Giving people something for nothing is USUALLY a bad idea. People often see something "free" as something without any real value and don't really care about it, take care of it, maintain it, etc... When you give people "free money" the things they stop caring about and maintaining are culture, society, functional infrastructure....etc. Since to them its all just "free", why should they have to do something to maintain it? The Chinese even have a special phrase/word for this in Commie Land where cultural landmarks are just falling apart because no one has a sense of "ownership" over it so they just don't care when its falls apart. Archive: https://archive.today/VAB47 From the post: >>Just give people money. It's the simple, brute-force solution to so many problems. In low-income countries, charities are sometimes measured against whether their interventions are better than simply giving people cash. Even in high-income countries like the U.S., when disaster strikes, often the best thing you can do is get money into the hands of affected people immediately. They know whether they should use it to buy gas, rent an Airbnb or fly to their cousin's house one state over. So it wasn't that crazy to assume — particularly once promising pilots were released — that the same should be true for addressing chronic poverty in high-income countries. If you give a new mom a few hundred dollars a month or a homeless man one thousand dollars a month, that's gotta show up in the data, right? Alas.