Vox | This cash experiment cut child deaths in half. Here’s the catch.
Cash transfers can save lives. Just not very cost-effectively.
It sometimes seems like the basic income wars will never go away. My first Vox piece on the idea of a government-provided guaranteed income came in the summer of 2014 — a simpler time, the Obama years. I wrote a big feature about it in 2017. Since then, we’ve had Andrew Yang’s presidential run, Covid-era stimulus checks, and massive progress in AI, all of which have made the idea feel more plausible.
We’ve also had some research findings that throw cold water on the concept, at least in the US. Three studies that gave out unrestricted cash to Americans during the pandemic found nulls on all the outcomes they tested: the cash didn’t improve health or self-reported well-being or even, in one study, how well people say they’re doing financially.
Two more recent, even bigger studies have backed that up. The Baby’s First Years Study, which began in 2018 and gave $4,000 a year to low-income American families with young kids for over four years, found no effects on child development outcomes at the four-year mark. No reduction in behavioral problems, no improvements in language ability — nada. Another study run by the group OpenResearch gave out $12,000 a year to families for three years. While it found some positive outcomes, like parents spending more on their kids, mostly it found null effects, too. Participants spent more because their incomes grew, but they also worked less, offsetting the income gain a bit.
But as I wrote back in 2017, “The biggest potential for basic income isn’t in the US but in developing countries.” A big new study from the charity GiveDirectly seems to back that up, finding that cash grants in Kenya not only reduced poverty but actually saved lives.
Even here, though, it’s important to be careful. Covering basic income experiments for more than a decade has taught me that readers love to hear about ways in which cash programs work and are less eager to hear about ways they fall short. That resulted in some big expectations that, in more recent US research, at least, have been dashed.
Some coverage of the GiveDirectly study has only focused on the good news (lives saved) and not limitations, like the fact that it didn’t save lives very cost-effectively.
That’s a problem.
