Episode Details

This is a crosspost of the full text of Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly's journey to $1 billion delivered from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week. GiveDirectly will be taking part in the discussion thread, but the author, Paul Niehaus, may not see your comments here.

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Is it nuts to give cash to the poor without strings attached?

That's not a rhetorical question; it's the headline the New York Times ran the first time they covered GiveDirectly. My co-founders and I had a mild panic. We had been hoping, I suppose, for something benign and puffy along the lines of “New Charity Founded by Thoughtful Econ PhDs Is a Great Idea.”

The truth is of course that that piece did what it needed to do, which was to speak to its audience where they were at. At the time (i.e., in 2011) most New York Times readers probably did think it was nuts—or, at best, naive—to give out money for nothing. And one can hardly blame them. They had been fed a steady diet [...]

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Outline:

(05:07) Cash transfers and causal evidence

(17:22) From evidence to empowerment tool

(26:29) Normative choices in positive economics

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First published:
May 11th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jhxNNNALQgrFSseDg/money-for-nothing-the-roles-of-evidence-in-givedirectly-s

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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