Giving the poor a wodge of cash is better than dripping it out

What happens when you give people free money? The world’s largest basic-income experiment is trying to find out. Since 2018 the American charity GiveDirectly has been sending the equivalent of $22.50 a month to thousands of villagers in western Kenya. On December 1st researchers including Abhijit Banerjee, a Nobel prize-winning economist, presented results from the first two years of the trial.The core idea of a universal basic income, which is intended to reduce poverty, is to send money to everyone, without strings attached, regardless of their earnings or if they are employed. But attempts to test it, from Finland to California, have generally made payments to a smattering of individuals for short periods of time. The experiment in Kenya is unusually “universal”: it covers every adult within selected villages and will run for 12 years.