You can help the poorest people in the world

There's something in it for you, too

For those of you who prefer to skip straight to the ask, this Giving Tuesday, we’re inviting readers to join us, along with Nate Silver, Brian Beutler, Mikala Jamison, Rachel Cohen, Tim Lee, Joey Politano, and other writers in raising money to support cash transfers to people living on less than $2.15 per day. Donations will be matched up to $400,000.

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We love Giving Tuesday here at Slow Boring. That’s in no small part because we have, in our opinion, one of the most engaged and generous audiences on Substack. Last year, you helped raise over $275,000 for GiveDirectly, who delivered it in the form of direct cash transfers to some of the poorest people on earth. This year, we’re back with even more Substackers with the goal of raising $350,000, and we really hope you can help. Read on to learn more about GiveDirectly, and to see what we’re offering donors this year.

Cash is not the answer to all of the world’s problems, especially in rich countries where the lowest-income people are often struggling with complicated and multi-faceted problems. But if you live in a village where everyone is poor, in a country where nearly everyone is poor, surrounded by other countries where it’s also the case that nearly everyone is poor, then it is simply extremely hard to access meaningful economic opportunity no matter what you do. A direct infusion of cash into your pocket (or your cell phone-linked bank account) is simple, transparent, and powerful. It’s also, in the context of blogs that fight a lot about politics and policy, pretty nicely value-neutral. I very much believe in the public health charities that GiveWell endorses, but my beliefs there involve a complicated chain of epistemological deference to trusted institutions, as well as value judgments about health versus other material improvements.

Cash is cash. Money is money. A direct transfer to someone who really needs it is good and helpful according to almost everyone’s values and everyone’s politics, and I think the idea of coming together around something, especially right now, is really nice.

And even the optimizers have recently raised their estimate of GiveDirectly’s cost effectiveness by a factor of 3-4x to account for spillover effects. Which is to say, not only do the people who get the money benefit, their increased consumption levels generate additional business opportunities for others nearby. “Just give more cash, bro” is not a workable comprehensive development strategy for the world’s poorest countries, but it really does help a lot — and, if you’re able to, I think you should do it!

What we’re asking for and what we’ll do for you

Giving money away is underrated.

I know there’s a school of thought that preferences volunteering, often locally, to help in tangible ways. We see this during election season, when a lot of people seem to prefer spending a Saturday afternoon knocking on strangers’ doors to sending some money to professionals who can target well-tested messages to whomever needs to hear them. And we see it around Thanksgiving, when there’s a lot of emphasis on volunteering and community engagement. I never want to discourage anyone from doing that kind of thing, but I do want to try to reframe giving money a little bit in a less sterile, more optimistic way.

In the modern digital world, so many of us struggle with the fact that the landscape is just so vast.

Broadcast television created what was in many ways a very cozy simulacrum — just 22 minutes of news, just three or four shows at a time to choose from, a few sports leagues. Our finite attention was focused on common problems and a handful of well-known friendly faces. Today, a confusing cacophony of voices insists that everything is terrible and everyone is lying to us. Problems often seem inconceivably large, and we’re left to feel helpless and agitated, a state better suited to clicking and scrolling than to actually doing anything.

Part of the power of a simple financial contribution is that unless you are genuinely destitute, which most people in this country are not, it’s actually pretty easy for you to make a significant difference.

Giving $500 of your money to people who live in countries where people earn less than $5 a day has an incredible impact.

It’s an impact that you can choose to make today or any day of your life, and I think you should choose to make it. Or, rather, you should choose to give what you reasonably can. But what you should absolutely not do is spend a lot of time wringing your hands about the fate of the world, while simultaneously feeling like its destiny is out of your control. I think most of us truly do want to make a difference, and the good news is that most of us can, but we don’t necessarily do as much as we actually should or as much as will actually make us happy.

Today is a great day for large, one-time donations, because those will be matched up to $400,000. But if you’re thinking of making a more modest donation, it's worth considering setting up a recurring monthly donation (and getting your first month matched today). For example, if you're planning to donate $50, would you be willing to donate $10 per month instead?¹

And to put some of our own skin in the game, here’s our offer to Slow Boring contributors for the next 24 hours:

• Anyone who makes a one-time donation larger than $300 OR a monthly recurring donation of at least $25 will receive six bonus newsletters in 2025. This won’t be typical Slow Boring content, but lighter, more personal pieces, like movie reviews and Top 10 lists.

• Anyone who makes a one-time donation larger than $1200 OR a monthly recurring donation of at least $100 will, in addition to the bonus content, get a guaranteed answer to a mailbag question in 2025.

Just email your donation receipt to kate@slowboring.com and include the email address associated with your subscription. You can also see if your employer is able to match your donation.

How it works

For anyone who wasn’t here last year or needs a refresher, this is how GiveDirectly works:

Historically, the logistics of delivering cash to the world’s poorest people were really difficult. So even though in a lot of ways, it seems like cash assistance should be the baseline, that’s not how the history of foreign aid unfolded. Paying relatively affluent people to do projects or deliver services was more tractable than putting money into the hands of the rural poor. But the rise of cell phones has enabled mobile payment systems in many countries around the world, including some countries that are incredibly poor and otherwise lack well-developed banking systems. It’s not available in every country, but GiveDirectly’s poverty relief programs have operated for years now in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda and Uganda, with other cash transfer programs in Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Nigeria, Morocco, Mozambique, and the US.

The way they run their poverty relief programs is that first they identify villages where the majority of the population is living on less than $2.15 per day, and then after explaining the program to everyone, they set up a transfer of approximately $1,000 to every household in the village with no strings attached.

There are obviously other ways you could think about doing this, but their method has a lot of advantages, like ensuring that you don’t provoke intra-village rivalry between those who receive the benefits and those who don’t. Ideally, of course, at some point we won’t have tons of villages that have so much systematic poverty that this works, at which point we’d need more sophisticated methods of identifying specific very poor people. For now, though, there’s unfortunately enough poverty that GiveDirectly is not running out of village-level targets.

And it works well! Meta-analysis shows a large majority of studies find positive impacts on monetary poverty and a preponderance of evidence showing improvements on savings, investment, and production.

Importantly, there are also studies looking at the question of whether one-off cash transfers reduce employment and education, which seems like the most plausible way cash transfers could backfire. But while there are some studies that find reductions in employment, three times as many find that employment increases (most show no result) and the evidence on education is even better. I don’t think we can necessarily promise a positive upward spiral of health gains, educational gains, and employment gains generating sustained long-term growth increases. But there are enough positive findings out here that indicate it’s at least possible with complementary good governance or good luck. Beyond that, though, I think the mechanical impacts on poverty are more than enough to make this a worthwhile cause.

Photo of Charlotte courtesy of GiveDirectly

On a more personal level, you can hear from participants like Charlotte about her experience with GiveDirectly:

It was tough not having enough to eat regularly. As a single mom of four, paying for my kids' education was out of the question. I was making just $1 a day working in the local farms, but most of that went towards rent. So when I finally received transfers, I decided to use it to build a house for my family.

We worked hard making bricks and gathering materials to build our home. I put the majority of my first transfers into that. With the rest, I bought some kitchen utensils. Now I'm looking forward to using my next transfer to buy a small piece of land. This way, I can ensure my kids won't go hungry even if I can't find work or if I get sick like before. I also want to invest in goats and livestock for some extra income in case of emergencies. And of course, I'll save up the rest to cover my children's school fees.

I'm so grateful to have been able to build a house. Now that I have some income coming in, I'll be smart about saving and planning for a better future for my kids.

I'm delighted to have succeeded in building a house. With the income I will now receive, I intend to save carefully to ensure a bright future for my children.

Slow Boring readers, along with our Substack partners, brought in over $275,000 last year, and I’m confident we can do even better this year.

Thank you for helping, and of course feel free to share this post with friends and family who don’t subscribe — the whole point is that this is not directly tied to any big political or ideological projects, and I think it’s a way of helping that a lot of people can get on board with.

1. Many of you had concerns about the logistics of making recurring donations. You can read more about this on GiveDirectly’s website, but they make it easy to pause or cancel your recurring donation, and you’ll receive an email with a yearly summary for tax purposes.