Great question. Top three reasons: 1) There are many benefits from delivering newborns in health clinics outside of Nevirapine. 2) It would be much more challenging to reach all of the traditional birth attendants, maintain constant supply of Nevirapine, and monitor proper administration. Moreover, in our case, the cost of the program is the cash transfers and this is a large benefit for program participants. 3) Traditional birth attendants do not consistently test women for HIV when they deliver, because of various reasons (one being it is bad for business to share negative news).
I think this is a great game and a portrayal of reality where a small number of people get most of the wealth, a 50% number are middle class with enough to be just okay (or at 1) and with a still a very large number who can barely have a comfortable life (say $4k/month household income).
Yes, many economics papers are at the intersection of economics and psychology with a focus on human behavior. One of the broad assumptions of economics is that individuals are largely rational, but controlled experiments sometimes show that people don't always act in their best interest.
But at a macro level, there are no controlled experiments. We can look toward "natural" experiments (e.g., wages and the labor rate of two border towns, where one is in a state that has raised minimum wage and the other has not), but there's nothing like the gold standard double blind randomized trial that you'd find in a drug study.
In all seriousness, can somebody please help me understand what can be bought for $1.9 and how they came up with this arbitrary number?! I don't know if anybody can even get (or cook) one full meal a day for that... maybe I'm missing something?
Why even have such a measure unless it's going to be at least $10/day as one likely needs at least that much just to feed themselves the cheapest possible food they can find.
That's enough for 50 servings, meaning you could feed yourself for $0.20 a day. Of course this ignores PPP, malnutrition and other factors, but don't underestimate how cheap food actually is.
A few years ago, I realized that several Asian cuisines are actually very cheap. Indian dishes are a great illustration of how you can make wonderfully tasty meals with very little of the expensive ingredients, and cheaper than fast food—not to mention way healthier.
It's not hard to be cheaper than fast food, other than possibly dollar/value menus.
All of the "staples" are insanely cheap - potatos, rice, etc. Most vegetables are as well. Toss in som emeat of whatever was on sale and you can easily cook a meal for 4 for 10 dollars, if not quite a bit cheaper.
Exactly. You just have to look past the 'big steak with some chips' meals, and appreciate something with staples plus a smaller portion of meat (e.g., stirfry, pasta, curry/stew bulked with potatoes).
Frozen veggies are healthier and cheaper. Plus you get to cook them to your taste, rather than what the canner decides (cooking too long, adding salts, etc.)
Frozen veggies definitely win if you have access to refrigeration -> access to energy. Canning is a revolutionary preservation technique in that it allows for long-term storage of perishables at room temperature.
1lb of raw rice has ~1200 calories, so 5lb has ~6000 calories, so a person needs about 2.5lbs per day.
At 200 calories per cup of cooked rice, you'd need 1.5 servings to get close to a "cheeseburger equivalent" meal in calories, and my "cheeseburger equivalent" system gives you 6-7 cheeseburgers per day at about 350 calories each. This means a person is eating 9-10 cups of rice per day.
For example, in India $0.3 has about the same purchasing power as $1 in the US. US$1.9/day is thus about Rs 400/day in India, which is survivable. For example, a simple meal at a food stall will be under Rs 100.
Like, I'm not trying to be snarky, there's a lot of conversions going on there that aren't explicated. My takeaway is that if you can buy food and little else, that's poverty, right? Or no?
I was born and brought up in India. When I was going to school in 1990, my dad used to earn around 6,000 INR / month (120$/month, exchange rate was 50 back then). We ate out probably once every few months but even then, the salary was enough to feed family of 5 and send me and my sisters to school. I think you lack the perspective on how poor India and China is.
It was simply a correction to the following portion: "6,000 INR / month (120$/month, exchange rate was 50 back then)". Assuming the accuracy of the salary, it appears the following is more accurate: "6,000 INR / month (300$/month, exchange rate was 20 back then)".
Well, if you have a home and can cook food 400 Rs/day isn't too bad. (With 100 Rs you can get some vegetables more than a kilo of rice) Buying from a food stall is going to be somewhat more expensive than cooking food yourself. And food stall prices vary depending on quality of the food.
Also, poverty definitions vary.
EDIT: 400 Rs/day = 12000 Rs/month which isn't horrible.
The reason why it's $1.90 is because extreme poverty was pegged at a dollar per day by the World Bank in 1993 which has risen due to inflation to $1.90. There's nothing magical about the number, it simply provides a convenient baseline for comparisons to be made.
You forget that the US is an extremely expensive place to live relative to countries like India and China where enormous %s of the world population lives. $1.90 goes a long way in those places.
$1.9 doesn't afford you a comfortable life anywhere, but in the developing world, it's enough to not fear starvation. And that fear is a big part of being "extremely poor".
PS You need to do the shopping, or learn to cook, $1.90 is very easy to feed people. But obviously it also about other things like food security and important stuff like happiness.
> Why even have such a measure unless it's going to be at least $10/day as one likely needs at least that much just to feed themselves the cheapest possible food they can find.
Out of touch much? While studying, I fed myself with about $10-15 a week, and I ate better quality food than most people. I live in a place where food is more expensive than the US.
You can buy the calories you need per day for individual cents, if you buy potatoes in bulk. Above that, buy basic ingredients in large quantities, and you will have plenty of money left for fresh greens to top off you meals. Don't eat meat in every meal, and meat should always be a flavoring, not what makes up most of the meal.
I guess I could get by on $1.90 per day for food in the US if I had to, but it would really suck.
But the article is about extreme poverty. People who don't know if they're going to survive the next week or month. In the developing world, $1.90 per day provides just enough security that you're pretty sure you won't starve next week.
It's pretty damn bleak, but the fact is that a lot of people live in conditions where they know they may starve in the near future, and if fewer people live in those conditions, that's important.
My wife runs an early stage charity called New Incentives supported by Givewell, hoping to become a candidate for their top charity recommendation.
They use an evidence-backed model called conditional cash transfers. They give money to disadvantaged pregnant women when they achieve health goals that increase the probability of their child's survival (example: activities to reduce HIV transmission from mothers to babies).
The whole organization is a mobile-first organization using biometrics for verification (because technology is the best way to cut across corruption) and they work on many interesting operational challenges. The organization could really use the help of more engineers, especially Android app developers, to tackle some of these challenges.
If anyone is interested, please respond to this comment or ping me.
I have a (minor) concern that we here at HN are biased towards charities that are tech-oriented, hip app-developing to solve the world, versus a more mundane charity. Can you (or your wife) comment on that? Why does this charity need flashy tech? New tech comes with costs, like unreliability or unexpectedly high costs or extra training - any concern for that? Givewell's support is a significant confidence booster in this regards, but I think it's an interesting subject to discuss.
Best of luck to New Incentives.
(P.S. if you want to recruit in this thread, I'd specify if it's paid or volunteer and whether it's on-site or remote. Or anything else they have in Who's Hiring? threads.)
Great question! The key is in what way are we using tech. Our model, conditional cash transfers (CCTs), has been used for many years by governments in several contexts. We are not inventing anything new by any means. However, our manner of implementation is trying to innovate by reducing some of the biggest challenges these government programs face: corruption and accountability.
For example, without technology we'd be facing the same issue as the Nigerian government (the country we work in): ghost beneficiaries. By taking advantage of currently available biometric solutions, we reduce this and increase the likelihood that our money goes to real beneficiaries. We are wary of adopting technology unless it is absolutely necessary. Another way we use technology is to collect data in the field. We are working in remote, rural areas with high levels of rainfall so we use mobile apps to collect data. This helps reduce the amount of data compromised and also provides an additional layer of verification: by seeing timestamps and knowing exactly who edits what and when. This helps us maintain higher levels of accountability and identify early warning signs of potential fraud.
Tech is very effective in reducing corruption, because tech makes it possible to make for example bureaucrats and applicants unknowable to each other in simple cases, thereby making it harder to ask for, or give, money.
Online applications are a huge success, corruption-wise. So tech does really have something going on in a very meaningful amount of cases.
Do you know if there is a good cost-effective/cost-benefit analysis for Conditional Cash Transfers? In the one that I have seen, CCTs do poorly. I would like to know why GiveWell is pushing in that direction.
Article from 2013 analysing and comparing Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) and Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) - Pennies From Heaven (http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...). The evidence suggests that they're both pretty effective, and you would choose between the two depending on the initial conditions in the region and budget available.
It's important to note that GiveWell is not necessarily pushing in this direction yet. Instead, they are placing bets that they potentially think could have a huge payoff if done right.
CCTs can be very effective or completely ineffective. This is because the second "C" matters a lot. What the program conditions makes all the difference. If the program is focusing on incentivizing interventions that are not cost-effective, the CCT won't be cost-effective because the underlying focus is too costly. Another aspect is what the long-term effects of the program are when the incentive ends. In our case, we are focusing on HIV transmission from mothers to infants and neonatal death. Our temporary incentives have a long-lasting effect by saving a child from getting HIV or a newborn from dying. However, if you were to have a CCT for something that is not life or death and would be needed throughout one's lifetime, the cost would potentially be too high.
Some of the most successful CCTs are for immunizations. This is because immunizations are a proven cost-effective health intervention in the first place. So adding the small CCT to increase coverage maintains cost-effectiveness while achieving benefits from having a greater percent of the population that is immunized.
Only if the funds are shared between the two people fighting the lawsuit... In the current market, the entity spending the most money generally wins. This needs to go away first and it can go away if both (or all) entities in a lawsuit have to pool and divide the resources. This should help equalize the ground a little bit.
Playboy should relaunch itself as a women empowerment magazine. There is a strong sense of empowerment for women to pose nude and playboy helped bring about this revolution (or can take some claim for it). We don't need another Vice but we do need a magazine that interviewed the likes of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to do interviews on women leaders. It should be remembered that Christie Hefner has probably directed the company for a lot of its history and was instrumental in its development. In many ways, playboy is not inherently sexist or undermining women (do we consider a nude men's magazine to undermine men? no so the argument carries itself quite well I think).
But the "Playboy philosophy" (which was a thing Hefner, at least, took very seriously -- see http://www.brooklynrail.org/2005/07/express/the-playboy-phil...) was always explicitly about liberating men: liberating them from the constraints of things like marriage and monogamy and propriety. It was interested in liberating women only insofar as it's difficult for men to live a swinging lifestyle in a culture where all the women are either monogamously married or saving themselves for such a marriage. Swinging men can't swing unless there are swinging women around as well. But women's lib, for Playboy, was always about them being freer to offer themselves sexually to men.
Women eventually reappropriated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation) its pages to enable a kind of female liberation that was about what women wanted rather than men, but that was something organic, not something the magazine itself created.
That would be a good idea save for the mostly male audience of Playboy (mag/site). It's always tried to market itself as the Gentleman's magazine, and although it could try to market to women in terms of empowerment, I'd argue that it always tried to empower all people in terms of sexual freedom.
I don't think an all-male audience is where interviews on women leaders should go, simply because it won't sell.
If Playboy wants to be a fashion magazine, it will probably not remain one only for men. If it does, well... they won't make much money because women probably make up a large majority of fashion purchasers. I think if Playboy started talking about women business leaders, they could turn some heads. Honestly, I love me a smart business lady with chops, especially when she's not nude and has achieved a lot more than I probably will.
I would argue that they're not a fashion mag at all, at least in a clothing sense. The apparel they sell with a logo on it, that's definitely marketed towards women. But the magazine is supposed to keep men interested. They themselves have admitted that it's a loss leader.
Playboy used to be something you could keep on your coffee table, engendering sex-positivity while having tasteful and interesting gentlemanly articles. Interviews with MLK and others come to mind, as well as serializations of good books like Fahrenheit 451.
They no longer do this, unfortunately. It was easy enough to cruise on money, and now Playboy is a guilty pleasure for people who remember what it is and don't know how to use the internet for porn.
I want the tasteful Playboy back. I don't care so much about getting rid of the nudes, I just want something interesting to read.
Sure its sexist discrimination. It might be positive discrimination, but there's a flipside. I'm not sure though, I'm not a feminist and even they don't agree on one opinion. I won't argue that in its outlook on what men want, it would degrade men to instinctive animals.
Being taught to be ashamed of your body and to keep it covered all times isn't exactly "empowering".
This is a common feminist talking point. While I agree in this context it could be argued, ultimately it's about the woman having full authority over her body and how its portrayed. That includes the authority to display it in the nude and not be shamed into covering up.
