Is giving directly best?

I've written before about effective charity, specifically focusing on optimal strategies for doing the most good. GiveWell still ranks GiveDirectly as its top charity right now.

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Kevin Starr & Laura Hattendorf express their doubts.

But is GiveDirectly’s model, as Slate put it: “the best and simplest way to fight poverty”?

No. It’s an experiment—an important one, but an experiment nonetheless. We hope we’re wrong, but our hunch is that it is more of a 1-year reprieve from deprivation than a cost-effective, lasting “solution to poverty.”

Poor people are poor because they don’t have money, and so we think unconditional cash transfers should be judged primarily by how much money recipients are making a few years out from the windfall. GiveDirectly’s work in Kenya is too new to know that, but cash-transfer enthusiasts like GiveWell point to other studies of other cash-transfer programs and predict a slam-dunk.

We looked at those studies, and we’re puzzled as to why GiveWell’s analysts, who rightly prize impact and cost-effectiveness, chose GiveDirectly as one of their “Top Charity” trinity. In the most relevant, longer-term study that GiveWell cited—a program working with unemployed youth in Uganda—recipients of an initial $382 grant had a 41 percent greater monthly income 4 years out. This sounds like a big return on the donor’s dollar.

It’s not. Working out the cost-effectiveness of income-generating funding can be confusing, and we at Mulago find it useful to benchmark grants by calculating the amount of additional income over 3 years, divided by the amount of grant money it took to generate it: the income bang for the donor buck. Of the baseline income of those youth, 41 percent turns out to be $11 per month. By that calculation ($11 per month x 36 months ÷ $382), the unconditional cash grant produced $1.03 of additional income over 3 years per donor dollar, essentially a wash.
 

Chris Blattman responds with several points, two of my favorites being the following.

1. Victory! If it’s becoming standard to judge interventions by their cost effectiveness, then I can’t be more thrilled. Same goes for GiveDirectly. You can think of cash transfers like the index fund of development (making GiveDirectly the Vanguard). If the NGOs (money managers) of the world can outperform the index funds, then the world becomes a better place.

...

3. Scalable? Whether these other interventions prove as scalable or replicable as cash is another question. Too many NGOs search for solutions to help 1,000 people a year not 1,000,000. But I’m confident some alternatives to cash will prove promising. Some already are, from vaccines to election monitoring, if only because they solve the problems cash cannot. I’m more skeptical we’ll see better alternatives for pure poverty-alleviation, but we’ll see.
 

I'd never thought of cash transfers as the index fund of charity, but it's a useful analogy. If you can't do better than giving someone cash, then give someone cash.

In Asian cultures, the most common wedding gift is cash. When I was younger that seemed like a gift for the creatively deficient, but at its heart is also a genuine pragmatism that signals the unselfish nature of the giver.

Beware the opposite sex during high school

...the share of opposite gender friends has a sizable negative effect on high school GPA. The effect is found across all subjects for students over the age of sixteen, but is limited to mathematics and science for younger students.
 

From a research paper (PDF) by Andrew Hill at the University of South Carolina.

My mother was always wary of me chasing after girls in high school because she was worried it would interfere with my studies. Perhaps she was on to something.

(h/t Marginal Revolution)

The elevator

For most city-dwellers, the elevator is an unremarkable machine that inspires none of the passion or interest that Americans afford trains, jets, and even bicycles. Wilk is a member of a small group of elevator experts who consider this a travesty. Without the elevator, they point out, there could be no downtown skyscrapers or residential high-rises, and city life as we know it would be impossible. In that sense, they argue, the elevator’s role in American history has been no less profound or transformative than that of the automobile. In fact, according to Wilk, the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns.
 

As the world's populations grows and congregates towards cities, we have to build upward towards the skies, so perhaps it's high time we give the elevator its due.

I liked this bit about how the elevator turned the top floor of buildings from the least to the most desirable level.

The arrival of the elevator upended more than urban planning: It changed the hierarchy of buildings on the inside as well. Higher floors had once been distant, scrubby spaces occupied by maids and the kind of low-rent tenants who could be expected to climb six flights of stairs. The more important people climbed at most one or two flights, which gave brownstone-style homes, for instance, their high-ceilinged parlor floors. While the arrival of elevators didn’t change this right away—the top floor of Henry Hyde’s building was occupied by the in-house janitor—the upper reaches of buildings eventually became desirable. The elevator ushered in the end of the garret and the beginning of the penthouse, as lawyers and businessmen came to appreciate the advantages of having beautiful, bird’s-eye views and respite from the loud noises of the street. Hotel owners, meanwhile, started turning their top floor rooms into their nicest ones. They could even rent out their roofs for garden parties where guests could survey the glittering new city, all without doing a bit of work to get there.
 

And I wasn't expecting a discussion of serendipity and elevator systems.

For elevator fans like Bernard, Wilk, Gray, and Carrajat, this mixing of worlds is one of the main things that makes elevators so important. And the more opportunities modern life gives us to separate ourselves from others—by getting into our cars and escaping into our suburban homes, by hiding in our cubicles and burying our heads in our social networks—the more the elevator matters as a place that squeezes us together for a moment and forces us to grapple with one another’s existence.

Sadly, there is cause to worry about the future of these moments. The next big leap in elevator technology, already active in large new office towers, is something called “destination dispatch,” which groups people who are going to similar floors together in order to get them where they’re going more quickly. Such a system, Wilk points out, is more efficient in terms of both time and energy, but it also makes it so that people who work on far-flung floors are less likely ever to run into each other. More specifically, it may reduce the chance that someone high up in a company’s hierarchy would share an elevator ride with someone who works down below. Serendipity, in this scenario, begins to recede.

The anti-social network

Cloak is a new mobile app that “scrapes Instagram and Foursquare to let you know where all your friends, "friends," and nonfriends are at all times so you never have to run into that special someone.”

Funny, but I suspect the people who have enough friends on those services to make this app useful at all might be the exact types of people who would love random social encounters.

I suppose if no one wants to use the app that way they could use it as an efficient stalking facilitator: a built in pivot.