give a person a fish

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Here's an article from The Conversation about "basic income" as an alternative to a bunch of different kinds of welfare.

The author, Ralph Callebert, says:

"In my own research on labor in Africa, however, I have found that wage labor is only a small part of a larger picture.

"In most of the Global South, whole generations are growing up without realistic prospects for employment. We cannot develop the world solely by getting people into jobs, encouraging them to start small businesses or teaching them how to farm (as if they didn’t already know). The painful reality is that most people’s labor is no longer needed by increasingly efficient global chains of production."

"In economic speak, a large portion of the world’s population is surplus to the needs of capital. They have no land, no resources and no one to whom they can sell their labor."

These ideas are new to me, but make at least some sense.  I've been wondering what is going to happen to all the people who have traditionally worked in agriculture, or in manufacturing, as those sorts of jobs become less and less available.....

"Giving every resident an unconditional grant, regardless of whether you are a billionaire or destitute, is a significant departure from our existing welfare state."

"Pilot projects suggest that simply giving money to the poor could successfully tackle poverty. In Namibia, poverty, crime and unemployment went down, as school attendance went up. In India, basic income recipients were more likely to start small businesses."

"The problem of global inequality is not that we do not produce enough to provide for the world’s population. It is about the distribution of resources. This is why the idea of a basic income is so important: it discards the assumption that in order to get the income you need to survive, you should be employed or at least engaged in productive labor. Assumptions of this kind are untenable when for so many there are no realistic prospects for employment."

I would surely like to see the results of more research into this idea.  It's entirely new to me, and I wonder what the results would be of adopting this sort of plan.

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