I’m not qualified to judge the technical merits of the paper, but their conclusion seems plausible. They concluded that in an illiterate rural population, there did seem to be a threshold effect in asset levels above which it seemed much easier to progress economically. But it’s unclear to me how applicable this is to the poor in the US or other developed economies, particularly when we’re talking about a population where almost everyone can read and write, and many of them have cellphones and internet access. Part of the reason that many people (including my family) try to emigrate from developing countries to more developed economies is that the same person, with the same skills, can be vastly more productive in those economies, which is what allows that person to have a much better lifestyle. And much of the reason that high-productivity jobs are not available in those poor countries is because of a lack of capital. So it makes sense that giving the poor some minimal amount of capital is required, so that those same people can be more productive. But it seems unlikely to me that adding capital (increasing the assets of poor people) would have the same beneficial effect in developed economies, given the large pre-existing ‘capital stock’

This [article](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/08/27/by-globa...) describes what american poverty levels would be if we used the same measure as we do in developing countries and makes the point that by those measures there are no poor people in the US, just “lower middle class”. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and improve the lives of people at the lower end of the income distribution, but we should at least understand that when we use the term poverty in developing and developed economies, we’re talking about something qualitatively and quantitatively different - so the optimal solutions are likely different too.