I read through a lot of the comments so far and they expectedly turned into a stream of educated opining for and against the validity of stipends for the poor. Although many points are well said, do they really matter? Seems like the fundamental point is the ongoing lack of experimentation around poverty alleviation that leads to a Duke researcher only having a small Indian community that she has been studying who then gets a casino to be the only opportunity to see potentially innovative policy initiatives.

I'd love to see block grants distributed to states for a competitive process of poverty reduction (or pick any another long term social cost) where such experimentation could become institutionalized and there'd be a lot more to talk about.