Just Give Money to the Poor

This book by Joseph Hanlon, David Hulme and Armando Barrientos is an extremely well-balanced between scholarly and readable overview of a 'new' means of tackling poverty, the nature of which you may be able to guess from the title.

   Conventional aid and development strategies,* especially those led by Western academia propping up entire industries of Western people whose jobs it is to find ways to help the poor, are pretty wasteful and inefficient - in the context of a single simple misapprehension being pointed out: however effective an organisation seeking to alleviate poverty is, would the money it takes to pay their (probably Western) staff or fund their (probably paternalistic) projects be more effective at actually alleviating poverty if, instead of paying those staff or funding those projects, it was simply given to the poor? The authors of this book answer: probably, yes, with a few large caveats. Central to their argument is a very reasonable faith in the non-idiocy of poor people - i.e. if you give money to a family in poverty, they are likely to use to it for productive and worthwhile ends, so any expensive NGO scheme seeking to tell them what might help them be less poor is redundant; moreover, such schemes assume that poor people remain poor because of ignorance or particular personal failures to act in certain ways, rather than that poor people remain poor because they do not have enough money. It almost seems too obvious. Giving poor people money helps break the poverty trap - pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is impossible if you're too hungry to bend down and you can't afford any boots anyway - thus improving basic living standards and empowering people to engage with healthcare, education, small-scale investment, and so on, stimulating their local economies and nurturing upward spirals of development. These schemes, called cash transfers, come in a wide array of forms, and are emerging across increasing numbers of developing countries in the global south in response to the abject failure of Western development strategies to alleviate poverty, and (subject to the caveats, which I'll come to) are proving incredibly successful almost everywhere, such that they attracted the attention of skeptical Western academic economists** who promptly conducted a flurry of skeptical studies into these cash transfer schemes and were even more surprised to find their own studies supporting what the governments, academics, and straight-up socioeconomic evidence from the global south was suggesting was true - giving money to poor people helps them be less poor! Wow!

   Anyway, the caveats. Basically there are just loads of problems with deciding who gets the cash transfers - everyone, or only old people, or families with children, or the poorest 10% or 20% or 50% of the population (and how do you means test for this?), or people living within particularly poor areas? There are also extensive problems with ensuring that the people receiving cash transfers get lifted out of poverty; some schemes require work or participation in programmes to qualify; a larger issue is that for poor people to be able to engage with education or healthcare or entrepreneurship or markets or whatever those facilities need to be in place and adequate - yes, paying Pedro's family $7 a month might enable them to afford enough food that he can quit shining shoes and go to school, but if there are sixty kids in his class and no effort is put in to bring him up to speed, the future benefits for Pedro are dampened.

   So this book provides an excellent overview of 'just giving money to the poor' as a poverty alleviation strategy, key debates and problems with the idea, outlines of schemes currently in action and how they're faring, and summative pointers about what makes such a scheme effective and how practicalities can be approached. Worthwhile reading for anyone interested in understanding the global political economic struggle to end poverty, especially for those supportive of bottom-up common sense solutions.****

* Microfinance, while not in quite the same league of paternalistic resource-intensive aid strategies broadly described above, has been super popular among liberal progressives and is often heard touted as a key means of alleviating poverty. However, it has problems which I can't be arsed to write so google it if you're interested, and the core concept of this book was the nail in the coffin of my thinking it was worthwhile. What's the point loaning money to someone who's in a poverty trap? Just give them money instead. On that note, I've withdrawn all my outstanding Kiva funds after five years of recycling loans of questionable helpfulness. Ah well.

** I mean, trust an economist to be confused at the notion that giving money to poor people helps them be less poor. The mind boggles.

[this book was the first of an enormous*** pile of university library books, mostly about global political and economic issues, that I'm using as practice for speed reading. partly because the nature of these books' content means I'm unlikely to have particularly interesting thoughts or reflections on them (instead just drinking in large quantities of information to flesh out or refine my views on pretty niche topics) and partly because I've had some of them out for over two years and there are quite a few of them and I've only got ten months left with a valid student card. also partly because it'll mean I'll get to do lots of blog posts, as compensation for how relatively few books I read this summer and (so far) this autumn. one final also - because speed reading is a skill someone who blogs about books they've read should probably have, but it takes lots of practice to get high-speed high-comprehension. anyway. hope that's cool.]

*** Just counted - there were fourteen including this one, so now thirteen.

**** It also slots nicely into my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of global capitalism and conceptualisation of systemic change: somewhere in the overlaps between grace-led economic structures and radical redistribution from the global north to the global south.