are addicted to political activism.
How about the type of incentive pay Bloomberg experimented with in NY? Bonuses to further your education, your kids education, etc. In some countries we'd have to avoid reproductive choice incentive pay for religious reasons. May have to avoid female education incentive pay too. But I like incentive pay better than blind garunteed income.
Unless the best economics shows blind garunteed income will get us better results (a safer, more productive, world), of course.
Paul Gowder: There may be a massive academic literature, but it seems to be intellectually firewalled from actual public discussion of politics. Throughout the entire years-long debate about repealing the US inheritance tax, I merrily read opinion pieces and entered into arguments. Commonly those arguments were based on the moral rightness of inheritances being substantially redistributed to people who had inherited their citizenship. That seems like a pretty natural place to expect references to intellectually respectable ways of justifying this. But of the moral-indignators, only one brought up a connection to anything academic: the veil-of-ignorance idea of Rawls. (And since I was engaging him in person, he soon discovered that the veil of ignorance idea is less of an obvious moral justification for the non-internationalist variant of socialism than his class at MIT had evidently led him to believe.)
Would you like to recommend some pointers to some post-1945 literature (and ideally post-Civil-Rights-Act literature) on the subject? Ideally, to support your criticism of RH bringing up a philosophically half-baked critique of real-world policy, including at least one pointer which has a clearly recognizable connection to the moral arguments that people actually make in real-world politics?
(I have been curious about this (in a cynically skeptical way) off and on for years, and today I'm actively curious. To quote myself commenting on another blog earlier today, "Someday I'd love to see some scholar trace the intellectual history of how the left built its firewall between inheriting nationality and owning jobs, on one side, and the classic criticisms of property rights on the other.")
A world ID card and the associated databases of citizens is not a 'minimal' requirement. The closest we will probably get is systems like Tribler that provide new identities(defined on general purpose computing machines that are increasingly ubiquitous, but which were certainly not in 2008) to start with a default amount of trust, but where they are expected to interact with the rest of the world system in some way to maintain that status.
But a perfect example of why this is problematic is the Disqus comment system. Disqus has been slowly turning the tap off of the ability to make comments that challenge the prevailing prejudices of the day. System after system of discussion(facebook, google, twitter, disqus, gab...), and economic transactions(patreon, paypal, ..) is being coopted by those who would seek to use those systems to control what is said, and how money is spent. You should expect those very politically motivated entities to take hold of whatever system you propose and to exclude those who do not match their politics. The more automated we make these systems, the easier this process becomes for them.
A global system of ID that determines who gets their bread is one step away from being a way to slowly and silently starve all on the Blues (or Greens) at the flick of a switch.
i want yo say that do u have any idea about third world nations. i belong it .so say whats idea about it . this is not a controversial matter this is a burning problem my friend. so tel what is the resuscitation say say say.how u can solve this problem.
Because foreign nationals have a lower moral value than co-nationals.
Mike, it's whatever we can get away with with regards to incentive pay. You've uncovered the infinite footnote problem of blog comments. I wasn't able to add infinite nuancing footnotes to that comment.
How about the type of incentive pay Bloomberg experimented with in NY? Bonuses to further your education, your kids education, etc. In some countries we'd have to avoid reproductive choice incentive pay for religious reasons. May have to avoid female education incentive pay too. But I like incentive pay better than blind garunteed income.
You're imposing on them the idea that education is the right and proper solution to their problems, but do not wish to impose the idea that reproduction should be a choice, or that women should be as educated as men - why?
Also, i don't think welfare dependency would be a major issue. Its unlikely that the lifestyle supported by such a global welfare state would be high enough that people would lose incentives to work hard and improve their lot. Since we basically ensure the poor in the US a warm bed, indoor plumbing and food, we are ensuring them a paradise compared to what our bodies evolved to expect (sleeping outside on rocky earth, regularly starving, fighting cave-bears, etc.). A global welfare state might ensure malaria medicine and a cup of rice, but not much more.
I'm all for it. It doesn't make sense to help out people who are upper middle class by global standards just because they are closer to us. Its very myopic.
The idea is kind of like microlending, but instead we just acknowledge that we aren't going to get the money back. Couldn't we just send a wire transfer to a poor person in Cambodia, or wherever?
I would guess that the poor folks here voted for direct payments rather than development schemes; and that the poor folk overseas would too, if they could.
The question is interesting because it suggests that U.S. voters decided to distribute foreign aid thru development schemes because they "know" that that approach gives the best results; and did not choose the approach giving the best results for themselves. I think there is a common type of bias here. A pilot may "know" that, in a given situation, an autopilot is much less likely to crash than a pilot; and yet choose to turn the autopilot off if he is the pilot. I've heard people explain, about similar situations that I can't now quite recall, that in a matter of life and death, they would choose the riskier option that gave them "control" over the less-risky option that did not give them control.
The US constituency in favor of overseas aid may be different than the constituency in favor of welfare here. My recollection is that Americans overwhelmingly think we spend too much on foreign aid, so the forces keeping it in place are probably different from the forces keeping welfare in place.
Where's William Easterly when you need him? Has anyone checked out www.globalgiving.com. It perhaps offers a workable solution to (some of) Robin's points.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita explains why foreign aid is from government to government and who it's real intended beneficiaries are here.
the problem isn't money and has never been money. the problem is making people self sufficient. development programs that help out people in poor rural areas with agricultural education and financing of farm equipment/livestock have done well.If you supply the means to become self sufficient to a people and they don't improve? not your problem anymore.teach a man to fish...if he refuses to learn? personally I'd kick him out of my society.
How is such an idea not another example of love for 'victimology'? Once again, this idea of a 'world welfare state' is postmodernism's elevation of "helplessness" as the supreme virtue.
This is similar to the idea that welfare in the existing welfare states would be more effectively provided by a voluntary organisation, or organisations, funded by donations (in cash or kind, including personal services) from all the people who think it is ok to pay taxes to the governement to provide welfare.
That would sort out the people who really want to help the poor from the people who are addicted to political activism.
How about the type of incentive pay Bloomberg experimented with in NY? Bonuses to further your education, your kids education, etc. In some countries we'd have to avoid reproductive choice incentive pay for religious reasons. May have to avoid female education incentive pay too. But I like incentive pay better than blind garunteed income.
Unless the best economics shows blind garunteed income will get us better results (a safer, more productive, world), of course.
Amen, I have been saying that for years.
Paul Gowder: There may be a massive academic literature, but it seems to be intellectually firewalled from actual public discussion of politics. Throughout the entire years-long debate about repealing the US inheritance tax, I merrily read opinion pieces and entered into arguments. Commonly those arguments were based on the moral rightness of inheritances being substantially redistributed to people who had inherited their citizenship. That seems like a pretty natural place to expect references to intellectually respectable ways of justifying this. But of the moral-indignators, only one brought up a connection to anything academic: the veil-of-ignorance idea of Rawls. (And since I was engaging him in person, he soon discovered that the veil of ignorance idea is less of an obvious moral justification for the non-internationalist variant of socialism than his class at MIT had evidently led him to believe.)
Would you like to recommend some pointers to some post-1945 literature (and ideally post-Civil-Rights-Act literature) on the subject? Ideally, to support your criticism of RH bringing up a philosophically half-baked critique of real-world policy, including at least one pointer which has a clearly recognizable connection to the moral arguments that people actually make in real-world politics?
(I have been curious about this (in a cynically skeptical way) off and on for years, and today I'm actively curious. To quote myself commenting on another blog earlier today, "Someday I'd love to see some scholar trace the intellectual history of how the left built its firewall between inheriting nationality and owning jobs, on one side, and the classic criticisms of property rights on the other.")