
Want to help the poor and transform your economy? Give people cash. - nkoren
http://chrisblattman.com/2013/05/23/dear-governments-want-to-help-the-poor-and-transform-your-economy-give-people-cash/
======
mc-lovin
This is a great article. Not because it proves a particular point (we should
accept the evidence no matter where it leads) but because of the clarity of
the article, and the fact that it accurately represents the academic paper: on
a cursory reading of the academic paper, the randomization is truly as good as
they sell it in the linked article.

I think this is potentially a big step forward in our understanding of
development. It challenges the assumption that the main thing holding back
development is a lack of investment in human capital (training) rather than a
lack of access to physical capital.

The only issue I have is whether you can expect the same results from one-off
payments, as an ongoing basic income, and whether we can expect the same
results for the whole population as the group that was selected, who seem to
form a very specific group.

~~~
bdcs
If I recall correctly, it has been shown that Basic Income Guarantees[1] (free
cash without means testing besides citizenship) works incredibly well for both
developed and developing countries. This article comes as no surprise, but is
well-written and compelling which is a great boon to BIG. Despite stereotypes
of poor people, basic income is used very effectively with little
administrative cost (not for booze and gambling? how bizarre!): \- People work
more and for a higher wage (exceptions: recently pregnant mothers and
students) \- Domestic abuse plummets \- People are unemployed LONGER, but use
that time to find a job they like more (or create their own!)

This form of welfare has been supported by people on the right (Friedman,
Hayek) and left (Russell). I'm really disappointed it isn't used to greater
effect. Voters and tax-payers have simply no faith in those damned poor people
to make the right decision it seems.

Here's a great story from in Canada, where it was referred to as Mincome [2]

BIG also works well in India, where women, in particular, benefit[3]. A
further benefit is it is highly corruption resistant. There are no tests,
forms, etc. If you're a citizen, you get cash. Done.

Please, anyone, show me some research that shows BIG doesn't work well. Cheers

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee>

[2] A town without poverty? <http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100>

[3] <http://www.soas.ac.uk/news/newsitem84314.html>

~~~
mc-lovin
You are making very big claims without adequate references. The study shows
the effects of a one-off payment, to a highly selective group (note that I'm
not implying their randomization was bad, but that both treatment and control
groups were very special relative to the whole population), an a particular
developing country.

You may personally believe that this is part of a general phenomenon that
applies to highly developed countries, to all groups of people in that
country, and in the long term not just the short term, but you have presented
little evidence for the claims in your first paragraph (I read all the links).

You seem to view BIG as somehow unique, when in fact it is functionally
equivalent to progressive taxation plus welfare, when welfare is only
conditional on income. It is also hard to argue against because it treats
redistribution, which is a sliding scale, as something absolute: it suggests
an (imaginary) bar for "basic" income.

I personally believe systems where welfare is primarily conditional in income,
but weakly conditional on searching for work or getting training (such as
Australia's) are optimal for developed countries. The government can be far
more generous when it adds some strings to welfare, than when it is simply
giving out money. The only issue is whether countries with different
governmental frameworks can copy Australia's model.

In short, you seem to be overlooking what I consider the real interest of this
study, which is its specific relevance to developing nations.

>Please, anyone, show me some research that shows BIG doesn't work well.
Cheers

That's a very asymmetric way to think about the evidence for and against a
particular policy.

edit: The specific problem with your evidence, is that on a such a broad
topic, I would expect to see an academic review of the literature. What you
provided was [1] wikipedia, [2] an interesting example with no control, and
[3] something that wasn't an actual academic study, but a description of a
program and it's alleged benefits without any peer-reviewed study
demonstrating these benefits.

~~~
Cushman
> I would expect to see an academic review of the literature. What you
> provided was [1] wikipedia

I expect this is why you're seeing downvotes.

~~~
mc-lovin
If you look at that article, you will find it does not provide evidence for
any of the claims in the post. That's not the fault of Wikipedia, as I
explained, this is an extremely broad and complex issue, and most academics
won't directly cover it because "basic income" is too vague a concept for
them.

But that was the point I was making in the first place: you cannot cite three
sources and then claim to have the evidence on your side, when these three
sources don't provide the evidence that would be needed.

~~~
Cushman
Personally, I assumed that whatever followed "If I recall correctly" would
likely not be expertly sourced. I did look at that Wikipedia article-- it has
102 references, many of them offline. So hell if _I_ know if there's evidence
in there, but I'm certainly not complaining that I don't know where to read
more for myself.

But like the GP-- It's something I want to believe, it's very well-
credentialed, and I've seen some encouraging but inconclusive evidence. So
naturally as a skeptic the main thing I'm looking for now is the strongly
negative evidence, if such a thing can exist. Do you have any leads?

~~~
mc-lovin
I don't want to get too bogged down in the details of this thread, so I'll
just tell you straight up why I don't support the idea of a basic income
guarantee. Hopefully doing so will indirectly address the issue of evidence
that we were discussing.

The main problem is that the BIG is an unnecessary and unhelpful concept. I
believe the sociology is that people like to believe in causes, rather than
fine grained facts or principals, and so BIG is attractive as a cause in spite
of not being a useful concept.

First, BIG confuses the issues around redistribution. Assuming welfare is only
conditional on income, the sum total of taxation, welfare, BIG and others, can
be thought of as a negative taxation system. BIG obscures this because it
implies there is something special about redistribution through a "guaranteed"
income. E.g. economists are very concerned about the incentive effects of
welfare, because every dollar you earn results in less welfare. BIG obscures
this by focusing on the flat portion (the guaranteed income) and drawing
attention away from the more progressive income taxes that would be needed to
pay for it.

Second, BIG is different from many current welfare systems because it is
unconditional on being part of a special group (e.g. a parent, farmer,
elderly) or certain actions (e.g. education, training, looking for work in
good faith). I consider this to be a bad thing, in that it is too extreme in
the direction of being unconditional, at least for the developed world. Both
in terms of ethical fairness, political feasibility, and economic incentives,
giving away money for nothing has strong limits on it. Adding a few
conditions, like ensuring people are really looking for work, strikes a much
better balance. So again, BIG takes a sliding scale decision (how much should
welfare be conditional on certain actions, and should it be conditional on
things other than income) and makes it seem like a binary decision by only
providing one extreme as an alternative to the status quo.

btw, below I give a well argued article which claims BIG _is_ a useful
concept.

www.usbig.net/pdf/manyfacesofubi.pdf

~~~
ppereira
I don't understand your problem with a basic income guarantee. You say that it
is unhelpful, but it is a very clear description of the mechanics of
redistribution. It is much easier to explain a "basic income" to my mother
than a "negative income tax" -- and yes she understands that anything provided
by the government must be paid for by taxation.

The unconditional aspect of a basic income allows individuals to accumulate
capital. Many welfare systems require recipients to sell their cars, property,
and maintain bank accounts at a near zero balance. They also clawback
employment earnings at punitive tax rates of 50-100% (often higher than the
top-marginal rate). Since welfare is often very low, those supplementing their
income are often driven to working under-the-table for cash. This creates a
welfare trap that keeps poor people poor.

Means checking requires an expensive bureaucracy, is paternalistic, and I
think unnecessary.

If you read the research results for the Canadian and US experiments you will
find that people want to work, even with a basic income. The slight negative
incentives that were discovered can be attributable to two basic factors: 1\.
some women chose to stay home to care for children or elderly family members
-- this has an obvious societal benefit, and 2\. if the experiment is
conducted in a non-saturation site (i.e. one fraction of the population gets a
basic income while the other does not) then there will be an economic
distortion affecting low income workers. Employers are driven to employ those
without a basic income, who are more desperate for work. The same would happen
if you tried to enforce a minimum wage on half the population. Employers would
hire those without a minimum wage.

If you are looking for the real problems with the basic income, it is easy to
find. The cost to raise everyone above the poverty line is _very_ high. One
would have to consider the size of the family unit receiving funds and adjust
for economies of scale. Nevertheless, it could be done. By contrast, a basic
income at the rate of many existing welfare systems would be very affordable
and would result in many collateral savings such as reduced health care and
administration costs.

Also, despite the cost of a basic income, it has the support of many Nobel-
prize winning economists because it increases utility. I have not yet seen a
model for optimal income taxation that does not point to a negative tax /
basic income. See, for example, textbooks on public economics or the classic
paper by Mirrlees,

[http://www.econ.yale.edu/~dirkb/teach/pdf/mirrlees/1971%20op...](http://www.econ.yale.edu/~dirkb/teach/pdf/mirrlees/1971%20optimal%20taxation.pdf)

~~~
mc-lovin
While you make some interesting arguments for a basic income guarantee, I
think your post would be better as a top level comment.

You don't seem to have addressed anything I wrote past the first two
paragraphs (which were a kind of introduction). E.g. I explained precisely
what I meant by the concept being "unhelpful".

------
Cushman
I'm very predisposed to believe this. In fact, I'll go further and say I'm not
sure I can think of a friend of mine who wouldn't do something really cool if
you gave them a year's income in cash.

My friends, generally speaking, spent a lot of money on a very good education
that's not valued by the labor market. To put that another way: My friends are
wildly overqualified for what they do, and many of them are poorer than broke.

Those without a lot of ambition are pretty much the millenial layabouts you
imagine. They're working median-wage retail jobs to pay the rent, smoking a
lot of weed, and just generally hanging out. They don't want to work more, and
they couldn't really work any less, but they seem pretty happy.

Those _with_ ambition aren't living much different. They're working median-
wage retail jobs to pay the rent, working second jobs to try to pay down their
debt faster, smoking a lot less weed, and using the rest of their time trying
hard to find a job in their field of expertise that wouldn't pay much more
even if it did exist. These people could _easily_ work a lot less if they
wanted to, but they don't. They want to work more, and work harder, but they
cannot find work to do. They seem like they're struggling.

So say we gave them all an unconditional grant which erases their debt and
provides some capital. (A year's income wouldn't do this for most, but set
that aside.) Most of the first group, maybe it wouldn't affect that much. They
might quit their jobs or cut down on hours, but actually they don't mind their
jobs that much. They might smoke more weed, but that's probably not possible.
More likely they'll spring for a car or a house or a home theater and just
keep on keepin' on.

For those in the second group, though, this changes everything. They've
instantly jumped a decade into their own future. They'll quit their jobs the
same day, immediately start planning a move to where they _really_ want to
live. They'll immediately open small businesses. They'll collaborate on epic
works of art. Some of them will buy boats; some of them will buy farms.
They'll travel, volunteer, teach, research, write, direct, design, produce,
and _make_ things. And you know what? They'll probably smoke even _less_ weed.

It's just a wishful thought experiment, but it does seem plausible the overall
economic effect would be _massively_ positive. The argument against basic
income seems to be basically that it would move people from the second
category into the first category. Maybe that's the case for people in general,
I don't know, but for the poor young people _I_ know it seems far more likely
to do the opposite.

~~~
sliverstorm
There is a fucking huge problem with this idea (excuse my french). The
majority of jobs in this country, nobody wants to do- _but they need to be
done_. If we just freely hand out a living wage to everybody, nobody will be
working the crappy jobs and our world will _fall apart_.

~~~
Cushman
Capitalism, hey? The garbage will pile up until somebody is willing to take
away the garbage for what you are willing to pay. Then you will know what the
_real_ value of garbage removal is to you, when you can no longer use the
inhumanities of poverty as a bargaining chip.

~~~
sliverstorm
Thing is, the system is already stable. I take that as meaning it is a
reasonable approximation of where most services belong.

Don't forget that the _real_ value of garbage removal to me is not what
defines the fair market price. It is the combination of what it is worth to
me, and what someone will do it for. In the case of garbage removal, it is
likely the latter is lower than the former, and thus where the market settled.

~~~
zem
nope, it's the combination of what it is worth to you, and what someone will
do it for, when the alternative to doing it is to starve. if you remove that
large influencing factor, you would get a lot closer to a _fair_ market price,
where the unpleasantness of a job factors more strongly into the value of
doing it.

------
kevinconroy
Some professors at Yale had a similar idea and set up a charity that allows
you to directly transfer cash to very low income families in Kenya. They're
doing a bunch of randomized control trials (RTCs) which are the NGO equivalent
of A/B testing for outcomes. Highly recommend them if you're looking to
support something like this directly (no pun intended).

<http://www.givedirectly.org/>

~~~
thenomad
REALLY?

This is about the best news I've heard all week. Thank you VERY much for
pointing us to this.

The costs of Basic Income test programs in the third world are SO damn low
that I've been thinking for a while that it's possible to run some fairly
credible privately-funded trials. Really pleased to find someone else doing it
so I don't have to try to learn the NGO side of things :)

------
tnuc
As much as I would like to say this is a good idea, it probably isn't.

Most "grants" that the world bank gives are usually as a supplement to some
loan that they are giving to a country.

Think of it as Ford/World Bank funds a loan for a new road so they can sell
cars. The world bank gives a loan for the road, Ford sells the cars. And on
the side the world bank sets up a little side thing to show statistics by
training existing motor mechanics how to fix Fords by giving them money for
parts/tools and minimal support. The money is given out piece meal to ensure
they spend it on the right things, like Ford parts.

World bank builds the road, Ford sells the cars, some small figure is given to
keep the mechanics happy and help fudge figures. The road builders are from a
foreign country and get a tax break as does Ford.

Some years down the track, after the professors go home, the road falls into
disrepair. The government/people owe money for the loan for the road, and the
Ford/Car owners are in debt to the banks for their vehicles. Poverty cycle
starts again.

The only part of the road that is kept in good shape is the road from some
mine to the port/market, if at all.

The figures presented in the article look at a small part of the larger
picture. The countries that "fund" the world bank benefit as they use it prop
up their own industries to the detriment of the developing country.

The long term figures on most of these "aid" programs are mostly awful. Most
countries would be better off accepting no aid and building what they need.

I have spent too many years working with shit like this. The world bank and
the IMF are much the same.

Note: Ford is an example, please replace it with any car company.

Edit/update: The author of the article is Chris Blattman; He is most likely
going to say great things about any project that he writes about. If you write
bad things you don't get invited back to write again/get paid more money.

~~~
yarou
Upvoted you because it's a very good analogy. The Washington Consensus and
neoliberal trade theory have wrecked developing economies by at least 10-20
years. It's no surprise that the developing economies doing well right now
accepted little to no aid. Reading up on structural adjustment policies give a
good insight into what the consequences are of seemingly benevolent loans.
It's basically like a mafiosi loan shark giving you a desperately needed loan,
then threatening to break your legs because you don't have the means to pay it
back, forcing you to do whatever they ask of you.

~~~
mc-lovin
>It's basically like a mafiosi loan shark giving you a desperately needed
loan, then threatening not to make any loans to you in the future because you
don't have the means to pay it back, forcing you to do whatever they ask of
you.

Fixed that for you

------
pkulak
There was just a very good Planet Money that came to many of the same
conclusions:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/21/185801589/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/21/185801589/episode-460-its-
hard-to-do-good)

~~~
joezydeco
I caught this episode a few days ago and I totally didn't expect this
conclusion. Planet Money does a superb job of coming up with relevant topics
and episodes way way beyond their original mission of explaining the 2007
meltdown.

------
jaggederest
Interesting how nearly a hundred and fifty years after Marx wrote "Das
Kapital", it comes down to access to and ownership of the means of production
in poor countries.

~~~
josh2600
Sort of. Owning the means of production is the answer when other productive
means of earning a living are not. That is to say, if you can't earn a living
working for someone else's production, it makes sense to own your own.

Ergo, you don't necessarily need to own the means of production, you just need
access to meaningful, productive and well-compensated positions. Owning your
own production is one way to achieve this.

~~~
bct
It also helps ensure that it stays achieved.

------
swalsh
Though its not exactly what the article is talking about, I accept the idea of
a basic income in some form as almost inevitable... but it'll have to wait
until after the baby boomers loose power.

~~~
tomjen3
I doubt it will ever be accepted and I hope it isn't. Basic income is a waste
of money -- a stack of clothing, a toothbrush and deodorant, 3 meals a day and
a bed to sleep in could be provided to any citizen who asked for it for a lot
cheaper and it would prevent anybody from dying in the streets (the scenario
welfare proponents argue necessitates the governments involment), yet would
also provide maximum incentives to get of welfare and to find a job.

(since I don't think this should be means-tested, I guess you could argue it
is a form of basic income, although usually basic-income is paid in some form
of cash).

~~~
azundo
Read the article. This is exactly what NGOs attempt to do right now, figure
out exactly which things people need and provide the bare minimum. It doesn't
work. The point of the article and paper is that people with choice actually
do make good decisions and turn that money into economic growth.

While you may think that handing out a bunch of stuff to people (even if that
stuff is the bare minimum) would provide incentive to move off of such
assistance it doesn't. It strips people of any interest in agency and has them
believe they don't control their own well-being. This is exactly what the
development sector has gotten wrong for several decades and until things
change, not much good will come out of it.

~~~
josh2600
Yes that's exactly the point. I originally agreed that providing the basic
units of subsistence would be the most equitable form of welfare, and perhaps
in a country like the United States it is, but in a society without access to
means of production or meaningful employment, the basic units of subsistence
cannot provide economic growth.

If you want growth, you need enterprise, not subsistence.

------
thenomad
Those of you who are opposed to Basic Income Guarantees or cash transfers on
the basis that you believe they don't work:

Can you define the assumptions / beliefs that make you think they don't work,
in a testable fashion? (Ideally in a fashion which would be testable on as
small and cheap a scale as possible.)

I'm not asking this because I'm planning to rubbish those assumptions or
beliefs. I'm asking because this is an area of enough interest to me that I
may look into organising fundraising for trials in the future, and it'd be
useful to know what the most compelling hyphotheses to test would be.

~~~
mseebach
The problem is the erosion of morals, and that is obviously difficult to test.
It's not about what happens if someone gets a grant for a couple of years to
do whatever, it's waking up in the morning, every morning, and knowing that
even if you never lift a finger to do a single thing for someone else, you're
guaranteed a minimum quality of life.

The promises of the vast european welfare systems were similar to those of the
basic income guarantee proposals: That people's morals are fundamentally wired
to be ashamed of idleness and eagerness to contribute to society, so if you
just remove the negative spirals of poverty, everything will fix itself.

The lessons from the european welfare systems, however, shows something quite
different: Plenty of people are happy never to lift a finger, either for
themselves or anyone else, and a culture of entitlement has blossomed.

~~~
EliRivers
"Plenty of people are happy never to lift a finger, either for themselves or
anyone else, and a culture of entitlement has blossomed."

Nothing we can do about that. They will continue to do so no matter what the
system is. So, we can either keep going as we are, or we can have a basic
income.

Keep going as we are; these people who won't lift a finger continue to do so.
All the people who would use a basic income to better themselves and thus
improve society are also still screwed. Society does not benefit.

Have basic income; these people who won't lift a finger continue to do so. All
the people who would use a basic income to better themselves and thus improve
society do so. Society benefits.

Is it fair? No. Given the choice between more fair, or less fair and a better
society (by which I mean an actual opportunity for people to build themselves
better lives, because no matter what propaganda we hear about "American dream"
the evidence clearly indicates it's just that - a dream), which should we
pick? That's a personal choice, but I know which I'd go for.

~~~
mseebach
You're missing two dimensions in your analysis:

1: The possibility that some people that are currently contributing (by having
a job, even if it's not a great job, and takes care of themselves) choose a
life of no positive activity. I don't know what the calculus is, but they're
not balanced out by just _any_ >0 number of people choosing to improve
society.

2: That when at least _some_ of those people on long term passive income
receive a good, solid kick in the butt (in terms of expiring benefits), they
are, in fact, able to turn their lives around and become contributing members
of society.

~~~
EliRivers
Guess all we can do is look at the evidence where this has been tried.

It's my understanding that it looks good. Seems that more people are caught in
the benefits trap than choose to actually be there.

------
easymovet
We are so hung up on the idea that "you can teach a man to fish and that will
feed him for a lifetime" in reality if you give a man a boat and fishing gear
he will figure out how to fish on his own. The US doesn't have the same credit
issues as uganda but we instead have the wellfare trap which could be easily
solved by raising the minimum wage to above poverty level, heck raising the
minimum wage to $30/hr would solve a lot of our economic problems.

~~~
ctdonath
Raising minimum wage to $30/hr would soon be followed by the price of basic
essentials quadrupling. Money is just a medium of exchange, a convenient way
of saying 20 minutes of floor sweeping is about equal in value to one gallon
of gasoline; raise the pay for the former and the cost of the latter will rise
in kind.

~~~
easymovet
That sounds very reasonable but it actually isn't true see this MIT study:
<http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/157-07.pdf>

------
wildgift
Uhhhh. No kidding. It's cash that created the prosperity in the 1st world. It
wasn't really wages but labor unions that could force wages to rise and
conditions to ease up so that people had more free time that really did it. It
rebalanced the workday so that the high wages could be spent on acquiring
capital, and thus be redeployed into other activities that, among other
things, started new businesses and broke up market monopolies.

------
davidandgoliath
Want to transform your economy? Instead of bailing out banks, bail out student
loans. :)

------
zamalek
Living in a 3rd-world socialist country has taught me one thing: "you do not
multiply wealth by dividing it." Capatalism breeds in an ethos of elitism, the
ratio of motivated:lazy seems to be driven by the possibility of dire failure.

Put another way, my government spends ridiculous amounts of money (as much as
20% of the salaries of the earners) on "people," and all they get in return is
an unmotivated nation. The only people that are truely motivated are the
demographic that are excluded from the government assistance (and I think that
they would stand to be unmotivated in the event that they government gave them
money instead).

The only way to transform the economy would be to give money to people that
are _deeply motivated_ ; people who do what they do because they believe it is
what is needed (religeous for want of a better word). The problem is that
those people need to be identified.

Instead of discussing "give everyone money," I think it's better to instead
discuss "identify who deserves gratis money." Universities play a pretty big
role in our current grant system; unfortunately they are broken beyond all
hope - they are doing a terrible job at it.

------
dools
There was a very similar article here a few weeks (months?) ago about a
startup Give Directly (or something like that) ... Perhaps they referenced
this research.

it may seem like a tautology to say this but this only works where the root
cause of poverty is lack of capital.

In cases where the root cause of poverty is deeply entrenched social
disadvantage, mental illness, substance abuse or corruption then handing out
cash will do little to solve poverty.

~~~
easymovet
Agreed, in those places you need to have a min wage that's higher than the
poverty level and higher than any wellfare traps.

------
michelpereira
In Brazil there is a government initiative named Bolsa Família that gives US$
45,00 per child on school. It's removing proplr from poverty and increasing
the local market in some cities.

The main benefit is that the people doesnt want to earn this money from
govern, so they stsrt to look at job opportunities.

~~~
michelpereira
More information about the program:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia>

------
spiritplumber
I tried this with two homeless girls and it literally mostly went up in smoke.
Giving them anything but (groceries, parts for their projects, etc) worked a
lot better,

------
Aeiper
This reminds me of myself because I've been trying to get $100 to make a
website, but not one person has given me a single dollar...

------
youngerdryas
We have structural unemployment that is only going to get worse so something
will have to change but idle hands being the devil's workshop I think some
minimum of productive output will have to be required if only for their own
sake. Volunteer charity work or art, anything but total sloth.

------
wittysense
I'm not sure what to say to this, honestly, and I technically mean that, given
my background in philosophy. I see the Sorite's Paradox pop up everywhere, and
I'm frankly surprised to see it uniquely apply here.

How Much do I give? I frequently hand out $5s, $20s, on the principle that at
that given time, given what is in my pocket and on my (spontaneously emerging)
schedule, this cash would better service this chap, bloke, schizo, street-
ranter, street-cryer, snot driveling, moaning, wailing, decaying, wasting --
stop me when you get my point.

Whence cometh Jesus?

On every occasion I give large sums, thinking "not too large" because well --
[insert tangent:] Today I stopped for a BIT too long to hand a bloke on the
street a cigarette. I'm wearing my usual dapper attire. A second person
accosts me. Then a third. Before I knew it, I had half a pack of cigarettes. I
was handing out the first as a romantic gesture, latent in capitalism: "Here's
yr last cig, mate." We all do it. Are you ready to buy a pack, walk out, hand
them all out, and sleep without absurdity?

Are you calling for decentralized, anarchism liquidation? If you are, fucking
say so. Because I've been fucking waiting for this day. If you tell me to
fucking burn down a bank, don't leave it to my imagination to make out that
you're trying to say that. This is becoming infuriating the way we programmers
are writing.

I dropped a street violinist a $20. He MOANED at me, and STOPPED playing. I
had to REMIND him that I listened to him from a hotel room from which I was
staying for 45 minutes. He kept me sane, as a programmer isolated and stranded
in a remote city. I could not communicate this to him.

Do you think green bills with "God" printed on them are the solution? This is
NOT mature thinking. I just don't care.

Are you telling me I need a GTD strategy to liquidating my hard-earned,
mentally crippling, psychologically and socially handicapping means for a
living through this computer such that everyone on my street gets the average?
Should I become a servant to the masses, when I'm already working for them in
my own form of labor that I know?

Not to mention the opportunities for factionism and favoritism. Perhaps it's
time for this. Perhaps this is what you are saying. But do I still have to
accept that anarchism only works on paper? If I hand someone a bill and say,
"Thank Anarchism, not God. Thank the realization of postscarcity."

I'll get slapped by mothers and gang members alike. It's just going to get
spun as a hand out.

