Last updated on December 7, 2015
‘Tis the season for giving and many people will turn to food banks, some for their subsistence and others as an outlet for their charity, so I wanted to share (very quickly and without much commentary or analysis, given time constraints) two noteworthy items about food banks.
The first is an article from Montreal daily La Presse (in French, but easily translated with Google Translate), in which Paul Taylor, the director of a food bank in one of Canada’s poorest areas, makes the claim that food banks just don’t work:
From all [his] experiences, he has learned a lesson. And it is brutal. “Food banks don’t work.”
Why is that?
“While we focus on this charitable work, we lose the opportunity to debate the real reasons behind all that poverty. People do not need more food. They need more income. And that, we never talk about. What we teach our kids is that to help the poor, we must give a can from our pantry.”
I happen to completely agree with Taylor’s take.
The other link is an EconTalk podcast in which host Russ Roberts talks with the University of Chicago’s Canice Prendergast (whose 1999 classic JEL paper “The Provision of Incentives in Firms” I really loved when I was teaching myself contract theory) about some work Prendergast has been doing with food banks:
If you have 250 million tons of food to give away every year to local food banks how should you do it? Canice Prendergast of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how he and a team of economists created an artificial currency and a daily auction for the national food bank Feeding America so that local food banks could bid on the types of food that were the most valuable to them. Prendergast explains the results of the new system and the cultural and practical challenges of bringing prices, even artificial ones, to a world accustomed to giving things away.
An interesting solution, and a very Chicago one at that!