In Your Face

South Africa is the world’s most unequal country. It is also only as unequal as the world. This is only possible because the primary tool of Global Apartheid is Nation States. While it has become less and less acceptable to discriminate opportunity by race, gender, and sexual preference, “where you were born” is still a legal tool of hereditary privilege and apartness. According to Bryan Caplan’s book “Open Borders”, we are willing to pay a Trillion Dollars in economic handcuffs to restrict the free flow of labour, goods, capital and services. The biggest loser in the restriction of four freedoms is people. I am a Soutie. One foot in South Africa and one foot in the UK. In the relief programs for 2020’s forced time to reflect, unemployed people in South Africa received R350/month (about £15). The furlough program in the UK saw about 7.5 million people receive 80% of their salaries. Capital Controls make it difficult to even send Unconditional Cash Transfers. The contrast is stark. I only see that because my eyes and heart are on both countries. South Africa takes the world’s inequality, squashes it, and shoves it in your face.

Dependency and Entitlement

Most people are honest. Most people act honestly. The data collected by “Bagel Man” Paul Feldman suggests that the most “Dependency and Entitlement” (not his words, but what we normally attribute to the poor) comes from people with more. Feldman left bagels and honesty boxes in multiple offices in Washington. Some people took without paying, but not enough to make the project not worthwhile. Interestingly, honesty decreased higher up the chain. A criticism of just giving people money is that it creates dependency. This forgets just how dependent even the wealthy are on their communities. On their ability to rely on each other when they stumble. To retreat to their homes. Feldman found the honesty on the Executive floors to be lower than on the Sales and Administration floors. Except we are blind to our own dependencies. Our own entitlements. We forget the job we got through friends. The bank of Mom and Dad. We shouldn’t design systems around our fears. We should design them around trust and honesty. Most people are good.

See what the Bagel Man saw

Core Strength

Stay home doesn’t have a universal meaning. The self-evident truth of the current Global Crisis is that while we are all in the same storm, we don’t have the same life-boats. An excessive focus on the conspicuous, means our foundations and buffers have been found wanting. Our lives revolve around income. Income defines our local. Who we spend our time with. How we spend our time. Who can afford to spend time with us. So that in an emergency, when we retreat to our safe spaces, we aren’t connected to those who don’t have matching core security. We don’t have names, faces and trust to do something as simple as a Cash Transfer to those who don’t have the privilege of a world that continues when the work stops. Most of us don’t even have trusted individuals who have done the work to understand the parallel realities we are separated from in Global Apartheid. There is some existing trust. There are existing relationships.  We need to lean in, imperfectly. Then tear down walls and build bridges when we start again.

Cash Transfer

People need Cash. Without a living wage, or a buffer, or Capital, or friends or family to assist, or time, it becomes the only problem that matters. What each individual needs the cash for differs. The best way for them to spend it differs. We live in a hand-to-mouth, pass-the-parcel economy where we have to be active to survive, and there have to be enough jobs (available and permissible) in a functional chain for the music to keep playing. We can’t pause to check everyone is okay. We can’t pause to breathe. Except. We can. There are buffers. There is Capital. We do have enough. The challenge is a very simple technological problem. Cash Transfers. One Bank account to another. One person to another. It is not that we can’t do it. It is that we don’t trust each other. Stay home doesn’t mean the same thing and we don’t live together. In a world where we can’t look someone in the eye, hold their hand in a greeting, learn to pronounce their name, and see their world… the immediate necessity is Emergency Trust.

Hand it Over

Give Cash

The theory behind GiveDirectly.org is that people are best placed to make their own decisions. As Rutger Bregman puts it, “Poverty isn’t a lack of character, it is a lack of cash”. Unconditional Cash Transfers don’t have any criteria about who receives the money, or how it is spent. Cash gives people autonomy over their own lives. All business ideas start with identifying and articulating the problems of people with money, in a way the people with money recognise. Non-Monetary programs tend to impose the views of people with money, on what problems people without money have. The addition of a layer of bureaucracy (people who aren’t in poverty receiving salaries) and costs (of means testing and delivery) means lots of the money allocated to those struggling gets lost in translation. There is an ego cost of giving cash. It means you don’t get to use your wisdom and insight to solve the problems of others. It means you trust that they understand their worlds better than you do.