On Scarcity & Plenty

 

Haruna Niiya - a modern print selling at Room and Board

Recently read a section in "Poverty, by America" where Desmond talks about the false sense of scarcity that marks political conversation in America. 

Here he is in a NPR interview:

It's true that universal programs, like some universal basic income ideas, are incredibly expensive, and that should concern us. But it's also true that a nation as rich as ours needs to reject this scarcity mindset and just move toward broader tint targeting, as I say in the book. So the Child Tax Credit that we saw in COVID was a pretty good example of this. It had this massive intervention into the lives of low-income families, right? Just historically drove down their poverty, especially child poverty. But it also reached the lives of working-class and some middle-class families, too. And so I think that those kind of bigger-tent targeting can make a big difference in how we design policies. So I think that our goals should be ambitious, and they should reject this, like, in a world of scarce resources talking point.