# aiddist: aid the poorest but already productive people

in @/aidsim i've created a simple model of society and then little toy to play with various aid distribution strategies. i don't claim that the model is realistic but nevertheless let's pretend it is and see what the results would mean.

# few high-value individuals

even before we send any aid, the baseline scatterplots show an interesting thing already. there are surprisingly few people that are super valuable and there's a large population of low value people.

this turns out to be an artifact of the random value generation. in order to be high value, you need to have both high potential and you have to be wealthy. both of them are rare so together they are even rarer.

in practice one of the variables will be below average for most people so they will have a limited value. i claim this is actually quite realistic: there are only a handful of truly high-value individuals in societies. and by high-value i mean a person, whose impact improves many people's lives immensely.

# universal distribution is ineffective

one thing i immediately noticed is that distributing money uniformly is not efficient. and that totally makes sense to me. imagine aiding a criminal (person with potential less than 0) with money. the criminal can now buy more efficient weapons and bombs. of course that will just make things worse for society overall.

or imagine giving money to a very disabled person (person with potential around 0). there will be very little value return for that so the money invested will be pretty much wasted.

big sidenote: i'm not saying we should not help low potential people. rather, they need different sort of help than sending them money directly. you might give a homeless person money and he might spend it on drugs because he can't do anything else. but instead you give them housing and job training, and it might actually unblock some of their hidden potential. after that investing money makes sense.

or just think about educating young students: you don't give them money and then let them buy their education. you teach them first. once they are independent and reliable adults, you give them money through employment. this is another example where it's not always money that people actually need to increase their worth.

and in general i have a lot of other beefs with the concept of universal basic income. stuff like where is that money coming from and how will be the resulting inflation dealt with. so far the only reliable way towards equality was to make everyone equally poor. a lot of societies managed to achieve that throughout the history. and my expectation from ubi is that it can achieve equality only through the same means. (my current opinion for the utopia is that we have to embrace inequality a little bit but more on this in a future post.)

# help the poor

giving money to rich people is mostly wasted money. they already have a lot of them so each individual dollar will give them very little value. giving to poor will give more for the bang.

# help the valuable

only aid people who have already proven that they are a worthy individual. this is probably the most nasty observation but it actually makes sense if i think about it.

ideally we could measure the potential but as i described in @/aidsim, it's not possible. the next available proxy is the individual's current value. imagine the case of the poor genius. a lot of value is held back due to low wealth. but if they passed the value threshold, then it means they have incredibly large potential to compensate. giving them a little money gives a large amount of value back. maybe the genius can afford internet access and then his knowledge exponentially grows. that is definitely worth the investment.

it's unfortunate that this approach won't detect the truly high potential but super poor people. but there's no good way to catch such people. the best thing to do is to improve society at large such that even the poorest people can have a high standard of living. and to achieve that, we just need keep advancing our society's technological achievements and hope that the advances trickle down to everyone.

# tiebreaking

suppose after all the filtering you have surplus people and you need to eliminate about half the people. from what i can see simply randomly picking the beneficiaries is a relatively sound strategy. relatively little value is lost as i drag the random slider compared to the filter sliders.

an alternative approach (not modeled by my demo) could be to look for evidence of additional hurdles in the person's life. if they managed to overcome those, then it also means they have larger potential to compensate for them. so i think discrimination based on race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc could make sense. e.g. suppose there are two equally wealthy and equally qualified candidates for a tech job, one white guy and one black woman. i'd expect the black woman would have more hidden potential simply because she is likely to have had more hardships in her life. then picking i'd expect that the black woman will give you more value assuming you can create an inclusive place for her where she can unleash her potential. but if such discrimination is off the table then random should work too.

# results

after some poking i found that for 1k wealth about 30% worthiest and 30% poorest works the best. for 10k wealth about 40% worthiest and 40% poorest. the exact numbers don't really matter. what matters is that basically the optimum number of beneficiaries highly correlates with the amount of wealth available to distribute. it isn't worth giving a little to everyone or a lot to a few. it's best if you give a reasonable amount of wealth to as many people as you can afford in a very specific priority order.

again, all this thinking was based on a toy model which might not be representative of reality. but at least it gives me some sort of intuition about a problem space if such topics ever come up in discussions.

published on 2022-10-10

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