If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we're far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before.
The solution is to just give the poor cash, instead of all this job training and drug counseling and education.
4 comments:
Sachs says similar things in "The End of Poverty". He makes the point that if you don't have enough money to get to a minimum point you are trapped in poverty. The example he used was if you just make enough to feed your family then you don't have any money to repair your infrastructure so it degrades. With inferior infrastructure you make less money next year the the cycle repeats. The goal should be to get people to the point where they can be self sustaining. Something not mentioned was raising the minimum wage and then indexing it to inflation should help raise the incentive and value of work at a small cost to those who are less affected by price. Of course we could always just tell the poor this sucks but life sucks and is unfair.
Instead of just plain cash which I think might lend itself to abuse I say give them services like health care, food and transportation.
It's really tough to take the risk of trying for more when you have very little. But if you had little risk of losing the very basics and had access to becoming a bit more mobile, especially around here, it might help your chances of becoming more industrious.
Food and basic health care are pretty cheap these days anyhow.
It's almost impossible to navigate the waters of life if you don't have a certain amount of "financial padding". It's one of the reasons why folks like Dave Ramsey say that one of the first things to do is get $1000 in the bank for things like a car breaking down, etc.
yeah that's very true... when you live at the edge of your means day in and day out, and little bump can cause major setbacks and disaster.
Luckily in America it's much more possible to get the work to build up that padding than in most countries.
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