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Giving people money helped less than I thought it would

theargumentmag.com · 2,847 words · saved by 1 readers

Just give people money. It's the simple, brute-force solution to so many problems. In low-income countries, charities are sometimes measured against whether their interventions are better than simply giving people cash. Even in high-income countries like the U.S., when disaster strikes, often the best thing you can do is get money into the hands of affected people immediately. They know whether they should use it to buy gas, rent an Airbnb or fly to their cousin's house one state over. So it wasn't that crazy to assume — particularly once promising pilots were released — that the same should be true for addressing chronic poverty in high-income countries. If you give a new mom a few hundred dollars a month or a homeless man one thousand dollars a month, that's gotta show up in the data, right? Alas. A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new mothers and som

Giving people money helped less than I thought it would Ending the war on poverty will take more than cash transfers Kelsey Piper Aug 19, 2025 677 61 106 Share U.S. singer Eartha Kitt is seen at the end of the Poor People March, on June 19, 1968, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by ARNOLD SACHS/AFP via Getty Images) Just give people money . It's the simple, brute-force solution to so many problems. In low-income countries, charities are sometimes measured against whether their interventions are better than simply giving people cash. Even in high-income countries like the U.S., when disaster strikes,

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