Kelsey, thanks for putting this article together! I’m curious if you reviewed or discussed with researchers the studies on the impact of the expanded/2021 Child Tax Credit? I gather that those are not RCTs, but is there anything to gain from the observational data on that large scale policy intervention (and withdrawal from it)?
Yeah, I was also curious about this. The CTC cut child poverty nearly in half in 2021, and it rebounded back up to prior levels in 2022 post-expiration — that seems like a pretty strong effect even if it’s not a RCT.
But there’s a difference between literally having more money (thus pushing you above the poverty line!) versus the other effects they’re evaluating — cognitive gains, maternal health, employment, stress, etc.
Yep! I looked at some of the work there and I agree with you both that the ECTC worked well. And not just for 'the recipients had more money', which is pretty reliably true (the question is whether that's having any of the hoped for broader benefits) - the ECTC specifically worked well on a couple the metrics that I've been surprised to see not improve with cash. For example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12210083/ finds 'current on rent' and mental health effects - which is even more reason to be puzzled that we aren't seeing more results like that from transfers. A couple theories:
Some researchers raised with me the possibility that we should be shifting from monthly transfers to lump sums. One argument for this is the pattern in stress/wellbeing: often it initially gets better and then that benefit goes away (a hedonic treadmill effect, maybe?) and then towards the end of the study and after the end stress is actually higher (maybe related to the payment discontinuation). GiveDirectly said they mostly do lump sums in their non-US distributions now, and want to test more lump sums in the US. For stress in particular I'd hazard a guess (but note this is not that well supported by evidence yet) that a one time windfall is better than ongoing payments which will eventually terminate, since people habituate to them and then are extremely stressed when they end.
What can we conclude from the international evidence on the effects of child allowances on long-term outcomes (human capital development, criminality etc) for poor kids? Lots of countries have child allowances, after all, and surely many of them must have changed over time in ways that provide similar study fodder to the 2021-22 ECTC changes.
There are Canada and UK child allowance programs, but they're small enough I don't expect to see much effect and new enough I haven't seen any longitudinal research.
That said if I were to get way out ahead of the research and hazard a guess, I bet the connection between an allowance and reduced teen crime in particular is real. Teen crime seems disproportionately responsive to the labor market and honestly just disproportionately responsive to a lot of random things? It's more opportunistic and dumber and easier to deter.
There's an elegantly designed EITC study that makes use of the fact that a January baby gets bupkis for the prior year vs a December baby nets their family thousands of dollars. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30373
That study found detectable long term effects (including on the child's future earnings(?!)) which to be honest feels wildly implausible, but is a small point for "maybe these are compounding effects that turn up later" and/or "maybe you want to give money in a way that complements work vs replacing it."
A lack of money is the definition of being poor, but it isn't the cause of being poor. The causes lie elsewhere -- skills, intelligence, impulsiveness, criminality, addiction.
Instead of giving out money, it appears the better path will prove to be (1) education to provide skills, (2) treatment to curb bad behavior and (3) more law enforcement when incentives don't work.
Kelsey already pointed out that participants don't spend their extra money irresponsibly, so we should expect there to be a positive impact.
You can explain poverty however you like as a result of personal failing. But consider the marginal person - someone just unintelligent, ignorant, impulsive, lazy enough to be poor (in your view) but not so much of any of those things that they are destined to be poor in every circumstance. What do we expect there?
Why wouldn't money improve that person's life? And if it does not, why does your job training program have any better chance?
It's true that there are non-monetary things society can do to improve people's lives and certainly that people can do to improve their own lives. But nothing about that explains away these cash results.
I'm still curious as to whether these studies are really putting enough money down to say something meaningful enough. $1000/month is both "a lot" and "not really that much when you think about it".
The OpenResearch paper says that their "optimistic" estimate of the study's impact on people's net worth was $5000. That's not really a lot of growth over 3 years, right? What would happen if another (ludicrously expensive) study were done giving people $5000 a month? Or if a study were engineered to increase their net worth by 20k or 50k? Surely there has to be an amount at which giving money does indeed solve their problems.
Yeah I similarly believe that this is just not enough money to show the results researchers are looking for. I am pretty surprised by the Denver outcomes though.
But it's enough money that I expect to see a directional effect, even if a small one. $12k seems like it should be enough to forestall some downward spirals (e.g. car breaks, can't afford the fix, lose your job, etc)
I also wonder if the fact that the cash transfer was time limited affected the results. You might behave differently if the money was a government entitlement rather than a gift you’d receive for only a few years.
Especially with housing. A temporary grant isn’t very valuable as proof of income towards a lease or mortgage, whereas a government-backed UBI would be, as one example.
I also wonder how well landlords understood the program. If a tenant shows up and tries to use this program as proof of income, a lot of landlords are going to be skeptical or simply not understand what it is; they'd rather stick with something familiar.
One thing that surprises me is how cash transfers are so powerful in low-income economies yet don't do much in developed ones. I just wonder what the reason for this might be.
Keep in mind that the amount of money we're transferring as a share of income is generally much larger in developing countries. GiveDirectly's fantastic new study that found cash transfers cut infant mortality in half gave money in Kenya, where GiveDirectly's stats say more than a third of people live on less than $2.15 a day. I would guess this describes the typical recipient, since they target poor areas. They give them $1000, or the equivalent of more than a year's income. I'm not aware of any guaranteed income program in the US that transfers more than $30k per recipient, which is what it'd take to be close to equivalent.
We've also just already nabbed most of the low hanging fruit. The likely mechanism for that infant mortality cut in the GiveDirectly study is that women are much more likely to give birth in a hospital. Even the poorest women in America typically do give birth in a hospital. To a first approximation no one in America is starving to death. A lot of the most acute problems cash addresses, we've already solved - leaving things that are harder to fix.
My thesis is that a developed country has a multitude of options available to avoid poverty. The people who don't take advantage of those options likely have some underlying set of issues that are hard to change. But in a low-income country, there just aren't as many options to avoid poverty, even for those with talent and energy.
The poor in developed countries are still much better off than the poor in developing countries. So my guess is the things developed world poor need to meaningfully improve their lives are either much more expensive, or have to do with the conditions of their communities (public schools, healthcare availability, public safety, etc.). The latter can’t be solved by giving an individual more money, it would only be solved if the community as a whole got wealthier.
It this one of those literal First World problems?
I don't mean it in a demeaning way in the sense that they are fake problems. On the contrary, poverty in the First World is the extremely hard part of the problem that is left to solve after you already fixed all the easy parts. As any engineer can tell you, the last 20% of the project takes 80% of the work.
More specifically, I think all the problems that poor people in the US have that can be solved with just a bit of cash have already been solved. Credit is cheap and easy to get. Hospitals have to treat you in an emergency even if you don't have money. Unlike in the Third World, a temporary lack of cash is pretty much never going to kill you.
The people who live in the most prosperous country in the world and nevertheless manage to remain persistently poor are those who have serious issues that probably require personalized attention. The ones who can be helped by cheap scalable interventions have already been helped and are not poor anymore.
My understanding is that both the test and control groups also received a fair amount of unplanned cash from the government during the pandemic relief, child tax credit, and other programs. I know that I'd totally ignore that if the results had come out the way I wanted them to (because, y'know, bias.) But I still think it's worth saying that the government actually did a fairly large amount of cash transfer in the middle of the test, which is ... hopefully a good thing?
How do you think about that? It probably makes for a robust comparison with the big lump sum group. But maybe less so with the other test groups? Or is that p-hacking myself to proving my priors?
It’s discouraging to me how few people seem to be changing their mind as a result of this research. This seems like a pretty compelling case that cash transfers are a bad idea!
Fwiw there's some research into cash transfers that are more specific and contextual that I think is promising and that I certainly don't want to prematurely declare defeat on. Transfers to pregnant women seem to reduce the risk of serious complications (this saves money, because NICU stays are incredibly expensive); transfers to people just released from prison seems to reduce recidivism; transfers to domestic violence victims seem to make them somewhat likelier to safely leave. There's a ton of research underway and I wouldn't be surprised if we find some great use cases.
And then there's one reason that the world got excited about studying UBI - AI related mass unemployment - and I don't think these studies really tell us anything about how to handle that.
But I was indeed expecting stronger results for cash for homelessness and cash for chronic poverty, and this has changed my mind there.
If you want people to change their minds, you have to give them a better alternative. It can't just be "Well, cash benefits don't do anything, might as well give up"; it has to be "Cash benefits don't work, but here's a policy that will meaningfully improve outcomes for poor people". Otherwise, there's a strong suspicion that the research is just coming from the large community of people who are ideologically opposed to spending money on helping poor people. In a world where conservatives exist, liberals can't assume shared values and good faith.
I really appreciate this write up! I've been wrestling with these same findings in my last few posts, as I was also both surprised and disappointed by the results. But when I took a step back, I realized that these results jive really well with a finding from a big Megan Stevenson paper and Niskanen symposium from awhile ago. Essentially, what we fail to see in most social service interventions are "cascade effects" into other areas of people's lives, which is what we usually see when we do high quality studies like RCTs or try to replicate strong programs elsewhere. Giving people money is a good recipe for them to... have more money, which I agree is probably good! But the Stevenson article, which I wrote up a bit here, helped me understand why I should not have been as surprised by these findings as I was:
This was really interesting, but it left me wondering about how external economic factors impact these kinds of results. In particular, if you conduct a trial like this in a tight labor market, could that meaningfully effect the outcome?
The scenario I'm imagining is this: in a tight labor market, I can choose to work a few less hours if I am given money, but that doesn't have a major impact on my well-being. If the labor market crashes, though, and I can't supplement my income as needed, does this external support play a much more important role of filling an otherwise-intractible gap?
I like this article a lot, thank you. The Denver results seem unsurprising to me. We already see poorer results than we would like giving people rent vouchers and services, and finding apartments for them.
I think the underlying theoretical mechanism here must be that people themselves are better positioned to know how to use a marginal dollar than social service agencies (especially when those agencies are dealing with many restrictions on the funding).
I bet that’s true in many cases, for example, the larger number of equally poor people who don’t become homeless seem to have this skill. Here though you have a group that’s already demonstrated they aren’t as good at this as others.
It would be really interesting if instead of giving low-income families cash you set them up with an investment account in an index fund and put $100 a month into the fund. They could put in additional money, but they could only take out 5% of the value in the fund every year. I wonder if holding investments and seeing them grow would lower stress levels because they felt some level of security in their future. Or maybe it would have no impact on their lives. Or maybe it would make them more stressed.
Eh, I think the problem with this is that you want interventions that help people *now*. If someone is poor now feels a bit cruel to give them money but lock it away.
You are absolutely correct. This would feel cruel to do. As an intellectual exercise I do wonder if there is some kind of positive benefits of telling people that there is an investment in your future.
Personally, I was really hopeful that direct assistance or various forms of UBI would show positive results. But, if the evidence suggests otherwise, I wonder if there is a pyschological element we are missing.
Maybe it isn't about giving people cash assistance but the government providing them better opportunities to earn more money. Similar to how public works projects under the New Deal lifted the spirits of people.
Maybe we could tie that investment into a clear need like affordable child care and expanding after school programs. This could allow more parents (particularly women) to stay in the workforce.
As media criticism a headline announcement that homeless people spend free money poorly seems like the least newsy story ever.
Like to go back to my journalism courses it has a bit of useful information not news quality to it and should lead activists to change tact not to get valuable space in American newspapers and websites.
Whenever I hear someone claim that a study showed that some intervention "didn't work", I wonder if that's just because people have bad intuitions about effect sizes and statistical power.
I'd find the null effects much more compelling if they could be described more like:
In previous studies on the correlation between log-income and [outcome] within a country, each doubling of income was associated with an X amount increase in [outcome], but these cash transfer studies rule out an increase in [outcome] that is even 1/10th the size of X per income doubling.
Excellent article! More targeted programs with more clearly defined behavioral objectives will likely yield stronger results.
Have you looked at any of the research on Contingency Management? It is a promising evidence-based intervention for people with substance use disorder, where conditional cash payments are provided to individuals so long as they participate in their substance use treatment and pass clean drug tests. A 2013 RCT found that it improved outcomes for methamphetamine users. In the substance use disorder treatment world this is a big deal, given that (unlike opioid and alcohol use disorder) there is no pharmaceutical treatment for methamphetamine use disorder.
Usually the "strings" attached to cash assistance programs are nothing more than a method of exclusion, but Contingency Management shows they can lead to real benefits if structured thoughtfully.
Kelsey, thanks for putting this article together! I’m curious if you reviewed or discussed with researchers the studies on the impact of the expanded/2021 Child Tax Credit? I gather that those are not RCTs, but is there anything to gain from the observational data on that large scale policy intervention (and withdrawal from it)?
Yeah, I was also curious about this. The CTC cut child poverty nearly in half in 2021, and it rebounded back up to prior levels in 2022 post-expiration — that seems like a pretty strong effect even if it’s not a RCT.
But there’s a difference between literally having more money (thus pushing you above the poverty line!) versus the other effects they’re evaluating — cognitive gains, maternal health, employment, stress, etc.
Yep! I looked at some of the work there and I agree with you both that the ECTC worked well. And not just for 'the recipients had more money', which is pretty reliably true (the question is whether that's having any of the hoped for broader benefits) - the ECTC specifically worked well on a couple the metrics that I've been surprised to see not improve with cash. For example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12210083/ finds 'current on rent' and mental health effects - which is even more reason to be puzzled that we aren't seeing more results like that from transfers. A couple theories:
Some researchers raised with me the possibility that we should be shifting from monthly transfers to lump sums. One argument for this is the pattern in stress/wellbeing: often it initially gets better and then that benefit goes away (a hedonic treadmill effect, maybe?) and then towards the end of the study and after the end stress is actually higher (maybe related to the payment discontinuation). GiveDirectly said they mostly do lump sums in their non-US distributions now, and want to test more lump sums in the US. For stress in particular I'd hazard a guess (but note this is not that well supported by evidence yet) that a one time windfall is better than ongoing payments which will eventually terminate, since people habituate to them and then are extremely stressed when they end.
What can we conclude from the international evidence on the effects of child allowances on long-term outcomes (human capital development, criminality etc) for poor kids? Lots of countries have child allowances, after all, and surely many of them must have changed over time in ways that provide similar study fodder to the 2021-22 ECTC changes.
It's possible I've missed some of the literature but the studies I'm familiar with were in Latin America (eg https://www.nber.org/papers/w29056 and (https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/6371/spillovers-from-conditional-cash-transfer-programs-bolsa-familia-and-crime-in-urban-brazil), so they run into the same dynamic discussed below in the comments - in countries that are poorer to start it's both easier to give a large % of household income and there's a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of things we know produce good life outcomes.
There are Canada and UK child allowance programs, but they're small enough I don't expect to see much effect and new enough I haven't seen any longitudinal research.
That said if I were to get way out ahead of the research and hazard a guess, I bet the connection between an allowance and reduced teen crime in particular is real. Teen crime seems disproportionately responsive to the labor market and honestly just disproportionately responsive to a lot of random things? It's more opportunistic and dumber and easier to deter.
Thanks. Is there not more research (maybe not in English) on the effects of changes to universal child benefits in continental Europe or Japan?
There's an elegantly designed EITC study that makes use of the fact that a January baby gets bupkis for the prior year vs a December baby nets their family thousands of dollars. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30373
That study found detectable long term effects (including on the child's future earnings(?!)) which to be honest feels wildly implausible, but is a small point for "maybe these are compounding effects that turn up later" and/or "maybe you want to give money in a way that complements work vs replacing it."
A lack of money is the definition of being poor, but it isn't the cause of being poor. The causes lie elsewhere -- skills, intelligence, impulsiveness, criminality, addiction.
Instead of giving out money, it appears the better path will prove to be (1) education to provide skills, (2) treatment to curb bad behavior and (3) more law enforcement when incentives don't work.
Those things, but also creating jobs that pay well that low-intelligence people can do.
I don't know how to do that. But I think it would help.
Kelsey already pointed out that participants don't spend their extra money irresponsibly, so we should expect there to be a positive impact.
You can explain poverty however you like as a result of personal failing. But consider the marginal person - someone just unintelligent, ignorant, impulsive, lazy enough to be poor (in your view) but not so much of any of those things that they are destined to be poor in every circumstance. What do we expect there?
Why wouldn't money improve that person's life? And if it does not, why does your job training program have any better chance?
It's true that there are non-monetary things society can do to improve people's lives and certainly that people can do to improve their own lives. But nothing about that explains away these cash results.
This seems like such an obvious point and yet one that is so commonly elided lest it come across as judgmental.
Of course, this can go too far; micromanaging people's grocery purchases with SNAP is almost certainly not worth the cost/effort involved.
This was well-written and thoughtful.
I'm still curious as to whether these studies are really putting enough money down to say something meaningful enough. $1000/month is both "a lot" and "not really that much when you think about it".
The OpenResearch paper says that their "optimistic" estimate of the study's impact on people's net worth was $5000. That's not really a lot of growth over 3 years, right? What would happen if another (ludicrously expensive) study were done giving people $5000 a month? Or if a study were engineered to increase their net worth by 20k or 50k? Surely there has to be an amount at which giving money does indeed solve their problems.
Yeah I similarly believe that this is just not enough money to show the results researchers are looking for. I am pretty surprised by the Denver outcomes though.
But it's enough money that I expect to see a directional effect, even if a small one. $12k seems like it should be enough to forestall some downward spirals (e.g. car breaks, can't afford the fix, lose your job, etc)
I also wonder if the fact that the cash transfer was time limited affected the results. You might behave differently if the money was a government entitlement rather than a gift you’d receive for only a few years.
Especially with housing. A temporary grant isn’t very valuable as proof of income towards a lease or mortgage, whereas a government-backed UBI would be, as one example.
I also wonder how well landlords understood the program. If a tenant shows up and tries to use this program as proof of income, a lot of landlords are going to be skeptical or simply not understand what it is; they'd rather stick with something familiar.
Yeah, one-time transfers vs a known 3-year thing vs permanent.
Still plenty of experimenting to be done IMO.
One thing that surprises me is how cash transfers are so powerful in low-income economies yet don't do much in developed ones. I just wonder what the reason for this might be.
Keep in mind that the amount of money we're transferring as a share of income is generally much larger in developing countries. GiveDirectly's fantastic new study that found cash transfers cut infant mortality in half gave money in Kenya, where GiveDirectly's stats say more than a third of people live on less than $2.15 a day. I would guess this describes the typical recipient, since they target poor areas. They give them $1000, or the equivalent of more than a year's income. I'm not aware of any guaranteed income program in the US that transfers more than $30k per recipient, which is what it'd take to be close to equivalent.
We've also just already nabbed most of the low hanging fruit. The likely mechanism for that infant mortality cut in the GiveDirectly study is that women are much more likely to give birth in a hospital. Even the poorest women in America typically do give birth in a hospital. To a first approximation no one in America is starving to death. A lot of the most acute problems cash addresses, we've already solved - leaving things that are harder to fix.
My thesis is that a developed country has a multitude of options available to avoid poverty. The people who don't take advantage of those options likely have some underlying set of issues that are hard to change. But in a low-income country, there just aren't as many options to avoid poverty, even for those with talent and energy.
The poor in developed countries are still much better off than the poor in developing countries. So my guess is the things developed world poor need to meaningfully improve their lives are either much more expensive, or have to do with the conditions of their communities (public schools, healthcare availability, public safety, etc.). The latter can’t be solved by giving an individual more money, it would only be solved if the community as a whole got wealthier.
It this one of those literal First World problems?
I don't mean it in a demeaning way in the sense that they are fake problems. On the contrary, poverty in the First World is the extremely hard part of the problem that is left to solve after you already fixed all the easy parts. As any engineer can tell you, the last 20% of the project takes 80% of the work.
More specifically, I think all the problems that poor people in the US have that can be solved with just a bit of cash have already been solved. Credit is cheap and easy to get. Hospitals have to treat you in an emergency even if you don't have money. Unlike in the Third World, a temporary lack of cash is pretty much never going to kill you.
The people who live in the most prosperous country in the world and nevertheless manage to remain persistently poor are those who have serious issues that probably require personalized attention. The ones who can be helped by cheap scalable interventions have already been helped and are not poor anymore.
Fantastic first article from Kelsey here. Really looking forward to more from the team!
My understanding is that both the test and control groups also received a fair amount of unplanned cash from the government during the pandemic relief, child tax credit, and other programs. I know that I'd totally ignore that if the results had come out the way I wanted them to (because, y'know, bias.) But I still think it's worth saying that the government actually did a fairly large amount of cash transfer in the middle of the test, which is ... hopefully a good thing?
How do you think about that? It probably makes for a robust comparison with the big lump sum group. But maybe less so with the other test groups? Or is that p-hacking myself to proving my priors?
"We're not doomed. We just have a very long to-do list."
Love this! Thank you Kelsey!
It’s discouraging to me how few people seem to be changing their mind as a result of this research. This seems like a pretty compelling case that cash transfers are a bad idea!
Fwiw there's some research into cash transfers that are more specific and contextual that I think is promising and that I certainly don't want to prematurely declare defeat on. Transfers to pregnant women seem to reduce the risk of serious complications (this saves money, because NICU stays are incredibly expensive); transfers to people just released from prison seems to reduce recidivism; transfers to domestic violence victims seem to make them somewhat likelier to safely leave. There's a ton of research underway and I wouldn't be surprised if we find some great use cases.
And then there's one reason that the world got excited about studying UBI - AI related mass unemployment - and I don't think these studies really tell us anything about how to handle that.
But I was indeed expecting stronger results for cash for homelessness and cash for chronic poverty, and this has changed my mind there.
If you want people to change their minds, you have to give them a better alternative. It can't just be "Well, cash benefits don't do anything, might as well give up"; it has to be "Cash benefits don't work, but here's a policy that will meaningfully improve outcomes for poor people". Otherwise, there's a strong suspicion that the research is just coming from the large community of people who are ideologically opposed to spending money on helping poor people. In a world where conservatives exist, liberals can't assume shared values and good faith.
I really appreciate this write up! I've been wrestling with these same findings in my last few posts, as I was also both surprised and disappointed by the results. But when I took a step back, I realized that these results jive really well with a finding from a big Megan Stevenson paper and Niskanen symposium from awhile ago. Essentially, what we fail to see in most social service interventions are "cascade effects" into other areas of people's lives, which is what we usually see when we do high quality studies like RCTs or try to replicate strong programs elsewhere. Giving people money is a good recipe for them to... have more money, which I agree is probably good! But the Stevenson article, which I wrote up a bit here, helped me understand why I should not have been as surprised by these findings as I was:
https://flyovertakes.substack.com/p/what-do-we-do-if-nothing-works
This was really interesting, but it left me wondering about how external economic factors impact these kinds of results. In particular, if you conduct a trial like this in a tight labor market, could that meaningfully effect the outcome?
The scenario I'm imagining is this: in a tight labor market, I can choose to work a few less hours if I am given money, but that doesn't have a major impact on my well-being. If the labor market crashes, though, and I can't supplement my income as needed, does this external support play a much more important role of filling an otherwise-intractible gap?
I like this article a lot, thank you. The Denver results seem unsurprising to me. We already see poorer results than we would like giving people rent vouchers and services, and finding apartments for them.
I think the underlying theoretical mechanism here must be that people themselves are better positioned to know how to use a marginal dollar than social service agencies (especially when those agencies are dealing with many restrictions on the funding).
I bet that’s true in many cases, for example, the larger number of equally poor people who don’t become homeless seem to have this skill. Here though you have a group that’s already demonstrated they aren’t as good at this as others.
It would be really interesting if instead of giving low-income families cash you set them up with an investment account in an index fund and put $100 a month into the fund. They could put in additional money, but they could only take out 5% of the value in the fund every year. I wonder if holding investments and seeing them grow would lower stress levels because they felt some level of security in their future. Or maybe it would have no impact on their lives. Or maybe it would make them more stressed.
Eh, I think the problem with this is that you want interventions that help people *now*. If someone is poor now feels a bit cruel to give them money but lock it away.
You are absolutely correct. This would feel cruel to do. As an intellectual exercise I do wonder if there is some kind of positive benefits of telling people that there is an investment in your future.
Personally, I was really hopeful that direct assistance or various forms of UBI would show positive results. But, if the evidence suggests otherwise, I wonder if there is a pyschological element we are missing.
Maybe it isn't about giving people cash assistance but the government providing them better opportunities to earn more money. Similar to how public works projects under the New Deal lifted the spirits of people.
Maybe we could tie that investment into a clear need like affordable child care and expanding after school programs. This could allow more parents (particularly women) to stay in the workforce.
As media criticism a headline announcement that homeless people spend free money poorly seems like the least newsy story ever.
Like to go back to my journalism courses it has a bit of useful information not news quality to it and should lead activists to change tact not to get valuable space in American newspapers and websites.
Have you taken a more quantitative look at this?
Whenever I hear someone claim that a study showed that some intervention "didn't work", I wonder if that's just because people have bad intuitions about effect sizes and statistical power.
I'd find the null effects much more compelling if they could be described more like:
In previous studies on the correlation between log-income and [outcome] within a country, each doubling of income was associated with an X amount increase in [outcome], but these cash transfer studies rule out an increase in [outcome] that is even 1/10th the size of X per income doubling.
Excellent article! More targeted programs with more clearly defined behavioral objectives will likely yield stronger results.
Have you looked at any of the research on Contingency Management? It is a promising evidence-based intervention for people with substance use disorder, where conditional cash payments are provided to individuals so long as they participate in their substance use treatment and pass clean drug tests. A 2013 RCT found that it improved outcomes for methamphetamine users. In the substance use disorder treatment world this is a big deal, given that (unlike opioid and alcohol use disorder) there is no pharmaceutical treatment for methamphetamine use disorder.
Usually the "strings" attached to cash assistance programs are nothing more than a method of exclusion, but Contingency Management shows they can lead to real benefits if structured thoughtfully.
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.11121831