by Gary Farber
ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:
This is something we can do:
To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:
The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world
Everything connects:
The thick black.
I recommend reading some of the comments on this post. But other things can help, too:
10 NASA Inventions You Might Use Every Day
How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats) (by Marshall Kirkpatrick / November 16, 2009)
Parsing how dogs and people communicate.
To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:
The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world
Today, however, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.
Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent of earners. (see this great series in Slate by Timothy Noah on American inequality) Productivity among low and middle-income American workers increased, but their incomes did not. If current trends continue, the United States may soon be more unequal than Brazil.
[...]
But a major part of Brazil’s achievement is due to a single social program that is now transforming how countries all over the world help their poor.
The program, called Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) in Brazil, goes by different names in different places. In Mexico, where it first began on a national scale and has been equally successful at reducing poverty, it is Oportunidades. The generic term for the program is conditional cash transfers. The idea is to give regular payments to poor families, in the form of cash or electronic transfers into their bank accounts, if they meet certain requirements. The requirements vary, but many countries employ those used by Mexico: families must keep their children in school and go for regular medical checkups, and mom must attend workshops on subjects like nutrition or disease prevention. The payments almost always go to women, as they are the most likely to spend the money on their families. The elegant idea behind conditional cash transfers is to combat poverty today while breaking the cycle of poverty for tomorrow.
Most of our Fixes columns so far have been about successful-but-small ideas. They face a common challenge: how to make them work on a bigger scale. This one is different. Brazil is employing a version of an idea now in use in some 40 countries around the globe, one already successful on a staggeringly enormous scale. This is likely the most important government anti-poverty program the world has ever seen. It is worth looking at how it works, and why it has been able to help so many people.
In Mexico, Oportunidades today covers 5.8 million families, about 30 percent of the population. An Oportunidades family with a child in primary school and a child in middle school that meets all its responsibilities can get a total of about $123 a month in grants. Students can also get money for school supplies, and children who finish high school in a timely fashion get a one-time payment of $330. [...]
Brazil’s conditional cash transfer programs were begun before the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but he consolidated various programs and expanded it. It now covers about 50 million Brazilians, about a quarter of the country. It pays a monthly stipend of about $13 to poor families for each child 15 or younger who is attending school, up to three children. Families can get additional payments of $19 a month for each child of 16 or 17 still in school, up to two children. Families that live in extreme poverty get a basic benefit of about $40, with no conditions.
Do these sums seem heartbreakingly small? They are. But a family living in extreme poverty in Brazil doubles its income when it gets the basic benefit. It has long been clear that Bolsa Familia has reduced poverty in Brazil. But research has only recently revealed its role in enabling Brazil to reduce economic inequality.
The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank are working with individual governments to spread these programs around the globe, providing technical help and loans. Conditional cash transfer programs are now found in 14 countries in Latin America and some 26 other countries, according to the World Bank. (One of the programs was in New York City — a small, privately-financed pilot program called Opportunity NYC. A preliminary evaluation showed mixed success, but it is too soon to draw conclusions.) Each program is tailored to local conditions. Some in Latin America, for example, emphasize nutrition. One in Tanzania is experimenting with conditioning payments on an entire community’s behavior.
The program fights poverty in two ways. One is straightforward: it gives money to the poor. This works. And no, the money tends not to be stolen or diverted to the better-off. Brazil and Mexico have been very successful at including only the poor. In both countries it has reduced poverty, especially extreme poverty, and has begun to close the inequality gap.
The idea’s other purpose — to give children more education and better health — is longer term and harder to measure. But measured it is — Oportunidades is probably the most-studied social program on the planet. The program has an evaluation unit and publishes all data. There have also been hundreds of studies by independent academics. The research indicates that conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil do keep people healthier, and keep kids in school.
In Mexico today, malnutrition, anemia and stunting have dropped, as have incidences of childhood and adult illnesses. Maternal and infant deaths have been reduced. Contraceptive use in rural areas has risen and teen pregnancy has declined. But the most dramatic effects are visible in education. Children in Oportunidades repeat fewer grades and stay in school longer. Child labor has dropped. In rural areas, the percentage of children entering middle school has risen 42 percent. High school inscription in rural areas has risen by a whopping 85 percent. The strongest effects on education are found in families where the mothers have the lowest schooling levels. Indigenous Mexicans have particularly benefited, staying in school longer.
[...]
Outside of Brazil and Mexico, conditional cash transfer programs are newer and smaller. Nevertheless, there is ample research showing that they, too, increase consumption, lower poverty, and increase school enrollment and use of health services.
If conditional cash transfer programs are to work properly, many more schools and health clinics are needed. But governments can’t always keep up with the demand — and sometimes they can only keep up by drastically reducing quality. If this is a problem for medium-income countries like Brazil and Mexico, imagine the challenge in Honduras or Tanzania.
For skeptics who believe that social programs never work in poor countries and that most of what’s spent on them gets stolen, conditional cash transfer programs offer a convincing rebuttal. Here are programs that help the people who most need help, and do so with very little waste, corruption or political interference. Even tiny, one-village programs that succeed this well are cause for celebration. To do this on the scale that Mexico and Brazil have achieved is astounding.
Mexico can do this. Mexico.
Why can't America?
You can help in small ways. Help keep the hamsters happy in the heating season for Lambert.
Libby Spencer of The Impolitic.
Joe Bageant has cancer.
Arthur Silber's very bad health means that he's almost entirely housebound.
You can help these people. Or go large. Or help stop Gas Chamber Euthanasia! And help the Animal Rescue Site.
Read The Rest Scale on the people, and the program: 5 out of 5.
ADDENDUM: This post has been revised, as of January 20th, 7:15 p.m., Pacific time, to remove a video, a link, and add a video. Sue me.
Marty? GoodOleBoy? It's YOUR TURN.
How about it?
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 02, 2011 at 02:13 AM
Gary,
a priori - formed or conceived beforehand
An a priori preferference is one formed beforehand, it does not exclude other options in the face of facts. Having a preference for private solutions does not exclude public solutions to problems.
I would also point out that, in your rants graphs etc., the number and percentage of poor and homeless has grown over the years since the implementation of the Great Society.
Last, you talk a lot about not being able to see who poor and homeless people are and how they reached their station in life by looking at them. I agree with this. I try to keep the quarters in my pocket, give to individuals when I have the chance with as little bias for how they ended up there as possible.
You need to apply that same view to your estimate of people of "privilege". Many of us have been homeless, on food stamps, working poor, gone hungry so our children could eat, lived in a room with eight others, etc..
The advantages that we might have today don't make us forget that next month or next year we could again be back on that corner of Elm St hoping the Dinwiddie truck stops by randomly at 4 am to take us to drop off circulars for 10 hours for 8 bucks so we can eat today. Or, for most of the guys with me, they could get a bottle of maddog and a little something to eat.
Or, shorter Marty, don't lecture me about being poor. Give me all the cites on the soltuion you want.
Posted by: Marty | February 02, 2011 at 08:55 AM
'Marty? GoodOleBoy? It's YOUR TURN.
How about it?'
I saw your comment notation on the sidebar so I jumped back here and found you were paging me.
There is too much for me to try to catch up on, but I will say that I have no interest in disenfranchising anyone. I do agree that homeless citizens have a right to vote. They also have other rights. They likely have rights to many public services that may not reach them because the delivery mechanism needs to find an endpoint to close that process. I have been very directly involved in this process since I managed the very first effort to deliver SSI benefits to recipients using EBT. You should have been there when I first approached banks to allow homeless individuals to access their government benefits through ATM's. This takes me back over 2 decades and I'm removed from those processes now, but I do understand the difficulties.
Voting is a process of selecting a representative and there is an assumed geographical connection. We just lost a state elected official in my neighborhood because he suddenly discovered he lived a short distance outside the district he was elected to represent. I don't know how to resolve the residency requirement for homeless people to vote because I don't know who they should be able to vote for.
Posted by: GoodOleBoy | February 02, 2011 at 10:08 AM
Do we need to spend this much?
That's a chunk of change.Note:
Is Robert Gates a poor authority on defense spending, or a crazy liberal? Marty, that's because most of those programs were removed by Republican Congresses and Presidents. Would you like to see the graphs and cites on the history? This is a wonderful think you do, and I applaud you and admire you for it. I wish everyone would do this. I'm well aware of that. It's why I point out that we can afford social support for all our citizens if wePosted by: Gary Farber | February 05, 2011 at 07:35 AM
GoodOleboy: thank you for your thoughtful response.
We've already decided. Hope this helps.More on the legal issues. A state by state chart.
What do you think?
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 05, 2011 at 07:38 AM
'...] And when was the less regulated market that the theory indicates cannot work tried, or did we just jump to the highly regulated theory-based approach? Did we ever have a relatively free market environment in which an individual could acquire health insurance coverage?'
I read your links on voting for the homeless and it looks as if this issue is being addressed and that's good. Healthcare is another good reason to be able to identify homeless people when it is necessary to access healthcare history to treat properly.
Were there any options at all in the marketplace for health insurance during Dickens' age? I thought most health insurance coverage in this country emerged mid-20th century and was highly regulated early in its development. I looked at state mandates and concluded that regulation has much to do with the cost and reduces competitive offerings. I think a reduction in these requirements and state regulations requiring each licensed insurer to pick up an apportioned amount of assigned risk to cover the high cost cohort with pre-existing conditions would be worth trying.
Posted by: GoodOleBoy | February 05, 2011 at 08:40 AM
"Is Robert Gates a poor authority on defense spending, or a crazy liberal?"
Actually Gary the last time I commented on this I wrote:
Funny, I came up with the same 25% number.
Posted by: Marty | February 05, 2011 at 08:56 AM
Damn, forgot to save to buffer, and forgot I was in IE, and a whole long comment just got ate.
And one of the things I wrote was about how I've had Ailments all night, unable to sleep, and thus not up to posting. @$%#%^
Anyway, I wrote about how I agreed with both you guys a lot, but how agreement was boring, and how Duty Calls, and more about agreement, and a bunch of specifics I agree with Marty and Goodoleboy about, and some generalities, and how, hell it was a very long comment.
How I mentioned:
And I edited a lot of this, but too much pain now to recreate, so: How stupid this was, how it incentivised mugging for cards by the same amount, how homeless people would be attacked by other h p for an invaluable card that is desperately hard to obtain, how others will, how it's hard to protect when you're homeless, how this was an insane expenditure of money merely for a Republican talking point and to suppress probably Democratic votes, how this is how the standard Republican line about "saving the taxpaper money" is bs, because see here, and a whole bunch of points, and I gotta go, sorry.It was a nice comment. :-(
Oh, yeah, and hooray for private enterprise and competition, which is better than evil inefficient government.
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 05, 2011 at 11:35 AM
And thanks to LJ for pointing it out, ow now.
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 05, 2011 at 11:35 AM
And no, there were just poorhouses, not fun.
Back soon maybe.
Posted by: Gary Farber | February 05, 2011 at 11:37 AM