The Universal Basic Income experiment in Kenya

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

There's this fundamental question in economics that has proven really hard to answer: What's a good way to help people out of poverty? The old-school way was to fund programs that would support very particular things, like buying cows for a village, giving people business training, or building schools.

But over the past few decades, there has been a new idea: Could you help people who don't have money by ... just giving them money? We covered this question in a segment of This American Life that originally ran in 2013. Economists who studied the question found that giving people cash had positive effects on recipients' economic and psychological well-being. Maybe they bought a cow that could earn them money each week. Maybe they could replace their grass roofs with metal roofs that didn't need fixing every so often.

The success of just giving people in poverty cash has spawned a whole set of new questions that economists are now trying to answer. Like, if we do just give money, what's the best way to do that? Do you just give it all at once? Or do you dole it out over time? And it turns out... a huge new study on giving cash was just released and it's got a lot of answers.

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Transcript

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0:17.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:22.0	There's this fundamental question in economics that has proven really hard to answer.
0:28.0	How to spend money to help people out of poverty.
0:31.6	The old school way of doing it was to fund programs that would support very
0:35.2	particular things, buying cows for a village or giving people business training or building schools.
0:41.6	But over the past few decades, there has been a new idea.
0:46.0	What if the cure for people not having money was just giving them money?
0:50.6	No strings attached.
0:52.0	The argument for this idea is people know their own situation best.
0:56.8	They can decide if they need a cow or training or a school. They just need some money.
1:01.4	This idea has spawned a whole new set of questions that economists are trying to answer.
1:07.0	Like if we do just give money, what's the best way to do that?
1:10.5	Do you just give it all at once, or do you dole it out over time like through what's called a universal basic income?
1:17.0	Well, a huge new study on giving cash was just released and it's got a lot of answers.
1:23.0	Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Dave Blanchard.
1:27.0	And I'm Amanda Aranchick.
1:28.0	Today on the show, what have we learned about the best ways to give money to people who need it.
1:33.0	We go to Kenya and hear from gossiping neighbors.
1:35.0	We find out what people spend their money on when there are no strings attached,
1:39.0	and we discover how a cow might be a better bank than a bank.
	...

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