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On Monday, The New York Times's Fixes column dived into the results of conditional cash-transfer programs, which have been instituted in 40 countries and give direct payments to low-income families if they meet certain conditions, like keeping their children in school. The amounts are low: In Brazil, poor families get about $13 a month for each child. But for extremely poor families, that $13 makes a lot of difference, and the money both helps ameliorate the effects of poverty while trying to break the cycle by encouraging children to stay in school longer and be healthier.A similar program ended in New York City because results were mixed, and this might be a difficult thing to scale to the United States, where the cost of living is higher and poor families face different types of challenges, depending on where they live. But what's so nice about these programs is that, elsewhere, they work. What conservatives who rant about creating dependency don't understand is that children mired in poverty are much less likely to achieve when they're sick, tired, and hungry, because they don't have basic necessities, and we shouldn't require super-human resilience for them to do so. Moreover, it does us as a country no good to lose talented minds and able workers to menial labor, prisons, or early death.
For skeptics who believe that social programs never work in poor countries and that most of what’s spent on them gets stolen, conditional cash transfer programs offer a convincing rebuttal. Here are programs that help the people who most need help, and do so with very little waste, corruption or political interference. Even tiny, one-village programs that succeed this well are cause for celebration. To do this on the scale that Mexico and Brazil have achieved is astounding.These kinds of programs take commitment from the government, however: A rise in demand for good schools and better community health clinics means even more investment than the cash payments. But in Brazil, poverty has fallen and the inequality gap has narrowed, and that will likely help drive Brazil's future success.-- Monica Potts
