All but one of the beggars who approached me in Kathmandu were children. If children can productively beg there is no incentive to educate them. Just send them out on the streets.
It isn't a matter of being greedy. It's avoiding counterproductive behavior.
This. In India and probably in many other countries, a lot of beggars operate under some gangs and most of their income goes to them. Especially true for beggars one sees at the traffic signals. So if you pay them, it is added incentive for the gangs to put more people out on the street.
My take on this is that everyone has a different way of being most effective in helping others. To really improve their situation, a homeless person needs someone who can invest a lot more time and effort. So if you want to help them, give to charities that work with them. In our individual capacity, we are more effective in helping someone who already has a platform. Consider financing the entire education of a child. That is more effective use of the money than distributing it piecemeal to several homeless people.
> So if you pay them, it is added incentive for the gangs to put more people out on the street.
I sometimes think that is just a handy excuse.
I actually enjoy seeing tourists get taken advantage of, and actively encourage it with my own behaviour.
I often admire go-getting capitalist tourist scams or annoying vendors - at times even illegal or immoral behaviour (people take risks because they need to, not usually out of choice).
Love the rest of your comment... exactly my point that we can all find ways to truely help (while avoiding ways that damage).
Hard to explain - however I don't mean in a Schadenfreude way...
E.g. vendor selling something for 10x what a local would pay. I don't haggle much and admire chutzpah. If someone steals my wallet because that is the only income they can get, I won't like it (but I am not about to go hungry, get rickets or fail to get healthcare).
Obviously hard to delineate what is 'bad', or what are downstream effects.
I had my wallet stolen several years ago -- I set it on the bar at a cafe momentarily while paying, and somehow left without it (maybe someone subtly laid a paper over it? maybe I was just distracted?) and it was gone when I realized about 30 seconds later and came back in.
I can't say I admired the chutzpah, though.
The thief took a minor risk, earned less than 20 euros, and cost me days worth of my time and more than 100x that amount of money, to replace documents I hadn't realized would be so difficult to replace (the big one: my US driver's license, and I didn't live in the US anymore; replacing the US credit cards was also non-trivial, but less expensive).
The small amount of cash they got was about commensurate with the risk they took (fairly small); but the waste entailed was huge. I would much rather have been mugged and had my cash taken, and my watch as well -- i.e., items valuable to the mugger, not simply my wallet (which contained things mostly only valuable to me). Or they could have tossed the cashless wallet in a trashcan nearby. They didn't (I searched them all).
The real cost to society of this kind of theft and waste is not so much monetary; it's more psychological. That experience burned into my head fairly well that there are plenty of people around who care so little about me, they'll happily take whatever they can from me, regardless of the suffering it causes.
I have a suspicion that it's the series of experiences like this that turn people from political liberals to conservatives as they age -- they feed easily into racism and classism, they turn us from thinking "how can I help people who need it" to "fuck 'em -- they'll do the same to me if they could". Etc..
Sure - avoiding counter-productive behaviour is a good goal. However it is difficult to avoid condescendingly 'knowing' what is best for a child if it aligns with selfish motives, and one knows nothing about the situation...
The question is how to help kids though... I have tried gifting useful stuff to local schools, once I helped teach English to a class. Leaving coins where children might find them seems good to me. Hiding small toys down low is fun too - and is suitable anywhere in the world!
I feel churlish if I do not share my 1st world worth when enjoying the hospitality of other countries... but it takes some ingenuity to come up with ways to do so that are good for all involved...
It isn't a matter of being greedy. It's avoiding counterproductive behavior.