That's an interesting experiment, although the sample is too small and uncontrolled to give much confidence in the results (I'm completely confident that if I c

That's an interesting experiment, although the sample is too small and uncontrolled to give much confidence in the results (I'm completely confident that if I could pick which people received the money, I could find a hundred people in London who would show the same pattern; to really prove the case we need a controlled random sample). Still, this experiment lends weight to the idea that somebody should run that study. > It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary This is an interesting and subtle case: they gave out money, and did some amount of aid work (the article indicates £50k was spent, of which £39k was the handouts, and it's not clear what the rest was spent on), in a city where addiction treatment is free and readily available to anybody who's willing to take it. That combination of things worked, at least in these cases, and I think that's consistent with my expectations that we need combined financial, healthcare, and education support to get really good results. To get more insight we'd need a study which ran the same programme in many locations, including ones where these things are not readily available. > But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective. And therein lies the tricky part: it's definitely true that if you give somebody enough money, it will solve all these problems for them. Unfortunately it's just unaffordable to raise everybody to the median income. Can we afford enough to make a difference at the population level, even if it's not enough to make all their problems go away? I don't know, and we should keep running more and larger experiments to find out.