But it's reasonable to question whether that's a good solution, a band-aid, or perhaps a short-term hack with future blowback, etc.
Direct cash transfers are not exactly some foolproof, no-brainer solution to poverty. We've made a real mess in some third world countries with the cash spigot.
There's a huge difference between giving poor people some money with no strings attached, versus giving governments and ruling classes money with or without expectations, or IMF and World Bank-style economic imperialism.
1 dollar spent on increasing food stamps increases GDP by something like $1.75. For something like an expanded child tax credit, it's more like $1.25. And for tax cuts for top earners, it's around $0.30. Even just looking at it from a purely economic standpoint, one policy is drastically better than the other. But more importantly, the first two policies also have enormous positive and direct benefits - they drastically decrease things like child poverty.
These are some of the most obvious public policy choices for any wealthy country, and for whatever reason we just refuse to take action until there's a massive recession or a global pandemic, and even then it's for like 6 months or a year.
I am very skeptical of this - not that we have data, but that the data suggests such a clear and simple relationship that is open to exploitation via policy. There is a long history of people trying to exploit correlations and realizing that the correlation breaks down whenever they try to turn this into a policy lever.
There is also the issue that foodstamps might be beneficial up to a point, but when you flood the system with foodstamps they are no longer beneficial and can be harmful -- there are regimes of effectiveness.
Can you cite the 'actual data' -- has it held up to broad peer review? Can you provide examples of critique of these policies, and explain why detractors have concerns, and how we could address them?
This isn't global warming (science is clear) -- social policy is inherently messy, with lots of tradeoffs, and is hard to prove empirically. There are lots of reasons why expanding the welfare state might be beneficial for society, but please stop with the moral grandstanding -- it does nothing to further real dialogue.
Has there been a comparable scenario of direct cash transfers to poor people?
[1]. https://www.povertyactionlab.org/case-study/giving-directly-...
To use Taleb’s terminology, the rentier class have made themselves antifragile. Look how they’ve benefited from political chaos be it financial crises or pandemics.
There is really interesting history around the food rationing program from the Red Cross that actually just increased human trafficking.
It may turn out that direct cash payments are the most efficient means because then you parallelize the distribution of decisions.
Surely this makes a difference in the lives of these people but on large scales, how much of a difference have you actually made?
Effectively what you've erected is a subsidy for high rent and low wages which target the poor, there must be better solutions than solidifying the systematic problems which capture this segment of the population.
Giving cash to liquidity- and asset-constrained folks with high-value spending needs (like raising a kid) makes a huge difference if you can even roughly target the intervention to them. It's almost impossible to theoretically bound the benefit, it could be very large indeed. Even if some money were wasted on "bad" spending, and even though redistributing it is inherently costly, it's the kind of thing that's absolutely worth trying. It has all the well-known benefits of UBI, except on an even larger scale.
Judging by the article, quite a large difference.
>there must be better solutions than solidifying the systematic problems which capture this segment of the population.
We're talking about poor children here. The systemic problem of this segment of the population is that they are poor. It's easy to talk about poor adults and prescribe behavioral adjustments, it's a way of assigning desert. It's much harder to talk about poor children because it's obvious that no child deserves to be poor.
Capitalism is a religion, they believe because they grew up told to believe it. We have found out that the theory is almost entirely made up and rarely reflects reality.
I don't think I will ever wrap my head around the fact that there are politicians who seem to sincerely believe that the best way to decrease poverty is to give tax cuts to the rich and huge corporations, instead of actions like what's described in the article.