“What giving people money doesn’t fix” by GiveDirectly

by Caitlin Tulloch, Senior Director of Research, Learning, and Product at GiveDirectly. Caitlin is an expert in evidence-based policy and cost-effectiveness, and formerly served as Deputy Director in USAID's Office of the Chief Economist. Summary ❌ Cash isn’t a silver bullet and it can’t replace missing or broken systems. It doesn’t pave roads, improve schools, or stock pharmacies. 💸 Yet when it comes to reducing poverty, there are no interventions with more consistent evidence for their effectiveness than cash. ⚙️ GiveDirectly follows the evidence: we use cash where it works best, and test alternatives when the goal isn’t just poverty reduction. GiveDirectly has written a lot about what giving people money is consistently very good at (e.g., recipients earn more, spend more, own more assets, and the local economy gets a boost), the myths that aren’t true (e.g, cash doesn’t make people work less or drink more), and the fact that it's what most recipients prefer. But the fact that cash improves many things doesn’t mean it improves everything. And frankly, that's an unrealistic bar to set. I’ve spent the last 15 years doing cost-effectiveness analyses across education, health, nutrition, and livelihoods—first at MIT's J-PAL, then [...] ---Outline:(01:52) Giving individuals money won't build infrastructure or systems(05:22) When poverty reduction is the goal, cash works; when the goal is something else, we test(07:45) This isn't an either/or--it's about using the right tool for the outcome --- First published: November 6th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iMDoPK92GHWN2Csss/what-giving-people-money-doesn-t-fix --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.