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by nkoren 3700 days ago
It's simple: a lot of the actual needed "work" in impoverished communities is informal. These communities are quite good at self-organising -- but barter can only get you so far. What cash grants give you is better liquidity for conducting mutually-beneficial exchanges of goods and services locally -- as well as the means of acquiring external resources for facilitating those transactions. In this context, most low-level jobs are self-creating.

Higher-level jobs require a more educated populace -- but it's been shown that when a Basic Income is given, people will naturally seek out greater education -- either travelling to find it remotely, or paying for education services locally. The jobs can't be "brought in" before the populace has the education to fulfil them.

One thing which Basic Income doesn't address, however, is infrastructure creation (or at least infrastructure which can't be sensibly paid for by end-user fees). So there's definitely still a need to address that, Basic Income or no. But for various reasons that should really be done by the government, rather than an NGO.