[HN Gopher] How do cash transfers impact the people who don't re...
___________________________________________________________________
How do cash transfers impact the people who don't receive them?
(2019)
Author : herbertl
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-08-22 06:06 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.givedirectly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.givedirectly.org)
| origin_path wrote:
| It's probably worth applying some scepticism to this study:
|
| 1. It's an economics paper. Not a field with a reputation for
| accurate predictions beyond the basics.
|
| 2. It's commissioned by a charity that wanted academic evidence
| of the benefits of its own policies, so it's as conflicted as can
| be.
|
| 3. It's research by academics who are as a group notoriously left
| wing, so they're being asked to do research to support their own
| ideological preconceptions.
|
| That doesn't mean the conclusions are wrong, but it does mean
| they shouldn't be accepted at face value, and you'd have to
| review it very thoroughly - ideally with external double checks
| of validity - to be able to conclude anything from it.
|
| Doing even a very fast check of the paper immediately reveals a
| major problem: the headline claim of 0.1% price inflation
| excludes the price of labour, which inflated significantly. This
| pretty much explains the entire effect. Not surprisingly, if you
| start handing out cash at random in poor communities then the
| people who aren't lucky enough to get it start demanding some of
| that cash too. But you don't need research to know this. It's
| economics 101, that's what's happening right now in western
| economies (big cash transfers from governments -> inflation).
|
| We may suspect the paper is being undermined by ideology and
| funder bias because its early statements on inflation try hard to
| hide this fact. At the start, it's saying:
|
| _" Importantly, we document ... minimal price inflation"_
|
| (abstract). Then it becomes:
|
| _" For inputs, we find positive point estimates [of inflation],
| but they are not always statistically significant. For outputs,
| we document statistically significant, but economically minimal,
| local price inflation."_
|
| (page 4). Unless read very cynically this sounds like good news.
| But then we notice how obfuscated this statement is. "Positive
| [input] point increases but they are not always statistically
| significant", i.e. some are and the magnitude of the increase
| isn't mentioned. Later we find:
|
| _" we do see significant increases in the factors that we
| directly measure, and particularly in the wage bill: enterprises
| in treated (control) villages increase spending on labor by USD
| PPP 82 (70), a sizable change relative to the control mean"_
|
| (page 20). So we've gone straight from "minimal price inflation"
| to "significant increases ... a sizeable change". I've read so
| many academic papers in the last few years and whenever you see
| such large slippage between claims in the abstract and claims
| buried deep in the paper, it's always a bad sign. It's a leading
| indicator that there's going to be other kinds of problem,
| probably involving bogus stats/models/assumptions.
|
| Moving on. We might have hoped that people would use the money
| for investment that could permanently increase their standards of
| living after the cash transfers end, but that doesn't happen:
|
| _" Strikingly, we do not see strong evidence of a firm
| investment response"_
|
| But this isn't something that needs research to know, it's the
| story of decades of massive and sustained foreign aid to Africa.
| Aid money gets spent on increased consumption but not sustainable
| investment.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Similar to this, a few weeks ago, centered on the US:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32043969
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32044076
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Worth pointing out the summary (2nd link) by the people is
| arguably pretty bad. They are basing being better off on
| reactionary feelings and money left in the bank. That makes
| no sense at all for people with little wealth. It seems like
| they purposefully picked things to make the study a failure.
|
| Many of the children comments explain this well.
| notahacker wrote:
| > So we've gone straight from "minimal price inflation" to
| "significant increases ... a sizeable change".
|
| I'm not sure the fact that a different variable (total wage
| expenditure) from the one discussed in the abstract (price
| inflation) recorded a different outcome is a particularly
| pertinent critique of the paper.
|
| Since the paper also records that the increased wage
| expenditure allowed wage earners to buy more goods because the
| price of goods inflated minimally, and the enterprises spending
| more on wages nevertheless experienced a [non-statistically
| significant] increase in profit, leaving _all groups materially
| better off_ , this is GDP growth, not inflation.
|
| A more pertinent observation is that this is pretty much what
| you'd expect from injecting additional money into a local
| economy operating well below capacity and buying most of its
| consumer goods from areas not receiving cash injections, so it
| doesn't necessarily work at national scale or if the
| jurisdiction self-funds its poverty alleviation funding.
| origin_path wrote:
| Although I agree with your conclusions that the study doesn't
| tell us much, I don't think wages should be excluded from
| claims about price inflation, especially in non industrial
| economies heavily reliant on cheap labour. The charity
| advertises the headline 0.1% rate and the abstract makes no
| mention of the fact that actually some of the most important
| prices in that society increased significantly. If they'd
| admitted to this up front of would have seriously reduced the
| apparent success of their initiative.
|
| But there is really a deeper problem here. Every time
| researchers do this they're training people to assume their
| claims are deceptive in some way. Large groups of people are
| just tuning out academic claims because of this sort of
| thing, they don't care. But this is bad for social cohesion
| because the people who take academic output on faith then
| conclude that they must be a superior breed of person:
| "reality based", "understands the science" etc. We already
| have this problem and it's getting worse. To wit: you can't
| afford the time to double check every claim presented as
| important or that will affect social policy that affects you,
| so you have to generalize, and increasingly that means
| assuming that if an academic makes a claim convenient for
| their prevailing ideology, it's probably a trick or
| misleading in some way. If caught they tend to blame
| journalists for "misrepresenting" their work, or they'll
| point to a footnote on page 67 where they redefine a standard
| term and use it to claim nobody should have ever assumed the
| obvious interpretation of what they were saying. It's just so
| tawdry. Then for people who stop listening, it gets used as a
| weapon to beat them around the head.
|
| So I think academics have a moral obligation to be brutally
| honest in their claims and abstracts. This sort of word game
| where they arbitrarily exclude the prices that went up from
| their definition of price inflation, is ultimately self
| defeating.
| notahacker wrote:
| Wage spend literally _isn 't_ price inflation though, and
| real wage increases (or employment increases) due to
| increased output aren't even likely to _cause_ price
| inflation. Local enterprises sell more, so the workers get
| more money, with which they are able to buy more stuff.
| That is economic growth, not price inflation.
|
| If you would like to argue that people earning more money
| is always and everywhere a negative outcome aid agencies
| should do everything in their power to avoid, that's a
| _bold_ argument you 're perfectly entitled to make, but it
| doesn't change the fact that it is not - by itself - price
| inflation. If the paper has computed price inflation
| _wrongly_ that 's another matter, but it won't be because
| they haven't created a new definition of price inflation
| which includes wages (or profits or units sold or unfilled
| vacancies or speculator activity or anything else which
| isn't price inflation, no matter how often it correlates
| with it or causes it).
|
| Put another way, academics should continue to use
| definitions correctly, and not add fake caveats to stuff
| which is _tautological_ to pander to the sensibilities of
| people who (i) don 't understand the basic definitions (ii)
| assume that a reasonable starting point is to assume that
| if their view on what the basic definition should be
| conflicts with the academic's understanding, it is because
| the academic is acting in bad faith.
| origin_path wrote:
| Inflation is a general rise in prices, and what the paper
| reports is not merely that people who received money paid
| their employees more (yay!) but also that employers in
| villages that didn't receive any money _also_ had to pay
| more in wages. Literally they experienced an inflationary
| shock in the labor market. The research is very quiet on
| this part - in the control villages the little businesses
| suddenly had a big problem. They couldn 't/didn't raise
| prices because their competitors in the next village over
| weren't doing so, but they suddenly had to pay more in
| labor costs.
|
| You can say this isn't a problem but the goal of aid is
| to try and create sustainable increases in wealth that
| stick around after the money flow stops. That clearly
| didn't happen here.
|
| As to definitions, that's exactly the problem in talking
| about. The academic definition of inflation is useless
| and misleading. They say prices didn't go up, as if labor
| is some magical thing that doesn't have a price. And they
| neglect to mention that a very important category of
| prices did inflate unless you read most of the paper.
| Majromax wrote:
| > I don't think wages should be excluded from claims about
| price inflation, especially in non industrial economies
| heavily reliant on cheap labour.
|
| As I read your quote above, it sounds to me like "increased
| spending on labour" refers to an increase in the _quantity_
| of labour demanded, more than an increase in the hourly
| wage. That 's consistent with both economic improvement and
| low inflation.
| origin_path wrote:
| I think they're taking about increases in individual
| wages. Businesses didn't expand by my reading of the
| paper.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 1. It's an economics paper. Not a field with a reputation for
| accurate predictions beyond the basics.
|
| If your first reason for dismissing an economics paper is
| because you don't like economics, that's a bad start.
| Especially since the rest of your comment reviewing this
| economics paper consists of _you doing economics_. You 're
| preemptively dismissing everything you yourself have to say.
|
| I mean, if economists suck, then surely the economic theories
| of people who don't think economics is real suck more.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think skepticism towards individual psychology papers is
| warranted given the replication crisis in their field.
|
| I think the same is true of economics -- and is the sentiment
| that person was expressing.
| timbre1234 wrote:
| Trickle down economics?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| In fact it's almost exactly the opposite. Rather than the
| supply-side economics which trickle-down focuses on, this
| sounds like a clear example of _demand-side_ economics. By
| improving the income of some consumers in a community, they are
| able to buy more goods and services that they wouldn 't have
| otherwise, thus improving the local economy altogether.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Does it improve that economy by at least as much as the cost
| of the transfers? It seems like a lot of economic benefits
| can be created by injections of money from outside the system
| under study.
| margalabargala wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if that were the case.
|
| Imagine someone who sewed things by hand, given (or even
| loaned) the money to purchase a sewing machine, making them
| many times more productive. Now the community can have
| things sewn faster and more easily with less effort, with
| tons of downstream effects (more sails, better clothing,
| stronger soft goods, etc) and it's easy to see how the net
| improvement to that community can far exceed the price of
| the machine.
|
| Another way to ask that question is "does there exist tools
| whose price is less than the total amount of increased
| economic activity they enable", which when phrased that
| way, it seems clear that the answer is "yes".
| drc500free wrote:
| I would think that the more consumers that can "vote with
| their wallet" on which products are the best, the more
| quickly the market will identify and reward good products.
| Identifying and rewarding the best products (i.e. those
| processes that create the most valuable outputs from the
| inputs) is one of the primary benefits of market-based
| economies. The positive feedback loop of reinvesting
| profits helps them lift above the general noise.
| notahacker wrote:
| That's the point of the fiscal multiplier figure: according
| to their estimates it improves the economy by a multiple of
| 2.6x the cost of the money transferred.
|
| -
|
| Seems like reverse "trickle down" in another respect too:
| the poorest recipients got better off but the gap between
| rich and poor still widened, presumably because the poor
| spent much of their increased budget buying things from the
| rich.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| "while there were large economic gains for recipients (targeted
| as the poorest), gains for non-recipients were so substantial
| that the gap between the poorest and least-poor within villages
| widened slightly." Now that is a novel result!
|
| Publicising that might be a way of overcoming the resistance of
| the large number of people who are mainly interested in their own
| relative status, and so dislike giving assistance to the poorest
| members of society. If you can show people that yes this
| intervention will help the poorest but it will help you more then
| those concerned mostly with their own relative status might be
| more likely to back it.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _If you can show people that yes this intervention will help
| the poorest but it will help you more then those concerned
| mostly with their own relative status might be more likely to
| back it._
|
| Folks have been trying this. When the poorest folks have enough
| money to spend on things, everyone tends to benefit - it isn't
| a new theory. But mostly, teaching folks this has failed. It is
| either that, or you need to settle on "people simply dislike
| giving others help, even if they reap rewards."
|
| I think part of the issue is that the rewards aren't nearly as
| visible or shockingly impactful as actually being given money
| to thrive.
| obastani wrote:
| One important caveat is that in the study, as far as I can
| tell, the money is coming from a different country
| (presumably the USA) than the target country (Kenya), so
| there is a baseline effect of increasing the net wealth of
| Kenya. If the money is collected from and distributed to the
| same community, the results may not necessarily be the same.
| I think it would be very interesting to see a study along
| these lines, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which is key - a system that had money injected into it
| showed the results expected of increasing the money supply.
|
| The same may not happen on a national scale if you're
| circulating inside it.
| belorn wrote:
| It not that simple. The same theory say that government
| should spend more money during recessions since that send
| more money into the hands of citizens, thus increasing
| peoples ability to consume more and drive up the economy.
| However, by doing so the amount of money in the system
| increase and thus you get inflation, forcing the government
| to spend even more money.
|
| This doesn't happen every time as is demonstrated by this
| study, but history has plenty of example where it has and
| hasn't worked. The open question is to figure out when it
| work and why it doesn't work in other situations.
| [deleted]
| Jochim wrote:
| The cause of the inflation matters in how the response
| plays out. The inflation we're seeing currently isn't being
| driven by the general population having too much money but
| the response by central banks has been to act like it is.
|
| Personally I view the two major factors to be post pandemic
| shipping costs and the Ukraine. A meaningful response from
| government could have headed this off but instead we're
| seeing energy producers hit record profits while large
| parts of society are going to be unable turn their heating
| on over the winter and on top of that rising interest rates
| are going to see every other aspect of their budget become
| even more expensive as well.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| > The inflation we're seeing currently isn't being driven
| by the general population having too much money
|
| Actually, it partially is. One third of the current
| inflation is demand driven according to the Fed (i.e.
| stimulus checks, unemployment payments, above-market
| wages due to unemployment checks, etc.) [1]. There are
| also supply shortages but it's hard to disentangle what
| part of the supply shortages are due to shipping costs
| vs. having labor shortages due to said unemployment
| checks.
|
| We're seeing a lot of the price pressures calm down now
| as coincidentally, the labor force grows back to pre-
| pandemic size. [2]
|
| > A meaningful response from government could have headed
| this off
|
| Like what, putting a price cap on oil? That doesn't work
| and you and I both know it.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/demand-issues-
| account-one...
|
| [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-steak-is-getting-
| cheaper-a...
| belorn wrote:
| There are multiple studies and theories being put out on
| why inflation occur, both now and in the past. I don't
| really see a major consensus on a single explanation.
|
| The two major one that seems to make most sense to me is
| "net importing vs net exporter", and the other is the
| theory about low supply. For the first one, if a country
| is importing more than exporting, then the imports is
| being paid over time by the exports. Increasing the
| amount of money in such country does nothing since its
| the exported products that pay for the imports, not the
| currency.
|
| The second theory is that in periods where demand exceed
| that of supply. In those situation people will bid to buy
| the limited resource, and if you increase the amount of
| money circulating then the bids will simply go up for the
| same limited resource. Natural gas is being used as an
| example in Europe, where the only way to reduce inflation
| is to reduce consumption. Reduced consumption however
| slows economic growth and thus a conflict between
| inflation and growth.
| Jochim wrote:
| > There are multiple studies and theories being put out
| on why inflation occur, both now and in the past. I don't
| really see a major consensus on a single explanation.
|
| I wasn't suggesting a general explanation for all cases
| of inflation. I'm saying that the current inflationary
| period has some easily identifiable causes and the
| measures that central banks take against general
| background inflation are actively harmful in this
| situation and instead should be tackled by government
| directly.
|
| The second theory is the closest explanation for the
| current inflationary period and the measures are
| perfectly fine if you're talking about curbing the
| consumption of luxury goods and services. It falls down
| when you're targeting the necessities of survival because
| at that point you're effectively choosing to kill off
| some of your population because of a refusal to regulate.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The general trend of history seems to suggest this isn't
| true.
|
| Why do you think it is?
|
| I mostly see propaganda and lies directed at stopping this
| from happening rather than a basic human response to it.
|
| Like say the 'welfare queen' myth, or the trope that 'giving
| people money will just cause them problems or make them
| lazy', seems you have to really stretch to convince people
| that helping the poor is a bad idea and the standard human
| response is to help.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Like say the 'welfare queen' myth, or the trope that
| 'giving people money will just cause them problems or make
| them lazy', seems you have to really stretch to convince
| people that helping the poor is a bad idea and the standard
| human response is to help.
|
| In my experience, these attitudes are more common among
| those who live around poor people than among those who
| don't. It's my wife who taught me the difference between
| "people who are good at being poor and ones who aren't."
| Coming from a privileged background, I had no idea.
|
| It's a sociocultural adaptation to scarcity. Historically,
| whether you were in a Bangladeshi village or rural Oregon,
| even the rich don't really have sufficient surplus to help
| more than a few people. And there were no rich foreigners
| or central government to swoop in. In that scenario,
| anticipating and expecting help is maladaptive. Everybody
| in the village needs to be incentivized to work as hard as
| possible for themselves before relying on anyone else.
| standardUser wrote:
| "even the rich don't really have sufficient surplus to
| help more than a few people"
|
| This wildly underestimates how rich some people are in
| the US. For example, just 5% of the wealth from _only_
| the _20_ wealthiest Americans would cover all federal,
| state and local funding for housing support in a year.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Would be interested in your math.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >In my experience, these attitudes are more common among
| those who live around poor people than among those who
| don't
|
| It shouldn't exactly come as a shock that the people who
| have to live in proximity to the results of such systems
| have more to say about the downsides than those who can
| just observe from their ivory tower and can look at some
| spreadsheet, do a little math and say things like "net
| positive" with a clear conscience. Even if you have very
| good results the former group is simply going to be much
| more aware of the tradeoffs than the latter who will at
| best only know second hand.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| When did rural Oregon find out that there was in fact
| several layers of central government available to help
| them? Didn't they feel a bit foolish at that point?
|
| It's great that they were all working so hard in grinding
| poverty and just letting the weak die or whatever, very
| inspirational, but being vaguely aware of reality might
| have served them better overall.
|
| The New Deal agriculture subsidies must have really
| confused them if they didn't even know about the state
| government.
|
| https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/narratives/the-
| world-ru...
|
| Hopefully they can ditch those unhelpful socioeconomic
| adaptations they picked up now they've rejoined society.
| beambot wrote:
| Also seems to suggest that minimizing wealth gaps may _not_ be
| the best objective function (by itself) relative to other
| possibilities. Curious.
| em500 wrote:
| Let's imagine this in the most extreme form in a thought
| experiment. An identical twin is stranded in the desert. You
| have the means (water, transport) to save one of them. Is it
| better to save one (which one?) or leave both to die? (I have
| not settled on a firm answer so far.)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Any value system in which "save one person" is not
| obviously and objectively better than "save zero people",
| with no other tradeoffs or details present, seems
| objectively incorrect.
| notahacker wrote:
| tbf real world tradeoffs are usually more like "save one
| person with high degree of likelihood of success" vs
| "attempt to save two people with significant likelihood
| of failure"
| beambot wrote:
| The result from this study: Give one a glass of water, and
| the other may end up swimming in a natural oasis -- both
| live & have better lives.
| simplebutimpact wrote:
| You can have a large wealth gap, while still having a high
| bottom standard of living. A great example of this is Sweden
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E0dWHCnic8
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Did anyone suggest it was? That seems like a very weak straw
| man of the very many sensible arguments from multiple angles,
| for why vast wealth inequality is a bad thing for society,
| including the members of the society with the extreme wealth
| but surrounded by poverty.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think it exactly contradicts that:
|
| Wealth gaps are a sign of wealthy societies -- the question
| is wealth distribution, not distance from the lowest to
| highest.
| yunohn wrote:
| Supplying handouts does not affect the wealth gap - giving
| the needy some real capital like own housing, shops, etc
| would actually contribute to that goal. Handouts don't help
| enough because the money is spent on their necessities (which
| was the point), and obviously that means the money
| immediately flows to the rich ones that supply those items
| (housing, food, etc).
|
| Reducing the wealth gap is crucial, I think you're severely
| misunderstanding.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Yeah, this is an unfortunate side effect of many social
| programs. Eg. housing assistance is just money that (1)
| goes directly to landlords and (2) removes market pressure
| and keeps prices for low quality housing higher than it
| should be.
|
| Way more effective would be caps on rent, but for some
| reason politicians don't want to use this tool....
| lupire wrote:
| Caps on (housing) _rent_ suppress development. Caps on
| rental _profit_ ( _economic rent_ ) suppress
| profiteering.
| martopix wrote:
| "Trickling up" instead of "trickling down"!
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Or trickling from the people who do nothing to the people who
| have to produce something nice for the lucky ones to buy.
| From the non-workers to the workers.
| colechristensen wrote:
| But you can also say the opposite: handouts increase inequality
| and poverty.
|
| Who is going to suffer because of the enormous covid handouts
| and subsequent inflation?
|
| It was nice while it happened but a lot of rich people really
| benefited and a lot of poor people are going to go through the
| worst consequences of inflation and recession.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Even if I also have a hunch that your attribution of
| inflation to handouts is true, I do not believe that it has
| been established.
|
| What is clear however, that increased prices for labor, wheat
| and energy, combined with post-covid logistics issues, have
| very clearly increased consumer pricing.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Inflation is due to the amount of money (over $10 trillion?
| hard to find a solid number that doesn't end in bickering
| about small details) created by the US Federal Reserve, in
| no small part in order to pay for handouts to people in
| businesses.
| chongli wrote:
| _handouts increase inequality and poverty._
|
| Or perhaps another way to say it is this: cash doesn't
| matter. It's all about capital. If you want to reduce
| inequality, give the poor some capital. Unfortunately, I
| think they'll likely sell their capital to buy food or pay
| rent.
| piva00 wrote:
| Capital is only valuable when your basic needs are met. If
| shelter, food, energy and transportation costs creep into
| you every week it's just logical you'd trade some capital
| for cash to meet those needs...
| chongli wrote:
| Yes, and unfortunately we've built a society where home
| owners have all the power to ratchet up shelter and
| transportation costs for everyone else.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And homeowners are increasingly becoming massive
| companies rather than individuals. That's going to end up
| being feudalism, right? The ownership of these companies
| is going to be passed down through families.
| tpxl wrote:
| > Who is going to suffer because of the enormous covid
| handouts and subsequent inflation?
|
| Don't know how it played where you live, but in my country,
| most covid handouts went to the rich, not to the poor.
|
| 1. Cash was given to companies they could then give to the
| people, instead of straight to the people.
|
| 2. Cheap/free loans were given to companies/rich people, not
| poor people, because poor people can't pay off loans so
| nobody gives them any.
|
| The insane stock market profits were the result of this -
| rich people getting excess money. If it went to the poor
| people, they'd buy food and shelter, not stonks.
| colechristensen wrote:
| In the US 1 & 2 happened in a big way certainly, but there
| were also large direct payments to people below a certain
| income along with significantly bumping up unemployment
| benefits (to the extent that many were making more
| unemployed than they were when they had jobs)
| greedo wrote:
| The amount of fraud in the PPP program alone might be
| north of $80B. And the fraud in the other programs isn't
| inconsequential either. "large direct payments" is a
| joke, right? $2500 for a family? That's about one month's
| income for people who had lost their jobs. And many
| states decided not to extend their unemployment, or to
| limit it drastically because business interests started
| to complain about not being able to find enough wage
| slaves.
| remram wrote:
| How large?
| clcaev wrote:
| One can so see how pandemic unemployment and other direct
| payments also substantially benefited existing businesses
| by not having demand for their goods and services drop,
| causing a cash crunch in otherwise healthy businesses.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > But you can also say the opposite: handouts increase
| inequality and poverty.
|
| They didn't say anything that would let you conclude either
| of those things in the article, one they said the exact
| opposite of. Not read the whole paper yet though.
| theptip wrote:
| It's interesting, this is the sort of thing that Angus Deaton
| suggested when he argued against the EA program in a Rationally
| Speaking podcast[1]. His premise is that cash transfers to the
| needy won't work in a country where an oppressive government
| can just take the cash for themselves. Perhaps this is part of
| the effect here? (Bribes, taxation, etc.) I'm a bit skeptical
| that this is a knock-out argument against the GiveDirectly
| program, but it's definitely something to keep in mind and
| explore further.
|
| [1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deaths-of-despair-
| effe...
| stormbrew wrote:
| The problem is that the conservative perspective would largely
| rather go without these net benefits than see someone they
| think is undeserving, or worse "immoral" in some way, get any
| benefit.
|
| That's why we have means testing at all: not to prevent people
| from needlessly getting benefits, but to prevent those who are
| undeserving of them from getting them.
|
| A lot of things make more sense when you understand this imo,
| and stop trying to frame other people's views into your own
| moral framework (giving you the mistaken impression that
| they're hypocrites about it).
| martopix wrote:
| I like givedirectly very much, especially because they try to do
| actual research on the outcomes. However I would love to see some
| research that is not done directly by them, but is more
| independent.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Givewell has pretty in depth reports on the charities they
| recommend. They've spent a very large amount of time trying to
| figure out the efficacy of giveDirectly, largely because it is
| effectively an infinite sink that all other philanthropic
| activities can be compared against. Interestingly givewell just
| recently demoted giveDirectly to instead recommend a charity
| that does cash handouts to parents who get their children
| vaccinated. I've got the report on my reading list but haven't
| had a chance yet.
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