25th January 2021. Money | Burns
Giving them money; the enduring Robert Burns
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to write daily, five days a week, if I can manage it. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Giving them money
There has been a number of pilots and studies now that say the same thing: that if you give money to people who don’t have it they almost all use it to most advantage. The idea that they will blow it drugs or alcohol turns out to be a myth about the “undeserving poor” put about by people who are better-off.
In Basic Income experiments in India, for example, a common outcome is that girls get to go to school rather than being kept at home to work.
Here’s another case study that says the same thing. Vancouver gave C$7,500 to a selected group of homeless people, and they used it well, helping them to break out of the cycle of badly paid work and the “poverty premium.” Potential participants with serious addiction issues had been screened out. There was a control group as well. This Next City article reports:
Though the formal research has yet to be published, the early results are staggering. Half of the cash recipients moved into stable housing one month after they received the money, compared to 25 percent of the control group…
Almost 70 percent of them were food secure in one month. Like Ray, they spent most of the money on the essentials — food, shelter, bills… After one year, cash recipients reduced their spending on alcohol, drugs and cigarettes by an average of almost 40 percent, challenging “the widespread misperception that people in poverty will misuse cash funds,” the report stated. At the end of the year-long study, participants had an average of $1,000 still left in the bank.
Oh, and the recipients actually saved the authorities money. The control group cost the provincial government C$8,000, because of the time they spent in emergency shelters.
I was partly educated in Scotland, so was brought up with the works of the country’s great poet Robert Burns all around me. His poems, songs and language are as embedded in Scotland’s culture as Shakespeare is in England’s.
It’s Burns Night tonight, so it seems a good moment to ask why Burns has endured. This short (14 minute) podcast is one of five on Burns, and Burns’ Night, hosted by the Glasgow academic Pauline Mackay.
There’s a fine selection of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation, and at the British Library site curator Robert Irvine goes further into the way Burns’ reputation was shaped while he was still alive—and how his radicalism got him into trouble.
And it’s worth heading over this evening—virtually—to the Big Burns Supper in Dumfries, which is hosting an online version of its annual festival.
J2t#16
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