Research Finds Outright Grants of Cash Are Effective Form of Aid to the Poor | Hacker News Reader

Research Finds Outright Grants of Cash Are Effective Form of Aid to the Poor

news.columbia.edu

42 pointschistev9 comments

Every leftist who has engaged with mutual aid knows this and has known this for decades. Glad someone is backing it up with research.

Means testing hurts programs and leads to worse outcomes.

Also the cost of the bureaucracy is eliminated.

There is often so much bureaucracy in government aid programs that I sometimes wonder if universal basic income might be more efficient. It's something I don't see brought up at all in ubi discussions. You'd still need some bureaucracy for expanded aid etc but I'd find it very interesting to see someone do the math on whether it would save money for various countries. And I don't mean this to be an argument for ubi it's just a point of many related to ubi that I'd love to see brought up more.

I think this has been piloted in other places too, including the US, with similar results. Similarly, means testing and friends also just makes the program more expensive with no benefits. The problem is those who could distribute have goals that are not just help people. Even people who want to help often do so with biases that make it so the problem is just poor management (because your own relative success is always earned)

Cash grants are incompatible with the deeply ingrained values and norms of the Protestant work ethic especially as practiced in the US. Until this changes, cash grants to the poor are DoA.

The article describes a grant system where recipients used the money to train up & start small business operations. The US also has small business loans in its own right.

Can I ask why you think they are DoA? We had a few via COVID relief. Republicans were for them. Democrats offered no objections.

Hilarious how so many 4 hours of actual office work a day non-hunters who have never grown a carrot, buy everything at Costco believe they are living the Protestant work ethic the stereotype invokes

Ah, $400 or a year’s income as a one-time grant. Pretty cheap to help people in Uganda. Does make the EA case a little since similar research for $1k every month (more than twice as much and not just a one-time grant) shows no such effects in the US.

Just back of the envelope, median household income is $80k in the US so let’s set that to $40k per individual and the census says 34 m in poverty so that’s about $1.2 T in increased transfers (I.e. in addition to current transfers) to mimic this as a universal tactic here. I wonder what happens to constrained resources like housing etc. and what portion of transfers transfer into disposable income if something like this were attempted.

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