Why help the poor

Problematically, recent research suggests that cash programs can actually be counterproductive because conflicts can arise over who receives assistance.

This can erode social capital within communities. The failure of cash to remedy structural issues may be one reason its long-term effects are often limited. For example, a recent study in Uganda looked at the impacts of cash transfers nine years after people were given money.

While the researchers found positive effects on employment and earnings after four years, these impacts virtually disappeared after nine.

Cash can certainly help some people , and this is undoubtedly an important consideration, especially in emergency situations when immediate assistance is critical — such as during a pandemic.

But there is simply no one-size-fits-all approach to poverty alleviation. Different countries, communities and individuals have unique needs and face different obstacles to escaping poverty. Sometimes that means investing in structural reforms, sometimes it means providing food aid and sometimes, yes, it means direct payments. Sign up for our weekly newsletter. In this chapter, it is argued that the answers are yes and no: No , because we can leave particular recommendations to experts once we know precisely what we should promote—but also yes , since we must know the exact end of our demanded action.

Empirical poverty-research without specified ends is blind; it requires the prior identification and rational justification of particular ends. This, however, is the task of ethics because no empirical science can lead to normative insights.

Since it is highly controversial whether philosophical reflection can provide such a justification, a transcendental argument is outlined: if there is something good, then it is good that the good is actively supported, and if a capability to do so is a necessary requirement for this support, then it is also good that human beings have this capability. It is an essential condition for supporting the good. We are obliged to help others so that they can help.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF. Skip to main content. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Advertisement Hide. When I asked about evidence on impacts, I was directed to a perfunctory questionnaire. I wondered: maybe repeat borrowing is not good if the client's business does not continue to grow. Perhaps true success would be to provide one loan to help someone in need and then down the road to discover the borrower to be stable enough not to need another.

Here was a huge nongovernmental organization pulling in large grants to help the poor, with no real measurement of whether their efforts were working. For-profit businesses have benchmarks to know how they are performing, but most donors are not accustomed to asking charities about their results.

Sometimes they ask what proportion of money goes to overhead, but that number is mostly meaningless. The question that needs to be asked—and that needs to be asked every time someone writes a check to a charity or a government commits to a multimillion-dollar aid project—is, Will this actually work to alleviate poverty?

In other words, how will people's lives change, compared with how their lives would have changed without the program? This question knocked me off my Wall Street track and into graduate school for economics. One of my professors, Michael Kremer, had just started conducting randomized controlled trials to learn what programs work to help kids stay in school and improve the education they receive. He was borrowing this method from health and other sciences—randomly assigning schools to either receive a particular resource the treatment group or remain as they would have been otherwise the control group and then comparing school performance across these two groups.

His approach gave me an idea about how to return to the microlending questions that had brought me to academia in the first place. When I presented my questions and described a simple experiment that could address them, I thought that I was proposing a side project, not a dissertation. I had just finished reading complicated papers for two years, papers that often tackled empirical questions with fancy econometrics, and I assumed a dissertation must do the same. So off I went in my fourth year of graduate school to South Africa to set up my first experiment on the question of whether microlending is effective.

I trained a team that would seek individuals who wanted a loan from a microlender. Of the ones who qualified, I randomly assigned them into treatment and control groups and provided the lender with the list of those assigned to treatment.

The lender would approach them and offer them loans. It seemed fairly straightforward. Instead the research project failed miserably. Each time I passed names to the lender, it would take months for them to find the potential client, and sometimes they never would.

And then the lender poached my best team member, killing my best shot at gathering more people for the project.

It turns out to be difficult for academics at universities to carry out studies far away with the level of detail that good scientific trials require. You need reliable staff on the ground who understand the science but who also have the social skills to work with partners and manage field operations.

But starting in , the world started changing very, very quickly. Two centuries ago, four out of five U. Now, one farmer feeds people. So, the reason I talk about this is because we have to put these things in perspective.

We have to put the evolution of sort of human advancement--which is what we work on at the World Bank, development--we have to put it in the perspective of what happened. You know, Chinese President Xi Jinping talks about having thousands of years of a great success.

And truly, it was Asia and the Middle East that were the sources of much innovation before And then, he often says that the years after were not so great for China, but of course China is growing very rapidly, now. Now, this is what I see everywhere I go: Everywhere I go I see young people who may not own a smart phone, but who have access to smart phones.

By , many analysts are saying that the entire world will have access to broadband. Now, when you get access to broadband, when you can see things on the Internet, a couple of things happen. First of all, people are much more satisfied with their lives when they have Internet access. When they have Internet access, they can see how the world works. They can watch movies, television shows. The satisfaction with life goes up.

But the other thing that happens is their reference income goes up, and this is something that we actually study at the World Bank Group. The income to which they compare their own goes up. And when that happens, your income also has to go up or you're not very satisfied. Now, technology is going to do us a great service by getting everyone connected, but the other thing that technology is doing at the same time is it is going to eliminate some jobs. Now, there are a lot of different predictions about how many jobs will be lost.

Some will say that just about the jobs will be lost. Let me just tell you what one person says, this person who I got to know quite well, Jack Ma, who founded the great company, Alibaba, right?

He's the richest man in China. It's a huge company. Jack Ma puts it this way: "You know, when my grandfather was alive, he worked 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and he felt very busy. Me, I work eight hours a day, five days a week, and I feel very busy. My children will work three hours a day, three days a week, and they will feel very busy.

He says that every single muscle power job will be eliminated by technology. And he goes further and he says that every single knowledge-based job will be eliminated, as well--maybe not as quickly, but it will be eliminated.

And he predicts that whenever you have these kinds of ruptures--and he thinks that this is a major rupture, the way that artificial intelligence and technology is moving, there is a major rupture. And when that happens, his interpretation is that when those things happen there are at least 30 years of tremendous difficulty and upheaval.

And so, what do we do? How do we respond to these kinds of upheavals? How do we respond to this phenomenon in which everyone knows how everyone else lives and their aspirations are going up. They want more for themselves while, at the same time, technology potentially could eliminate many, many jobs. Well, if you look back into the history of how you tackle the problem of inequality, how you tackle the problem of poverty, this man, Andrew Carnegie, is a very important figure.

He wrote, in a book called "The Gospel of Wealth"--he said that, "The man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life will pass away unwept, unhonored, and unsung. The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. So, Carnegie helped other, John D.

Rockefeller, think differently about their money. And so, philanthropy was started. The word "philanthropy" entered the English language around the 17th century, translated from the Greek "philanthropia," which means "love of mankind.

And British Parliament in passed the Statute of Charitable Uses, the first time when governments were supposed to take care of the poor in any given region.

Around the same time, Islamic leaders endow property to create major educational centers. Shah Abbas--we were just talking with Padideh about this--of Persia, endowed school at the royal mosque, which set a pattern for similar colleges. And so, there was this tradition of philanthropy. But the point here is that philanthropy, which was our traditional way of thinking about how you tackle the problem of inequality and poverty is not going work anymore.

Let's look at another example, a very famous one of course is Albert Schweitzer. Now, I always get in trouble when I talk about Albert Schweitzer like this because people, for good reasons, admire him very much.

But Albert Schweitzer was part of a different tradition. He was part of the colonialist movement. He was also a missionary. And there was this sense that it was the responsibility of people like Albert Schweitzer to bring civilization to the uncivilized masses.

But Albert Schweitzer also portrayed himself as a great physician who was providing care to the poor. And I'd first heard about this because there was a cardiologist from the hospital that I trained in in Boston who actually, in the s, visited Albert Schweitzer. And when he came back, he wrote a little report saying that he was absolutely appalled at the conditions that he found in Albert Schweitzer's hospital.

He was a cardiologist that specifically looked at rhythm disorders. And he said that so many of the patients there had these things and there were things to be done for the patients but they were not done.

A little tiny report, but then it turns out that there was a British journalist named James Cameron who visited Schweitzer in , and here's what he wrote about the hospital that he found:.

I had been prepared for some unorthodoxies, but not this glaring squalor. The doctor had fenced off all mechanical advance to a degree that seemed both pedantic and appalling. The wards were rude huts, airless and dark, plank beds and wooden pillows, everyone infested with hens and dogs.

There was no running water but the rain, no gas, no sewage, no electricity, except, again, in character, for the operating theater and the gramophone. Cameron goes on to say, "I said then that the hospital existed for him rather than he for it. It was deliberately archaic and primitive, deliberately part of the jungle around it, a background of his own creation which clearly meant a great deal more philosophically than it did medically.

Now, part of the criticism here is that what Schweitzer was up to--and he talked about it with great clarity. He talked about it--he was an inspiration to many. He talked about his mission to correct the wrongs that others had instigated in the name of Christianity.

But for 30 years I worked in an organization called Partners in Health, and we tried to do exactly the opposite of what we saw Schweitzer having done. We thought, "Look, this is not about us. It's about providing the best possible medical care we can out of respect for the fundamental humanity of these others.

And so, there is so much aspiration, there is so much desire to have access to education, to make sure that your children are not underfed. There is so much aspiration out there, and once people get access to the Internet, the aspiration will continue to go up. How do we possibly respond to this situation? Well, it gets right to the core of what we are as an institution. In a, I think, just brilliant--what's the right word? In a brilliant move, leaders in the world, especially of the U.

Countries would devalue their currency, would try to do everything they could to gain an advantage, and the status of global currencies was in a mess. So, they needed to bring some stability to the global system. But also, they thought that there should be an organization that rebuilt Europe, and that is what the World Bank is. The original name was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the purpose was to rebuild Europe.