Cash Transfers

 Giving People Money Helped Less Than I Thought It Would. from The Argument, via Rob Henderson. 

 I cannot stress how shocking I find this and I want to be clear that this is not “we got some weak counterevidence.” These are careful, well-conducted studies. They are large enough to rule out even small positive effects and they are all very similar. This is an amount of evidence that in almost any other context we’d consider definitive. And yet, you'd be hard-pressed to hear about it in the media:

“Overall, the larger and more credible studies in this space have tended to find worse effects, and yet the press seems to prefer to cover the small pilots that show positive impacts,” Eva Vivalt, a co-author of one recent OpenResearch study on guaranteed income in the U.S., told me.

Maybe poor people are mostly poor people.