Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts,

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, or you can subscribe,

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Today is July 15, 2014, and my guest is Chris Blatman of Columbia University. He works in development,

poverty and related subjects. He's the author with Paul Nehaus of a recent article in Foreign

Affairs. The title is Show Them The Money, Why Giving Cash, Helps Aliveate Poverty, which is

the subject of today's episode. Chris, welcome to econtalk. Thank you.

So you have been writing a series of articles and done quite a bit of research, and we'll

hope to get into to much of that, arguing that giving people cash, rather than more complicated

forms of development, or welfare, might be the right way to go for helping people who are desperately

poor. What's the basic argument? Well, the basic argument is not necessarily the cash is more

effective than other forms of assistance, but that it's effective relative to its cost. It actually

can be, there's an always, but it can be very, very, very inexpensive to deliver. And so if you're

have any kind of utilitarian view of the world and you want to help as many people as possible,

then you pay attention to that. And so the question is, what is it good at?

And the sort of a two-part answer, one is like anywhere, people can use cash to buy the things

they need. Maybe that's just shelter-in-food, and that can be here or that could be in the poorest

country. But I think especially in a poor country where a lot of people have potential to

be self-employed, mainly because there aren't firms, so there aren't jobs. They're held back from

this self-employment because they don't have capital. And one of the cheapest ways to get them

...