> How do you know that they will become poor if not for your action?
Here's a simple example. A mine closes down. You can start giving the ex-miners money on an ongoing basis to let them keep paying their bills, maybe. Or you could fund training for them to learn a new career.
How do you know they will become poor if you don't fund the training? You don't. Maybe they would have managed to change careers anyway. But chances are you are in fact helping people avoid poverty.
> If you need to do this over and over again, and we're talking about just that,
Ah, maybe this is the disconnect. No, we are precisely _not_ talking about doing this over and over again for any given person.
Or put another way, this is the "give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish" thing. The latter, if it's an option, seems evidently better to me.
Giving money to people is the best way to help them. It turns out that most people are generally entrepreneurial and will spend the money on what they think is the most important need for them at the moment. Maybe the person doesn't need training; maybe they already have a skill, and what they really need is some capital to buy equipment or materials to pursue that activity.
This idea is behind a the success of the Earned Income Tax Credit in the USA. Giving people in need a substantial capital injection at a single point in time is a very impactful to people without the means to save.
This isn't about whether help is provided in-kind or in cash; there is indeed good evidence that the latter is better. And there is evidence that a lump sum is better than an extended dribble: that was more or less my point in the comment you are responding to.
But also, this is about the fact that if you provide help when a person just starts needing it, it might not take much to get them back to financial stability. If you instead wait until they have been out of the workforce for a while, lost their house, and maybe ended up with a substance-abuse problem as a coping mechanism, a much larger investment will be needed to get back to "normal". And that's not even counting the suffering involved in the interim in the second option.
Here's a simple example. A mine closes down. You can start giving the ex-miners money on an ongoing basis to let them keep paying their bills, maybe. Or you could fund training for them to learn a new career.
How do you know they will become poor if you don't fund the training? You don't. Maybe they would have managed to change careers anyway. But chances are you are in fact helping people avoid poverty.
> If you need to do this over and over again, and we're talking about just that,
Ah, maybe this is the disconnect. No, we are precisely _not_ talking about doing this over and over again for any given person.
Or put another way, this is the "give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish" thing. The latter, if it's an option, seems evidently better to me.