"The Crazy Cash-Giveaway Experiment"

GiveDirectly is a charity which gives money to some of the world's poorest people without any strings attached.  The New York Times looked at whether such an approach is a good one.  The author Jacob Goldstein concluded "At its most basic level, after all, GiveDirectly's work is an attempt to test one of the simplest ideas in economics-that people know what they need, and if they have money, they can buy it. Taken at its logical conclusion, this suggests that giving away money may often be more helpful to people than giving them cows, or medicine, or training, or whatever."