Blog - Yearly Archives: 2016

On Tuesday, Paul got a chance to respond to questions from the Reddit community, including some on his favorite topics, like the design of our RCTs and our new basic income trial. In related news, with the Swiss voting on a basic income this Sunday, and details about Y Combinator’s basic income trial just released, […]

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After days of talks, the World Humanitarian Summit’s Grand Bargain listed as its third recommendation: “Increase the use and coordination of cash-based programming.” But even as cash transfers continue to gain support, as Nikita Lalwani and Sam Winter-Levy uncovered in their long-form feature in The New Republic, some in the aid sector are pushing back. […]

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With the World Humanitarian Summit coming up next week, the discussion turns toward ways cash can make aid more cost-effective. Journalists reported on emergency cash transfers for disaster relief in Canada and the outcomes of cash on infants. The Irish Times covered Kenya’s mobile money system as a vehicle for sending cash instead of in-kind […]

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As the debate over basic income continues to heat up, the conversation turns to GiveDirectly’s upcoming trial to find answers through rigorous research. Meanwhile, cofounder Paul Niehaus talked basic income with Mark Leon Goldberg on the Global Dispatches podcast, and COO Domestic Ian Bassin appeared on Seattle Morning Radio and France 24 TV to explain […]

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This week saw continued and often in-depth coverage of GiveDirectly’s basic income trial. On both sides of the Atlantic reporters at The Telegraph and New York Magazine asked whether instituting a basic income could make welfare as a whole more efficient and better at serving the poorest. Meanwhile, research continues to show positive impacts of […]

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Our basic income trial continued to make headlines this week after our announcement in Slate two weeks ago. Cofounder Michael Faye spoke with Andrew Flowers of FiveThirtyEight, telling him, “To be honest, a full long-term universal basic income has never been tried, let alone rigorously evaluated.” In Fast Company, Ben Schiller reports: “After years of conjecture […]

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GiveDirectly made headlines this week when co-founders Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus announced our intention to run a basic income project. The story quickly got the attention of several writers and outlets (selections below). As Freakonomics’ Stephen Dubner says in an unconnected, but coincidentally timed podcast, basic income is “an idea whose time finally may […]

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From the Caribbean to the Philippines, cash transfers made it into the news this week as a way of reaching people in need. And in Canada, Senator Art Eggleton, in a letter to editor, argued forcefully for an adoption of cash transfers as a basic income, saying it would result in “a great upsurge in […]

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In an op-ed in The New Times Rwanda, Gitura Mwaura argues emphatically for African countries to start conducting their own Universal Basic Income experiments. He makes the case that research can help answer questions like, “Will the money encourage them to find a job or will they sit in their couches comfortably?” Meanwhile, other institutions were talking about […]

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