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TechnoratiLook to the Internet to Fight Poverty
AS PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama begins to put together his government, one question reigns supreme. How can he possibly deal with the economic crisis and the war in Iraq, and still have anything left over for the social justice initiatives that are so dear to many of the Democrats who elected him?
The challenge is tough but not impossible. In the past decade, information technology has begun to transform anti-poverty efforts and bring to the poverty world some of the increases in productivity that have been common in the private sector. If Obama can expand on this, the chances for him to make good on a broad social justice agenda will increase in spite of the other challenges he faces.
In the past two decades, electronic database and Internet technologies have driven down the cost of government overhead while significantly elevating the productivity of the nation's anti-poverty programs. Fraud has been reduced while the needs of the economically distressed are addressed in a more timely manner. This has freed up money for other pressing anti-poverty needs.
For example, the nation's food stamps and housing programs have been transformed by information technology. The food stamps program adopted the use of "smart cards" - electronic benefit transfer technology - to streamline benefits and eliminate fraud. The Department of Housing and Urban Development saved billions of dollars after adopting computer matching programs to handle housing assistance cases.
America's public-assistance system has gone from being plagued by problems to a program that has made great strides in helping the poor. Part of the change was the result of government action in the 1990s to shift the incentive structure of the system. But the transformation of how welfare is administered, how cases are handled and processed, would have been impossible without information technology. This is one area where the investment has more than paid for itself, and, as welfare cases increase, this would be a good place for the new Congress to invest.
Benefit eligibility is only one area where the Internet has helped improve anti-poverty work. It has also expanded the effectiveness of more traditional anti-poverty efforts. For example, the Internet has allowed the poor and their advocates to better navigate the complex bureaucracies that are characteristic of modern welfare states. In addition, it has helped poor children in underserved schools and poor adults seeking jobs, financial skills, or small-business opportunities. Through Beehive, a multi-lingual self-help portal created by One Economy Corporation, thousands have been able to find employment tools such as a business plan helper, and information on unemployment benefits and financial literacy.
In the developing world, where anti-poverty programs are either small or nonexistent, the Internet has allowed non-government organizations to bridge the social, economic, and physical isolation of the poor. In countries like El Salvador and India, the Internet has helped to more effectively link farmers with markets, getting rid of costly and sometimes corrupt middlemen. One program in India provides Internet access to farmers via solar panels and satellites, allowing them up-to-the-minute information about weather, soil testing, and other factors that will increase productivity. And the Internet is becoming a critical tool for health workers who often work in remote areas far from doctors and specialists. Armed with PDAs, these workers can offer better medical care than ever before.
Internet innovation has transformed business, entertainment, and even government. In an Obama administration, it can transform approaches to poverty at home and abroad. The government's efforts should be focused on expanding access to Internet and other technologies for as many Americans as possible while continuing to develop our national broadband capacity. An expanded technological infrastructure will help Obama make good on a broad social justice agenda as he confronts the myriad problems he has inherited.
23 Comments so far
Show AllTechnology is a good thing for benefit distribution to a point. But, what we have seen in states such as Texas and Indiana is the privatization of welfare benefit distribution which allows big, major companies such as IBM, Deloitte and ACS make millions of dollars off the neediest people in our society.
In Pennsylvania, they have tried to replace skilled casewokers with the wonders of new technologies. Technological advances can supplement and improve benefit distribution, but it should not be implemented to replace the human element is the process and that is what is occurring around the nation under the disguise of better service. Human services are called that for a reason. We are seeing the opposite as more and more humans (staffing levels) continue to be cut and replaced with technologic advances. This was occurring before the economic strains we are witnessing today.
Technological improvements have their place and can be beneficial, but they should never take the place of a human being who can reach out and speak or see the person in need in front of them.
Currently, we are seeing many governors implementing these new technological practices to receive a kickback from the companies who get the contract.
The best tool for fighting poverty is a real social safety net, which the USA hasn't ever really had. Add to that a single payer health care plan which the Progressive Democrats of America are advocating. Canada has both is doing mighty fine in combating poverty and ill health. The main problem Canada has had is with provinces that tried to experiment with US style rip off privatization, and then they got all the waiting that was otherwise fiction, but which I've experienced than once in the 'good old USA," even in one emergency when it took me an hour and a half to see a doctor. But obviously this is with the health care run by big health insurance companies who always put themselves ahead of the people.
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Article says" "the Internet has allowed non-government organizations to bridge the social, economic, and physical isolation of the poor. In countries like El Salvador and India, the Internet has helped to more effectively link farmers with markets, getting rid of costly and sometimes corrupt middlemen. One program in India provides Internet access to farmers via solar panels and satellites, allowing them up-to-the-minute information about weather, soil testing, and other factors that will increase productivity."
That's good news about the middlemen. But I wonder if the squeeze of monopolies on fuel, transportation costs, fertilizer etc. have been overcome. Is the farmer suicide rate down as a result? That would be a good indicator.
Joe
Lots of good comments here that take on the space between business school theory and how stuff works out. But don't stop dreaming - idealism is a good place to start! But listen to the troops as well.
Information technology is just a tool. It has to be used properly. The Obama campaign used information technology in a sophisticated and efficient way, so perhaps the Obama administration can ameliorate some problems by using the internet and databases. At least they don't think it is a series of tubes and they are unlikely to create a big mess like the one that recently had a neighbor's six year old grandson stopped at an airport as a terror suspect.
As dr.kcusick noted there are problems. One is motivation. I recently observed a library employee in my neighborhood wave away a high school girl who needed a book, saying they didn't have it. The librarian did not tell her that it could be looked up and ordered from another branch. I showed the student how to look it up on the network and told her to ask the librarian to order it.
It is still necessary to humiliate and thwart people who look for help. Long lines, unanswered phones, rudeness, suspicious attitudes, long waits, failure to give and keep appointments, confusing regulations, repetitive forms are designed to show people how unimportant they are. You have to want to treat people well.
Also, the internet cannot create reality. As thegreatrockyhill says, people can search for jobs, but only if the jobs exist. Similarly, internet and computerization cannot be used to fix the complicated, chaotic insurance and billing situation at hospitals and doctors' offices. Maintaining systems that deal with that shifting sand of providers and rules becomes a major never-ending expense.
Acquiring a database system but not implementing it is very common. After all, the contract is the thing in government. Although the information is kept somewhere in a database, the tools to access it or use it are not developed. (When I worked as a teacher, we entered all grades and daily attendance records for every period into a database, but we still had to do all our summary reporting and statistical analysis manually. Nobody wrote the very simple programs that would collectively have saved tens of thousands of hours of deadening non-classroom oriented teacher work and eyestrain.)
Joe
Amazing!!! & why is it that applicants must fill out the same form, over and over again, each time they need a little help.
Oh! I get it, Social Services haven't figured out the information is in their data base.
GT I like your randomocracy.
Yes, Libraries are free, but one has to get there. Amazingly my Library serves the people who have always used Libraries, and our Board of Trustee's does nothing, absolutely nothing, to involve families who dont know Libraries exist. That, by the way is part of their job as trustees.
Gotta keep the poor in their place - out of the Library.
Good observations. Staff and budget cuts and bad attitudes thwart technology's promise.
TAX THE RICH. To Eliminate Poverty AND Solve the Economic Crisis
A little history. In 1928, the top tax bracket on the richest Americans was 25%, down from Woodrow Wilson's wartime rate of 73%. And the top 1% of the population made 23.9% of the national income. Result of this inequality: the Depression.
Today, the top income tax rate has also been plunging downward. 91% under Eisenhower and Kennedy, 70% from Johnson to Carter, 28% in Reagan's last year, up to Clinton's 39.7%, and down to Bush's present 35%. And inequality has climbed to near 1928 levels. The top 1% took home 21.8% of the national income in 2005, up from 8.9% in 1976.
(Tax data: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_has_the_Income_Tax_contributed_to_the_economic_crisis_of_2008
Income data: http://www.demos.org/inequality/numbers.cfm )
The result of the decline in top taxes and the increase in poverty and inequality is today's economic crisis. The "debt crisis" or the "financial crisis" has 2 causes. 1) Too many poor and working class people have been unable to live without borrowing over their heads; and 2) The ruling class has had enough wealth and power to make their own rules, and live without "regulations." Both are the result of inequality.
Will Obama go back, not to pre-Bush but to pre-Reagan tax levels? Not unless the Labor and Progressive movements unite in a NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR A GRADUATED INCOME TAX (NAGIT), and keep pushing.
Obama wants a jobs and recovery program. Good for him. But he can only pay for jobs and ecology in two ways. He can tax the rich or he can borrow more from the Chinese and the Saudis, etc. If he borrows, the recovery will only last until the bottom drops out on the dollar, and the Chinese take their money home.
Our job is to defeat the billionaires who have "embedded" themselves around Obama. If we can't, if Obama "triangulates" the way Clinton did, he will quickly lose power as Clinton did in '94, and the economy will get much worse.
Oh for cryin' out loud.
Why is it that folks refer to coerced redistribution as "anti-poverty" or 'social justice' efforts? It is more rightly "pro-Leviathan" and "pro-Murder".
Expropriating money from people under threat of violence - be they 'rich' or just poor schlubs - perpetuates a system that drops bombs on wedding parties. The vast pool of money attracts precisely THE worst elements of our species (more accurately, a new, parasitic subspecies - homo politicus Cheneyensis).
Get a clue - you think that redistributing pennies to the poor helps, when gazillions of dollars go to Raytheon and General Dynamics for the sole purpose of increasing the State's ability to rip other poor people into oozing bloody pulp?
You are advocating band-aids on bullet wounds, while simultaneously calling for an increase in the mulcting of the masses... which, always and everywhere throughout recorded history, means that some or other group of grasping homicidal arseholes, results in MORE war, not less.
So yeah - let's use the internet so that the parasitic vermin in Washington can better organise their rape of the taxpayer.
Take Jefferson's Oath, the lot of you. Give people back all their tax, and see how the PRIVATE decisions of people turn out not to be nearly as death-wreaking as those of government.
Cheers
GT.
GT's Market Rant
How can Obama pay for this mess? How can Obama pay for this mess? How can......
It just boggles my mind as to how many times this question is asked on T.V. with never an answer. Tax the hell out of the 1% rich, they got us into this mess, now let them pay for the repairs. Why is there so much confusion?
"Obama" doesn't pay for a damned thing. The TAXPAYER pays for it. CONSUMERS pay for it. FUTURE GENERATIONS pay for it.
Jefferson said "The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale". Smart man (for a slave-owner).
People ought to get over this idea that government can magic money out of thin air - and that some gang has the right to steal money from others on the basis of a numerical majority of those who voted.
Obama - like every president before him - got a minority of the adult population... in every voluntary election, the overwhelming majority votes either "The Other Guy" or "None of the Above"... that is to say, about 75% of the population do NOT vote for the resultant 'winner'.
In any case, majority rule does not entitle the victor to despotism over the losers. A majority cannot accrue rights that its constituents do not possess.
At what point will everyone accept that government views the people as chattels? When tax rates hit 100%? When debt rises so high that debt servicing costs the entire tax take?
Cheers
GT
GT's Market Rant
Great arguments for decentralized Direct Online Democracy. A world without corruptible professional politicians is technologically inevitable. The sooner the better.
As an intermediate step towards 'akraty', I would consider 'randomocracy' - the appointment at random of adult citizens to political office.
Randomocracy would get rid of career politicians, political parties, political dynasties (and therefore, inbred morons with a sense of entitlement - like Bush and Ted Kennedy)... it would produce a group of folks with average intelligence, average avarice and average megalomania.
That would be a 3-for-3 improvement over the corrupt parasites that currently call each other "The Honourable".
Cheers
GT
GT's Market Rant
The Internet will not solve poverty overnight but in time, it will make it easier to do so. Hell, maybe my state will turn blue someday? I mean, I'd like to have more educated minded folks in my state, not un/under-educated and misguideds to ruin it for the rest of us all. Let's just hope and make sure that the conservatives doing fudge the internet like they did tv and radio.
Jason Jordan
Sandpoint, Idaho
Carla-craigslist isn't much better.
Obama will use the internet to fight poverty.
Internet or none, Obama's going to need to get through Congress and possibly SCOTUS to be successful at fighting poverty. The Chamber of Commerce is no friend in fighting against poverty.
The internet has potential, but unless it's free, it's still going to underserve millions and millions of Americans.
As for being useful in finding a job, it's only useful if there are actually decent paying jobs out there. I've been trying to get out of the shithole I've been working at for four years, and I can't find anything. All you see on monster.com are military recruiters, temp agencies, and "work at home" BS.
Sioux Rose
ROCKY: Did you consider starting your own business as a freelancer? Even if you build clientele slowly, the FRUITS will be yours. What are you good at? Just about everyone has at least one skill that can be bartered for necessities or used for conventional financial transactions? Yes. It's a downturn but that also brings forward the opportunity to innovate. Perhaps you can find a way to invest in yourself?
Besides, don't those internet sites you mentioned post only jobs in the big cities? You could also try craigslist or something like that.
The internet is free if you can use it in the library.
It's not working out here in my state. :(
Terrance Mitchell
Redfield, South Dakota
What is also rising is a generation that see the world through internet eyes. There are projects that never existed ten years ago to link poor communities in say Asia with a microfinance project that gets posted and registered with an NGO and through set ups like paypal you can donate $25 to hundreds of dollars to a concern that you yourself choose. If you want to make that a tax deductible contribution you might need to do some double checking.
Three very interesting projects are Catalytic Communities, Global Links Initiative as well as Idealist.org. They are constantly researching and developing better links, methods and creative modes of inclusion, diversity and plurality.
You are correct about the new outreach but it is too bad local and state level election turnouts aren't changing even with the internet. Tell me how many youtube videos you find on your local and state level pols compared to the presidential candidates and select congressional races.
The Internet has been around for more than a decade and poverty's still rising. Dream on.