Dependency syndrome causes social ills

Laventille and Morvant — or, more precisely, specific parts of these areas — have far higher murder rates than other communities.

This is generally true of the East-West corridor as a whole. Poverty, HIV-AIDS, and educational failure are also higher in these areas. In a sense, this is curious, because these are also the areas from which the People’s National Movement, which has ruled the country for over 35 years, has traditionally drawn its staunchest support. And the PNM has not been ungrateful — it has favoured its core supporters with favoured dispensations of jobs, infrastructure, and housing.

Yet it is precisely these areas which remain the least developed in the country.

It has been argued that it is because of such PNM favouritism that these communities have remained disadvantaged, by creating a ‘‘dependency syndrome.’’

This may well be so. Attempts to alleviate poverty through State transfers of incomes and resources generally fail. While there are specific reasons for this, the fundamental one is that such transfers provide negative incentives to the people receiving them. In the first place, a government must establish a criterion for the receipt of income transfers and other political favours. If it did not, then everyone would be eligible, and nearly everyone would apply, and funds would soon run out.

The problem is, once criteria are established, people will modify their behaviour in order to become eligible for money, ten-days or other political favours. So an entiregeneration of people, mainly in the Laventille and Morvant areas, have grown up knowing that being poor and criminal qualify them for make-work and unearned money.

In the second place, such incentives also impact negatively on the majority of persons from these communities who are willing to work hard and obey the laws of the land. After all, they still have to go through certain actions in order to qualify for the URP and other government programmes. At the very least, they have to join long lines, and this is time that, if such programmes weren’t available, could be better spent seeking or even doing productive work.

What this means is that the value of the transfer is dissipated because of the competition to qualify for it. Thus, to put it in economic terms, the individual’s net gain will be significantly less than the amount of the transfer payments.

But why don’t people realise this? In other words, why don’t they refuse to be part of a system that keeps them poor and socially disadvantaged? The short answer is that they don’t know that the system is bad for them. But the longer answer is that transfers soften the consequences of adversity. Necessity is the mother of invention, but transfers make necessity bearable.

Were it not for that, the very people who depend on URP and social assistance might well find other ways to survive and even prosper. Indeed, the transfer of funds even encourages counter-productive lifestyle choices, such as drug use, dropping out of school or the labour force, even teenage pregnancy and the abandonment of children by fathers.

In other words, it is not that the people of Laventille are inherently less hard-working, less capable, less intelligent, or less law-abiding than the people of other communities. But the incentives given by the Government, in terms of money and political favouritism, has served to undermine all of these qualities. And the whole society pays the price.