by Guest Contributor | Jul 20, 2018 | Opinion
Written by: Michael Laitman
There is no controversy about the benefits of breast milk, but its politicization is giving us food for thought. The New York Times claimed that the US government unsuccessfully threatened to retaliate against nations backing breastfeeding to favor the $70 billion-dollar infant formula industry, an accusation fervently denied by the current administration. Beyond the sensational headlines, the key factor is that such an important health-related topic for mothers and children has been put back on the table. It is also time to open the discussion about practical measures to encourage breastfeeding to benefit society.
Breast milk is rich in nutrients and includes antibodies to fight off viruses and bacteria protecting the baby from infections and allergies. While those who can’t breastfeed can use baby formula from a site like tastyganics.com, it may not provide that same level of protection. In fact, breastfeeding can save a baby’s life. It boosts the immune system, reduces infant mortality, and helps for a quicker recovery from common childhood illnesses. A Harvard study in 2016 estimated that 3,340 premature deaths a year among both mothers and babies could be prevented in the US alone given adequate breastfeeding. It also lowers a mother’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and osteoporosis.
It also reduces stress for both mother and baby, which helps to relieve common ailments such as colic. Whilst many believe that something like Infacol is the best cure for colic, gripe water, which has been used for generations, has been found to be just as effective. Gripe water, which is a simple syrup that can be made at home, has slowly been replaced by medication such as Infacol, and whilst, yes, they can be used together, there’s really no need to use Infacol when a natural alternative exists. This is a similar situation to breastfeeding, with formula slowly replacing natural milk over the years. The formula industry now has such a hold on new mothers that it’s hard for many of us to remember a time when breastfeeding was considered normal.
Besides the physical benefits and what laboratory experiments show, breastfeeding is one of the best ways of bonding with a baby. It releases oxytocin, which is the hormone responsible for other loving behaviors that make us feel good about a person.
Extended breastfeeding for the first two years of life allows for the child’s proper development, and women express more maternal sensitivity well past the infant and toddler years, according to a study by the American Psychological Association. Beyond such findings, there is also a natural inner connection between the mother and the child that allows for positive biological and internal development, which starts inside the womb.
The Need to Support Stay-at-Home Mothers
Considering the vital role mothers play in each individual’s development from the earliest of ages, it stands to reason that stay-at-home mothers should be given all the support possible to raise the next generation. They need to be entitled to receive financial assistance that will let them perform their remarkable duties without worrying about how to make ends meet, giving them a sense of freedom and control of their lives.
In today’s world, however, this is not the case. The bulk of the burden falls on the mother, who is usually expected to prioritize her career over her family, juggling tasks and becoming increasingly exhausted and unsatisfied. With the massive rise in the cost of living, mothers in most societies struggle to manage a balanced life, considering work as an economic necessity rather than liberation and personal progress and fulfillment. It can be difficult for mothers to get this balance right. Necessities are of different kinds. Home amenities like HVAC, electricity and water requirements are in addition to long-term and current expenditures. They need money for their family, but they also need to look after their kids, so they can’t work. This means that mothers often have no money to do anything, such as home improvements. So many stay-at-home mothers want to improve their homes, but they have no money to do so. They want faux stone panels on the outside of their home, but they are unable to do this. That’s why it’s so important that these mothers get more financial support to make sure they can improve their home or provide more for their family. Mothers get caught in an ever-tightening entanglement of commitments at work and home with very little restitution at any level. In extreme cases, there have been situations where work-stressed mothers abandoned their children while they rushed to work, e.g. a hospital CEO forgetting her child in a hot car where the child died, or a McDonald’s employee leaving her child alone in a public park while she worked her entire 9-hour work day.
Moreover, childcare can be extremely expensive and many women usually work just to cover its costs, challenging the whole purpose of going to the workplace. The so-called advancement of women’s rights to choose is in practice an oxymoron. At the end of the day, women who decide to fulfill a traditional role as stay-at-home mothers do not receive enough recognition, value, and economic support from society, as if raising a new generation were not the most important enterprise of all.
The same way science has been unable to create an artificial uterus that brings an embryo to life, a mother’s role of nurturing and educating the child is irreplaceable. We cannot pretend to be wiser than nature. If we really want to empower and foster women’s self-determination, society should create conditions for a comfortable motherhood.
Why UBI Should Prioritize Mothers
This is precisely where UBI can enter to encourage mothers who wish to raise their children full-time. UBI should benefit women first and foremost, particularly mothers who based on their own personal preference choose to leave the workplace in order to raise their children. Basic income should be provided for mothers without preconditions: not as welfare or charity, but as a remuneration for a crucial job in society.
Prioritizing UBI for mothers would be a win-win situation: it not only would help mothers, it would directly boost support for the entire next generation of society that mothers are now raising. Many personal and social problems, such as depression, anxiety and mental illness later in life, can be traced back to phenomena such as childhood neglect, stress, and traumas. Therefore, UBI would let mothers live with reduced economic stress, freeing them up to focus on caring, bonding with, and raising their children.
Likewise, as I’ve mentioned before, basic income for mothers would allow their participation in pro-social, connection-enriching activities, such as groups for pregnant women, parenting and home economics, among others, to enhance their motherly abilities with a supportive social climate. Naturally, such engagement in society would also positively influence their children.
Instead of treating mothers as second-class citizens, they should be recognized as “society’s CEOs”-the ruling force in creation, the only ones capable of giving birth to and nurturing a whole new generation. Keep in mind that the world is our roof, humanity is our home, and women are the pillar of this structure. Motherhood plays a critical role in giving birth to a new humanity. Therefore, taking a step forward in promoting UBI as critical support for mothers is a decision of utmost importance for a more promising future to all.
Michael Laitman is a Professor of Ontology, a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah, an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and was the prime disciple of Kabbalist, Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag (the RABASH). He has written over 40 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages.
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 18, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. It is, I think, the first article I published anywhere. I reproduced it here, because the original piece is not online.
Someone asked me to write about sports, but I’m like I don’t play any sports, I ride a bike, but that’s not a sport, that’s transportation. A sport is a physical activity that you do for fun or for a challenge. I don’t think that my bike riding qualities because I use my bike almost exclusively for transportation, but there’s sport to it.
The city is just the right size to ride a bike. Almost everywhere I go is less than 20 minutes by bike, twice as fast as by car and a lot quicker than public transportation. The city would be the perfect place to ride a bike, except it sucks. But, it only sucks because all those people who don’t realize that it’s the perfect place to ride a bike and insist on driving cars. Cars are too big and dirty for the city. Parking is impossible, they create traffic jams, and make the air really disgusting. Half the city has been plowed under to make extrawide streets and free parking spaces for cars, talk about government handouts. Still there’s not enough room for all the cars, but they keep driving in. At least they make biking sporting. My friends think it’s too scary to ride a bike in the city. But, to me, “scary” is walking home late at night risking violent death; risking accidental death trying to squeeze between two buses, that’s “sporting.”
Taxis are the worst, the natural enemy of the bike. They’ll honk at you for the crime of being in front of them. Then they’ll pass you and stop right in front of you with no apparent sense of irony. You can try is to get way over to the side of the road — typical rookie mistake. This saves you from getting honked at by people in a hurry to speed up to the red light in front of you, but it makes you vulnerable to all sorts of mishaps you can’t get in the center of the road. You can get driven off the street by cars making right turns, or buses and taxis stopping to pick up people, and, sooner or later, you’re going to get doored. One night a guy opened a taxi door right in front of me and clipped my handle bars. “Are you all right?” Next thing I knew I was lying face up on the pavement. The driver and the passenger both got out and stood over me, the passenger said, “Are you OK?” I was dazed and bruised and not quite cognizant.
“HOW ARE YOU?”
“I’m fine thanks.”
“He’s OK,” and they sped away.
Karl widerquist in the mid-90s
Pedestrians can make for sport. As the light turns they leave from both sides of the street. Do you try to get through the center before the two groups come together or do you go behind a group on one side after the last one leaves the corner. Pedestrians and bikers get along OK. You stay out of their way; they stay out of your way: no problem. Except, for the deer people. Most people know that if their crossing the street and they see a bike heading strait for where they’re standing right now, that if they keep going they’ll be well away before the bike gets there. Not the deer people. They walk right out into the street, and stop right in your path. You wouldn’t think a primate could be that stupid. But, dodging them is a sport.
This is not to say that there are not a lot o’bad bicyclists out there, there are. There are enough that I wouldn’t blame pedestrians for being scared. There was this guy who used to ride his bike in full football padding, helmet, face mask, shoulder pads, the whole bit, outside his close. I’d be stopped at a red-light, waiting for a break in in traffic to go. He’d zoom past me into a break I didn’t see. I don’t see him around lately. I wonder if he’s still alive.
Red lights, there’s a sport. To bicyclists every traffic law is a suggestion. I mean I try to stay out of everybody’s way, but if nobody’s comin’, I’m goin’, full speed. What’re they gon’a do, take your license away? This is safe, as long as you look, there is no risk to it at all, but it’ll kill me eventually. Like that scene in “Slaughterhouse Five” where the guy says, “I’ve seen my death, I’ve been there many times…” In Manhattan almost every street is one way. Parents teach their children to, “Look one way before crossing the street.” Sooner or later I’ll be looking left when the cross traffic is coming from the right and I’ll be on the grill of a garbage truck.
Simply standing at red lights is its own sport, you try to balance yourself while you wait for a break. A bike can’t come to a complete stop and still stay balanced, the trick is to inch forward, pull yourself back, inch forward… You could stop and put your foot on the ground. There is no practical reason for balancing, it’s just a sport.
The most challenging sport in city biking is keeping it. Bike theft is incredible in the city, I’ve lost count of how many bike’s I’ve lost. Legend has it that thieves use liquid nitrogen to make locks brittle and easy to break. But, theft can be beaten. You got’a have the worst bike and the best lock. First I tried one of those U-locks that “guarantees” against theft. Quite the bluff, actually, they’re one of the easiest locks to break, you can’t make a claim unless the bike was registered, you have a police report, a receipt for the lock, a receipt for the bike, a recent assessment of the bike’s value, you have to recover the broken lock, and the guarantee is void in Manhattan away. I wonder if they’ve ever paid on one of those guarantees? Now I’ve got a five foot, double reinforced metal square link chain that weighs more and costs more than my twenty year old girls ten speed, purple frame, with florescent orange spray painted stripes. That heavy chain makes it a lot more difficult to get up those hills, but it’s worth it. Theft is not a sport, it’s just aggravation.
One big drawback of using your bike for transportation and sport is that you arrive everywhere right after your workout. You change close a lot. One summer I took a job as a bike messenger. The biking was great, the actual delivering the packages wasn’t so great. That summer there was this huge heat wave. One day it was 100 degrees with 100% humidity, and I had to take a package to the Chanel Perfume company on the 30th Floor of a Fifth Avenue high-rise. It looked like one of those banks that Dickens described in a Tale of Two cities, it had all this old looking wood everywhere, everything was extra-fancy. There was this giant bottle of Chanel No. 5 encased in glass. Of course, I’m dripping with sweat. I go up to the receptionist at a big oak desk she said, “I’m not signing for it, take it to receiving, on 31, one flight up.” I walk toward the Oak wood circular Staircase, “No, you can’t use the stairs, go back into the lobby and take the elevator.”
When I’m on my way back down, the elevator stops again on the 30th floor, a model gets in. She’s obviously just been shooting an ad. She’s wearing a long flowing black shoulder showing dress. I’m wearing shorts and a short sleeved shirt so soaked in sweat that you can’t tell that I haven’t just been swimming in the ocean with all my close on. I’ve accessorized with a clipboard and a messengers bag that’s held together with duct tape. She leans against the back wall and puts all her weight on her left leg as her right leg comes out of this enormous heretofore unseen slit in her dress. There are mirrors on all the walls and the door and the ceiling, so that wherever you look you see the beauty and swamp thing. She has long flowing light brown hair. I have sweat is flowing out of my crooked bicycle helmet. She shifts her weight. Her right leg disappears and her left leg emerges from another unseen slit. So I straightened my helmet.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY 1996
by Jason Burke Murphy | Jul 16, 2018 | Opinion
Interview with Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang
By: Jason Burke Murphy
[Note from Jason Burke Murphy. This interview took place on June 11th, 2018. Yang took time out of one of his presidential campaign rallies and fundraisers to speak with me. I describe the rally in US Basic Income Guarantee Network’s blog. After I stopped recording, he expressed his hope that supporters of basic income would get behind his campaign early. Andrew Yang was then, and still is as of this writing, the only announced candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination.]
Murphy: How did you first hear about basic income?
Yang: I think I heard about it first for sure from Martin Ford’s book Rise of the Robots. I heard about it before then in articles but Martin Ford’s book made an impression. Andy Stern’s book Raising the Floor cemented the idea while coming from a different angle. Martin is a technologist and Andy is a labor leader. Stern’s book clinched it for me. I found myself coming to the same conclusion. Now basic income could no longer just be about technologists over-hyping the near-term progress of automation. Stern is someone who has a firm grasp on the labor market in the US.
Promotional for Andrew Yang’s book presenting his argument for Basic Income, Medicare for All, and “human capitalism”.
Murphy: How did friends and family react to your decision to run for President?
Yang: Oh, my parents were initially anxious and worried about it. Friends had a range of reactions. One cried tears of joy and has been immensely helpful. Others were skeptical. I will say now that support is very strong with friends and family. When you tell someone about a decision, they might react one way but when the decision is made in public, then they have a different attitude and stance.
Murphy: Joseph Biden, a possible candidate, has explicitly rejected basic income. It seems like other presumptive candidates have stayed quite distant. Why do you think that is the case?
Yang: I think in Joe’s case—and I read his comments—he is stuck in this framing of a subsistence model in which value is tied to showing up at an hourly waged job. His explicit argument for why basic income is a bad thing is that people need work. What he doesn’t realize is that universal basic income is pro-work. It is pro doing work that people actually want to do. Joe is stuck in an era when we thought that, if someone had a certain amount of money in their pocket, they would want to do nothing at all. That is an old welfare-era framework that I think was never true. [Laughs.] In Joe’s mind, that relationship is still there. Other Democrats are going to resist making commitments in this direction because they are afraid of being painted as “socialists” or economically unsophisticated. In truth, it requires a degree of economic sophistication to understand basic income and to see how it would be great for our economy and our people.
“Other Democrats in my opinion are not sophisticated enough to understand the impact a basic income would have in the economy… They do not realize that we would be channeling money back into our economy through the hands and the decisions of our citizens.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: Do you think as people hear about basic income, they are going to think more about economics?
Yang: What happens right now is that people are stuck in this scarcity mindset in which they ask how we can afford it. Won’t it cause rapid inflation? Won’t it make purchasing power go away? None of that is true! [Laughs.] So, other Democrats, in my opinion, are not sophisticated enough to understand the impact a basic income would have in the economy. They are stuck thinking that the money would be “gone” and we would need to “go get more of it.” They are not realizing that we would be channeling money back into our economy through the hands and the decisions of our citizens. The vast majority of the money would be spent in our regional economy every day. The Roosevelt Institute’s estimates that it would create four and a half million new jobs and grow the economy by two and a half trillion.
Murphy: I really liked that paper. For one thing, it is methodologically very cautious. For another, I liked basic income before I knew it would be that good.
Yang: Yeah, their projection was based on it coming from deficit spending and they posited a lower impact if it was paid for by taxes. Whereas, I am very confident that, simply by shifting money to the hands of the people most likely to spend, you would induce economic growth. One thousand dollars a month in the hands of a really wealthy person does absolutely nothing. It just becomes a line item somewhere.
Murphy: Money in the hands of the wealthy, if spent at all, goes into the streets that are already looking pretty good.
Yang: It just stays in someone’s account. When money goes to anyone in the bottom half of the US population then it will be spent on things that will manifest themselves in local businesses in the community.
Murphy: One of the reasons I support a basic income is that I grew up in Arkansas. A region like the Delta is invisible politically. I just know that very few other approaches are going to get anything down there.
Yang: That’s right. Virtually nothing else.
Murphy: If someone has a big plan for education and job training, I am not against those, but I doubt it will actually get to the neighborhoods I worked in there in Arkansas.
Yang: You are right.
Murphy: How are you looking to fund a basic income?
Yang: The main way we need to fund it is through a value-added tax. A VAT is an efficient way to raise revenue, it taxes consumption, which is what we ought to be taxing instead of something like work and labor. We are the only industrialized economy that does not use the VAT. We would be harvesting the gains of automation and new technologies much more effectively than income-based taxes.
Murphy: There are a few other proposals like a carbon tax or a tax on income above the one percent. What do you think of these other proposals that pop up?
Yang: I think some proposals try to finesse something that cannot be finessed. We try to find a way to fund a basic income without causing any pain or friction. I support taxing carbon and we will tax rich people. But we are talking about re-organizing the way that value is distributed in our society. So we can’t think that we can do that in some elegant way that leaves most people untouched.
[Note from Murphy: Yang’s platform also includes a financial transactions tax, which we did not discuss. There is also a call for an end to the current favorable tax treatment for capital gains and carried interest. That is not listed as funding for a BI.]
Murphy: Thinking of that, sometimes supporters present basic income as a reformist measure and sometimes others present it as a very radical transformation.
Yang: You can put me in the “radical transformation” category.
“Fifty-nine percent of Americans can’t afford to pay a surprise $500 charge. Our life expectancy is declining due to a surge in suicide. Seven Americans die of opiates every hour. Americans are starting businesses, getting married, and having kids at record low level or at the lowest in multiple decades. So, society is disintegrating and even very sick.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: You are the first candidate [for the Democratic Presidential nomination] to announce. This is giving you access to curious people. I saw an article in which you were meeting with New Hampshire Democrats. That is a new crowd for basic income. How are these meetings working for you?
Yang: They are interested in what I have to say. Most of what I have to say revolves around the fact that we are going through the greatest technological and economic shift in human history. That is objective. That is data-driven. People find it very resonant. They sense that this is true. Most of our conversations are around what is happening with technology and labor and the economy and job polarization—all things that we are experiencing right now. One of the dangers of basic income right now is that it can seem like we are debating different versions of utopia. When we turn someone’s attention to the depth and breadth of our current social problems, we can talk about what can actually make a difference. The situation you saw in Arkansas is becoming more and more true for more and more Americans. May I give some of the stats that I feature in my book and in speeches?
Murphy: Absolutely.
Yang: Fifty-nine percent of Americans can’t afford to pay a surprise $500 charge. Our life expectancy is declining due to a surge in suicide. Seven Americans die of opiates every hour. Americans are starting businesses, getting married, and having kids at record low level or at the lowest in multiple decades. So, society is disintegrating and even very sick.
Murphy: We often use words like “self-employed” and “side hustle” for people who are…
Yang: Who are being exploited by a billion-dollar tech company that says “be your own boss” but pays you nickels on the dollar.
“We need to quit measuring everything based on GDP and profitability at the expense of human values. We should direct our energy towards thing that improve lives. The concentration of gains in the hands of a few is a toxic way to move forward.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: Not long ago, we would hear people say that we need to choose between universal health care and basic income. Your platform simply has both. It seems like we are having a similar moment with a jobs guarantee. We keep hearing that we need to pick one or the other. It seems like many good people think that basic income crowds out something they are very concerned about.
Yang: That is an unproductive approach. We should not get lost in dueling utopias. If you are for universal health care, you should think about how much one thousand dollars a month will open up access to health care. If you care about gender equality and you want to see women avoid abusive workplaces and domestic situations—a thousand dollars a month could be vital. Let’s start with the cash because that will be the easiest thing to get done.
Opening page of Andrew Yang’s Presidential Campaign website.
Murphy: Your platform has multiple issues alongside basic income.
Yang: Definitely. I am all for single-payer health care and we can certainly do better with health than we are at present. That said, even after I win the Presidency, giving everyone cash will be easier to execute than universal health care. Andrew Stern points out that the government is terrible at many things but it is excellent at sending cash to many people promptly and reliably.
Murphy: Any ideas on how a basic income would affect foreign policy?
Yang: In the end, I think basic income will rationalize our spending, make us more optimistic, and smarter about our resources. Our citizens may end up less likely to want to lose a trillion dollars on military interventions worldwide.
Murphy: You call your worldview “Human Capitalism”. For some people “capitalism” refers to markets. For others, it refers to the domination of wealthy people.
Yang; First, I would agree with those who think that our current version of capitalism and corporatism is why our disintegration is happening. I am not a fan of continuing down this road. We have to reverse course as fast as possible. Reversing course, however, does not mean abandoning the things that have made capitalism effective. The problem is that our measuring sticks are all wrong. There are more effective ways to do things. Markets can help find the effective ways. We need to quit measuring everything based on GDP and profitability at the expense of human values. We should direct our energy towards the things that improve lives. The concentration of gains in the hands of a few is a toxic way to move forward. This is bad even for the so-called “winners” in society. Studies have proven that the winners in an unequal society are more anxious and depressed than the winners in a more equal society. This is enlightened self-interest. I can sympathize with anyone who thinks that “capitalism” is a dirty word. The first line in the description of human capitalism on our website is “Humans are more important than money.”
Murphy: Thank you for speaking with me between events. Is there any last word you want to make to readers?
Yang: I am hoping to get support soon from the basic income community. I have been campaigning for about four months. We are drawing from their ideas. We hope we can see them sign up because we need their support.
You may disagree with some item on my platform but I hope you can see that the direction and the spirit are right and that we can push a genuine conversation about basic income. We could really use their passion. We need a movement that recognizes that our community is disintegrating and that basic income is an essential answer. I hope that basic income activists can believe in this campaign.
Photo of Jason Burke Murphy (Left) and Andrew Yang (Right) shortly after this interview.
[Note from Murphy. Some portions of this interview were edited slightly for clarity as we moved from spoken word to written word. No content was altered. Thank you to Andrew Yang for taking time out of his campaign to speak with me. Thanks to Tyler Prochazka for proofreading.]
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 11, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. I reproduce it here because the original source is not available online.
“The written word is alive…” but the book is dead, at least the bookstore anyway, and so is the CD, the record store, the VCR, and the video rental shop.
Recently I heard that record stores will soon manufacture CDs on the spot. It’s already possible for record stores to access a database through the internet that has the digital code for any CD in existence. All retailers need to do to generate a CD on demand is “press” the disc, laser print the cover, and insert both into a jewel box. Instead of walking around a store looking at covers, you’ll sit at a computer terminal browsing cover art on a screen and listen to music samples on headphones.
And this is only the beginning. It would not be much more difficult to put together a do-it-yourself CD using a home computer and a color laser printer. Assuming your computer will have enough memory, you can download the music (the digital information) from a central database onto your hard drive, and, if you feel like, you can print the cover–or maybe not. Just call it up on the monitor whenever you want. Or, you could sign up for an online service that lets you play any song ever recorded without having to download the information onto your hard drive. The digital information would come from that same database directly to your speakers. Many people take their activities in the realm of music downloads over to sites like Avoidcensorship which gives them access to Pirate Bay proxies so they can tap into a near limitless supply of on-demand music and film.
The CD as we know and collect it today is dead. By this same logic, the video is dead; newspapers and magazines are dead; the book is dead. Barnes & Nobles, Blockbuster Video, the corner newsstand-all dead.
As the bass player for one of New York’s most underground bands, my immediate reaction was, “Great, this means it will be as easy as to get world-wide music distribution as it is to post something on the internet.” Right now an artist who wants to get his work to the public has to find someone to risk the cost of inventory and shipping. The internet would eliminate these costs. Every book, movie, and song ever made will be compiled on one big database and available to anyone with the hardware and the cash. 
Since most of these books, movies, and songs will be crap, how will you find what you like? Aside from randomly browsing through the voluminous compost heap of information, I can think of two ways: hype and word of mouth. Hype–corporate advertising–creates superstars; word of mouth creates the underground scene. Hype has and always will be around, but the internet, by reducing barriers between artists and listeners, will help the small-time, underground, niche-market, limited-appeal, sub-alternative artist, or whatever you want to call it, flourish.
But then I thought about it some more. “Sure it’ll be great for subversive artists but what will all of this accessible information do for society at large?” Long ago people were born into a culture; now you choose your culture. What is the impact of each person customizing his or her cultural diet? I call it the specialization or the niche-marketization of culture.
In the stone age, the tribe was isolated from each other and members of a particular tribe knew the same songs and stories and shared common knowledge, experiences, and reference points for communication. More recently, a few centuries ago, every European who could read had read the same books: the Bible, the Greek Classics, and the major local authors.
Today we all read different things–the sports column, romance novels, sci-fi–you name it. There’s so much information available that you can’t possibly learn it all, so we go after whatever catches our attention. Whatever niche you choose has its own shared knowledge, vocabulary, and even a canon of literature. I bet there are more Star Trek books in print today than all books on all subjects in print 500 years ago. But, the more we pursue our niche, the less we share with people in our immediate vicinity.
Some Jesus-Freak-Sci-Fi-Geek translated the Bible into Klingon; his professor might not even know (or care) what Klingon is. A teenage girl in Turkey killed herself when she heard about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Her neighbor who spends his time studying the Koran–like the guy sitting next to me on the subway–probably never heard of Kurt Cobain. A thirty-year-old single woman producing the local TV news in Minneapolis probably has more in common with a newswriter in Seoul, Korea, than with the family in the apartment downstairs.
Just when it looked like global communication would join the world into one monolithic culture, we’ve started to split into smaller cultures again, this time based on what you know instead of where you live.
New age, environmentalism, Gay rights, Socialism, entrepreneurialism, right to life, right to death, turning fifty-ism, natural law, wicken-ism, and thousands of other categories–there are people who make these things their identities, while their next-door neighbors know nothing about them. These categories may not define a person as much as race and nationality do, but they’re getting more important all the time. The buffet is open: Choose your culture.
None of this is good or bad; it’s a fact of life. Regional cultures were the result of isolated communities. Niche-culture is the result of a world with abundant information and sophisticated communication. In some ways, it’s better. We can learn about each other and learn from each other–we don’t have to retreat into our own niche-cultures or lose all sense of shared experience. We don’t have to evolve into a society of strangers. We need a balance between the niche and the community–some common denominators that everyone gets. But what? The first task is to get people from all niches to agree on what these denominators might be. I’ll start by posting this question on the net.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY 1996
by Andre Coelho | Jun 10, 2018 | News
The Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) group, based in New York, is preparing a large-scale cash transfer study in Liberia, particularly focusing on rural farming households. Cash transfers will be delivered by GiveDirectly, and also coordinated with USAID, to be rolled out for at least two years. GiveDirectly has been responsible for other large scale unconditional cash transfer programs, namely in Kenya, and is applying the randomized controlled trial method to the Liberian study as well.
There have been other cash transfer programs in Liberia, such as the Cash for Work on Vulnerable Youth in Liberia, but “no positive psychosocial or economic impacts were observed”. This program, due to its conditionality, “was found to be undesirable and faced implementation challenges”. It was also managed by Innovations for Poverty Action, now innovating by participating in a basic income-style cash transfer study.
IPA and GiveDirectly are, therefore, recruiting senior researchers, program managers and office administrators. To this end, J-PAL – Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab – is also helping with providing ways to draw top human resources to this task. Already onboard are principle investigators Jon Robinson (University of California, Santa Cruz), Jenny Aker (Tufts University), Alan Spearot (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Shilpa Agarwal (India School of Business).
More information at:
Kate McFarland, “US/Kenya: GiveDirectly launches UBI experiment”, Basic Income News, November 17th, 2017
