Blog - Yearly Archives: 2016

This week our own Joe Huston spoke to the Universal Income Project in San Francisco about GiveDirectly’s upcoming basic income pilot and recipient autonomy. “It’s hard to out farm a subsistence farmer,” he said “it turns out they’re pretty good at it.” In other news the Overseas Development Institute published a study, called “Understanding the […]

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This week, the 2013 randomized controlled trial on GiveDirectly’s work, led by Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, was published in the leading economics periodical, The Quarterly Journal of Economics. As Chris Weller summarized in Tech Insider, “the result: People who received the money were happier, more satisfied with life, less stressed, and depressed less often. […]

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This week the National Post, while discussing Ontario’s upcoming basic income pilot, claims that “basic income is the romper of economic policy.” More attention on this newest economic fashion is one reason why it needs to be rigorously studied. And in Devex Catherine Cheney takes a thoughtful look at the upcoming research on basic income, […]

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The newly released Future of Work Conference video features a host of interesting speakers including our own Michael Faye, who spoke about cash transfers and basic income. He says, “The impacts of cash are as heterogeneous as people themselves. If there is one lesson, it is that every individual has different unique needs.” On the […]

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This week, Alan Krueger announced that he will be joining the research team for GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot. Dr. Krueger is the former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a professor at Princeton. As Max Ghenis remarked, “Krueger’s research has a history of influencing public policy.” In other exciting cash-policy news, the […]

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This week President Obama fielded a question on basic income (he was sympathetic to the arguments but didn’t come down one way or the other). On CNBC Andy Stern proposed that basic income — possibly “the biggest ‘new’ idea of the 21st century” — could be the solution to “a tsunami of economic disruption… barreling toward the United […]

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Abhijit Banerjee, leading academic from MIT and one of the principal researchers on our new basic income trial, wrote in an op-ed in the Indian Express that “the poor, liberated from having to worry… might plan their lives better.” GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot, he writes, “will offer us a chance to learn… If you care […]

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Stephen Warren, of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, was looking for advice on how and where to give, when he stumbled upon “effective altruism.” He writes, “modern interventions and modern research help us maximize the impact of our giving.” One of these modern interventions is cash, or in it’s long-term form, basic income. As Matt Zwolinski writes, […]

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Zev Minsky-Primus wanted to give some of his Bar Mitzvah money away, but he didn’t know how. After looking at the evidence, Zev decided to give “plain old money to people” through GiveDirectly, no strings attached, and let them decide for themselves. Elsewhere in the news, cofounder Michael Faye talks about direct giving on a […]

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