I found it surprising that you described cash transfers as “milk” and bednets, vaccines and avoiding nuclear war as “cheese”.
In my experience, it’s more likely to be the latter category which is, “to nearly everyone, intuitively and obviously good.”
By contrast, I’ve heard lots of people confidently and knowingly say that cash transfers don’t work (because they don’t get to the root of the problem, because the poor will waste the money on alcohol, etc)
I interpret those criticisms of cash transfers as people saying they think you can do more good other ways, not that poor people having more money is neutral or harmful?
For the ones I described as mild cheeses, the idea is there’s a little background knowledge required before you can see that the work is valuable, but people tend to already have that background.
One way to get at this is to look at what you see in world religions around charity: there’s a lot about giving to the poor and not much about more complex ways of trying to make the world better.
Actually I think the popular concept is that cash transfers are neutral or harmful. That’s one reason why there was no charity like GiveDirectly until ~15 years ago, and arguably GiveDirectly would not exist today without funding from EA sources. The earliest news coverage I could find about GiveDirectly is not until 2011 (Time/NPR/Boston.com) and two of those pieces described it as “radical”.
I interpret the “radical” claim in Time and NPR as “give directly proposes a massive change in how we address poverty”. What about it makes you think it’s intended in a “you would think that this proposal is actually harmful, but it’s not” sort of way?
Unfortunately all three articles no longer have a comment section, and I couldn’t load comments through the Internet Archive. But my memory about the non EA discussion at the time was that it was all “there’s got to be something better you can do” and not “this is useless or counterproductive”?
In my experience, an extremely common lay objection to GiveDirectly is something along the lines of, “Won’t recipients waste the money on alcohol/drugs/tobacco/luxuries/etc.?”, with a second-tier objection of, “Won’t cash transfers cause inflation/conflict/dependence/etc.?”.
I think both these questions have been pretty well addressed by the research, but those who are not aware of (or do not trust) that research are, I think, pretty likely to believe that cash transfers are neutral or harmful.
The second objection does sound like saying it is harmful, thanks!
The first one is more mixed. My interpretation has always been that people were saying they didn’t think it was very useful, not that it was harmful: I doubt the person making the objection thinks that all of the money will go to buy luxuries, and if some of the money goes to buy valuable things and some of it goes to buy luxuries that are essentially morally neutral then the effect is less positive than if it all went to buy valuable things. But maybe they think that providing luxuries is actually harmful, and not just neutral? (Which, conditional on thinking they spend lots of the money on drugs and alcohol, it could easily be, since it’s funding people to buy addictive drugs they won’t be able to continue consuming.)
I found it surprising that you described cash transfers as “milk” and bednets, vaccines and avoiding nuclear war as “cheese”.
In my experience, it’s more likely to be the latter category which is, “to nearly everyone, intuitively and obviously good.”
By contrast, I’ve heard lots of people confidently and knowingly say that cash transfers don’t work (because they don’t get to the root of the problem, because the poor will waste the money on alcohol, etc)
I interpret those criticisms of cash transfers as people saying they think you can do more good other ways, not that poor people having more money is neutral or harmful?
For the ones I described as mild cheeses, the idea is there’s a little background knowledge required before you can see that the work is valuable, but people tend to already have that background.
One way to get at this is to look at what you see in world religions around charity: there’s a lot about giving to the poor and not much about more complex ways of trying to make the world better.
Actually I think the popular concept is that cash transfers are neutral or harmful. That’s one reason why there was no charity like GiveDirectly until ~15 years ago, and arguably GiveDirectly would not exist today without funding from EA sources. The earliest news coverage I could find about GiveDirectly is not until 2011 (Time/NPR/Boston.com) and two of those pieces described it as “radical”.
Thanks for digging up the early news coverage!
I interpret the “radical” claim in Time and NPR as “give directly proposes a massive change in how we address poverty”. What about it makes you think it’s intended in a “you would think that this proposal is actually harmful, but it’s not” sort of way?
Unfortunately all three articles no longer have a comment section, and I couldn’t load comments through the Internet Archive. But my memory about the non EA discussion at the time was that it was all “there’s got to be something better you can do” and not “this is useless or counterproductive”?
In my experience, an extremely common lay objection to GiveDirectly is something along the lines of, “Won’t recipients waste the money on alcohol/drugs/tobacco/luxuries/etc.?”, with a second-tier objection of, “Won’t cash transfers cause inflation/conflict/dependence/etc.?”.
I think both these questions have been pretty well addressed by the research, but those who are not aware of (or do not trust) that research are, I think, pretty likely to believe that cash transfers are neutral or harmful.
The second objection does sound like saying it is harmful, thanks!
The first one is more mixed. My interpretation has always been that people were saying they didn’t think it was very useful, not that it was harmful: I doubt the person making the objection thinks that all of the money will go to buy luxuries, and if some of the money goes to buy valuable things and some of it goes to buy luxuries that are essentially morally neutral then the effect is less positive than if it all went to buy valuable things. But maybe they think that providing luxuries is actually harmful, and not just neutral? (Which, conditional on thinking they spend lots of the money on drugs and alcohol, it could easily be, since it’s funding people to buy addictive drugs they won’t be able to continue consuming.)