Not one of the 19 studies found that cash grants increase tobacco and alcohol consumption and many of them found that it leads to a reduction. … They don’t squander it. (via Giving poor people cash gets them to spend more on good stuff and less on tobacco and alcohol — Quartz)
Tag: poverty
The ‘decline’ of marriage isn’t a problem If every poor adult in America married another poor adult, in other words, we would see a significant drop in the poverty rate. Nobody’s actual income would have increased, of course, but through the magic of statistics we would achieve a significant win in the war on poverty.
A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It Between 1974 and 1979, residents of a small Manitoba city were selected to be subjects in a project that ensured basic annual incomes for everyone. For five years, monthly cheques were delivered to the poorest residents of Dauphin, Man. – no strings attached. […]
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Why Poor People Stay Poor
Why Poor People Stay Poor I once lost a whole truck over a few hundred bucks. It had been towed, and when I called the company they told me they’d need a few hundred dollars for the fee. I didn’t have a few hundred dollars. So I told them when I got paid next and […]
Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead a study published in June suggests that the things that really make the difference — between prison and college, success and failure, sometimes even life and death — are money and family. … They found that a child’s fate is in many […]
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Two Theories of Poverty
Two Theories of Poverty Poverty replicates itself in very predictable structural ways. Not a perfect article but worth a read. I’ve never seen any reason to support the pull-your-pants up view of poverty being a defect in individuals. If it were true the great depression would have been the great slack where a fifth of […]
Krugman on Paul Ryan at CPAC: Actually kind of awesome, in the worst way. the caricature of Ryan and people like him is that they treat the hardships of poverty as if they were merely psychological, that they talk big about dignity while ignoring the difficulty of getting essentials like food and health care. Well, […]
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The Real Poverty Trap
The Real Poverty Trap the evidence suggests that welfare-state programs enhance social mobility, thanks to little things like children of the poor having adequate nutrition and medical care. And conversely,of course, when such programs are absent or inadequate, the poor find themselves in a trap they often can’t escape, not because they lack the incentive, […]
2014 Gates Annual Letter: 3 Myths That Block Progress For The Poor Bill Gates discusses global poverty. Well written. Worth a read.
What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend? What precisely did the income change? Ongoing interviews with both parents and children suggested one variable in particular. The money, which amounted to between one-third and one-quarter of poor families’ income at one point, seemed to improve parenting quality. … That “helps parents be better parents,” she […]