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Computer Model Reveals Escape Plan From Poverty's Vicious Circle
KentuckyFC writes "Infectious disease condemns poor countries to an endless cycle of ill health and poverty. Now a powerful new model of the link between disease and economic growth has revealed why some escape plans work while others just make matters worse. The problem is that when workers suffer from poor health, economic output goes down. And if economic output goes down, there is less to spend on healthcare. And if spending on healthcare drops, workers become less healthy. And so on. So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare. But the new model says governments must take care since the cost to a poor country can send the economy spiraling into long term decline. By contrast, an injection of capital from outside the country allows spending on healthcare to increase without any drop in economic output. 'We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap, but increasing health spending alone is not,' say the authors. And the amount required is relatively little. The model suggests that long-term investment needs only to be more than 15 per cent of the cost of healthcare. But anything less than this cannot prevent the vicious circle of decline."
Keep your people healthy and they'll live longer, work longer and pay more tax.
What kind of idiot hasn't realised this yet? (obviously, America)
This clearly is working for Africa.
So the solution to poverty.. is for other countries to just give you some money?
What the hell kind of solution is that?
Who would have thought? Well I guess WHO, CARE, Red Cross, Oxfam, ...
But, now we know the reason...
Effective, sustainable anti-poverty measures begin here.
Poverty-stricken countries remain poor because they cannot produce enough to sustain themselves. They cannot produce enough because their workforce is sick. Give them medicine and you break that cycle without putting local farmers or manufacturers out of business. Doctors without borders is a good start.
Demand cuts in social programs including health care. The World Bank and IMF are evil.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Most "poor" countries to which we send aid, are being plundered just as hard, or even harder. Every time we send food aid to some poor African or central American country, the local farmers get no money for the little food they produce and the local market is ruined, stopping local production of food instead of encouraging it.
Every time we demand the lowest price for all the stuff we import from those countries, we make them find ways to produce even cheaper, lowering the standard of life there. This results in pricing that is so low that our own economy can't compete and we put import taxes on these goods. This results in the foreign producers being forced to lower their prices even more, again ruining their economy and health.
Instead of "sending aid" every time a famine or natural disaster strikes one of these countries, we should stop plundering them. Micro credits for local businesses there have helped a lot, investing in farming for local food supply helps. These people are perfectly capable of helping themselves, given half a chance.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In real science control groups are required to establish causality.
Social scientists are as terrified of real control groups testing causal hypotheses in human ecology as were the Jesuits of independent interpretations of the Bible. This is because social science is essentially a pre-enlightenment theocratic discipline:
If the powers-that-be oppose your social "science" then no matter how much data you gather, some variant of "correlation doesn't imply causation" will be trotted out to ignore it.
If the powers-that-be like your social "science" then the NYT will take one data point -- perhaps even one anecdote about one person at some point in history and base public policy on it. With the mass media holding mass and preaching said sermons the pious slaves to intellectual fashion, generally those with college degrees from the seminaries known as "colleges", and and with IQs below 140 who like to pretend to be morally superior "thought leaders" (knowing they have safety in numbers from hearing sermons at "mass") will then to the dirty work on the street.
Moreover, this theocratic sophistry, imposing social theories on unwilling human subjects, locks into place powerful interests that oppose any truth-discovery.
From Machiavelli's "The Prince" chapter 6:
If we are ever to escape this vicious cycle driven by the social sciences, the Enlightenment must penetrate them through Sortocracy:
Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them.
Fortunately, like the Protestant movement's impetus to independently interpret the Bible due to the Gutenberg press, the Internet is now letting people have direct access to and independent interpretation of data about human ecologies -- and the demand for freedom from imposition of social theories on unwilling human subjects will increase until freedom from theocratic forms of government -- and their social scientist theologians -- will win the day.
In the process, as with the wars for freedom of religion that lasted over a century, we cannot expect this penetration of Enlightenment values into the social sciences to take place without a struggle.
Seastead this.
So long as we just focus on *treatment* of the sick, costs will continue to spiral.
A general influx of cash doesn't just focus on treatment of those sick - it starts to alleviate the issues that allow disease to spread in the first place (lack of hygene, lack of vaccination, lack of clean water, lack of balanced food (and complete meals), and lack of general preventive care, and lack of birth control - ALL things people in poverty already lack).
Health care costs get under control when the focus is on prevention rather than treatment: you spend FAR less money when fewer people get sick. When you use the capital to address the causes of disease rather than just treating it, you spend much less on treating the ones that got away.
Relatedly, this is why insurance companies love birth control - a pill a day and a box full of condoms is far cheaper to them than the thousands of dollars for examinations, the birth, emergency natal care, and having to cover the kid for the next 26 years.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
(and gee, many of our problems in Education go away when one addresses the poverty issue that makes education impossible rather than constantly trying to change the education system that has otherwise worked for generations)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
"So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare."
If that's the case then the USA must be the greatest country in the world.
Bah. I bet you think it would be more effective for doctors to spend 20 minutes with the patient rather than 4 minutes with the patient and 16 minutes on t government paperwork.
I bet you also think eating healthy foods like vegetables and whole grains works better than eliminating $15 copays by exchanging them for $163 tax expenditures.
"If [an injection of cash from outside the economy] is large enough and sustained for long enough... [W]e find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap"
That should generally be true anyways... for individuals as well as for poor nations.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"'We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap, "
No shit Sherlock, every time someone gives me a billion dollars I don't feel the poverty any more.
How about this, mandatory birth control for your out of control population growth... you think that would help your health issues?
No, instead you go looking for outside investment which will hurt you even more in the long term.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Out of the poverty trap, and into the corporate consumerism trap.
Yes, just dump more money into it, and see it vanish into the pockets of those who are in power while they build a clinic that costs as much as three hospitals. And one year later, even that will start to fall apart, because the dictator's/president's/king's yacht has priority over the budget.
Poverty is not an economic/health issue, it is a cultural one. If you don't change how the people and their leaders think, countries will remain poor.
I came from a poor country, and lived there for 23 years. Enough time to see how things truly work.
The amount spent on care is completely disconnected from the benefit or real cost of care. There are few other fields where cooperating state-sanctioned monopolies conspire to drive up cost and deprive a minority of service entirely. It is not good for health. I doubt it will ever change.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"an injection of capital from outside the country allows spending on healthcare to increase without any drop in economic output." Well, dang, ain't that just the statement of the century.
I reject that as complete liberal bullshit.
I reject your rejection.
How's THAT for an argument?
I don't respond to AC's.
"Computer Scientists and Statisticians Demonstrate That Computer Models Can Demonstrate Anything You Like"
Ergo, my country needs to invade and pillage another country.
But (sorry, Republicans!): do it cheaply. If you spend more money on the aggression than you pillage, obviously that's not going to count as a net injection of capital.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
One lesson that seems to be glossed over here is that since richer countries fare better, then making a country richer is (according to the model) a successful strategy for mitigating the harm of disease (and probably a huge variety of disasters, natural and man-made, as well). But my take is that there's a lot of countries, both rich and poor, which are trying hard to make their countries poorer and hence, more susceptible to disease under this model.
Back in 1900, virtually everyone was suffering from the same diseases. The Western world had discovered the benefits of public sanitation and fire control, but a lot of places still didn't have that. Medicine was still in the sawbones era where uncontrollable infections routinely led to amputation. What changed from then to now is that the developed world developed, including vast knowledge of pathology and the biology of our bodies.
Everyone on the planet can use that development process as a template, readily subject to local modification. It's something that has been demonstrated to work, to make people wealthier and healthier. And they are doing so. I think it's getting better.
Just a bit disingenuous, no? The countries with the socialist bias are almost always about to run out of money, even with crazy tax rates (eg sweden).
I guess we know who Jobs willed his Reality Distortion Field to.
Sweden has, as a percentage of GDP, less than half as much debt as the USA.
Norway is very decidedly in the black with their pension fund.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It sounds like the cure for poverty if for someone to give you money. is there a -1, Obvious?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
that is nice. but here in america, we have a plan to get back into the prison of poor health for poor people.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
That's true. People who insist on ignoring facts, and make their decisions based on right-wing ideology, will reject these arguments as "complete liberal bullshit."
What a load of stupid garbage. Anyone that thinks politics, economics, culture, geography, and the happenstance of history doesn't rule the destiny of nations is an idiot.
To claim its all down to healthcare is just mindless self serving statistics for healthcare aid organizations. To claim that all the worlds many problems will just go away if we have healthcare. How completely stupid.
Obviously poor health contributes to poor economic conditions. But as someone that has actually been to these countries and seen what is really going on... the poor health is itself a symptom.
In Nigeria for example there are villages with open pit wells. Just a hole in the ground where water bubbles up. No effort made to keep it clean or sanitary. They wash animals in the same pit they drink from. SHOCKINGLY they get horribly ill with some frequency.
This is a problem that was solved about 6000 years ago if not earlier. You create a series of step wells. The highest step is either human drinking water or completely left untouched. The next step is for cleaning. And the step after that is for animals.
This costs nothing to build. Literally nothing. You can use dirt/clay from the area and just build this with local labor at a cost of literally nothing. Not 2 dollars a day. Not 10 cents a day. ZERO.
And yet they drink from the open pit well and get all sorts of horrible water born diseases.
The politics and culture in most poor countries is beyond hopeless. You're dealing with entrenched ways of doing things that kill.
If you want to fix these places you need to graft a new culture into their community that actually is effective. This isn't colonialism. We're not sending our own people over there to live permanently. Rather, you build a reasonable village for these people and structure it along lines that will be successful. That is your best chance at bringing real change to those parts of the world.
If you lack the "care" to do that... then just leave them alone. You're just wasting everyone's time otherwise.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
We've seen that the left's solution of throwing money at every problem doesn't work and often causes problems. The right's approach of just letting the poor fend for themselves (once the government gets out of the way) seems to move things in a good direction, but not always quickly. If this study and follow-ups can tell us where the happy middle is that would be a very ggod thing.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
We have tried this many times before.
Send lots of money.
The debt from this money is then leveraged to get the country to sell its resources to international corporations.
The people of the country now have to pay for water, and are restricted from hunting and fishing on their native lands.
The people cannot afford to pay for this privatized food or water and cannot gather it themselves any longer, so they starve to death.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The kind of "healthcare" that matters in developing countries is something that costs a few hundred dollars a year; less than a month of an ACA bronze plan. The kind of "healthcare" that is under discussion in the US is mostly overpriced, unnecessary fixes for poor lifestyle choices, plus useless intensive care at the end of life.
Keeping people healthy so that they live longer is not something healthcare does, it's something that good nutrition and exercise do.
Most people in the US die after retirement, so keeping them alive longer actually is not good financially like you imply. But American are covered by Medicare after age 65 anyway, so even if what you wrote were true, the US already has single payer, socialized medicine for those people.
Finally, your thinking that government should keep people alive longer so that they pay more taxes is pretty telling, and rather scary.
No, you're not the only one.
In order to make real-world use of this model, the health care industry would have us load catapults with doctors and medicines and fling them into Africa.
They're on the right track but with their health care model they're backing the wrong horse. How and when exactly did that endemic sickness that must be countered, arise?
Let's take a look at the world according to cholera [cases reported to WHO 2007-2009]. Cholera flourishes where masses of people have converged on areas without sufficient infrastructure to support them. They often do this in an attempt to escape rural poverty. It also flourishes along major rivers, such as the Ganges and historically the Thames, again where infrastructure for water filtration and sewage treatment is lacking.
Now look at the world according to (lack of) access to electricity [Numbers in Millions and % of People without access to Electricity, 2008. Source: WHO & UNDP]
Electricity means clean water and waste processing.
Cholera hates electricity.
That is because with electricity comes deeper wells, better filtration, distribution, active media filtration of surface sources and sewage treatment with water effluent ready for discharge into rivers -- along with the basics such as refrigeration for food and medicine. It was infrastructure and not better health care that eliminated the threat of cholera in North America, and other diseases besides.
And by electricity I mean real base load electricity, the power to run distribution and filtration plants and whole villages and cities. A full square meal of energy, not the 'energy happy meal toys' that are too often envisioned by North Americans as gifts to Africans -- a solar panel here or a wind turbine there, to run some tiny apartment fridge in some clinic somewhere, or a single LED light, sometimes. Solutions we could not and would not tolerate for ourselves.
The human race (at our favored levels of population density) has evolved past the point where a natural state of good health can be maintained without access to bulk electricity, which equates to drinkable tap water. This is a greater factor than access to doctors or medicine.
Obama is making the right noises about Africa with his $7 billion pledge to help Africa lift itself out of darkness with new sub-Saharan infrastructure. Remember -- this $7 billion is is NOT your hard-earned taxpayer dollars, which are all going toward repayment of interest on our national debt. This is magical unicorn money that will come from World Investment Funds and Bank perpetual money machine that is backed by International Corporate Banks that bought shitloads of worthless paper that were bailed out by Bushobama with the Fed minting virtual money that saved the banks' balance sheets from ruin, and Treasury Bonds purchased by the Chinese who have said fuck-it and have decided to give Africa their time and especially their money directly, some of which would ultimately come from us as repayment on debt to China with China becoming Africa's direct partner in infrastructure instead. This does not make sense on so many levels.
I think the United States is presently screwed on Energy but not in the conspiracy sense. It is this awful mental condition where we have lost sight of 'big electric' and 'big water' infrastructure as something we are truly vested in, regardless of whether we personally own stock in it.
I think it is why discussants in these forums never seem to discuss topics of coal, nuclear and natural gas production of electricity at any length -- and spend so much more time on the minutia
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Sweden is a much better comparison, they have no oil at all. Norway, well we've hit the jackpot in terms of oil. The oil-related jobs are creating an income level which makes a host of service industries (Like, who cuts the hair of the oil workers? Who serves them beer?) which is entirely out of touch with everyone else. We're leading the McDonald's index and I'm quite sure we have the highest pay for being a McDonald's employee anywhere in the world as well, even post-tax. The government is sucking up most the oil revenue, first the oil companies pay a huge tax on oil (I think 50% + 28% of any profit), the the workers pay their income tax and finally everyone else pays as they get their oil-inflated income tax. In short, it's easy to be Norway
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A computer model reveals that spending other people's money is the answer?
Nice work if you can get it ...
Most "poor" countries to which we send aid, are being plundered just as hard, or even harder. Every time we send food aid to some poor African or central American country, the local farmers get no money for the little food they produce and the local market is ruined, stopping local production of food instead of encouraging it.
You are right, except it's not the West that causes it. In most cases it is the government (both state and local) that causes economies to get worse even as aid increases. In many cases these governments are corrupt to some degree, so the aid intended for local farmers or communities never gets there. The aid tends to go either to the military (purchasing soldiers is a lot more expensive than one would think, and it pays to keep soldiers happy-notice how many undemocratically elected third world rulers have military ranks?) or in the case of a tame military to personal residences and bank accounts.
In political science there is a theory that is known as the resource curse, whereby a state that has an abundance of a natural resource finds its growth hampered by that resource, so that it is poorer than one would expect. This is caused by a number of problems, such as a failure to diversify the economy or internal conflict (ie, war) over the revenue. However, a major cause of this is government corruption and revenue mismanagement. The government either diverts the proceeds to their own pockets or, expecting the revenue to continue at high levels, fails to invest the money back into the economy and spends it on pet projects to remain in power.
Now, this is kind of perverse, but think of poor people as a natural resource. As long as the people remain poor, the aid continues to come in. If the aid continues to come in, the local political elites are able to allocate that aid in ways that continues to enrich themselves while allowing them to remain in power (paying off cronies/the military/subsidies). If they invest the aid properly, then the economy grows, the poor get less poor, and as they get less poor they have more energy and resources to invest in things such as politics, demanding a greater say in how they are governed. This demonstrates a direct threat to the ruling elites, who as a general rule are not strong leaders, as they rule by economic coercion or the threat or actual use of military force. So, essentially, in order for them to remain in power it is in their own self interest (not a fan of rationalism, but sometimes it just fits) to keep their population poor. In a nutshell, this is one big reason why Third World states tend to remain poor even when they receive large amounts of foreign aid.
Ideally, the aid given to these states should be neither financial nor edible. The investment should be in infrastructure (roads), and in raising the standard of living (water filters, solar panels/crank generators, farming equipment, etc). Investments such as this help the poor and are much harder to divert or misallocate (can't exactly wire a shipment of solar panels to a Swiss bank account). You are correct that these people are perfectly capable of helping themselves given the right tools. The problem is getting the tools into the hands of the people who need them, not those who want them.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I used to hate Bill Gates. Then one day I realised Gates had "grown up". He's still a businessman, but he's using his business "prowess" to increase his ability to help people in Africa with his vaccination programme. Which is why he set up his charity with family, and uses investment in businesses like Monsanto to offset his expenditures (and who's not to say to direct the firm away from GM crops?)
Whether my "naive" optimist side is coming out or not remains to be seen. Either way, what Gates is doing for Africa fits this model perfectly, you'd have to say.
The UK was in a similar situation but blew all that money, killed their manufacturing industry, and were left with little other than very rich bankers and a huge unemployed underclass. Norway seems to be running things better than Thatcher did before her own party stabbed her in the back as a liability.
They needed a computer model to reach those incredibly obvious conclusions? WTF? You can figure that out with a little bit of logical thinking (as has been done many times in history)!
many of our problems in Education go away when one addresses the poverty issue that makes education impossible rather than constantly trying to change the education system that has otherwise worked for generations
Worked towards what goal? We've become more and more complacent, and I can't help but believe that a substantial portion of that is through the indoctrination received in the public education system, which is a series of lies — both outright, and through omission. You're told a bunch of rosy bullshit about how things are meant to be, but it's not explained to you how corporations get to write laws and decide which ones are passed. The general framework is described, and it's left for you to figure it out on your own, the subtext being that you're not supposed to actually figure it out. If you ask questions you become a nuisance and the teachers will deprecate you so that you are bullied in an effort to cause you to become withdrawn so they can do their job of pretending to educate the excessive number of students they've got.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So an outside infusion of money will break the cycle of poverty? How long were they working on that theory?
And where, exactly, is this 'outside' infusion of money to come from? Will it ever be repaid, or must it be a gift?
Who would have thought more money could end the cycle of poverty?! Brilliant!
Maybe now they can turn their big brains towards homelessness and hunger... Wait, let me take a crack at it - how about 'free housing breaks the cycle of homelessness'? 'Free food breaks the cycle of hunger'!
Ken
You can't simply give these poor countries a bunch of money and expect them to spend it properly on healthcare or any other necessity for that matter. There will always be too many sticky fingers and blatantly corrupt functionaries involved. The right way to do this is for some external organization to come in, set up the hospital, and administer treatment with zero local government influence. Of course, the eventual result might be that a healthy populace will come to realize that their totalitarian government is really screwing them over.
You need some external agency to give you lots and lots of money. This is genius! Who would have thought! Carry on with the research! Who knows, perhaps we can also solve world hunger with a similar solution.
...is they're not reality. And the problem with all economic models is that they only superficially resemble reality.
...inside its own petri dish. Most countries have a terribly broken society and government, preventing that infusion of capital from being properly injected.
Bravo!!!
So the authors take a wicked problem and find the just one element that solves it. This is intelligence of the highest order. I wonder if they are even aware of the definition of a wicked problem. I guess I have this problem with theoreticians.
Using the authors' logic, then if one were to make everyone healthy in â" say Afghanistan, then that country will have escaped poverty and would get to be on the road to being a developed nation...
It doesn't matter how healthy, productive or motivated the Afghan citizen is. His/Her life is impacted by people coming over their border with a very clear agenda.
As an aside, US has pumped a huge amount of development money into that country and Afghanistan is still a pretty poor country.
Anyone can play these âoeintelligentâ math games...
The US Health Care System would be fine for the middle class if states didn't screw it up with all these mandates for stupid stuff like birth control.
This is my sig.
I live in canada where we have the evil socialist health care system where if you are sick and go to the hospital you don't pay anything. This is obviously a system where someone is trying to trick people. There must be a hidden cost somewhere..... Sarcasm if you didn't notice. I had cancer it did not cost me a dime! Yes I pay more taxes. I thank god I do because I love the fact that when I am sick I don't have to worry about the costs of my healthcare.
Every time we send food aid to some poor African or central American country, the local farmers get no money for the little food they produce and the local market is ruined, stopping local production of food instead of encouraging it.
If the local farmers were producing enough food, then why would we be sending aid? If they are not producing enough food, then the aid is stopping them from gouging starving people. I fail to see the real problem here.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen