That's a rather complicated question, but in general I think a lot of people tend to believe in a greater broken windows effect than actually manifests in pract

That's a rather complicated question, but in general I think a lot of people tend to believe in a greater broken windows effect than actually manifests in practice...from the Economist article: > Mr Anoche’s first move on getting his windfall was to buy a new roof. Not only is thatch leaky, but it also needs to be replaced twice a year, at $40 a time. He spent half the money on his home, and half on timber and chickens. Those two businesses now turn a monthly profit of nearly $90. “If you’ve got the money and the mindset,” he says, “you can change your life.” > Of course, not all the money has gone on things that make development economists happy. Sitting on a rough bench in his moonshine bar in a banana grove, a tipsy Bernard Okumo says his wife used her windfall to bail him out of jail, where he was facing a murder charge. But the first independent study of Give Directly’s methods, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro (who is a former board member of Give Directly), suggests this sort of spending is unusual. In randomly selected poor households in 63 villages that have received the windfalls, they say, the number of children going without food for a day has fallen by over a third and livestock holdings have risen by half. A year after the scheme began, incomes have gone up by a quarter and recipients seem less stressed, according to tests of their cortisol levels. My own opinion still tends to believe that the net benefit will be positive, despite misapplications. At the moment the things I have read seem to indicate that while misuse occurs, it generally is the exception to the rule, not the other way around. Edit: I should also point out that UCT (Unconditional Cash Transfers) are concluded to only be part of the solution to poverty in the article. CCT (Conditional Cash Transfers) are also useful for correcting deeper systemic issues (such as undervaluing education in the poor).