It’s an unprecedented – and massive – experiment: Since 2017 the U.S.-based charity GiveDirectly has been providing thousands of villagers in Kenya what’s called a “universal basic income” – a cash grant of about $50, delivered every month, with the commitment to keep the payments coming for 12 years. It is a crucial test of what many consider one of the most cutting-edge ideas for alleviating global poverty. This week a team of independent researchers who have been studying the impact released their first results.
Can’t wait for someone to dismiss a 12 year study over their feelings that this is wrong. Undoubtedly accompanied by “Don’t they have bootstraps in Kenya, pick yourself up!”
Just as with climate change, they’ll just keep shifting back and forth between “but there’s nothing wrong” to “it’s too expensive to implement this solution” to “Just give us a few years, we’ll come up with something better” in order to derail the argument because the point is to maintain the status quo.
The poorer the poorest are, the richer the wealth class feels by comparison. Inequality, separating the capital society generates from said society into the owner class’s private accounts, is the entire point of capitalism.
Why would capitalists want to mitigate the central social ill they literally engineered for their explicit, sole benefit?
You’re more correct than you know. The rich have been funding studies since the 1950s to prove that “how it is, will be the best we will ever have,” and consistently those studies keep showing that if the rich would just pay people a thriving wage, they’d be magnitudes richer than there are.
The only conclusion I can reach is that since they have been shown the data for decades before the rest of us got a hold of it, they have decided to see how much unnecessary and needless death and suffering they can create before we start sniping them.
Their latest attempt to completely disregard reality was entitled: “You’ll own nothing, and be happy.”
Or “this would never work in America because [litany of ridiculously crass and inaccurate racial stereotypes]”.