The Universal Basic Income experiment in Kenya

There's this fundamental question in economics that has proven really hard to answer: What's a good way to help people out of poverty? The old-school way was to fund programs that would support very particular things, like buying cows for a village, giving people business training, or building schools.

But over the past few decades, there has been a new idea: Could you help people who don't have money by ... just giving them money? We covered this question in a segment of This American Life that originally ran in 2013. Economists who studied the question found that giving people cash had positive effects on recipients' economic and psychological well-being. Maybe they bought a cow that could earn them money each week. Maybe they could replace their grass roofs with metal roofs that didn't need fixing every so often.

The success of just giving people in poverty cash has spawned a whole set of new questions that economists are now trying to answer. Like, if we do just give money, what's the best way to do that? Do you just give it all at once? Or do you dole it out over time? And it turns out... a huge new study on giving cash was just released and it's got a lot of answers.

For more:

• I Was Just Trying To Help - This American Life 
• The Charity That Just Gives People Money - Planet Money 
• What Happens When You Just Give Money To Poor People? Planet Money  
• Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya - The Quarterly Journal of Economics
• Results From The City That Just Gave Away Cash - Planet Money 
• The Basic Income Experiment - Planet Money 
• People can do more with lump sum of money than payments, experiment in Kenya suggests - NPR 
• Early findings from the world's largest UBI study - GiveDirectly

This episode is hosted by Dave Blanchard and Amanda Aronczyk. The reporting for the first part of this episode was originally done for This American Life by Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum. Our show today was produced by Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Music: NPR Source Audio - "Race to Nowhere," "Spanish Fruit," and "Spanish Fire"