Tuesday, January 02, 2018

Poverty beyond a lunch topic

I deeply care about this topic. I'm finding it hard to assimilate the information & act. This post will be edited as I learn more about this topic. 

The tower of debt vs. tower of idle cash was an interesting concept shared by an ex-Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. Only that the peaks of those towers will increase in the near future unless a miracle happens! Not quite sure why only 7-months duration he served as finance minister.

I perceived that, balancing the towers was where the solution was! Along with a proposal of a capital owned by those happen to work in a corporation & a global currency used for funding scarce countries.

Martin Ford below shares his thoughts on how we'll earn in a world of machines. He brings historical data of Triple Revolution Report by Nobel Laureates submitted to the president of US in 1964 missed the predictions. Not sure if history can only be the reference for future! Are we realizing the pace at which jobs are getting disrupted in the current era unlike in the past ever? He also touches on the Basic income with incentives.

Rutger Bregman quotes the experiments done with sugar cane farmers in India. Another experiment by Frances Amy Richardson in Canada also was quoted. He calls out that poor needs to learn which needs time but "It's like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them into a stormy sea.". He points out that funds are there for Govt to enable the basic income. With more experiments & funds, he thinks without basic necessities of food, water & shelter the poor can't deliver the best results.


  1. Economics works on the premise of production/consumption & supply of money. 
  2. Politics is the decision making affairs within the boundary to distribute power & resources. 
Either money or power that is where things are. The world is an unfair place & a kid born in a well-placed family has a ton of advantages in the world. Various reforms & revolutions might have added systems like reservation, diversity etc. to ensure that every working class is heard/listened to. This will take many more years to make any significant change.

Say, if economics is about skill/advantages & politics is one of means to distribute power. Both are  biased in favor of well-placed family born kids. All powers are moving towards economically strong ends. The destiny is pretty unbalanced & it takes indeed a miracle to balance this out!

Yes, basic income is needed for the goodness of what it brings. But why would a benefited group favor the poor? How about deploying some of these at a nation level & then international level? Is it the greed which is the root cause which needs to be attended? Why are we consuming all the resources to create crappy things which isn't needed in the first place so don't we need to address those?

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