The Most Important Question
Best of: What Really Happens When You Just Give People Money?
What if we just gave people money?
That's today's big question and my guests are Caroline Teti and Michael Faye from GiveDirectly. This conversation from 2021, one of my all-time favorites is one of those conversations that can help you truly think outside the box and reconsider how to most effectively take a simple action that can have cascading effects.
Caroline Teti or just Teti as she likes to be called, I swear, works on the ground in Kenya, Nairobi, where she is the Director of Recipients Advocacy for GiveDirectly's global operations, and the Director of Governmental and External Relations.
Michael Faye is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of GiveDirectly.
I think we can all understand that different people need different things on different days. We're talking about life essentials: clean air, clean and accessible water, healthy food, shelter, medicine. The needs can vary enormously among people and on a day-to-day basis.
But one thing that unites us all in need is a need for agency over our own life.
From everything I've understood in this conversation and talking to so many folks over the past few years, nothing takes away agency like poverty.
And it turns out that giving people cash can create that power.
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INI Book Club:
- “The Biggest Bluff” by Maria Konnikova
- “The Art of Reading Minds” by Henrik Fexeus
- Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
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- Edited by Anthony Luciani
- Produced by Willow Beck
- Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com
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