
Aid burst lifts people out of extreme poverty - luu
http://www.nature.com/news/aid-burst-lifts-people-out-of-extreme-poverty-1.17560
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lkbm
This sounds much more involved than GiveDirectly's simple cash drops. It would
be nice to see a comparative analysis of the two.

I'm also curious how this scales. Give one family in an area money/support and
they can escape extreme poverty. If you give the same boost to every family in
an area, do you get a bigger impact, or smaller? And is there a point where
having n% of the people in an area boosting out of poverty leads to the other
(100-n)% being _worse_ off? Or are they all better off?

At any rate, this is really exciting. Both that they did RCTs to test it, and
that it worked really well.

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splitrocket
One of the many costs of poverty is the inability to suffer any opportunity
cost whatsoever. Another is the lack of slack in both time and money: any
shock is tremendously destructive.

This totally makes sense.

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JoeAltmaier
Is that title right? It improved their situation 5%. That sounds like noise.
Certainly they were still in extreme poverty. Its arguable that the statistics
show aid does almost nothing (5% change), and better methods should be tried.

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phaemon
The article says:

"Overall, one year after the intervention stopped, the experiment produced a
14% increase in assets and a 96% increase in savings, compared with similar
groups of people not enrolled in the program,"

And the paper abstract says:

"This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn,
leads to a 38% increase in earnings."

Where are you getting 5% from?

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JoeAltmaier
Oh! That's different article from the one I saw posted elsewhere. I read one
that was much, much longer.

