fatvegan

I've read a few different places that one of the "problems" Centrelink has with payments to Aboriginal communities is that people tend to give their money away or spend it all at once. That isn't necessarily a bad sort of wealth-management. If you get new wealth every day, as Aborigines did for a long while before whities arrived, then eating it all at once and spreading around particularly large amounts of wealth is a pretty sensible idea. And for people with enough to live each day, giving away large amounts of money is fine also. It probably strengthens communities and is a productive form of mutual insurance. However, if you don't have a enough to live each day you need to hoard wealth to survive. All a bank does is enable us to easily hoard wealth for themselves. And fortnightly Centrelink payments dictate a hoarding mentality if you want to live reasonably for the whole period. But what would be wrong with daily or twice-daily payments? It's not going to cost them any more - it's all electronic. If people use the fortnightly payments as a way of forcing themselves to save (like I do), you could easily offer people loan schemes or saving schemes by reducing their daily payment slightly. Someone who saves a percent of their fortnightly payment and then spends the remainder slowly is doing the same thing.

It would also require partners who steal/drink/gamble money to be stealing, drinking or gambling it every day. They can't just show up once a fortnight and take the whole lot. It probably also smooths out slightly drinking binges. If you wanted to have a really good binge, you'd actually have to save up specially for it. And that probably isn't going to happen.

I reckon it might also be quite good if for kids more food was never more than 24 hours away. I've known families who weren't even that poor, where the kids were hungry by the end of the week/fortnight because the family had mis-budgeted.

This doesn't just apply to Aborigines. I would find it helpful. Especially if there weren't transaction costs, which there needn't be. Perhaps it could apply to everyone unless they requested fortnightly payments instead, and possibly explained why fortnightly payments would be better.

My main point though is that the wealth management paradigm white people respect is only one sort. And not even a particularly brilliant one. But because the paradigm we like chosen doesn't fit that well with the one used by Aborigines, we label them as bad at managing wealth. The system they used was almost definitely optimal in historical communities and may still well be if the income patterns weren't chosen by the government for its own convenience.

I'd be really interested to know how much communal spending on alcohol occurs. I wonder if there is social pressure to spend "windfall" income on whatever it is that the social group most wants at the time. It's possible that daily payments would just ensure that every single dollar got spent on alcohol, because it would be physiologically feasible to drink every dollar as it arrived.