4 ms·

Aid burst lifts people out of extreme poverty

• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• splitrocket 12y ago
  One of the many costs of poverty is the inability to suffer any opportunity cost whatsoever. Another is the lack of slack in both time and money: any shock is tremendously destructive. This totally makes sense.
• lkbm 12y ago
  This sounds much more involved than GiveDirectly's simple cash drops. It would be nice to see a comparative analysis of the two. I'm also curious how this scales. Give one family in an area money/support and they can escape extreme poverty. If you give the same boost to every family in an area, do you get a bigger impact, or smaller? And is there a point where having n% of the people in an area boosting out of poverty leads to the other (100-n)% being _worse_ off? Or are they all better off? At any rate, this is really exciting. Both that they did RCTs to test it, and that it worked really well.
• JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Is that title right? It improved their situation 5%. That sounds like noise. Certainly they were still in extreme poverty. Its arguable that the statistics show aid does almost nothing (5% change), and better methods should be tried.
  • phaemon 12y ago
    The article says: "Overall, one year after the intervention stopped, the experiment produced a 14% increase in assets and a 96% increase in savings, compared with similar groups of people not enrolled in the program," And the paper abstract says: "This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn, leads to a 38% increase in earnings." Where are you getting 5% from?
    • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Oh! That's different article from the one I saw posted elsewhere. I read one that was much, much longer.