Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Please, stop giving money to the beggars:

Last week, I was on my way to room, I met few homeless people at city centre. Those homeless peoples have held their hands out to me and I have ignored many and felt terrible. I started thinking that may be my £1 can worth them to buy something to eat. This matter came in my again and again why people don’t want to work even government have given them a lot of opportunities to work. I can astonish how difficult it is to give money away properly. Because there are a lot of good job opportunities in rich countries compare to poor countries, the understandable generosity of relativity wealthy visitors and volunteer risks turning begging into a comparatively attractive profession-which is a self-defending process.
Let us suppose that an unskilled worker can make £1 a day, and a beggar can make £5 a day, in this situation who would be like to be an unskilled worker and work hard whole day? An unskilled worker will leave the jobs to beg until five times as many beggars are chasing the tourists and volunteers, returns collapse to a £1 a day, and the rest of unskilled workers continue their job. In other word, it applies to where families send their children: to school or to the jobs or to the streets? For the same reason, guides and taxi drivers will wait hours and days for the single lucrative tourist. This doesn’t do anyone any good.
It is true that begging often carries a stigma. Perhaps unskilled worker would rather work for £1 than beg for £2. Unfortunately, this is no better: our money is still doing nothing more than compensating beggars for the stigma of begging. This process of “rent-dissipation” is not limited to beggars. For instance, the net benefit of being crushed but getting cheap goodies in the New Year sales should be roughly zero-otherwise more people would be there is the scrum.
We will only help if we can hand out money without encouraging people to chase those handouts. When we work out how to do that, then it is assured that we have done great job now.

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