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The mention of cigarette spending is an extremely dangerous strawman, largely because for some reason people actually believe it. There's fairly strong evidence that there is no increase in tobacco or alcohol spending[1][2] with direct cash transfers to the extremely poor. These stereotypes are frequently used to argue against charity or welfare to the needy, and I can only consider this line of argument to be harmful.

This is not to take away from the rest of your point, but I would appreciate it if you chose a different comparison next time.

[1] https://www.givedirectly.org/research-at-give-directly [2] https://www.givedirectly.org/research-on-cash-transfers

Appreciate the sentiment, but it was actually a quite deliberate comparison because (i) the very poor in developing countries where cigarettes are very cheap often have a cigarette budget which comes before investment and improved nutrition (ii) I'm well aware that despite the startling prevalence of smoking amongst poor men, increased tobacco use isn't a significant factor in studies of how poor people spend donor cash.

(i) pretty much underlines my point about the things people choose to spend their money on not necessarily being what's best for them. And in the short term it's not an inexplicable phenomenon because cheap tobacco probably does provide more pain and stress relief than slightly better nutrition.

(ii) is partly because surveys like those you've posted accurately represent people tending not alter their habits of smoking cheap cigarettes (or frowning on tobacco) after receiving a sudden windfall; there's a limit to how much one can smoke and stockpiling makes no sense when for people who don't even have a waterproof roof. But it's also because poor people are smart enough to realise that people quizzing them on their lifestyle and unexpected windfalls from foreign donors aren't unrelated, and the natural response is to tailor responses to what they think the foreign donors want to hear, resulting in any increases in spending on cigarettes and alcohol (whilst likely low relative to increases in spending on roofs or microbusiness investments anyway) being systematically underreported.

Do you have any evidence for systematic underreporting? One could just as easily say that the members of control groups (who do not receive cash) would have a reason to underreport their spending on things that are not approved of in order to receive more potential money in the future.

Also the research presented by GiveDirectly also includes studies of people where the cash is not from the same people as the surveys (for example state funded benefit programs that have clear and universal criteria unrelated to spending or consumption.) In those cases again there is reason to expect the underreporting to be similar across both groups that get cash and those that do not currently.

> One could just as easily say that the members of control groups (who do not receive cash) would have a reason to underreport their spending on things that are not approved of in order to receive more potential money in the future

This apparently happening with control groups in the same villages as cash transfer recipients is actually some of the most persuasive evidence response biases exist in the surveys. According to various RCTs, when their neighbours start getting money, women are less likely to report their husbands beating them. On the other hand, they're also less likely to report being satisfied with their life. There are [just about] plausible mechanisms for how spillover effects from donations could cause those behavioural/satisfaction changes amongst non-recipients in a neighbourhood, but recipients thought they were less likely to receive money if they reported domestic violence or said they were satisfied with their life is the most Ockham's-razor satisfying one. (It's also likely part of the reason why recipients seem surprisingly unlikely to report increased satisfaction from life after receiving life-changing sums despite positive changes in almost every measurable area.)

Response biases are difficult enough to eliminate in social science surveys when participants have no reason to suspect a sum greater than their average annual income may hinge on their answers.

> If we're doing fair comparisons, the gift to a single family that allowed them to buy the iron roof could have dewormed 200-1000 child

It's worth noting, though, that deworming 200-1000 children doesn't mean deworming 200-100 children who have worms. It means administering deworming medication to 200-1000 children, a few of whom will benefit (because they had worms) and the majority will have no effect (because they didn't). IIRC, programs like Deworm the World don't target infected children, because figuring out who to treat is more expensive than just treating everyone, if you're in an area with a high infection rate.

Overall, it might still be more effective than GiveDirectly, but it's not as simple as "this would directly benefit 200-1000 children rather than one family". (I'm not saying that's what you were saying, but that's how I would interpret it if I weren't familiar with the programs.)

Soil-transmitted helminths infect 2 billion people. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs366/en/

More than a few will benefit, because in many areas with high infection rate, the majority of children really do have worms. Regarding Ascaris infection specifically: "In areas of poor sanitation virtually 100% of the population harbor the parasite."[Markell & Voge's Medical Parasitology p.241]

> I don't buy the argument that deworming doesn't really help people because they weren't offered the choice of buying the equivalent value of cigarettes instead.

Do you understand how condescending it is to think that you know so much better than people what they need that you think they'll buy cigarettes I'd you give them money?

Putting aside the fact that this isn't what people given money do in studies, your viewpoint is an extraordinarily arrogant one.

Do you understand how extraordinarily arrogant your white knighting is when I've already pointed out elsewhere in the thread that (i) the prevalence of smoking amongst poor males in most developing countries unambiguously is high irrespective of donations and even given a reason why low-cost tobacco might appear preferable in a tobacco/nutrition tradeoff and (ii) acknowledged that GiveDirectly-sized donations (as opposed to the one-pack-of- twenty-Rockets cost of a deworming tablet in the tradeoff comparison I actually made) tend to be invested in useful capital goods but explained why studies associated with donations likely systematically underreport tobacco consumption and other vices relative to studies not associated with donations anyway. And even edited my original post to explicitly state that I wasn't arguing that GiveDirectly was a bad idea.

I think it's probably more condescending, and certainly more harmful, to assume that extreme poverty bestows upon the global poor some mystical ability to make optimal spending decisions that for some reason doesn't apply to comparatively wealthy people in developed countries entitled to access heavily-funded collective healthcare and social insurance systems.

> I think it's probably more condescending, and certainly more harmful, to assume that extreme poverty bestows upon the global poor some mystical ability to make optimal spending decisions that for some reason doesn't apply to comparatively wealthy people in developed countries entitled to access heavily-funded collective healthcare and social insurance systems.

That's not what I said.

Fundamentally, I'm saying that personal choice in itself is a value, a value which is being overlooked by most aid programs.

Low income males spend a disproportionate amount of their money on cigarettes, but that is different from a statement that low income people will spend aid money on cigarettes.