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A comment on The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor. Parent comment

Re:The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor by Matumio on Monday October 26, 2015 @05:38PM (#10454676)
Do you happen to have any pointers to such research? If anything rigorous (comparable to GiveDirectly's randomized controlled trials) has been done in the US about the effect of just handing out cash, I would really be interested.
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Re:The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor by Matumio on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:09AM (#10469894)
Those are great, thanks! All bookmarked.
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Re:The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor by ChrisLomont on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @12:54PM (#10459307)
Another good read [1]. Here is a quote from the author of some key papers in favor of cash to certain poor, also the author of some pop articles on the idea:

"If I were an enterprising young researcher looking for an idea and experiments that will prove powerful in five years, I would try to find the stake I can drive into the heart of the cash transfer movement."

He states that giving cash is useful if the person is enterprising, such as trying to start a business, and direct cash is what is holding them back. I doubt this is most poor people, especially in the US. Otherwise, cash is not as useful as other poverty alleviation methods.

[1] http://chrisblattman.com/2013/06/27/why-cash-transfers-to-th...

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Re:The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor by Matumio on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:06AM (#10469891)
This is quite an interesting paper, thanks. But the idea that cash is useful only if the person is enterprising was not a result of this study, but an opinion that motivated its setup. As they write in the conclusions, it was "our conceptual framework" that suggests that the study has targeted the right (enterprising) people. Which I agree with, considering the variables they were interested in measuring.

Excerpts from the setup:

Groups had to submit a written proposal stating how they would use the grant for non-agricultural skills training and enterprise start-up costs. [...] The central government asked district governments to nominate 2.5 times the number of groups they could fund. [...] Successful proposals [note: randomized] received a large lump sum cash transfer [...] with no government monitoring thereafter.

Excerpts from the conclusions:

These results show that cash grants to groups of young people who develop business plans have large and persistent impacts in moving underemployed into non-agricultural jobs, increasing earnings and work hours. [...] In the end, YOP appears to have reached a group of motivated, able young people, who on average were neither exceptionally poor nor uneducated relative to their peers, in an economy with little financial depth but bouncing back from civil strife. Our conceptual framework suggests this is exactly the group to benefit from a windfall.

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