Comment on YSK in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power.

• ArchRecord@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Of course there are, but as has already been shown through many attempts at creating welfare programs that directly test the means of the recipients, the administrative cost to provide funds to people based on highly specific factors about themselves (e.g. total net worth, rate of income, spending, cost to employ farm employees, profit margins, etc etc etc) can cost significantly more than blanket assistance.

  It’s one of the reasons why UBI works so well compared to traditional welfare in administrative costs, since it doesn’t need to be means tested.

  Now obviously this isn’t a one-to-one comparison, but let’s say we create an index just like the one at question here, but it’s specifically the “poor farmer’s index.” To do so, we need to:

  1. Request extensive documentation from all farmers applying
  2. Somebody then has to verify the net assets, income, expenses, etc of all farmers who apply to be listed in the index via that paperwork…
  3. …and continue to verify that data over time, as it obviously changes year-to-year. The eligibility of every participant would have to be re-verified regularly, otherwise someone could become not poor, but stay in the index. This is a perpetual expense that grows linearly over time as more people are added to the index.

  Who will do that work? Now somebody needs to be paid to do this, or spend many hours doing volunteer work just to verify eligibility. Now, in the end yes, that kind of system would be ideal for determining who needs the most help, and I would pick that system every time over a “black farmers index” if it existed in a functional form.

  The problem is that it has significantly higher costs and requires consistent administration over time, something that is obviously hard to expect from a random volunteer project that, based on their staff information, only has 2 “Data Entry and Logistics” roles that are currently filled. Imagine two people handling the ingesting, data entry, and administrative tasks for all the farmers applying to this index across the entire United States, having to verify every single individual’s financial situation. It’s difficult, and costly.

  So yes, as I stated just earlier in this comment, and in my original post, of course I’d prefer an index that directly assesses the economic viability of every individual. However, because doing so is costly, and we know that race is a good proxy for the estimation of general wealth, it makes sense to use that for a small, relatively inexpensive, independently run online site, that now only needs to verify one factor, that doesn’t change over time, to get a good enough approximation of lack of wealth.

  This entire discussion revolves not around the ideals of what we should have, but what is feasible. If it is not feasible at the current point in time for such an organization to directly assess the needs of individuals, it makes sense to use a substantially cheaper to assess proxy, instead of not being able to have any index at all.

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