What absolute rubbish this article is from top to bottom.<p>A stupid system was replaced by a slightly more effective one... and it was 'markets and economists' that did it! Pure propaganda.<p>Heres a more efficient system. How much does the food box they give out cost? Say $50? Just give the customers $50 and let them spend it. No more admin
I have close acquaintances who will take that $50, spend it on drugs, and then starve to death. If you want them to stay alive, you have to give them non-money.<p>If everyone spent money like a rational, 100 IQ individual with a moderate amount of schooling on basic financial strategies, it'd be a lot easier to manage a population. Unfortunately, less than half of the population is 100 IQ, and in some areas less than 5% of the population understands a single high school course worth of financial management.<p>And then of course you have fundamentally irrational actors as well, like drug addicts. IQ and education don't help there, addictions are monsters that swallow people of all socio-economic varieties.<p>So you have to either let those people squalor, or find another solution.
<i>>How much does the food box _they_ give out cost? Say $50? Just give the customers $50</i><p>I emphasized <i>"_they_"</i> (Feeding America) because your interpretation of the article seems to misunderstand the situation.<p>Feeding America gets <i>most of its donations in the form of actual food</i> instead of cash. Unwanted food from farms, retailers, etc. (Yes, they also get some cash donations but the vast majority is still food donations.) They want to distribute that <i>food</i> to the network of food banks. They don't have the equivalent of $50 cash to give to poor people.<p>Working within that constraint, the economists then designed a form of "fake money" that food banks can "spend" so that "market" information flows up from the food banks to Feeding America. The way food banks bid and prioritize is encoded in the fake money which makes the distribution of donated food to be more efficient.
Your efficiency is having the $$ spent on goods worth the $$ given. However, the goal of food banks is to spend money on FOOD and make sure the FOOD is given out to those in need (with little wasteage). Efficiency is being measured completely differently than what you are hoping it is measured as.
Because Feeding America doesn't receive monetary donations in that kind of volume to hand out money. They also don't have a "food box". You clearly are speaking from a ivory tower position and it's quite disturbing.<p>It's a food bank network that uses the monetary donations it receives to support the logistics of moving hundreds of millions of pounds of food to food banks.