In Us We Trust

by Paul Niehaus

In Us We Trust

Summer, 2006. Jouncing down dirt roads in Odisha, India to learn from farmers about their fertilizer mixes. Usually hungry, I didn’t trust my effete city-bred stomach on anything sold by the road. Nor did I understand a word of the Odia spoken in torrents around me. When we’d arrive I was mortified to see how the whiteness of my skin commanded attention, opened doors, seated me in the only chair in the room, the others sitting on the floor as we drank the chai and ate the biscuits of a farmer who might earn as much in a lifetime of hard work as my graduate school stipend paid me to think for one year—to think, in fact, about why it was that I had so much money, and the farmer so little.

I felt so, so deeply out of place.

But, I felt called to that uncomfortable place. I often turn to Jesus’ first words to his neighbors in Nazareth, when he stood up to share that he would be making a career change from “handyman” to “Messiah.” Imagine the electricity in that room.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

    because he has anointed me

    to proclaim good news to the poor…”

This part of his vision for the inbreaking Kingdom really gets me up in the morning and keeps me up at night.

So I’ve carried on having conversations like those with the Odishan farmers, talking to people about their experiences with extreme poverty, focusing on what they’re doing about it. You see, an enormous number of people who once lived in extreme poverty no longer do. That’s a piece of good news that rich folk in rich countries need to hear—many of us mistakenly believe that extreme poverty has been getting worse. And given that, we naturally expect that things won’t get better until we do something different. So it’s grounding to get out and talk to the people actually wending their ways through and out of extreme poverty, learning how they go about it, reflecting on how we might contribute.

And speaking of contributions: as I sit and listen I become very aware of the cash in my wallet.

I travel with around $100. To me it’s a meaningless number, in the sense that I could not tell you anything meaningful about how my life would be different if I didn’t have it. But for the people I’m speaking with it could have deep meaning. It could mean working for themselves instead of scrounging casual jobs; educating a child to their full potential; not having to decide which family member skips meals. So the thought hits: I should leave this money behind when I leave.

Now, I’ve heard plenty of reasons not to do this, coming up through churches that were (relatively) engaged with global poverty, through universities doing my PhD in development economics. Poverty is a complex issue, not simply a matter of money. Money treats the symptoms, not the root cause. You have to teach a man to fish, not just give him a fish.

These adages seem to capture a kind of wisdom. But notice that they don’t address a very simple, factual question: what actually happens when we give money to people living in extreme poverty?

That seems worth knowing! Yet it turns out that until recently we really didn’t. The story begins all the way back in the 1960s when “economic development” really became a thing, a thing you could write papers about, attend conferences about, get a PhD in. Ideas about development were formulated and debated. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s that researchers began to test those ideas experimentally. That’s when we began setting up field-experimental trials to figure out what impact the many billions of dollars worth of programs we had designed were actually having.

There is no deep magic to these experimental trials—indeed they look very much like the clinical trials we use to test the efficacy of new drugs, or the A/B tests that technology companies use to evaluate new features. Yet they have profoundly changed our thinking about poverty and development. In 2019 the people who popularized them won the Nobel Prize for their efforts.

This “experimental revolution” has brought some real surprises. Strategies that made sense in theory turned out not to make cents on the dollar in practice. Take skills training, for example, designed to help people get jobs or start businesses—the epitome of the “teach a man to fish” philosophy. In practice, it hasn’t done much good. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the idea that “learning to fish” is important. It just means we’re not great at giving fishing lessons.

Meanwhile, simply giving money has worked quite well. Across hundreds of high-quality studies from around the world, data say that people living in extreme poverty use the money in sensible ways that improve their lives. They use it towards future goals, not just today’s needs. They don’t systematically abuse it on self-harmful things like alcohol or tobacco (if anything studies tend to find the opposite), nor do they work less hard themselves.

In 2011, based on this overwhelmingly positive evidence, my co-founders and I launched an unorthodox new nonprofit: GiveDirectly. Its radically simple purpose was to enable rich people to give money to poor people. And over the past decade we’ve done a lot of exactly that. This fall we delivered a transfer to our 1,000,000th household. We’ve worked across 10 countries, run 15 of our own experimental impact evaluations, been consistently rated one of the most impactful ways in the world to give, all as part of a broader movement towards cash transfers as the default approach to accelerating the end of poverty.

In doing this work, a through-line for me has been Philippians 2:3:

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves…”

Global poverty work, if we’re honest, has its share of “vain conceit.” I implicate myself. I’m part of a tiny, highly educated elite that influences or controls how billions of dollars of aid get spent. And it feels great! It feels great to exercise that power in the name of a just cause.

But what if we reflect on the data humbly, with fresh eyes? It would be hard to argue that we should have so much control over how the money gets spent, while the people we aim to serve have none at all. Certainly we do not have a demonstrably better track record of spending it than they do.

So: I invite you to join me in reflecting, and then embracing a deeper and more Christ-like generosity. We should begin to give in a way that humbly values people living in extreme poverty above ourselves.