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THE EDITOR: In his 1850 essay "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen," French economist and legislator Frédéric Bastiat wrote that understanding any human phenomenon required taking account “both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.”
This is very applicable to the ongoing controversies over the Unemployment Relief Programme (URP) and Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (Cepep). The opposition PNM is talking about the 10,000 Cepep workers who have been fired, and the ruling UNC about the corruption in these programmes. But it is crucial to look at the unseen effects. These include:
• Thousands of young men not alive because of gang battles over URP funds.
• Public goods (infrastructure, education, health) that do not exist because billions of dollars in Cepep/URP funds have instead gone into the pockets of politically connected individuals.
• Thousands of employable youths who instead found it easier to take a “ten days” than find real work or acquire marketable skills.
• More children in households with two responsible parents, because hundreds of women decided a URP/Cepep job was a good substitute for a man or a productive job.
In short, the negative effects of URP and Cepep far outweigh any good done by providing money to poor people. In sum, what cannot be seen is that these same people and their children would probably have been better off than if these programmes had never existed.
ELTON SINGH
Couva
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