The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty

Proof that giving cash to poor people, no strings attached, is an amazingly powerful tool for boosting incomes and promoting development.

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Wednesday, May 29, 2013, at 12:26 PM

Poverty is, fundamentally, a lack of money. So doesn’t it make sense that simply delivering cash to poor people can be an effective strategy for alleviating it?

Transferring money to poor Americans has been a much bigger success than most of us realize. When it comes to the global poor—the hundreds of millions of slum-dwellers and subsistence farmers who still populate the world—one might be more skeptical. Perhaps the problems facing these unfortunates are simply too profound and too complex to be addressed by anything other than complicated development schemes. Well, perhaps.