Joshua Greene

Okay, so how did GiveDirectly get started?

There were economists who wanted to do experiments on different ways of improving the lives of poor people.

And good scientists said, well, we need a control condition.

What's the standard of care?

What's the baseline?

And they asked around and there wasn't really an accepted kind of standard of care.

So they said, all right, well, maybe our baseline for comparison should just be what happens if we take the money that you could spend on this program doing some specific thing and just gave it to them directly.

And what they found was that giving people cash directly actually did better in many cases, a lot better than the innovative programs that they were looking to test.

So they created this organization called Give Directly that

follows this simple strategy.

And the first thing people worry about when they hear about this is, OK, well, are people going to spend the money on things that are destructive?

Are they going to spend it on alcohol or things like that?

And what they found when they first studied this is no.

What people tend to do is first satisfy their basic needs.

If they don't have food, if their children are in danger of dying from some disease, they get treatment.

If there's a hole in the roof, they fix the roof, right?

And then with whatever money is left, they invest in themselves and they invest in their communities, right?

And this is where GiveDirectly really is sort of different from other interventions because not only can it account for people's or support people's most immediate needs, but someone who wants to start a business, but let's say they need some way to sell their goods

in the surrounding villages, they can buy a motorcycle that can allow them to travel around and allow them to sell their goods and allow them to make a living.

So it's not just giving a fish and it's not teaching a fish because they already know how to fish.