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Originally Posted by Cochonette  Wow, this is my least favorite article I've read so far on this site. "Only give people money if they've had some before, even though those are the same people who don't need you to give it to them." Actually, on second thought, it could be great or terrible advice, depending on how you take it. Of course, the "developed world" creates an "underdeveloped world" by overdeveloping and then dumping food on it and forcing the underdeveloped world out of competition with free food, thereby promoting mass starvation... so that is actually something to guard against.
Okay, I'm not sure how related that is, but my head is about to explode right now, so I will think further on this another time. |
The vast majority of the data I've seen suggests that when you give people money, directly, they tend to waste it and get back to their previous state within a period of a few months. A famous anecdote is the experiment they did on Oprah where they gave $100,000 to a homeless man, but AFAIK the real data has shown this pretty consistently on all levels of income, from poor African families who can't afford vaccines for their children to middle-class American families who win the lottery. Another example is that median length of unemployment has pretty consistently gone in the direction of the length of unemployment benefits, regardless of the economy.
But the social work world seems to be very slanted to the point of insanity. See
Rhode Island College: Violation of Student?s Freedom of Conscience - FIRE for an example.
If you've seen data that suggests the opposite, I'd love to see it. There's no point in welfare that doesn't actually help people-that's just a waste of money and weakens the case for other aid in the future.