Food Banks and efficiency
Jonathan Kay quotes Karen Selick on the unnecessary transaction costs of food banks and suggests that food banks are a waste of everybody’s time.
Well they are up until you run out of money and your kids don’t have anything to eat. I’ve been close to that and I know people who have been in exactly that position. The abstraction which is the essence of efficiency arguments does a very bad job of putting food into the kids’ tummies.
Kay and Selick are absolutely correct in their accounting of the double costs of food banks, what they miss is that most of the people who use food banks don’t have a lot of options. It is not as if, as the end of the month rolls round and the cupboard is bare, they can trot down to the “loans for poor people” office and pick up $50.00. (Though Money Mart - aka The Bank of the Damned (ht KMG) does a land office business in payday loans to the working poor.)
The conventional answer of “get a job” is not going to cut it at noon when the kids have has the last eggs in the house for lunch.
Now, all of this can be put down to poor planning, lifestyle choices, bad budgeting and general idiocy; however, those are things which the hungry kids have no control over. What they want is dinner.
I have long maintained that the biggest problem poor people face is the lack of cash. It seems incredibly trite to say that, but being poor is incredibly expensive. The things people who have money take for granted - the trip to the drugstore to fill a prescription, running out for a few things, taking the bus - become a matter for painful calculation when you are poor. Sometimes people get those calculations wrong.
Kate, at SDA, quotes WP Kinsela’s line “build it and they will come”. So what if you don’t build it? What if there were no food banks?
Well, on the one hand large numbers of the undeserving would have to find other ways of filling their bellies. But there would be lots of people who would simply go hungry. As would their kids.
Now Kay suggests that greater efficiency would be achieved by tossing a couple of dollars into a can. “the same amount of social good could have been done by me throwing a dollar or two into a can as a cash donation.” I am not so sure. If there was, somehow, a magic, frictionless, way of speeding that twoonie into the wallet of a struggling family or an old man too proud to beg then, yes, Kay would have a point. But there isn’t.
In fact, the amount of social good created by a donation in kind rather than cash, may be quite significant notwithstanding the transaction costs, or, indeed, because of them. A cash gift looks an awful like a voluntary impersonal tax, a donation in kind can be quite personal.
For example - from time to time I have a spare dollar or two when shopping and I buy small jars of really good baby food. The same stuff Sam and Max were raised on. Call it a buck a jar or, in some stores, 5 for 4. I buy baby food because I am reasonably sure it will go to my intended beneficiary - a small child. I buy good babyfood because it sends a message to the family that at least one person thinks they are certainly worth the extra dime a bottle. So the social good begins to pile up. But, remember that social and economic goods are not divorced from each other. That $4.00 does indeed cover the overheads of the store I make my purchase at and, quite directly, keeps people in work. (The same $4.00 in a cash donation might keep a social worker busy but that is about it.)
Now, at the food bank end my goods are sorted and placed on shelves or in baskets. The people who do this are almost always poor people trying to make the transition back into the workforce or volunteers. My jars keep them busy. From that business the can arise a sense of connection and connectedness. More social good. Cash, on the other hand, would simply go out in a cheque.
Economics tells a fair bit of most stories however the logic of economics works best with money rather than social capital. Some of the most fundamental issues we face as a society - homelessness, drug addiction, falling birth rates, mental illness - might be susceptible to economic analysis; but they are more likely to reward an analysis which considers social capital formation along with purely economic efficiencies.
Put another way, one of the main reasons why food banks exist is that there are individuals and families who have very little money and very few social connections - no social capital at all. They literally have no one to turn to, not even family, if they are out of money and out of food.
Reconnecting poor people to the economic world can be hard, reconnecting them to the social world in which they can accumulate social capital in the form of friends, neighbours, churches, groups and the day to day structures of everyday life is hard in another way. Cash is not going to create any social nexus at all. Some jars of baby food might.
Written by jay on December 22nd, 2007 with
1 comment.
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#1. December 23rd, 2007, at 8:14 AM.
Yes, my lousy welfare mother used her disability pension (she was completely blind - diabetic complications) to buy two packs of cigarettes per day. This left our finances in a state where I remember eating nothing but puffed wheat with skim milk from powder for weeks at a time. If we ever had meat in the house, it was something like pork hocks.
So, as a kid, the arrival of a food bank hamper was pretty damned exciting. It also kept me from having to choke down more of that @#$%ing puffed wheat on X-mas day.
Yes, food banks do help people spend money on luxuries that they should spend on groceries. There’s no doubt the system is abused. But they still make a hell of a difference in the lives of the children stuck with useless parents.
On behalf of all the kids with shiftless parents, I’d like to ask that if the food banks will be shut down, could someone please do the decent thing and remove the children of shitty parents from their shitty homes?
However, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. Which is why I dropped a bag of groceries in the food bank bin last week, and why I will continue to volunteer for them.