1년 뒤 조사해 보니 13명 중 11명이 더이상 거리를 배회하지 않았다. 대부분 장기 숙박업소(호스텔)나 노숙자 쉼터에서 살고 있었다. 다들 뭔가를 배우려고 학원에 등록하거나 요리를 배우고 있었다. 마약중독 치료를 받기 시작한 사람도 있었다.
네덜란드 언론인 루트거 브레흐만은 지난달 31일(현지시간) 워싱턴포스트에 기고한 '공짜 돈의 위력'이라는 제목의 칼럼에서 이 사례를 소개하며 가난한 사람에게 돈을 나눠 주면 무책임하게 허비할 것이라는 추측을 반박했다. 이런 근거 없는 편견 때문에 빈자(貧者)에게 돈 대신 온갖 다른 것을 지원하는 프로그램을 짜내고 관리하느라 오히려 더 많은 세금이 들어간다는 것이다.
실제로 노숙자들을 관리하려면 의료비, 법률 서비스, 치안 유지비 등으로 1인당 연간 수천 달러가 들어가는 데 반해 이들 13명에게는 조사 직원 임금까지 포함해 총 8만 2000달러밖에 들어가지 않았다는 것이다.
이 노숙자 실험에 관여했던 한 조사 요원은 "솔직히 실험 결과를 별로 기대하지 않았는데 뜻밖이었다"면서 "이 실험은 우리에게 복지 문제에 다르게 접근하는 법을 가르쳐 줬다"고 말했다.
브레흐만에 따르면 가난한 가정에 공짜 돈을 나눠 줬더니 범죄율, 영아 사망률, 10대 임신율, 무단결석률 등이 하락했다는 연구 결과가 최근 속속 나오고 있다. 글로벌개발센터(CGD) 소속 경제학자 찰스 케니는 지난해 6월 발표한 보고서에서 "가난한 사람이 가난하게 사는 가장 큰 이유는 돈이 없기 때문"이라며 "그들의 문제를 해결하는 가장 좋은 방법은 돈을 주는 것"이라고 주장했다.
워싱턴 김상연 특파원 carlos@seoul.co.kr
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Free money might be the best way to end poverty
Rutger Bregman is a reporter with the Dutch-language online outlet De Correspondent, where a longer version of this piece can be found. He is on Twitter:@rcbregman.
In May 2009, a small experiment involving 13 homeless men took off in London. Some of them had slept in the cold for more than 40 years. The presence of these street veterans was far from cheap. Police, legal services, health care: Each cost taxpayers thousands of pounds every year.
That spring, a local charity decided to make the street veterans — sometimes called rough sleepers — the beneficiaries of an innovative social experiment. No more food stamps, food-kitchen dinners or sporadic shelter stays. The 13 would get a drastic bailout, financed by taxpayers. Each would receive 3,000 pounds (about $4,500), in cash, with no strings attached. The men were free to decide what to spend it on.
The only question they had to answer: What do you think is good for you?
“I didn’t have enormous expectations,” an aid worker recalled a year later. Yet the homeless men’s desires turned out to be quite modest. A phone, a passport, a dictionary — each participant had ideas about what would be best for him. None of the men wasted his money on alcohol, drugs or gambling. A year later, 11 of the 13 had roofs over their heads. (Some went to hostels; others to shelters.) They enrolled in classes, learned how to cook, got treatment for drug abuse and made plans for the future. After decades of authorities’ fruitless pushing, pulling, fines and persecution, 11 vagrants moved off the streets.
The cost? About 50,000 pounds, including the wages of the aid workers. In addition to giving 11 individuals another shot at life, the project had saved money by a factor of multiples. Even The Economist concluded: “The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”
What if this pilot program has broader implications? Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education. This kind of reasoning nourishes the myriad ingenious social programs, administrative jungles, armies of program coordinators and legions of supervising staff that make up the modern welfare state.
We like to think that people have to work for their money. In recent decades, social welfare has become geared toward a labor market that does not create enough jobs. The trend from “welfare” to “workfare” is international, with obligatory job applications, reintegration trajectories, mandatory participation in “voluntary” work. The underlying message: Free money makes people lazy.
Except that it doesn’t.
In recent years, numerous studies of development aid have found impressive correlations between free money and reductions in crime, inequality, malnutrition, infant mortality, teenage pregnancy rates and truancy. It is also correlated with better school completion rates, higher economic growth and improvement in the condition of women.“The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money,” economist Charles Kenny, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, wrote in June. “It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.”
In the 2010 report “Just Give Money to the Poor,” researchers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development give numerous examples of money being scattered successfully. In Namibia, malnourishment, crime and truancy fell 25 percent, 42 percent and nearly 40 percent, respectively, after grants were given. In Malawi, school enrollment of girls and women rose 40 percent in settings where money was given with or without conditions on its use . From Brazil to India and from Mexico to South Africa, free-money programs have flourished in the past decade. More than 110 million families in at least 45 countries benefit from them.
It is time to apply these lessons to rich but increasingly unequal societies. A world where wages no longer rise still needs consumers. Middle-class purchasing power has been maintained through loans, loans and more loans. The Calvinistic reflex that you have to work for your money has turned into a license for inequality.
Legend has it that while Henry Ford II was giving a tour around a new, highly automated factory to union leader Walter Reuther in the 1960s, Ford joked: “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?”
Reuther is said to have replied: “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”
No one is suggesting societies the world over should implement an expensive basic income system in one stroke. Each utopia needs to start small, with experiments that slowly turn our world upside down — like the one four-plus years ago in London. One of the aid workers later recalled: “It’s quite hard to just change overnight the way you’ve always approached this problem. These pilots give us the opportunity to talk differently, think differently, describe the problem differently.”
That is how all progress begins.
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출처 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-the-best-way-to-end-poverty/2013/12/29/679c8344-5ec8-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html
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