Speaker 1: Pushkin. I am Mayve Higgins, and this is solvable interviews
Speaker 1: with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the
Speaker 1: world's biggest problems. My solvable is putting the beneficiary as
Speaker 1: the focus of the aid and philanthropic sector and not
Speaker 1: the donor. We're letting the beneficiary choose where they want
Speaker 1: to spend the capital and taking that decision out of
Speaker 1: our own hands. That's Michael Faye, the co founder and
Speaker 1: president of Give Directly. Now imagine this. You're watching TV,
Speaker 1: or you're on your phone and you see some terrible disaster,
Speaker 1: or you read a story about extreme poverty in a
Speaker 1: country far from yours. If you want to help, and
Speaker 1: if you're moved to do something, the action you take
Speaker 1: will most likely be to send money. There are NGOs
Speaker 1: and aid organizations all over the world. Perhaps you'll find
Speaker 1: one working in that country or specializing in the type
Speaker 1: of aid you'd think is needed there, and you send
Speaker 1: them a donation. Then you feel a little bit better.
Speaker 1: But it's important to check, isn't it How effective is
Speaker 1: that aid system? Is it measured? Is it working for
Speaker 1: the people that it's supposed to be helping? And how
Speaker 1: can you even check that in the first place. Today,
Speaker 1: governments and donors are trying to find out how their
Speaker 1: money can make the biggest difference, and increasingly they're turning
Speaker 1: to a promising new tool, cash transfers, in other words,
Speaker 1: giving people cold hard cat. I guess it's not that
Speaker 1: new anymore because since the year two thousand, a growing
Speaker 1: number of developing countries have introduced these cash transfers instead
Speaker 1: of giving aid in the form of goods or services,
Speaker 1: and more recently, donors and development banks have begun championing
Speaker 1: these programs. Cash transfer programs have spread from a few
Speaker 1: middle income countries to basically all regions of the world.
Speaker 1: So you can understand why a growing number of voices
Speaker 1: are calling for an end to paying the middleman in
Speaker 1: the shape of aid organizations, and those voices are asking
Speaker 1: why not just give directly to the people who need it. Well,
Speaker 1: our guest, Michael Faye, founded his organization Give Directly to
Speaker 1: do just that. His organization are currently testing a universal
Speaker 1: basic income in order to try and permanently end extreme
Speaker 1: poverty for thousands of people and Kenya by guaranteeing those
Speaker 1: people an income high enough to meet their basic needs. Now,
Speaker 1: if that works. They're planning to do the same in
Speaker 1: other regions. We'll see the initiative launched in November twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen and it's going along now. It's set to run
Speaker 1: for twelve years. Let's hear all about it now in
Speaker 1: this conversation with Jacob Weisberg. So, Michael's the nature of
Speaker 1: this problem is the problem? Extreme poverty? Is at all poverty?
Speaker 1: What should we be thinking about trying to solve here?
Speaker 1: I think there are all sorts of these problems. There's
Speaker 1: extreme poverty. There are people that are poor because they
Speaker 1: were born in extremely poor location. There are people Interack
Speaker 1: that are suffering post genocide and trying to rebuild lives.
Speaker 1: And then I was recently in Uganda in a refugee
Speaker 1: camp where people have been for thirty years and don't
Speaker 1: have the capital to really build and move on in
Speaker 1: their lives. And why is this the problem you're focusing on.
Speaker 1: I know your background is economics. How do you find
Speaker 1: yourself running an international aid organization. We slowly tripped into it.
Speaker 1: So I did my PhD in development and at that
Speaker 1: time we were studying what worked and didn't work in
Speaker 1: poverty alleviation, and the reality was that before the early
Speaker 1: two thousands, this isn't something we spent much time on.
Speaker 1: If you are a pharmaceutical company, you might test your drug,
Speaker 1: but if you're a GEO or an aid organization, you
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily testing whether what you did was effective. What
Speaker 1: we learned in that period is that a lot of
Speaker 1: what we were doing was not as effective as we
Speaker 1: had hoped, and this simple idea of just giving people
Speaker 1: cash actually worked pretty well. Where does that idea come from?
Speaker 1: I mean, the idea that you replace something complicated with
Speaker 1: something simple. When it comes to internationally, it's the simplest idea,
Speaker 1: and we should take no credit for it. I think
Speaker 1: it's been an idea that's been out there for a
Speaker 1: very long time, but it's unsettling. We think people will
Speaker 1: waste the money, we think they'll stop working, and that's
Speaker 1: just not what the evidence tells us. So there was
Speaker 1: a moral judgment at the heart of the old aid
Speaker 1: system that you have to give people. You have to
Speaker 1: give money to deserving people, or you have to give
Speaker 1: them specific kinds of help, food, clothing that won't be
Speaker 1: wasted or lead to moral squal or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: I think that's right, and I think there's a certain
Speaker 1: implicit paternalism and a lot of what we were doing
Speaker 1: we thought, oh, we'll give this person the goat, we said,
Speaker 1: goat is great for their life, or we'll give them
Speaker 1: this specific nutrition intervention. And as you reflect upon that,
Speaker 1: I think it's important to ask why why do we
Speaker 1: think this person is going to waste money? I certainly
Speaker 1: don't want to receive my salary in bags of rice
Speaker 1: or corn. I'd like salary in dollars, so I get
Speaker 1: to choose. But why do we treat other people differently?
Speaker 1: So is your premise that giving cash instead is more
Speaker 1: just and fair, or that it's more effective or both.
Speaker 1: I think it's a bit of all. I think we
Speaker 1: should measure the impact of cash and compare it to
Speaker 1: other things. Us the aid sector philanthropists should have to
Speaker 1: make the argument to a recipient that we're doing more
Speaker 1: good with the money than they could themselves. And I
Speaker 1: think that's the minimum bar we should meet, and we
Speaker 1: often talk about that being the index fund or the
Speaker 1: benchmark for other interventions. But I also think there's an
Speaker 1: element about dignity choice. And when you talk to the recipients,
Speaker 1: they'll tell you that. They'll say this is not a
Speaker 1: large village. There's actually one village in Library with only
Speaker 1: seven people. But we all have different needs. I may
Speaker 1: need to send my child to secondary school and pay
Speaker 1: school fees. Someone else may want to feed their newborn,
Speaker 1: and somebody else may want to buy a motorbike to
Speaker 1: start a business. It's impossible to know that from here.
Speaker 1: But the people who do know their needs are the
Speaker 1: people themselves now, being a group of academic economists who
Speaker 1: started this organization, I think you did something unusual as
Speaker 1: you set it up as a kind of study. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we started with an evaluation, so before we got going,
Speaker 1: we knew that there are other cash evaluations that cash
Speaker 1: transfers were an effective means of helping people, but we
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure that we give directly we're also
Speaker 1: as effective. So we did that before even launching publicly.
Speaker 1: And what have you learned from the studies you've done?
Speaker 1: I guess I mean talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1: I know you started first in Kenya and have expanded
Speaker 1: in East Africa now elsewhere. But what are the oldest
Speaker 1: experiments in cash transfers now? Tell you Yeah, and we're
Speaker 1: not even the oldest. Before us, there are cash programs
Speaker 1: in Brazil, Mexico, many places. So let's start with what
Speaker 1: it's not and what everybody's worried about. People do not
Speaker 1: spend it on alcohol and drugs, and they do not
Speaker 1: stop working. And I think that's been shown across contexts.
Speaker 1: What people do do is they spend the money well,
Speaker 1: and how they spend it is really context specific. So
Speaker 1: you'll see projects that gave money to grandparents in South
Speaker 1: Africa and that seems to have gone largely towards nutrition.
Speaker 1: You'll see other programs where business income increased. You'll see
Speaker 1: programs that during the cash transfer program itself you actually
Speaker 1: saw a fall in HIV and STD prevalence. The range
Speaker 1: is wide, but that's sort of the point of cash
Speaker 1: is that people have different needs and we should expect
Speaker 1: the outcomes to be based on the specific needs. Now,
Speaker 1: that's the idea of cash transfers, which is that if
Speaker 1: you want to aid, you should give money and not
Speaker 1: bags of rice or a goad. And then there's the
Speaker 1: idea of universal basic income, which is the version of
Speaker 1: that that people are talking about in the developed world
Speaker 1: as well. But your large scale experiments in Africa are
Speaker 1: with UBI universal basic income, right, yeah. So universal basic
Speaker 1: income has come to me in a lot of things
Speaker 1: in the media, and in my view, it's something very specific.
Speaker 1: So it's universal. So you don't go and try to
Speaker 1: find the poorest person in the village. You give it
Speaker 1: to everybody. Everybody in the village, everybody in the village.
Speaker 1: It could be everybody in the country, depending on how
Speaker 1: broad your scope. It's basic so it's not a large
Speaker 1: amount of money. It's a small enough amount of money
Speaker 1: that you can get by. So in the case of Kenya,
Speaker 1: we're giving seventy five cents a day, which is the
Speaker 1: food poverty line, and then it's an income, so it's
Speaker 1: over a long period of time. This isn't a one
Speaker 1: time transfer or not. We're actually doing the first long
Speaker 1: term universal basic income that's ever been done anywhere. That's
Speaker 1: in Kenya, and people will be getting money for twelve years.
Speaker 1: Tell me what's happened in one of these Kenyon villages
Speaker 1: where you're conducting this experiment with universal basic income, I mean,
Speaker 1: how things change? What is it like? Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: can give you the anecdotes, I can't give you the
Speaker 1: evidence quite yet. We're doing the evaluation and that hasn't
Speaker 1: come out yet, but adotally it's incredibly interesting. So I
Speaker 1: think you see many of the kind of standard spending decisions,
Speaker 1: whether it's on school fees or food or a pair
Speaker 1: of houses that you might see elsewhere. But I think
Speaker 1: there's a social element of the universality that makes it
Speaker 1: a bit different than some of the other programs. And
Speaker 1: I think a recent recipients said it best when he said, look,
Speaker 1: before Universal Basic Income, there was rich and poor in
Speaker 1: the village. Now we're all Universal Basic Income recipients. We
Speaker 1: can talk about the twenty two dollars a month that
Speaker 1: we're receiving as a community, and we can have that
Speaker 1: conversation openly in a way that we wouldn't talk about
Speaker 1: our investments or funding otherwise. The second thing you see
Speaker 1: is you actually see a pooling of resource. Is because
Speaker 1: of this, you see groups of ten people that will
Speaker 1: actually start lending to each other. So each month, one
Speaker 1: person out of that group will take all the money
Speaker 1: so that they can make an investment, and the next
Speaker 1: month you'll see someone else. And then you see other
Speaker 1: pro social behaviors. So I was in the house of
Speaker 1: a village elder and she said, you know what's really
Speaker 1: amazing one of my jobs is to break up marital disputes,
Speaker 1: and I usually have two to three marital disputes a
Speaker 1: month that I need to intervene. I haven't had one
Speaker 1: in four and a half months. And you give to
Speaker 1: every adult in the village, So in a family, husband wife,
Speaker 1: not the children obviously that they get a larger grant
Speaker 1: depending on how many children they have. No so the
Speaker 1: children will get if they're eighteen and above. So once
Speaker 1: they're a team, they'll start receiving basic income as well.
Speaker 1: But it's at the individual level. And as you say,
Speaker 1: the results aren't in and I know you have kind
Speaker 1: of control villages where you're not doing this, But what
Speaker 1: do you hope to see from this experiment? What do
Speaker 1: you hope it will show. The beauty of cash is
Speaker 1: that where agnostic, which is I don't have a preference
Speaker 1: for what a recipient spends money on. And that's different
Speaker 1: than a lot of how we've historically thought about aid
Speaker 1: and structured the sector. So some organizations might have a
Speaker 1: mandate for shelter for food security for children, in which
Speaker 1: case the organization would hope that they'd see a food
Speaker 1: security outcome or an education outcome. I don't have specific hopes.
Speaker 1: I hope this improves people's lives and that you don't
Speaker 1: see any of the things that you might worry about.
Speaker 1: But given just the kind of magnitude of evidence on
Speaker 1: cash at this point, I'm not particularly concerned about that.
Speaker 1: But if you're giving someone a thousand dollars a year,
Speaker 1: or you'd like to see that they are in some
Speaker 1: sense a thousand dollars a year better off, well they
Speaker 1: should be at least a thousand dollars better off, and
Speaker 1: that's sort of it. They will be at least a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars better off. Maybe they invest it in a
Speaker 1: motorbike and they start working, so that compounds over time.
Speaker 1: And one element of cash that people often forget is
Speaker 1: that cash is very pro market. So if I get
Speaker 1: a thousand dollars, I need to spend that thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: So if I spend it on improving my home, I
Speaker 1: might actually be paying someone in the next village to
Speaker 1: do that, and that person may spend the money. And
Speaker 1: there is a paper that is forthcoming that suggests that
Speaker 1: there's a strong positive impact on even those that haven't
Speaker 1: received the cash. It sounds obvious. It's the point that
Speaker 1: you give a thousand dollars and someone gets a thousand
Speaker 1: dollars of benefit. But the benchmark isn't that. The benchmark
Speaker 1: is a thousand dollars spent on aid in the conventional
Speaker 1: aid world doesn't necessarily produce anything like a thousand dollars
Speaker 1: in benefit. In fact, a lot of it is lost
Speaker 1: in the friction and transaction costs of delivering it. It's
Speaker 1: exactly right. It's back to basics. Even that basic question
Speaker 1: of if you start with a thousand dollars on another program,
Speaker 1: how much value winds up in the hands of recipient
Speaker 1: is a question that we really just don't know the
Speaker 1: answer to as a sector. And the other aspect of this,
Speaker 1: I always think of this story. There's a program that
Speaker 1: gave coupons to buy goats, and this was in Pakistan,
Speaker 1: and you take your coupon to the business owner and
Speaker 1: you'd give him the coupon and he'd give you a goat.
Speaker 1: And they sent monitors to evaluate the program, and the
Speaker 1: monitors sitting outside and every person comes coupon goat, coupon goat,
Speaker 1: and it looks great. At some point he says, Tom,
Speaker 1: you know, all the goats just look so so similar
Speaker 1: in this market, and walk around the back and realize
Speaker 1: that after people would get their goat, they just sell
Speaker 1: it back to the shopkeeper. There is one goat in
Speaker 1: the village. And what you forget is that when you
Speaker 1: give people things that they don't want or don't need,
Speaker 1: they can just sell them to buy what they do
Speaker 1: want and do need. And now we spend all this
Speaker 1: time designing the sophisticated program to get people goats. Everyone
Speaker 1: loves a goat, and everyone's just sold their goat for cash.
Speaker 1: How does it actually work in these villages? Is someone
Speaker 1: handing out piles of cash every month? No, they're doing
Speaker 1: this on their phones mostly, so it surprisingly complicated. The operations.
Speaker 1: It seems simple, but there's a lot of work. So
Speaker 1: we have to go find the people that we want
Speaker 1: to target, look for the extreme poor, validate that they
Speaker 1: are who they say they are, and that we're not
Speaker 1: having people try to game the system. People squatting in houses,
Speaker 1: people cheating, we do all sorts of things. We actually
Speaker 1: pay people to try to cheat our own system. To
Speaker 1: understand how robust it is, you have a view of
Speaker 1: white hat hackers, it's exactly what we have. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 1: And that's a bit of putting the recipient at the center.
Speaker 1: It's how prone to fraud is your system. We also
Speaker 1: do customer satisfaction surveys where you treat it with respect,
Speaker 1: and then we pay people and incentivize them based on it,
Speaker 1: because we want to be treating the recipient as the
Speaker 1: customer and not the donor, even though the donor is paying.
Speaker 1: But how does the Kenyon villager actually get her money?
Speaker 1: Does it show up on her soul phone? Does she
Speaker 1: have them all get a text that says you've received
Speaker 1: a thousand shillings from give directly. They then can take
Speaker 1: that to a local shopkeeper or whomever and exchange that
Speaker 1: for physical cash and then spend the physical cash. So
Speaker 1: this is digital end to end. We can sit here
Speaker 1: in this room and send digital money to someone's phone
Speaker 1: in a Kenyan refugee settlement. I mean they're engaging in
Speaker 1: some cases and transactions that people in the developed world
Speaker 1: don't have access to. Right Is this because they had
Speaker 1: Venmo Before we had Venmo, Well, skip some of the
Speaker 1: technology we had and went straight to what were wells. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is there was no banking. There was no financial
Speaker 1: inclusion or digital finance for a large swath of the
Speaker 1: world's population, and now everybody has an ATM and bank
Speaker 1: in their pocket, and that's completely changed what's feasible. So
Speaker 1: if you go back when we started this a decade
Speaker 1: or so ago, you had the evidence that this thing
Speaker 1: we thought was really silly worked and you had the
Speaker 1: technology to actually make it feasible. But it wasn't that simple.
Speaker 1: I am and I know you had to set up
Speaker 1: essentially a separate company to help facilitate these transfers across
Speaker 1: international borders. Right. Yeah, the opportunity of mobile payments is there,
Speaker 1: as is always the case, the execution and operations is
Speaker 1: more challenging than you would like. So we wound up
Speaker 1: setting up Segovia, which is an enterprise payments company that
Speaker 1: was actually recently acquired by Crown Agents Bank. Now cash
Speaker 1: is a bit of a buzzword now in the development world.
Speaker 1: I think institutions and organizations that haven't traditionally been involved
Speaker 1: in cash transfers are now talking about them. Is what
Speaker 1: they want to be doing or part of what they
Speaker 1: want to be doing. What's really happening there? Is it
Speaker 1: your idea catching on or are you antagonistic to a
Speaker 1: lot of the existing aid at infrastructure. We should take
Speaker 1: no credit for the idea. The idea of giving people
Speaker 1: money goes back millennia. So there's been a real shift,
Speaker 1: certainly in the rhetoric and the commitments people are making.
Speaker 1: I think it is going to be hard to move
Speaker 1: this sector. In many ways. Cash fits everywhere. Cash impacts
Speaker 1: all of the objectives people have, nutrition, education, and so on,
Speaker 1: but it also fits nowhere. It may not be the
Speaker 1: single best intervention for a single outcome, and that's something
Speaker 1: that we're going to have to wrestle as a sector.
Speaker 1: The way I think of it is there is a
Speaker 1: lot of capital going to aid one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: billion dollars of development assistance now. Historically almost all of
Speaker 1: that has been decided by the donor what we spend
Speaker 1: that money on. Now, you may not think one hundred
Speaker 1: percent of it should shift to recipient choice, but I
Speaker 1: think all of us would agree that it should be
Speaker 1: more than zero percent. They should get to vote and
Speaker 1: choose over some fraction of that capital spend. But it
Speaker 1: points to, among other things, a much smaller development infrastructure.
Speaker 1: There are fewer people I imagine, working for gift directly
Speaker 1: than some of the more traditional organizations we're talking about
Speaker 1: that have large numbers of people on the ground involved
Speaker 1: in the delivery of physical aid. Yeah, that may be true.
Speaker 1: Give directly. We have two hundred and fifty or so employees,
Speaker 1: so it's not a small number of employees, and it
Speaker 1: certainly still takes work. But yeah, you'd be spending less
Speaker 1: time making the decisions. I recently heard a story from
Speaker 1: an AID worker that was a recent cash convert, and
Speaker 1: I said, well, what did it. Well, you know, we
Speaker 1: were just spending months and months internally debating what brand
Speaker 1: of food we should be buying for this settlement. We
Speaker 1: don't need to spend months debating. We can give the
Speaker 1: money and let the household decide what brand of food,
Speaker 1: or maybe they don't even want food. Michael, I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you about disaster relief. I think there were calls,
Speaker 1: especially after the hurricane and flooding in Houston, for some
Speaker 1: kind of direct cash type model to get help to
Speaker 1: victims of the storm faster, and I know you're trying
Speaker 1: to set something like that up. Yeah, we should give
Speaker 1: Felix credit. Felix Salmon wrote an op ed saying we
Speaker 1: need give directly in Houston, and then Felix Salmon, the
Speaker 1: journalist journalists now at Axios, and then we set up
Speaker 1: and did cash transfers in Houston. I think disasters spend
Speaker 1: is off in some of the least efficient spend in
Speaker 1: the sector that you see. I was in Houston and
Speaker 1: you saw piles of used clothes, piles of water bottles,
Speaker 1: a food truck serving rice and beans. Now that sounds
Speaker 1: great until you realize that the tap is working and
Speaker 1: people can get water from their faucet, that the Walmart
Speaker 1: and other restaurants are open down the street, and that
Speaker 1: what people need is different. Some people need to repair
Speaker 1: their car because it was flooded and they can't get
Speaker 1: to work. Some people need to rebuild their house. So
Speaker 1: we did cash transfers in Houston. What we're going to
Speaker 1: do next and just announced the partnership with Google is
Speaker 1: actually something called prepositioning. It's when we raise the money
Speaker 1: on already in advance of the disaster, and that'll allow
Speaker 1: us to be on the around immediately following the disaster.
Speaker 1: And how will that work? I mean if Houston happened,
Speaker 1: and now, how would you determine who gets aid and
Speaker 1: how would you be delivering it? Yeah, So it's a
Speaker 1: combination of damage from the storm and poverty levels, so
Speaker 1: you want to find high damage obviously and those most
Speaker 1: in need. The way we've delivered it in the US
Speaker 1: was through debit cards, so we didn't use mobile money
Speaker 1: in the US, and going forward will likely use something
Speaker 1: called hyperwallet, which is just a very flexible card product.
Speaker 1: So people get essentially a gift card that they can
Speaker 1: use to anywhere. Feel what's getting the roof fixed or
Speaker 1: whatever whatever. They It's essentially cash, but it's stored on
Speaker 1: a card. But how do you determine who gets how much?
Speaker 1: Is it a function of how much you have divided
Speaker 1: by how many qualified victims or recipients. So I think
Speaker 1: it's one of the hardest questions, how much versus how
Speaker 1: many people. I think historically the sector has always opted
Speaker 1: for a high number of people, and I think we've
Speaker 1: likely gone too far where we want the headline we've
Speaker 1: served a million people. Well, if we've given a million
Speaker 1: people a dollar, we probably haven't done much good. So
Speaker 1: we try to be thoughtful. We try to price how
Speaker 1: much we give to what the investments are that people
Speaker 1: need to make. So what would a car repair look like?
Speaker 1: What would it look like to pay rent for a year.
Speaker 1: Those sorts of things. People react emotionally, which is on
Speaker 1: the one hand, wonderful and understandable, but can produce very
Speaker 1: irrational results. I think people came forward and gave over
Speaker 1: a billion dollars to restore Notre Dame after the fire,
Speaker 1: and probably none of that money is needed because the
Speaker 1: French government would ultimately pay for it. But whether it's
Speaker 1: needed or not, it's probably more than it's needed, and
Speaker 1: certainly money that would be better spent elsewhere. Whether it's
Speaker 1: more or less, I don't know in the specific examples.
Speaker 1: I think the timing is what's really flawed, which is
Speaker 1: you look at some of these disaster funds and they
Speaker 1: still haven't spent the money years and years after the disaster.
Speaker 1: That's awful. People need money immediately to start rebuilding their lives.
Speaker 1: Cash actually provides an avenue to do that pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: We can get that cash out quickly. We don't need
Speaker 1: to wait years to pick a grant recipient who may
Speaker 1: repair a building or whatnot. We can just give it
Speaker 1: to the individuals. I wanted to come back to the
Speaker 1: universal basic income idea and ask you about it here
Speaker 1: in the United states where it's there are some experiments
Speaker 1: taking place, and there's also a lot of controversy around
Speaker 1: the idea, partly because some people see it as a
Speaker 1: kind of answer to the loss of jobs through to
Speaker 1: robotics and AI. Are you involved in that debate at all?
Speaker 1: What do you think about it? I think it's a
Speaker 1: complicated question in the US, and I think how we
Speaker 1: fund a true universal basic income there's a real question
Speaker 1: mark around that. But I think the elements of universal
Speaker 1: basic income I think we can take to current social programs.
Speaker 1: So if you look at some of the poorest people
Speaker 1: in this country, they face some of the highest marginal
Speaker 1: rates because as they earn more money, they lose more benefits,
Speaker 1: in some cases approaching one hundred percent of the money
Speaker 1: they're earning. I think that's a problem that's a real
Speaker 1: disincentive to work. If we could flatten that, make it
Speaker 1: more universal, and remove that disincentive, that's valuable. I think
Speaker 1: food stamps and other programs that may be limiting to
Speaker 1: people and may not be exactly what they need probably
Speaker 1: can be improved. So I think there are the principles
Speaker 1: of universal basic income that we can apply to other
Speaker 1: social programs. While we wait to see what the actual
Speaker 1: impact of a universal basic income is. But you don't
Speaker 1: see it so much as an answer to the problem
Speaker 1: of the loss of the jobs, the decline of work,
Speaker 1: or replacement for work. I think we're going to certainly
Speaker 1: need something if that happens. And one thing I always
Speaker 1: say is I don't know what the likelihood of that
Speaker 1: happening is. I do know with confidence that it's between
Speaker 1: zero and and given that there's some chance that you
Speaker 1: have mass unemployment from automation, we should be starting to
Speaker 1: think about what those solutions are and starting to trial
Speaker 1: them and understand what the implications are unsolvable. We always
Speaker 1: like to ask what people listening can do. In this case,
Speaker 1: it seems pretty simple. It's give cash, right, Give cash,
Speaker 1: I think, learn a bit about what our beneficiaries lives
Speaker 1: are like. Go to live dot give directly dot org,
Speaker 1: which is an unfiltered streaming feed from recipients. Start a
Speaker 1: conversation with friends or family about cash. People love debating
Speaker 1: whether or not giving is a good or bad thing.
Speaker 1: Always looking for really talented people to work at give Directly.
Speaker 1: So there's lots to do. Can you decide when you
Speaker 1: go to the give directly website, whether to give money
Speaker 1: to a village in Kenya or a refugee camp in Uganda.
Speaker 1: I mean, the different programs or places you're involved in
Speaker 1: are all there. So we let people choose which project
Speaker 1: to give to. We don't let people choose which individual
Speaker 1: And it's that's something you've thought about. I'm sure it is.
Speaker 1: But obviously with the more traditional kinds of aids, part
Speaker 1: of the marketing of it and part of the appeal
Speaker 1: is you're helping this person, this child. Here's her picture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And sometimes that's honest, and sometimes it's less honest. Even
Speaker 1: in the honest cases, I think it's a bit problematic
Speaker 1: because people have a tendency to fund kind of attractive
Speaker 1: people and not the types of people that you necessarily
Speaker 1: design a social program for. So you're in your case,
Speaker 1: you don't see the individuals. You see the play, don't
Speaker 1: see the individuals. We could wind up chasing the attractive
Speaker 1: recipients around ken you to give cash, and that's probably
Speaker 1: a both complicated and bad social policy. To conclude, I
Speaker 1: wonder if you can give me your sense of the
Speaker 1: overall picture. There's another interesting debate going on about extreme poverty.
Speaker 1: There are statistics that show it's gotten dramatically better in
Speaker 1: recent decades. At the same time, it seems in places
Speaker 1: more shocking and worse than ever. Do you think we're
Speaker 1: winning the fight against extreme poverty. We've made a lot
Speaker 1: of progress in extreme poverty. I think it's going to
Speaker 1: be harder going forward because it is concentrated in places
Speaker 1: with conflict weaker states, So it will certainly be harder.
Speaker 1: But as I think about that problem, there are two
Speaker 1: numbers that helped me dimensionalize it. So if you look
Speaker 1: at the poverty gap over the last forty years or so,
Speaker 1: so this is the amount of money that would mathematically
Speaker 1: be required to take every person above poverty. So if
Speaker 1: you're at a dollar and the poverty lines of dollar ninety,
Speaker 1: it's ninety cents for you. So that's been falling, which
Speaker 1: is great news over time, and it's probably somewhere around
Speaker 1: eighty billion today. On the other side is foreign aid,
Speaker 1: how much money we send to extremely poor places, and
Speaker 1: that's been increasing, which is also good news, and stands
Speaker 1: about one hundred and fifty billion today. What happened eight
Speaker 1: years or so ago is those two graphs crossed for
Speaker 1: the first time, which is that there is now at
Speaker 1: double the amount of aid spent that would mathematically be
Speaker 1: required to end extreme poverty via closing the poverty gap,
Speaker 1: And of course there's nuance behind that. Of course, we
Speaker 1: can't just snap our fingers and drop money on those
Speaker 1: that need it most. But just to think about the
Speaker 1: relative dimensions that makes me think that this is very possible.
Speaker 1: Those are fascinating numbers. It suggests that one hundred percent efficiency,
Speaker 1: were it possible, would eliminate extreme poverty if we could
Speaker 1: all do magic and get cash. We can't do magic yet,
Speaker 1: but we can do a whole lot better than we
Speaker 1: did ten years ago at the advent of mobile money,
Speaker 1: new technologies, and we're getting there. Michael, thanks for joining
Speaker 1: us on. Thanks so much. Oh I love to see it.
Speaker 1: As Michael Fay said, the social element of the universality
Speaker 1: is really interesting. Here in the US, we're grappling with
Speaker 1: growing inequality. I'm not saying that it's as serious as
Speaker 1: the poverty in the countries Michael works in, but I'm
Speaker 1: saying that there are lessons for us here too. Also,
Speaker 1: he uses the phrase the beauty of cash. I just
Speaker 1: think it's such a good tattoo idea. Don't you like,
Speaker 1: you would have to have small print too, Stating your
Speaker 1: tattoo is an anti poverty measure, but that only makes
Speaker 1: it more cool. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: and the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant,
Speaker 1: Laura Sheeter, and Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's
Speaker 1: executive producer is Neia LaBelle, Research by Sheer, Vincent, engineering
Speaker 1: by Jason Gambrel and the great Folks at GSI Studios.
Speaker 1: Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton, Carli Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving today's
Speaker 1: biggest problems at Rockefella Foundation dot org, slash Solvable. I'm
Speaker 1: Mave Higgins, Now got solve It.