Author: Jason Kerwin

In any debate on the Internet, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis approaches 1 as the length of the debate increases. This truism is known as “Godwin’s Law“, and in some circles bringing Hitler up in an unrelated debate is known as “Godwinning”. Godwinning is almost always 1) done in a negative sense, since, you know, the Nazis were bad and stuff; and 2) used against one’s opponents, i.e. comparing whatever/whomever you are arguing against to Hitler, rather than yourself.

Timothy Kalyegira, in a Daily Monitor op-ed about President Museveni’s imminent signing of a bill banning homosexuality*, has achieved a rare form of Godwinning, painting Nazis in a fairly positive light and comparing his own side of the debate to them:

This is what I don’t like about the way the gay agenda is being thrust at Africa. A determined and well-organised minority can wreak havoc on a majority.

It is this frenzy, the will to power, the assertion of a collective ego by the gay rights movement that I find suspect. It is the obsession with pushing the rights of tiny minorities and fringe groups into the mainstream and making the mainstream guilty about not embracing these minority rights.

It is this precise attitude of hysterical activism that led to the rise of the fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s. The Nazi in Germany and Italy’s Brown Shirts fascists started out as extreme nationalist groups, usually scorned and their leaders often in jail. But they skilfully worked up the sentiments of their disillusioned and frustrated populations until they became part of the mainstream and eventually rose to power.

The gay lobby needs to think seriously about the aggressive way they are going about their campaign. It might bring them disaster in future. (“The coming backlash against homosexuals”, February 23rd 2014).

In the leadup to the signing of the bill, the Ugandan media has been littered with ridiculous arguments against homosexuals and in favor of banning them, but this inverse self-Godwin is simultaneously the most ridiculous and the most terrifying point I have ever seen made in a political debate. Even casting it in the most favorable possible light, Kalyegira is telling homosexuals to watch out and keep quiet or they face genocidal retribution.**

None of this is to say that all of the op-eds on the topic have been ridiculous and anti-gay: in another op-ed in the same issue of the Monitor, Bernard Tabaire eloquently makes the point that demolishing free speech and the rights of minorities is a dangerously slippery slope:

Standing up for the rights of all Ugandans is as important today as it ever was. The government has no right to tell us who to sleep with and how; what to wear; which films to watch; what to protest for or against in a group. Otherwise we will soon be told what to think.

Unfortunately, given what Kanyegira is willing to openly write about homosexuals, reasonable people like Tabaire face a tough slog in fighting for minority rights in Uganda.

EDIT: The link to the Kalyegira piece above (which was the top hit I found on Google) for some reason omits the end of the op-ed, which is by far the most disturbing section. Here is the full text – note that the lion’s share of the scariest part is on the second page. I’ve excerpted it here in case it gets taken down:

I foresee a demagogue like Adolf Hitler, sensing the silent resentment in society at this agenda. He will seize the moment. He will be courageous or reckless enough to disregard public opinion. It will take an unconventional man at the margins like that to snap the West out of its present state.

He will form a far-right party and make the core of his agenda that of restoring traditional Christian values. At first, he will shock many by daring to challenge the taboo of not speaking out against gays.

He will be denied TV studio time, but like the rapidly-rising Far Right political parties in Europe in the 1930s and today, he will be, like Hitler, a man with nothing to lose. He will be tenacious and persist with his radical agenda of calling for the elimination of homosexuals from society.

Eventually, to the disbelief of many, he will be elected by an enthusiastic majority, tired of being made to feel guilty about feeling there is something wrong with homosexuality.
Then hordes of once-suppressed majorities will descend on gays in their neighbourhoods, work places and villages and they will be jailed or worse. History is full of such backlashes.

*Scheduled to happen about 2 hours ago as of the writing of this post.
**A less favorable interpretation might note that, among other things, he seems to blame the Jews for the Holocaust.

I lost most of this past weekend to illness. That’s not an uncommon occurrence when I work in sub-Saharan Africa; it’s even common for locals and long-time residents who are used to the bacterial flora. In the two weeks since I got to Lira, two of the seven permanent staff in the office where I’m working have been ill enough to miss work, one with typhoid fever and the other with an unidentified intestinal infection (both were initially treated for malaria, of course). And this is in an office where everyone drinks exclusively bottled water. As a result I was able to directly observe the economic consequences of poor sanitation: not only did we lose the productivity of three people, but there were knock-on effects on the whole rest of the office. I also think there are systemic effects on punctuality and reliability – one of the people who got sick had to meet with a bunch of our enumerators, and he was late due to needing to go to the hospital for treatment (twice a day!) This contributes, I believe, to an equilibrium where nothing ever happens on time anyway so there is no value to being on time (or even within an hour of the scheduled time). If my casual game theory is right, it shouldn’t take too much in the way of random blackouts and illnesses to get everybody pooling on the “show up late/when I feel like it” strategy.

One positive side effect of getting sick was that I re-found my favorite chart, which is available here from the FDA. It lists a range of “foodborne illnesses” and their characteristics, but the name isn’t quite right because I was almost surely infected through water (probably indirectly, through contaminated water getting on food). The less appetizing but more accurate name would be “fecal-oral transmitted diseases”. One great feature about the chart is that it lets you roughly speaking what you might have, based on the symptoms, and then you can use the time before symptom onset to deduce when you probably got it. This is especially nice if it’s a Sunday and the clinics are closed or you just aren’t close to a good one. It also reveals that people often reason falsely about what made them sick: most of these illnesses take long enough to show symptoms that it probably was not the last meal you ate that made you sick, but something prior to that. Great to send people who are traveling to the developing world for the first time.

Paolo Abarcar has a new post where he uses the example of a study of bloodletting to explain why randomized trials are important for answering questions in economics and development. The actual study he cites has a number of problems that can be attributed to the limited development of science back in 1835 – for example, it was an observational study, and the treatment was not randomized, meaning that potentially ceteris non paribus est.

But the bigger problem is highlighted by the caption of the graph above, which presents the main results of the study. There is no control group here – both groups received bloodletting, with the only difference being when it was done. Bloodletting was the standard of care – it was so confidently known to work that it was standard medical practice, and it would have been unconscionable to not provide it. Hence both groups in the study were bled.

This is common practice today, minus the part where we therapeutically cut people open and let them bleed. Medical experiments are expected provide the control group with the standard of care (whatever we typically provide to patients), while the treatment group also gets whatever is being studied. This is usually fine from an empirical and ethical standpoint: we almost always want to compare our treatment to the status quo. There are two kinds of situation where it is not. The first is a practice that I have always been uncomfortable with, which is the importation of developed-world standards of care into developing countries. This often makes the results meaningless, since we are comparing people receiving a realistic treatment to a group that is receiving care that would never be provided in the absence of the study. It also treats people who are selected into the study as more ethically valuable than other people who live in the study site.

The second is a possibility I hadn’t really considered before: what if our standard of care is actively harmful? If it is sufficiently bad, then it could mask any potential benefits of the treatment (remember, the treatment group typically gets standard of care + the treatment). Imagine if bloodletting were still the standard of care: it killed enough people that even effective treatments, in combination with intentionally cutting people open and removing their blood, might look like they didn’t work. Not to mention the fact that we would be actively killing many patients.

I am unsure how big of a problem I think this is. In social science, we don’t usually provide anything to the control group in our studies, which mitigates the extent of the problem. Most medical treatments in the developed world have been studied via randomized experiments, but in developing countries there are lots of standard practices that seem to be somewhere between dubious and actively harmful. For example, the standard of care in Lira appears to be to treat people with headaches and fevers for malaria irrespective of whether they actually have it, with untold consequences for medication compliance and drug resistance.

I’ve recently experienced a total blogging blackout due to being in Northern Uganda to oversee the baseline data collection for an ambitious three-year RCT that is designed to evaluate the impact of a literacy program run by Mango Tree Educational Enterprises Uganda. My coauthor and advisor, Rebecca Thornton, and I also worked on the smaller, pilot RCT of Mango Tree’s program last year. The early results from that experiment are really exciting – this is an incredibly effective educational intervention – and we expect to learn even more from the current study, as well as using it as a platform to understand how parents, students, and teachers make decisions about how much (and in what way) to invest in schooling.

There will be more on those results in future posts, but for now I wanted to offer some potentially useful ideas for 21st-century Americans that I’ve picked up on during my visits to the Lango sub-region, which is the area in which Mango Tree works. When I lived in Malawi while running the experiment that underlies my job market paper, I occasionally wrote posts about things that America could learn from Malawi; this is in the same spirit. The Lango sub-region is home to the Langi, a tribe from the broader Luo ethnic group. They make up virtually all the kids in our study, and as a result I have spent an inordinate amount of time staring at different lists of Langi names. One thing I noticed quickly is that siblings almost never have the same surname. With a representative sample of thousands of kids, I quickly rejected the possibility that these were all cases of half-brothers and sisters. After asking around about it, I learned that instead of giving children one of the parent’s last names as their surname, they choose the surname of one of their relatives of the same gender. Another thing my friends explained to me, after I commented that nearly 50% of surnames start with “A” and a similar fraction with “O”, is that almost all names starting with an “A” are for girls, and most “O” names are for boys.

It gets better: sometimes it is difficult to decide between the many relatives you have whose surname you will assign to a child. Pick one brother, and another one might get jealous. One guy said that, in order to resolve this tension, he gathered all the relatives who wanted their name to be used into a room, wrote all the names on pieces of paper, and picked a name by lottery. It’s like a Freakonomist’s fantasy: want to know the effect of having a particular name on your success in the labor market? Just run the regression, they are literally random conditional on family background. (Unfortunately the lottery method seems to be the minority approach, with most people just choosing whichever name they like best for their kid.)

There are two possibly-useful ideas here for America as we adapt to a world where patrilineal naming traditions no longer hold. Our surname system sucks: couples agonize over who should take whose last name in a marriage, and if the partners keep their birth names then they have to figure out what to call their kids. We have no clear guidelines, and the emerging de facto norm of wives keeping their maiden names but children taking their father’s surname is fairly confusing and also male-biased. The Langi system offers two options for resolving this. The first possible solution is that we give up on the idea of trying to unite people through their family names: pick your children’s family names based on ancestors or relatives you want to honor. When you file the marriage paperwork, you could even do the same for yourself.

A second option is take my friend’s approach, and avoid resentment and anger by using a lottery to assign last names. If you want to use your surname or your spouse’s, but can’t come to an agreement, flip a coin! Or better yet, hold a lottery over a range of possible surnames. If you want to be smart about it, and realize that the coin flip will ensure fairness on average, but not for all possible actual outcomes, you can do a stratified lottery. For example, a “heads” could mean that your first kid gets your surname but that your second one will get your spouse’s, while a “tails” reverses the order. That would be a better system than our attempts to shoehorn modern families into a pseudo-traditional naming system by endlessly stringing together hyphenated names.

As of the first day of this year, the culture wars that still linger from the 1960s are over. The beginning of legal marijuana sales caps off an amazing decade of victories for social liberals. In that period, gay marriage has been legalized in 16 states, and such marriages are now recognized by the federal government. The President is now a black man with a muslim name who is the son of an immigrant. In a partial victory old-school social conservatives, politicians have stopped talking about guns, but gun ownership is in steady decline.*

No formal treaty of surrender has been negotiated, but marijuana, gay marriage, intolerance toward muslims and gun rights are as good as finished as viable political issues. Conservative politicians will back away from them the same way that they have backed away from racism. The question is what we will argue about next?

A viable candidate, I think, is the advance of scientific research and the development of new technologies. Anti-scientism cuts across America’s current political divide, including  such diverse issues as the conservative dogma of skepticism about climate change, teacher unions opposing all efforts to use evidence to improve education, and damned near everyone seeming to hate and fear wearable technology like Google Glass.

The biggest political debates, however, seem to be over the use over GMO foods. This NY Times piece on Greggor Ilagan, a councilman from Hawaii’s Big Island, highlights the combination of passion and disbelief in empirical evidence that characterizes the anti-GMO movement. Mr. Ilagan took the time to learn about the science on GMOs ahead of a vote on banning them on the island. He was rewarded for his careful thought with mockery and hatred by his constituents. The article is worth reading in its entirety; it provides a wonderful combination of laying out the science on GMO foods and casual anthropology on the most passionate GMO opponents. Particularly telling is a passage in which every single claim made by ban proponents collapses upon further investigation, which features this damning paragraph:

He heard many times that there were no independent studies of the safety of genetically modified organisms. But Biofortified, which received no funding from industry, listed more than a hundred such studies, including a 2010 comprehensive review sponsored by the European Union, that found “no scientific evidence associating G.M.O.s with higher risks for the environment or for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms.” It echoed similar statements by the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Medicine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Margaret Wille, the main proponent of the ban, says things that sound like Republican talking points with the word “GMO” in place of “climate change”. All the scientists who oppose banning GMOs are characterized as being in the pocket of corporate interests. A lot of the quotes in the article sound like dialogue from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a videogame whose plot was driven by the debate about enhancing humans via technology. We increasingly have the capacity to do exactly that. It is hard to know what kinds of political coalitions will form as technology becomes the key social issue of the day, but Hawaii may be a window on the future of debates on social values. Things don’t look promising for science: the ban passed 6-3, with overwhelming support from constituents, and most people I know from Hawaii are rabidly anti-GMO.

Full disclosure: I have never received a penny from firms who engage in genetic engineering (do people still call it that)? I have probably eaten a large number of GMO foods, especially if you consider that almost everything we eat was bred specifically to select for crazy mutations such as fruit not having seeds.

*In sharp contrast with most liberals, I have been shooting quite a few times, and rather enjoy skeet shooting. I can’t really understand what people see in handguns, though.

Planet Money just finished an amazing eight-part series on how t-shirts are made, centered around following a shirt they are selling (men’s women’s). You can find all the episodes on their podcast’s webpage or by pulling up their podcast on your smartphone. I strongly recommend you listen to the whole thing starting from Part 1 (link). They’re each only around 20 minutes long, and they might be the best reporting on microeconomics, ever. I found that the series challenged a lot of my prior notions about how the garment industry works, and that’s even with a relatively strong base of knowledge.

One theme of the series was that t-shirts are now made in Bangladesh because that is the cheapest place in the world to make them. In the segment on t-shirt factories in Bangladesh, they note that the country recently raised its minimum wage. The consensus among industry experts was that this would end up just raising prices slightly for the end consumer. This would then lead to more income for garment workers in Bangladesh, which sounds like an unmitigated good.

What’s missing from this story is the history of globalized garment manufacture, which has always had the feature that production moves to the cheapest possible place. Indeed, Planet Money discusses one of the most dramatic such moves, which was when production moved from South Korea to Bangladesh because quotas were tightened on Korean-made t-shirts. This move was actually spearheaded by Korean businessmen who actively sought out Bangladeshi partners to start factories in the other country. The argument about the current change in costs is that Bangladesh is as cheap as it gets. There is no place else to go that is cheaper (although they do allude to Cambodia being competitive on costs)

I’m not sure that’s the whole story. Sure, no other country currently offers lower costs of production right now. But when t-shirt manufacture moved to Bangladesh, it didn’t offer lower costs either. What it did offer was lower wages . And despite what NPR might tell you, Bangladesh does not have the lowest wages in the world. According to the World Bank’s excellent PovcalNet tool (which I found via this CSAE blog post), there are 15 countries that have lower average incomes than Bangladesh, based on the most recent available household survey data. This is a decent proxy for having lower wages – made more compelling by the fact that all 15 said countries have higher poverty rates than Bangladesh, meaning that they have lots of people at the low end of their income distributions.

The other thing those countries have in common? All 15 are in Africa. The rise in wages in Bangladesh creates an opportunity for other lower-cost players to step in, and Africa is home to essentially all of them. This opportunity would only really accrue to countries with the ocean ports necessary to participate in the global manufacturing economy, so Liberia, Madagascar, Tanzania, Nigeria, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau are legitimate candidates. The other 8 possibilities are out of luck, unless road and rail transit improve drastically, or we do something crazy like building a set of canals into the heart of Africa.

This version of the future doesn’t have to end disastrously for Bangladesh, either. Remember, Bangladesh got its start not just by gaining the low-cost lead from South Korea, but also because Korean companies went to Bangladesh to invest there. And South Korea’s fate, after that point, was to continue its spectacular rise into the ranks of the world’s richest countries. This could be the kickstart Bangladesh needs to make a move up the value chain. There are risks: some Bangladeshis will probably lose jobs, for example, especially in the short run, but the large numbers of currently un- and under-employed Africans who would stand to benefit are jut as deserving of our sympathies.

I have no way of knowing whether this is the future we’ll actually end up with, but if I were in the t-shirt business, I wouldn’t settle for keeping my manufacturing in Bangladesh and just accepting higher costs. I would be looking at making clothes on the continent with the lowest wages in the world, which faces the exact same tariff and quota structure as Bangladesh. A continent with a huge number of jobless people who would benefit hugely from more jobs, which happens to have an economy that is growing faster than anyplace else in the world. I would be looking at Africa.

On Sunday Amazon announced plans to deliver online purchases within 30 minutes via fleets of autonomous drones. I’ve seen various reactions to Amazon Prime Air: from excited, to claiming this is a PR stunt timed to coincide with Cyber Monday, to the aforelinked Matt Yglesias piece which argues that this is a defensive move to prevent competitors from doing the same thing. But I think everybody can agree that the idea of using thousands automated miniature helicopters in order to save consumers the effort of going to the grocery store is totally insane. I, for one, was sure this was some kind of April Fool’s joke resurrected by the internet and circulated at the wrong time. And my instinctive response, on learning that it was serious* was “that will never work”.

And there’s a good chance it won’t work – they might not even be able to secure permission to do it. But that’s fine. Crazy ideas are the mother of successful innovation. I had almost the same response back when Google announced Gmail (which actually did happen on April Fool’s Day of 2004): “A gigabyte of storage? For free? No way. Never. Well, maybe in 2014, but not now.” As it happened, they were serious, and Gmail heralded the now-familiar world where all our data is stored in the cloud and accessible anywhere for free. But for every Gmail there are untold numbers of Webvans (which was really sort of a low-tech Amazon Prime Air), most of which we’ve never heard of.

And this isn’t just a private-sector game: government-sponsored crazy ideas make the world go round. Building the Panama Canal (and for that matter the Suez) was totally nuts – but crucial to the development of the world we live in today. We put a man on the moon during an era when science hadn’t yet sorted out that smoking kills you. As a result, we now regularly hurl chunks of metal off of the Earth’s surface, with enough speed that they miss the ground – chunks of metal that then send us signals from outer space to help us find the nearest gas station. The future is awesome – thanks in large part to crazy things people tried in the past.

Indeed, I’m actually worried that the world doesn’t have enough crazy ideas to keep pushing us into the awesome, unexpected world of the future. So you can only imagine my delight when I stumbled across this op-ed in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo. He calls for a set of canals linking the landlocked countries in Africa to the sea:

There could a T-shaped canal that begins in Mozambique, touches the Botswana-Zimbabwe border, hugs Malawi, snakes along Tanzania’s southeast border, to Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, then along the eastern edge of DR Congo, and to South Sudan.

Some of you may have heard me talking about almost the exact same idea – replicating the system of waterways that connects the American Great Lakes to the Ocean, but with their African cousins.

Now, this idea is completely nuts. The environmental consequences alone are enough to make it – probably – impossible. And where would we get all the water we’d need? This doesn’t even mention the number of locks we’d need, since the great lakes region of Africa is, topographically, more or less a single high plateau:

This would be a far bigger challenge that the Panama Canal was, or even the system of waterways connecting the American Great Lakes to the Ocean. On the other hand, the benefits would be enormous. Here is a map of where people in Africa live:

It’s not just that lots of countries in Africa are landlocked – a huge number of people live in landlocked countries, with a particularly high concentration around the great lakes. A system of canals linking those lakes to the ocean would drastically reduce the cost of shipping goods from those countries to the rest of the world – potentially making them competitive in actual manufacturing, instead of just exporting raw materials. It would also be absurdly expensive, require better international cooperation than the world has ever seen outside of wartime, and disrupt hundreds of fragile ecosystems. In short, it’s a crazy idea – the kind we need more of, because every once in a while an idea this crazy actually works out.

*I mean, probably serious. This could still be a joke for all I know.

A recent BBC piece reports on sex workers in Kenya using post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP)* as a substitute for condoms, cycling through different clinics to use the drugs on a regular basis. This lets them earn a premium for unprotected sex at relatively low risk to themselves (although not without social and personal cost). The article focuses mainly on the public health ramifications, which are definitely serious. A skeptical reader might point out that the only first-person anecdote about the alleged practice is in fact a totally reasonable use of PEP: a sex worker got drunk, she made a mistake, she got worried about HIV infection, so she got her hands on some ARVs. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do.

I want to put that aside, however, and focus on how goddamned clever the women described in this piece are. These drugs will keep me from getting HIV? Then I can use them instead of condoms – that way I can earn more money, since men will pay more for unprotected sex. You can’t get them from the same clinic more than once a year? That’s okay, I’ll give a fake name. Take pictures of the people you give PEP to? I start going to different clinics. Or I send a friend.

This isn’t an isolated case, either. Several years ago, TB-positive people in South Africa evidently started selling their saliva to other folks looking to get targeted disability grants. I remember hearing about a similar scheme involving the selling of HIV-positive blood. No matter how well you design your system, you should always expect people to find a way to game it.

Economics is often criticized for the assumption that people are rational. Obviously, the critics say, human beings are not perfect calculating machines, they make mistakes, they do things that don’t maximize profits, or whatever. The typical counterargument defends rationality by pointing out that it can accommodate mistakes, that we don’t actually think people maximize profits, and so forth – it confronts the “people aren’t rational” argument on its own terms.

I want to offer a different defense: rationality, the way it is typically used by economists, means that people are smarter than you think – even poor people. Indeed, the canonical economic model of a poor person is a rich person with less money.**  The rational choice paradigm of economics amounts to taking people’s choices seriously as legitimate choices given the options they face, and trying to understand them as such, rather than writing them off as obviously unreasonable.

*PEP is the use of a large dose anti-retroviral drugs shortly after a (potential) HIV exposure to prevent infection with the virus.
**Even most behavioral economics research that looks at poverty and poverty traps focuses on how resource constraints lead to impatience, time inconsistency, and other issues with decisionmaking. The poor make questionable decisions because they don’t have much money, not vice-versa.

Economists like to use improvements in standardized tests as a measure of how well education programs are working. This commonly leads to dissent on the grounds that standardized tests don’t really measure anything of value. My go-to response to that critique has long been that these exam scores are predictive of objectively important outcomes. Change the test scores (in a meaningful way) and you will shift those outcomes as well.

A new paper by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer, “The Medium-Term Impacts of High-Achieving Charter Schools on Non-Test Score Outcomes“, makes exactly that point. Participation in the Promise Academy (which famously raised students’ test scores in the short term, by half a standard deviation in math and a fifth of an SD in English) led to big gains in important outcomes in the medium term. Their abstract:

High-performing charter schools can significantly increase the test scores of poor urban students. It is unclear whether these test score gains translate into improved outcomes later in life. We estimate the effects of high-performing charter schools on human capital, risky behaviors, and health outcomes using survey data from the Promise Academy in the Harlem Children’s Zone. Six years after the random admissions lottery, youth offered admission to the Promise Academy middle school score 0.283 standard deviations higher on a nationally-normed math achievement test and are 14.1 percentage points more likely to enroll in college. Admitted females are 12.1 percentage points less likely to be pregnant in their teens, and males are 4.3 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated. We find little impact of the Promise Academy on self-reported health. We conclude with speculative evidence that high-performing schools may be sufficient to significantly improve human capital and reduce certain risky behaviors among the poor.

I was lucky enough to meet with Fryer when he came to Michigan to give a talk. One thing he said is that his research agenda is motivated by the robust link between racial gaps in test scores and racial gaps in outcomes. Fix the black-white gap in test scores, he said, and you could fix almost all of the gap in crime, teen pregnancy, and so forth. This is the first time, however, that I’ve seen compelling evidence that the observed relationship between test scores and overall quality of life holds up when you actually get low-scoring kids to do better in school.

Granted, a lot of other stuff could be going on. The Promise Academy surely had other effects beyond academics. But this study provides important evidence in favor of using test score improvements as a meaningful measure of improvements in education.

While I have been bogged down in the insanity of the middle of the academic semester, reports have kept coming out about the staggering success of unconditional cash transfer programs in Africa. For those of you playing along at home, that means just giving cash to poor people with no strings attached. These have even hit the popular press*, and been emailed to me by non-academics, prompting me to emerge from my involuntary blogging hiatus to offer a few thoughts.

1) These programs have massive benefits. Both the GiveDirectly and Northern Uganda Social Action Fund cash transfer programs are showing increases of around 50% on earnings, several years out, from cash grants in the range of $300-$1000. People I have explained this to commonly leap to the erroneous conclusion that that has something to do with the grants being around 50% of income. Nope – these are impacts on additional income. This implies massive social returns to this kind of investment strategy: Blattman, Fiala and Martinez say they are 40% annually. Amazing.

2) They don’t have the downsides that people often assume they will. One red flag often raised with giving the poor cash is that it will be wasted on alcohol or other addictions, potentially making people worse off. The GiveDirectly RCT looks at spending on these “temptation goods”, and finds no evidence of that.

3) It’s not just white people in rich countries who are worried about cash handouts being wasted. Paolo Abarcar links to a Jishnu Das post about this concern, where he asks “Can we please stop making judgments about what poor people should and should not do with money that is redistributed to them?” I agree totally that this is fundamentally unreasonable – but poor people are worried about these problems themselves. During a conversation I had with a man from rural Malawi, I asked if it wasn’t a better idea to hand out cash to people facing food shortages, instead of trucking in maize to an area that was growing tons of it. He (a potential beneficiary of this program!) was adamant that cash was a terrible idea. People would waste it on booze. Better, he said, to give us maize.

In ongoing research with fellow UM grad student Lasse Brune, we’re taking a radical approach to the question of how to measure whether money is wasted: we’re asking people to decide for themselves. What do they buy in violation of their prior plans and budgets? What do they buy and then regret later? Which things that they bought were spur-of-the-moment purchases, or regretted? Pilot-testing these questions has revealed some surprising choices. Maybe unsurprisingly, though, among the most common selections are alcohol and unhealthy snacks. The possibility that cash transfers might be wasted on temptation goods is a concern not only to Economist readers and international development donors, but also to the very people who stand to receive the cash.

EDIT: Corrected the end of the second-to-last paragraph, which had said “to give us cash”.

*Okay, popular among bourgie college graduate types.