Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

by Rutger Bregman

In their book Just Give Money to the Poor (2010), scholars at the University of Manchester furnish countless examples of cases where cash handouts with few or no strings attached have worked. In Namibia, figures for malnutrition took a nosedive (from 42% to 10%), as did those for truancy (from 40% to virtually nothing) and crime (by 42%). In Malawi, school attendance among girls and women surged 40%, regardless of whether the cash came with or without conditions. Time and again, the ones to profit most are children. They suffer less hunger and disease, grow taller, perform better at school, and are less likely to be forced into child labor.15 From Brazil to India, from Mexico to South Africa, cash-transfer programs have become all the rage across the Global South. When the United Nations formulated its Millennium Development Goals in 2000, these programs weren’t even on the radar. Yet by 2010, they were already reaching more than 110 million families in forty-five countries. Back at the University of Manchester, the researchers summed up these programs’ benefits: (1) households put the money to good use, (2) poverty declines, (3) there can be diverse long-term benefits for income, health, and tax revenues, and (4) the programs cost less than the alternatives.16 So why send over expensive white folks in SUVs when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor? Especially when this also takes sticky civil service fingers out of the equation. Plus, free cash greases the w...