One hypothesis is that one ends up being stuck in a first-order phase transition where the quantitative changes are not visible until enough energy is poured into the system (or removed from it). You can get all kinds of small and spurious effects, but nothing meaningful. If so, one would expect a discontinuous effect once the cash infusions become large enough or frequent enough to finish the transition and go into a more linear regime.
This feels right to me, and I think matches up well with:
The discussion in Elizabeth’s comment, about informal debts and other invisible money-sinks in the local environment;
Mingyuan’s comment about … something like, the relative straightforwardness, in the two environments, of turning cash into permanent value.
Unfortunately, it feels like the phase transition might be “escaping the local community”, in the model where (as discussed in Elizabeth’s twitter thread) the local community expects resources to be shared, and represents roughly a bottomless sink on individual resources. (As well as a source, when needed—it acts like a buffer with capacity far exceeding what you could give an individual in a program like this as a one-shot payment.)
This vaguely suggests that “enough money to move somewhere with better opportunities” ought to be a major threshold where effects should start showing up, if they haven’t already. Both because it separates someone from their existing community (removing the community-buffer factor), and because it overcomes the problem of limited opportunities to invest the money in something of durable value.
One hypothesis is that one ends up being stuck in a first-order phase transition where the quantitative changes are not visible until enough energy is poured into the system (or removed from it). You can get all kinds of small and spurious effects, but nothing meaningful. If so, one would expect a discontinuous effect once the cash infusions become large enough or frequent enough to finish the transition and go into a more linear regime.
This feels right to me, and I think matches up well with:
The discussion in Elizabeth’s comment, about informal debts and other invisible money-sinks in the local environment;
Mingyuan’s comment about … something like, the relative straightforwardness, in the two environments, of turning cash into permanent value.
Unfortunately, it feels like the phase transition might be “escaping the local community”, in the model where (as discussed in Elizabeth’s twitter thread) the local community expects resources to be shared, and represents roughly a bottomless sink on individual resources. (As well as a source, when needed—it acts like a buffer with capacity far exceeding what you could give an individual in a program like this as a one-shot payment.)
This vaguely suggests that “enough money to move somewhere with better opportunities” ought to be a major threshold where effects should start showing up, if they haven’t already. Both because it separates someone from their existing community (removing the community-buffer factor), and because it overcomes the problem of limited opportunities to invest the money in something of durable value.