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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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A Conversation article, arguing that we should talk more to children about poverty, so they develop a more sophisticated understanding of what it means.

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A Conversation article, arguing that we should talk more to children about poverty, so they develop a more sophisticated understanding of what it means.

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Rates of child poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand remain stubbornly high, despite the issue being the focus of considerable political attention while Jacinda Ardern was prime minister.

In 2022, 120,000 children in New Zealand were being raised in households experiencing material hardship. This means their family is unable to afford essential items such as food, clothing, accommodation, heating and transport.

Alongside the obvious and pernicious direct effects of poverty on a person's health and life prospects, there is a broader issue of what rising economic inequality may mean for all of us in the long run.

As we look at the consequences of poverty, we also need to ask what children themselves - the "kids who have" and the "kids who have not" - understand about the unequal world around them.

Stages of understanding

Statistics about childhood poverty tell part of the story of the widening gap in income and wealth. But children's perceptions and understanding of economic inequality, and their experiences of it, will shape how future generations deal with the social upheaval it may bring.

So how do our children learn about, or perhaps learn to tolerate, inequality? Just for a moment, let's set aside political or moral positions. For children growing up in poverty there are undeniable negative consequences on their physical and mental health, and their education.

Read more: We must go beyond singular responses in the fight against child poverty

Over the course of a person's life, this disadvantage restricts opportunity. Rising levels of poverty risk creating a cycle of inequality that continues into the future as those raised in poverty become adults.

Research indicates a consistent developmental pattern in how children acquire an understanding of economic inequality.

Before five years of age, children grasp only very basic distinctions between rich and poor. Older children can link wealth to work, albeit in a linear way: that is, they believe working hard leads to wealth.

And at around ten years, children start to consider effort, education, inheritance and occupation as factors affecting wealth.

Children understand fairness

Through most of childhood, wealth and poverty is framed in terms of basic stereotypes attributed to individuals. While these explanations can persist into adulthood, adolescents increasingly consider inequality more in terms of its structural, political and economic causes.

Children may not grasp the social and structural features that relate to economic inequality. But as any parent can tell you, you'll find out pretty quickly if a child thinks something isn't fair.

Of course, questions of inequality are intimately bound up with questions of morality. So while there is arguably limited reward in a conversation with your three-year-old about the finer points of macroeconomic theory, instilling a straightforward ethic of fairness and the principle of equality (or equity) from a young age is worthwhile.

Read more: The cost of living crisis means bolder budget decisions are needed to lift more NZ children out of poverty

The broader social and political context matters too. Public discussions on individualistic versus structural explanations for inequality, and the prevailing political milieu, provide important backdrops for how children will frame and discuss inequality at home, school and among their peer group.

For instance, children and adolescents in Finland - one of the world's most economically equal nations - use more structural explanations in discussing poverty compared with those from more unequal nations.

In nations with relatively high levels of economic inequality (such as New Zealand and the United States), people frequently believe wealth is based on individual merit.

Subverting meritocracy

Yet at the same time, poverty is associated with stigma. Stereotyping means poor people are more likely to be viewed as lazy or unintelligent. These stereotypes entail social influences that can diminish poorer children's self esteem, increase their anxiety and lead them to under-perform in academic assessments.

Conversely, children from more affluent families may be more confident of their ability. Compounded with the different opportunities for support afforded to rich and poor children, this may lead those from less affluent families to lack the confidence to seek and reach their potential.

Read more: Child poverty is at a 20-year high - but in one English community, children themselves are intervening

Human psychology subverts the supposed meritocracy in other ways. Adolescents tune in to social networks, status and hierarchies. Research from Wales found that moving to a high school with more affluent classmates negatively affected less affluent children's mental wellbeing.

In fact, these self-perceptions of class predict physical and mental health inequalities later in life better than objective measures of wealth.

Read more: Global inequality must fall to maintain a safe climate and achieve a decent standard of living for all - it's a huge challenge

Not all bad news

Unequal societies have lower levels of social cohesion. Economic inequality is associated with less subjective wellbeing, even among the more affluent members of a society.

In other words, everyone is less happy. And rising economic inequality intersects with societal "faultlines" such as race and gender which are ripe for political exploitation.

In the future, economic inequality may be as much a consequence as a cause of the challenges future generations will face - climate change, for example. But it doesn't have to be all bad news.

Historically, levels of income inequality have tended to fluctuate (albeit often as a consequence of financial crises or wars). So future economic inequality is not inevitable. And even if we adults cannot generate the political will or moral consensus to change things, maybe we can do our bit by nurturing and empowering a generation that can.

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Children have a basic understanding of poverty - a more equal society means talking to them about it

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Rates of child poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand remain stubbornly high, despite the issue being the focus of considerable political attention while Jacinda Ardern was prime minister. In 2022, 120,000 children in New Zealand were being raised in households experiencing material hardship.

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A Sky News report into how Haiti is caught in "a vortex of violence and poverty".

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A Sky News report into how Haiti is caught in "a vortex of violence and poverty".

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Over rubble-strewn and broken roads, we pass the cement barriers of long-gone police checkpoints entering one of the most dangerous districts in Haiti.

In front of us we can see a burning building, and two men pushing a battered pick-up truck.

To our left and right are burnt-out and destroyed businesses, in front of us at a crossroads we pause to film a deserted road, littered with debris and burnt-out cars, flanked by scorched buildings.

This is a battlefield, it's as simple as that.

What is incredible is that it is downtown Port-au-Prince, the heart of Haiti's capital, and home to the presidential palace, the French embassy, and various government buildings.

It should be full of people, but it isn't now.

Fighting is often intense here. And the scenes we are taking in are really just the signature of the violence in this city.

Market kiosks are empty, rows of shops are shuttered and closed down.

We see a lone armoured police vehicle guarding one of the roads leading to the presidential palace, waiting for gang attacks to resume.

And at another barricade, a lone police officer, heavily armed, protects another road leading to government buildings.

We were here on Friday, able to film briefly outside the presidential palace, but by Saturday there was a fierce gun battle in the area, so we filmed from a nearby hotel as police and gang members exchanged fire - the sounds of gunfire crackling in the air.

At another junction, armed police officers wearing black balaclavas and helmets try to direct traffic away from the most dangerous areas. A large, armoured vehicle, riddled with bullet marks, patrols past us.

Around us, people pile their worldly goods onto buses. They're heading south to family in the provinces.

But there are no safe routes out of Port-au-Prince, and the tickets are expensive because the bus drivers have to bribe the gangs to pass through. Even then, there's no guarantee of safety from robbery or kidnapping.

Staying is not an option for many.

Some who have nowhere to go and have lost their homes cram into schools and colleges which are now camps for internally displaced people.

Children shelter under school desks. Education has long since been abandoned in these buildings.
Read more: No food, no homes, no space
What is happening in Haiti?
Vigilantes defending Haiti neighbourhood 'tooth and nail'
As we talk to people, two gaunt and frail elderly women tap my producer on the shoulder and start pointing at their stomachs.

They say they're starving, rubbing their stomachs, and asking for food.

Food aid does get here but there is never enough - there are just too many people to feed.

To compound the problem, the ongoing fighting has shut down the airport, and the seaport is sometimes closed down too, meaning food aid can't get in. And when it does, it's sometimes looted by the gangs.

4:01

Whole families are camping at one school we visit, most have lost almost everything, and they're stuck.

Jimmy Jean Julian, the civil protection coordinator in charge here, tells me there are 6,500 living people in the school, and 33,000 people displaced by the violence across the capital.
'We're on the run'
"As a coordinator, I have to assess all the camps and I can say it's very difficult, not only here at this school, but all over Port-au-Prince.

"They're very traumatised because they're not used to living like this, there's no privacy for showering and other personal hygiene, little food, and they're like sardines living on top of each other because there's no space," Julian said.

Amongst the displaced living here is Nerlyne Auguste. She is here with her family and says they've been forced to move multiple times because of the violence.

"We're on the run, the gangs chased us out, this is our third camp," she said.

I asked her if she knows why their homes are being burnt down.

"We don't know, all we know is we are on the run, our houses have been burnt down and we're on the run, and we're not living, there's no life, we're in misery, we don't sleep, we're stressed, and we don't eat well," Nerlyne replied.

What should be a beautiful Caribbean country with a vibrant capital is stuck in a vortex of violence and poverty - and a leadership void.

They're praying things get better, but many fear it could actually get worse.

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A vortex of violence and poverty - starving families take shelter from Haiti capital's battlefield

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What should be a beautiful Caribbean country with a vibrant capital is stuck in a vortex of violence and poverty - and a leadership void. People are praying things get better, but many fear it could actually get worse.

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A Conversation article, looking at the potential effects of spending money on a global 'conservation basic income'. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the potential effects of spending money on a global 'conservation basic income'. 

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Imagine governments were to simply transfer money, unconditionally, to people living in or using key conservation areas throughout the world, from Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest to cattle herders roaming the plains of East Africa or fisherfolk living in coastal Indonesia. This is the conservation basic income, or CBI, a recent proposal modelled on the popular concept of a universal basic income.

We have calculated a global CBI would cost at least US$351 billion each year, and maybe as much as US$6.73 trillion. Our research is published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Either way, it's an enormous figure, considerably more than the roughly US$133 billion that governments currently spend on conservation each year.

However, considering these payments could safeguard the estimated US$44 trillion in global economic production that is dependent on nature, it would represent a shrewd investment in safeguarding our natural world.

Just, equitable and sustainable

Conservation strategies typically involve establishing protected areas or generating income through tourism or carbon storage. But these top-down schemes often impose substantial costs on Indigenous people and local communities, and they often don't provide enough revenue to replace lost livelihoods, or offer adequate alternatives to the extractive industries that sustain overconsumption in developed nations.

There are good reasons to think a conservation basic income is a good idea and would make things more just, equitable and sustainable. For instance, unconditional cash payments could help people to improve their lives in a way that is aligned with their own worldviews, while alleviating poverty traps that often force them to overexploit wildlife and other natural resources.

Similarly, payments could enable residents to resist expropriation of their lands, or having to grow cash crops for exports or sell their labour to destructive industries. It could also free up time for community activism and social participation, strengthening local institutions and decision-making. All of this could reduce the sway of populist politics and manipulation by extractive industry and could help rebalance the historic drain of resources from the global south.

Expensive...but valuable

So we knew that CBI has some promise - in theory. But we wanted to know how much it might cost. And to do that, we'd have to estimate how many people might receive payments, and how much they'd each receive.

At its least ambitious, covering only the most key biodiversity areas, we estimated a CBI would mean paying around 232 million people worldwide. A more ambitious plan, covering all existing protected areas, would affect 318 million people, of which 238 million are in low and middle income countries including 70 million in China alone. A much more comprehensive CBI, covering the 44% of the Earth's surface required to safeguard all biodiversity, would mean payments to an astonishing 1.6 billion people.

We considered a few plausible payment rates. The first was a flat payment of US$5.50 (£4.42) per person per day, regardless of the country they were in. That figure was chosen as it is considered a global poverty threshold. The second involved paying people 25% of their country's per capita gross domestic product.

The third involved paying the poverty line for that country's income group (that is, US$1.90 (£1.53) per day in a low-income country, or US$3.20 (£2.57) in lower-middle income countries, US$5.50(£4.42) in upper-middle income countries and US$21.70 (£17.42) in high-income countries).

When we applied these different payment rates to the various population estimates, we generated a range of possible costs. That's why, depending on the areas and payment rates chosen, we estimate a conservation basic income could cost between US$350 billion and US$6.73 trillion per year.

One middle-of-the-road option would be to pay US$5.50 per day to residents of existing protected areas in low and middle-income countries - that would cost US$478 billion each year.

Again, this is a huge number. But it is well within the amounts that conservationists assert is necessary to effectively protect nature around the world, and less than the up to US$500 billion governments are estimated to spend on subsidising harmful industries each year.

Will it work?

We know roughly what a global CBI would cost, but we still need some evidence that it would actually work. Locally-led pilot schemes are therefore an important next step and should help shed light on issues that could arise in implementation. For example, would the payments induce migration into conservation areas? Or how can schemes be inclusive of non-resident resource users or migratory populations, such as the livestock herders of Central Asia?

Excitingly, there are already proposals for CBI schemes in several locations. In Indonesian New Guinea, one of the most biodiverse yet also poorest regions in the world, a recent report highlighted that a basic income scheme could be generated through dividends from sales of carbon credits (bearing in mind their limitations as well), with revenues estimated at US$173 billion annually, providing each adult with around US$180 monthly.

Evidence from other cash transfer programs is promising. For example, across Indonesia, a country with vast tropical forests, unconditional payments to hundreds of thousands of the poorest families also reduced deforestation.

A recent survey found that conservationists themselves like the idea of a CBI. We believe it is time to test the conservation basic income at a bigger scale.

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A global 'conservation basic income' might cost trillions - but it's still a shrewd investment

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Our research estimates the cost of giving money to people in conservation areas as between $351 billion and $6.73 trillion annually.

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does Gaha Vince refer to political borders as ‘inventions’? How is the climate crisis putting pressure on the world’s current borders? What are the arguments for viewing the world as a ‘global commonwealth of humanity’ - and is this a viable mindshift for people to make? How and why does Vince suggest we rethink our ‘national pride’? Overall, ask students if they agree with the following statement: In order to create a more harmonious and fully functioning world, we need to “clear from our mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual.”

Key terms Borders, Cleanly defined, Invention, Livability limits, Meaningless, Controlling vs. managing, Reinvent, Power, Divisive tribalism

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by the effects of global warming by the end of the century, should it lead to a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?
I've had an obsession with maps ever since I first sought my bearings in Winnie the Pooh's "Hundred Aker Wood", trying to discover where was "nice for piknicks", and the locations of the characters' houses. My childhood was spent studying and drawing treasure maps, charting imaginary lands and plotting routes to faraway places I longed to visit.

Today, my home is plastered with the maps I've collected or been given - reminders of places that are special to me. By my desk, I have a large world map, the continents distinguished from the oceans by their mosaic of colours. Each coloured patch is a country, separated from its neighbour by a neat line drawn onto this two-dimensional representation of our world.

The borders are cleanly defined, ink separating nationalities destined for different fates. For me, these lines mark exciting possibilities, with the potential for exploration and adventure, to visit foreign cultures with different foods and languages. For others, they are prison walls that limit all possibilities.

Borders define our fate, our life expectancy, our identity, and so much more. Yet they are an invention just like the maps I used to draw. Our borders don't exist as immutable facets of the landscape, they are not natural parts of our planet, and were invented relatively recently.

It can be argued, however, that most of these imaginary lines are not fit for the world of the 21st Century with its soaring population, dramatic climate change and resource scarcity. Indeed, the idea of keeping foreign people out using borders is relatively recent. States used to be far more concerned about stopping people from leaving than preventing their arrival. They needed their labour and taxes, and emigration still poses a headache for many states.

There are, however, true human borders set not by politics or hereditary sovereigns, but by the physical properties of our planet. These planetary borders for our mammal species are defined by geography and climate. Humans cannot live in large numbers in Antarctica or in the Sahara Desert, for instance. As global temperatures increase, causing climate change, sea level rise and extreme weather over the coming decades, large parts of the world that are home to some of the biggest populations will become increasingly hard to live in. Coastlines, island states and major cities in the tropics will be among the hardest hit, according to predictions by climate scientists.

Unable to adapt to increasingly extreme conditions, millions - or even billions - of people will need to move.

Borders are often now a barrier to movement, but might that have to change in the future? (Credit: Nicolas Economou/Getty Images)

The most densely populated areas of the planet are clustered around the 25-26th north parallels which has traditionally been the latitude of most comfortable climate and fertile land. An estimated 279 million people are packed into this thin band of land, which cuts through countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, the United States and Mexico.

But the conditions here are changing. On average, climate niches - the range of conditions at which species can normally exist - around the world are moving polewards at a pace of 1.15m (3.8ft) per day, although it's far faster in some places. Adapting to the changing climate will mean chasing our own shifting niche - which for much of human history has been within the temperature range -11C to 15C (12F to 59F) - as it migrates north from the equator. True livability limits are the borders we must worry about as the world warms over this century, bringing unbearable heat, drought, floods, fires, storms, and coastal erosion that make agriculture impossible and displace people.

Already record numbers of people are being forced to flee their homes with each passing year. In 2021, there were 89.3 million people, double the number forcibly displayed a decade ago, and in 2022 that number reached 100 million, with climate disasters displacing many more people than conflicts. Floods displaced 33 million people in Pakistan this year, while millions more in Africa have been affected by drought and the threat of famine, from the Horn of Africa to the continent's west coast.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi appealed to global leaders at the COP27 climate change conference to take bold action to tackle the humanitarian consequences of global warming. That change needs to be "transformational" according to the UNHRC. "We cannot leave millions of displaced people and their hosts to face the consequences of a changing climate alone," says Grandi.

Migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn)

Without action, hundreds of millions people will have to leave their homes by 2050, according some estimates. One study from 2020 predicts that by 2070, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, " one to three billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years".

With so many people on the move, will this mean that invented political borders, ostensibly imposed for national security, become increasingly meaningless? The threat posed by climate change and its social repercussions dwarf those surrounding national security. Heatwaves already kill more people than those who die as a direct result of violence in wars.

Compounding this, the global population is still growing, particularly in some of the regions worst hit by climate change and poverty. Populations in Africa are set to almost triple by 2100, even as those elsewhere slow in growth. This means there will be a greater number of people in the very areas that are likely to be worst affected by extreme heat, drought and catastrophic storms. A greater number of people will also need food, water, power, housing and resources, just as these become ever harder to supply.

Meanwhile, most countries in the Global North are facing a demographic crisis in which people are not having enough babies to support an ageing population. Managed mass migration could thus help with many of the world's biggest problems, reducing the number of people living in poverty and climate devastation, and helping northern economies build their workforce.

But the main barrier is our system of borders - movement restrictions either imposed by someone's own state or by the states they wish to enter. Today just over 3% of the global population are international migrants. However, migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn) - some $3tn (£2.6tn) more than they would have produced in their origin countries. Some economists, such as Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development in the US, calculate that enabling free movement could double global GDP. In addition, we would see an increase in cultural diversity, which studies show improves innovation. At a time when we have to solve unprecedented environmental and social challenges, it could be just what is needed.

After WW2, Britain encouraged migration from Commonwealth countries to help make up for labour shortages (Credit: Haywood Magee/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Removing borders or making them far more flexible, especially to labour flows, has the potential to improve humanity's resilience to the stresses and shocks of global climate change. Managed well, migration could benefit everyone.

What if we thought of the planet as a global commonwealth of humanity, in which people were free to move wherever they wanted? We'd need a new mechanism to manage global labour mobility far more effectively and efficiently - it is our biggest economic resource, after all. There are already wide-ranging global trade deals for the movement of other resources and products, but few that deal with labour movement.

Some 60% of the world's population is under the age of 40, half of these (and growing) under 20, and they will form most of the world's people for the rest of this century. Many of these young, energetic jobseekers are likely to be among those moving as the climate changes - will they add to economic growth to build sustainable societies, or will their talents be wasted?

The conversation about migration has become stuck on what ought to be allowed, rather than planning for what will occur. I believe nations need to move on from the idea of controlling migration to managing migration. At the very least, we need new mechanisms for lawful economic labour migration and mobility, and far better protection for those fleeing danger. Everyone could be offered an official form of United Nations citizenship in addition to their birth citizenship. For some people, such as those born in refugee camps, lacking papers, or citizens of small island states that will cease to exist later this century, UN citizenship may well be their only access to international recognition and assistance, even though citizenship is a human right. Passports could be issued on the back of this.

The political theorist David Held argued that we have outgrown our national boundaries through increasing globalisation, and now live in "overlapping communities of fate" from where we should form a cosmopolitan democracy at a global level. Today, we are experiencing a planetary crisis and I believe it is time to see ourselves as members of one globally dispersed species that must cooperate to survive. The scale of the climate crisis requires new global cooperation and, I believe, new international citizenship with global bodies for migration and for the biosphere - new authorities that are paid for by our taxes and to which nation states are accountable.

Currently, the United Nations has no executive powers over nation states, but that may well need to change if we are to bring down global temperatures, reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and restore the world's biodiversity. Global governance could also be useful in coordinating the vast new mobile workforce, perhaps using an international quota system to help allocate people to positions during the mass climate migrations of this century. But it would also face challenges created by bureaucracy, corruption and lobbying by powerful corporations.

Nations are communities that do things together - David Miller

Underpinning global governance, however, there also needs to be strong states. The tension between the desires and needs of the individual and society are very real for us all, and hard enough to reconcile when our society is a small, closely knit group, let alone the population of the whole planet. It's hard to care, for example, about a nameless, faceless stranger in a country you've never visited when making choices about your own life in a city thousands of miles from them. Most people find hard to balance the needs of a stranger one street away. Successful nation states help to manage this with structures and institutions that ensure a useful level of cooperation between strangers that nurtures a strong society in which we all can succeed. We willingly make small, daily sacrifices of time, energy and resources as individuals - paying taxes, for instance - to ensure our societies operate. Most of us do this because it's our society, our social family, our nation state.

The invention of the nation state has been a very powerful tool in enabling us to cooperate so well. As the political theorist David Miller put it: "Nations are communities that do things together."

It would seem unwise, then, to try to completely dismantle or abandon our existing geopolitical system in the brief time we have to prepare for the massive disruption that is expected to occur over the course of this century.

Only strong nation states will be capable of setting up the systems of governance that will help our species survive climate change. Only strong nation states will be able to manage a massive movement of migrants from different geographies and cultures to the native population.

It may instead require a blend between internationalism and nationalism.

In recent decades, the growth of globalisation has led to greater internationalism - a citizen of London may often feel more commonality with a citizen of Amsterdam or Taiwan than with someone from a small country town in Britain. This may not matter for many successful urbanites, but natives of more rural areas can feel left behind by their own country as once dominant industries decline, and social spaces and cultural traditions dwindle away. This creates resentment and fear of the kind that can lead to prejudice against immigrants, as was seen in parts of the UK during the Brexit debate.

Flooding in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have displaced millions of people in 2022 (Credit: Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

Open borders do not have to mean no borders or the abolition of nation states, though. It may be necessary to explore different types of nation states, with different governance options. Will states that are most affected by climate change buy or rent territory in safer places? Or will we see charter cities that operate under different jurisdictions and rules to the territory surrounding them, or floating states that build new territory on the waves?

It will take work to reinvent the concept of the nation state so it becomes more inclusive so that it strengthens local connections while forging greater and more equitable global networks. There are multiple benefits in encouraging commonality, a kinship with our fellows, based on our shared societal project, language and cultural works. These traits matter to people enough to make patriotism a powerful source of identity.

So why not also engender patriotic feeling about our nations' air, land and water, to encourage people to look after them.? One approach, since we all face environmental threats, might be to enlist military and other security institutions in the struggle against climate change. National service for younger citizens and immigrants to help with disaster relief, nature restoration, agricultural and social efforts could be another solidarity-creating step. And we may need to restore or invent new national traditions that are environmentally or socially beneficial, and for which citizens can feel pride and respect. These could include social groups and clubs that sing, create, play sport or perform together, and to which members can belong for life. These traditions can help maintain dignity in hard times and provide patriotic meaning for immigrants to assimilate to.

The new patriotic narrative could be about civic nationalism, based on the common good, with rights and duties, and a passionate cultural attachment to nature, and to protecting and conserving places of national (or international) importance.

Costa Rica, for instance, embraced the term pura vida, broadly meaning "good life", as a national ethos, mantra and identity. Its use became widespread from the 1970s, when refugees from the violent conflicts in neighbouring Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador relocated to the country in large numbers. Costa Rica, a small Central American country that has no standing army and instead invests heavily in nature protection and restoration alongside social services such as health and education, used this outlook on life to help define its character and integrate new immigrants.

"A person choosing to use this phrase thus is not only alluding to this shared ideology and identity, he/she is at the same time constructing that identity by means of expressing it," says Anna Marie Trester of New York University. "Language is a very important tool of self-construction."

See these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers

This offers us a new way of looking at national pride. It doesn't have to mean seeing "your people" as better than other nations', nor does it mean a centralisation of meaning and power. Instead, it can involve the devolution of traditions and an appreciation of regionality and of the enormous cultural value of new citizens. The European Union is an example of supranational identity that allows citizens to feel they are European and identify with the values of the EU, but without having to give up their national identity.

A similar idea can apply within nations as well as between them. In the UK, for instance, London's Chinatown is rightly a much-visited tourist destination, as is Little India - they are part of the nation's identity, even though Chinese Brits and British Indians often face prejudice and socioeconomic disadvantage.

To earn national pride rather than suffer divisive tribalism, a nation needs to reduce inequality. The state must invest in the people for the people to feel invested in the state. That means putting social and environmental issues first in ways that are for the benefit of all, rather than a small tribe of global aristocrats. The Green New Deals proposed in the European Union and the US are examples of policies aimed at restoring economies, providing jobs and boosting dignity while helping unite people in a bigger social project of environmental transformation.

Try, if you will, to clear from your mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual. As if nationality were anything more than an arbitrary line drawn on a map. See instead these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers across the possibilities that Earth's lands offer us all.

* Gaia Vince is the author of Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval and a freelance science journalist and broadcaster.

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Is the world ready for mass migration due to climate change?

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by climate change by 2100, does there need to be a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?

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A Conversation article, examining how ChatGPT might be able to help the world's poorest people, and the organisations that work with them.

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A Conversation article, examining how ChatGPT might be able to help the world's poorest people, and the organisations that work with them.

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ChatGPT has been touted as a tool that is going to revolutionise the workplace and home. AI systems like it have the potential to enhance productivity but could also displace jobs. The ChatGPT website received 1.5 billion visits last month.

Though no comprehensive statistics exist, these users are likely to be relatively educated, with access to smartphones or computers. So, can the AI chatbot also benefit people who don't have all these advantages?

We are associated with Friend in Need India Trust (FIN), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in an isolated fishing village named Kameswaram in Tamil Nadu state. FIN wages a daily battle against women's lack of empowerment, pollution and a lack of functioning sanitation.

These problems and others act as key obstacles to local economic development. Recently a FIN colleague, Dr Raja Venkataramani, returned from the US keen to discuss ChatGPT. He wondered whether the AI chatbot could help to create awareness, motivation and community engagement towards our sustainability goals in Kameswaram.

For one experiment, we worked with local women who are FIN staff members but didn't have a high level of education. The women staff at FIN are local villagers grappling with patriarchal attitudes at home, who find it difficult to construct engaging arguments to motivate local people - especially boys and men - to conserve water, use toilets and not litter in public places.

We introduced ChatGPT to them as a tool to aid them in their lives and work. After installing it on their phones, they found it very helpful. ChatGPT acted like a companion and remembered what had been discussed previously.

One staff member wanted to use it to debate politics with her husband in the run-up to the state elections. She asked ChatGPT what was good and bad about her preferred candidate and requested that it back this up with data.

She then repeated this for that politician's opponent. She found the responses for both candidates were equally convincing. The staff member did not have the patience to check the veracity of the arguments and so ended up even more confused. This made her reluctant to use ChatGPT again.

Sam Altman, ChatGPT's creator, along with other tech leaders in the US are calling for regulation to contain the risks of AI hallucinations, which is when the technology generates false information that could trigger social tensions. We asked ChatGPT to produce a speech calling to quell a mob bent on carrying out honour killings.

Even today, India remains plagued by communal violence such as honour killings against, for example, couples who marry outside their caste or young women who seek employment outside the village. ChatGPT proved to be a very effective speech writer, producing compelling arguments against these acts.

However, those in favour of maintaining the status quo could also use the chatbot to justify their violent behaviour to the community. This might happen if they were seeking to retain their status within the village, countering any efforts to encourage community members to end the practices. We found that the AI system was just as adept at producing arguments in favour of honour killings.

In a different experiment, we aimed to see how the chatbot could help NGOs promote women's empowerment - a central mission of FIN's - in a way that could benefit the community. We asked ChatGPT to create a speech explaining the relevance of International Women's Day to villagers.

The speech was very impressive, but it contained factual errors on sex ratios, the abortion of foetuses outside legal limits, and women's participation in the workforce. When ChatGPT was asked to justify the errors, it replied: "I apologise for any confusion. I provided a hypothetical statistic to illustrate the point."

Pollution problem

In another experiment, we wanted to address the problem of pollution from traditional festivals in India. These frequently involve firecrackers and parties, which increase the levels of air and water pollution.

Though street theatre has previously been used successfully to motivate behavioural change, neither FIN's staff nor its mentors felt capable of writing a script. However, within three minutes of being fed the right prompt, ChatGPT came up with a skit involving young people.

It included both male and female characters, used local names and was mindful of local nuances. The FIN staff boosted the local character of the skit by inserting their own jokes into it. The short theatre piece argued that the impact on our oceans of microfibres from synthetic clothing represents a significant environmental problem that can harm livelihoods.

Asking the AI

We asked ChatGPT for its opinion on our results. It asserted that ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for both economically disadvantaged people and NGOs because it provided valuable information, offered emotional support and made communication more effective.

But the chatbot avoided discussing its obvious downsides, such as making arguments based on false, incomplete or imperfect information. Just as it can help us, it can also act as a capable speech writer for those who would seek to divide or raise tensions.

For the time being, ChatGPT seems like a handy tool for well-intentioned NGOs, but not so much for the ordinary individuals that they assist. Without users having the means to monitor the ethics and truthfulness of ChatGPT's suggestions, AI systems could become dangerous enablers for disinformation and misinformation.

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How ChatGPT might be able to help the world's poorest and the organisations that work with them

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AI chatbots can be educational tools but still have many drawbacks.

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A UN report into the fact that 1 in every 10 women around the world lives in extreme poverty. 

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A UN report into the fact that 1 in every 10 women around the world lives in extreme poverty. 

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Climate change is accelerating persistent poverty gaps. As competition for scarce resources intensifies, livelihoods are threatened, societies become more polarized, and women bear an increasingly heavy burden:

1 in every 10 women in the world lives in extreme poverty.

The number of women and girls living in conflict-affected areas doubled since 2017, now, more than 614 million women and girls live in conflict-affected areas. In conflict areas, women are 7.7 times more likely to live in extreme poverty.

Climate change is set to leave 236 million more women and girls hungry by 2030, twice as many as men (131 million).

At prime working age, only 61 per cent of women are in the labour force versus 90 per cent of men.

We cannot continue to miss out on the gender-equality dividend. More than 100 million women and girls could be lifted out of poverty if governments prioritized education and family planning, fair and equal wages, and expanded social benefits.

Almost 300 million jobs could be created by 2035 through investments in care services, such as provision of daycare and elderly care. And closing gender employment gaps could boost gross domestic product per capita by 20 per cent across all regions.

The current reality is far from this. Programmes dedicated to gender equality represent only 4 per cent of official development assistance. An additional USD 360 billion in developing countries is needed per year to achieve gender equality and women's empowerment. This is less than one fifth of the USD 2.2 trillion spent globally on military expenditure in 2022, for example.

The areas needing investment are clear and understood. First and foremost there must be an investment in peace. Beyond this, the investments needed include: laws and policies that advance the rights of women and girls; transformation of social norms that pose barriers to gender equality; guaranteeing women's access to land, property, health care, education, and decent work; and financing women's groups networks at all levels.

UN Women is also calling on Member States at the Commission on the Status of Women, starting in New York on 11 March 2024, to back up their commitments on gender equality with resources. The world's leaders have this opportunity to develop concrete and progressive agreed conclusions that reflect the crucial need for financing gender equality, women's empowerment, and women´s organizations. They must seize it for the sake of equality, our planet, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

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1 in every 10 women in the world lives in extreme poverty | UN Women - Headquarters

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On International Women's Day, UN Women calls for the world to "Invest in Women, Accelerate Progress" as the best way to accelerate economic growth and build more prosperous, equitable societies.

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A Big Think article, asserting that it isn’t income inequality that is the world’s most pressing problem, but time inequality. 

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A Big Think article, asserting that it isn’t income inequality that is the world’s most pressing problem, but time inequality. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why do Dr. Marian Tupy and Dr. Gale Pooley “dissent” from this view? How does including a consideration of human knowledge change the way we calculate the level of resources available to us? What are the five reasons why thinking in terms of ‘time price’ instead of ‘money price’ provides a better insight into standards of living, and levels of inequality? Overall, ask students if they agree with the statement, “economics can be much more illuminating by going beyond money and atoms to knowledge and time”? How does this make us rethink population growth?

Key terms Limited resources, Finite, Human knowledge, Time prices, True prices

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“Time inequality” is the world’s real problem, not income inequality

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Inequality should be measured in terms of the time it takes for us to earn the money to buy the things we need.

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An Economic Observatory report into the socio-economic impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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An Economic Observatory report into the socio-economic impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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Ukraine: what’s the global economic impact of Russia’s invasion? - Economics Observatory

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Russia’s brutal invasion has driven millions into poverty and debilitated – but not quite destroyed – Ukraine’s economy. Meanwhile, sanctions are straining the Russian economy, but they are yet to end a war that has sown financial turmoil and personal hardship in the region and across the globe.

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A Conversation article, investigating what happens when we train AI to examine global poverty.

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A Conversation article, investigating what happens when we train AI to examine global poverty.

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Visualising wealth and poverty through AI. Authors, CC BY-SA

To most effectively deliver aid to alleviate poverty, you have to know where the people most in need are. In many countries, this is often done with household surveys. But these are usually infrequent and cover limited locations.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have created a step change in how to measure poverty and other human development indicators. Our team has used a type of AI known as a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to study satellite imagery and identify some types of poverty with a level of accuracy close to that of household surveys.

The use of this AI technology could help, for example, in developing countries where there has been a rapid change of land use. The AI could monitor via satellite and potentially spot areas that are in need of aid. This would be much quicker than relying on ground surveys.

Plus, the dreamy images our deep learning model has produced give us a unique insight into how AI visualises the world.

A DCNN is a type of advanced AI algorithm commonly used in processing and analysing visual imagery. The "deep" in its name refers to the multiple layers through which data is processed, making it part of the broader family of deep learning technologies.

Earlier this year our team made an important discovery using the DCNN. This network was initially trained on the vast array of labelled images from the ImageNet repository: a huge pictorial dataset of objects and living things used to train algorithms. After this initial phase, where the network learned to recognise various objects, we fine-tuned it using daylight satellite images of populated places.

Our findings revealed that the DCNN, enhanced by this specialised training, could surpass human performance in accurately assessing poverty levels from satellite imagery. Specifically, the AI system demonstrated an ability to deduce poverty levels from low-resolution daytime satellite images with greater precision than humans analysing high-resolution images.

Such proficiency echoes the superhuman achievements of AI in other realms, such as the Chess and Go engines that consistently outwit human players.

After the training phase was complete, we engaged in an exploration to try to understand what characteristics the DCNN was identifying in the satellite images as being indicative of "high wealth". This process began with what we referred to as a "blank slate" - an image composed entirely of random noise, devoid of any discernible features.

In a step-by-step manner, the model "adjusts" this noisy image. Each adjustment is a move towards what the model considers a satellite image of a more wealthy place than the previous image. These modifications are driven by the model's internal understanding and learning from its training data.

As the adjustments continue, the initially random image gradually morphs into one that the model confidently classifies as indicating high wealth. This transformation was revelatory because it unveiled the specific features, patterns, and elements that the model associates with wealth in satellite imagery.

Such features might include (but are not limited to) the density of roads, the layout of urban areas, or other subtle cues that have been learned during the model's training.

The sequence of images displayed above serves a crucial purpose in our research. It begins with a baseline satellite image of a village in Tanzania, which our AI model categorises as "poor", probably due to the sparse presence of roads and buildings.

To test and confirm this hypothesis, we progressively modify each subsequent image in the sequence, methodically enhancing them with additional features such as buildings and roads. These augmentations represent increased wealth and development as perceived by the AI model.

This visual progression shows how the AI is visualising "wealth" as we add things like more roads and houses. The characteristics we deduced from the model's "ideal" wealth image (such as roads and buildings) are indeed influential in the model's assessment of wealth.

This step is essential in ensuring that the features we believe to be significant in the AI's decision-making process do, in fact, correspond to higher wealth predictions.

So by repeatedly adjusting the image, the resulting visualisation gradually evolves into what the network "thinks" wealth looks like. This outcome is often abstract or surreal.

The image above was generated from a blank slate when we asked the DCNN what it associated with "high wealth". These images have an ethereal quality and don't closely resemble typical daytime satellite photos. Yet, the presence of "blobs" and "lines" suggests clusters of homes interconnected by roads and streets. The blue hue might even hint at coastal areas.

Dreamy images

Inherent in this method is an element of randomness. This randomness ensures that each attempt at visualisation creates a unique image, though all are anchored in the same underlying concept as understood by the network.

However, it is important to note that these visualisations are more a reflection of the network's "thought process" rather than an objective representation of wealth. They're constrained by the network's training and may not accurately align with human interpretations.

It is crucial to understand that while AI feature visualisation offers intriguing insights into neural networks, it also highlights the complexities and limitations of machine learning in mirroring human perception and understanding.

Understanding poverty, particularly in its geographical or regional context, is a complex endeavour. While traditional studies have focused more on individual aspects of poverty, AI, leveraging satellite imagery, has made significant strides in highlighting regional poverty's geographical patterns.

This is where the real value of AI in poverty assessment lies, in offering a spatially nuanced perspective that complements existing poverty research and aids in formulating more targeted and effective interventions.

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How AI 'sees' the world - what happened when we trained a deep learning model to identify poverty

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Researchers fed an advanced AI algorithm with satellite photographs to see if it could identify areas of poverty and it interpreted the data through abstract images.

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A Conversation article, which looks at the consequences that over half of charity campaigns for causes focused on Africa.

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A Conversation article, which looks at the consequences that over half of charity campaigns for causes focused on Africa.

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The images used by charities and NGOs can become deeply ingrained in the memories of supporters, donors, development partners and the "beneficiaries" themselves. These stories colour what is generally known about global poverty and the developing world.

One of the most notorious examples was the media and charity coverage of the Ethiopian famine in the early 1980s. Powerful and disturbing images brought the reality of the famine into the lives of millions of British people and fast became the currency of the media and NGOs.

But there's a problem with this. The use of such imagery seems to confirm rather than challenge traditional perceptions that Africa is underdeveloped and not capable of dealing with its own problems.

In 2021, I purchased 17 national newspapers in the UK every weekend over a period of six months. The aim was to explore whether charity adverts have changed in recent years and what kinds of characters are represented in fundraising campaigns.

After analysing a total of 541 fundraising images, one of the major findings was that Africa continues to be over-represented in charity adverts supporting international causes. Over half of the images (56%) focused on countries in Africa. And almost none of these images contain whole family units - rather they are set in rural areas and feature women and children.

But there is also evidence that charities are actively responding to previous critiques of using shock tactics, dehumanisation and employing images to evoke emotions.

Why does it matter?

By constantly focusing the spotlight on African countries, charities reinforce historical stereotypes of underdevelopment that equate Africa with poverty.

A report from 2010 that was commissioned by the Department for International Development, for instance, found that the UK public view "developing countries" as synonymous with "Africa". They associate Africa with poverty and misery, reflecting some of the representations used in charitable appeals.

The consistent portrayal of these depictions in various campaigns has promoted the view among the British public that there has been little to no progress in economic and social development across Africa since the 1980s. This has contributed to the belief that Africa is a " bottomless pit " in terms of charitable efforts and the constant need for foreign aid.

But, in reality, this is not the case. Africa is developing fast. It has the world's youngest and fastest-growing population which, by the middle of this century, is expected to hit 2.5 billion.

Addressing stereotypes

Nevertheless, my findings do suggest that the sector is making strides towards decolonising narratives and addressing its use of damaging stereotypes. In 2016, a study found that 34% of all British charity adverts used "pitiful images" that explicitly emphasised human suffering.

However, by 2021, only two out of the 27 charities that placed adverts used pitiful images in their fundraising appeals. This amounted to 11% of all adverts as these charities repeatedly used such imagery over the six month study period, but it still represents a significant decline.

Women and children continued to be the most popular characters in newspaper adverts. But, compared to similar studies from 2013 and 2016, there was a significant reduction in the use of images of children. In 2021, 21% of charitable campaigns featured images of children, down from 42% in 2013.

By 2021, 20% of all the images used in charitable campaigns were also of people characterised as professionals or leaders from developing countries. These people included doctors, nurses and other development workers, offering a more realistic view of people from Africa.

Several factors have prompted charities into reconsidering the potential damage of the representation they use and the stories they tell in recent years. One of the main factors is the need to decolonise narratives by reducing the use of negative stereotypes.

The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were a significant catalyst in charities rapidly adopting or updating their ethical imagery policies. The protests alerted people and organisations to the injustices of colonial histories.

The COVID pandemic was also instrumental in charities being forced to employ local photographers and filmmakers in the countries where they deliver programmes. Travel restrictions that were imposed during the pandemic meant charities were unable to fly in their own staff.

What next?

Images have the potential to inflict damage. So communications professionals in the charity sector must strive to diversify the characters they portray.

But the public has a level of responsibility too. We all need to be careful about making assumptions of other countries and cultures when viewing charity images in newspaper adverts. Photographs may not always provide a complete picture.

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Over half of charity campaigns for international causes focus on Africa - here's why that's harmful

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Charity advertising often reinforces historical stereotypes of underdevelopment that equate Africa with poverty.

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A Guardian article, reporting on the fact that the world's five richest men have doubled their money - whilst the poorest have become poorer.

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A Guardian article, reporting on the fact that the world's five richest men have doubled their money - whilst the poorest have become poorer.

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The world's five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) since 2020, while the world's poorest 60% - almost 5 billion people - have lost money.

The details come in a report by Oxfam as the world's richest people gather from Monday in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum meeting of political leaders, corporate executives and the super-rich.

The yawning gap between rich and poor is likely to increase, the report says, and will lead to the world crowning its first trillionaire within a decade. At the same time, it warns, if current trends continue, world poverty will not be eradicated for another 229 years.

Highlighting a dramatic increase in inequality since the Covid pandemic, Oxfam said the world's billionaires were $3.3tn (£2.6tn) richer than in 2020, and their wealth had grown three times faster than the rate of inflation.

The report, Inequality Inc., finds that seven out of 10 of the world's biggest corporations have a billionaire as CEO or principal shareholder, despite stagnation in living standards for millions of workers around the world.

Will Elon Musk be the world's first trillionaire? Photograph: Reuters

Compiled using data from the research company Wealth X and Forbes, it says the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world - Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg - have increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people - making up 60% of the world population - has declined by 0.2% in real terms.

"People worldwide are working harder and longer hours, often for poverty wages in precarious and unsafe jobs," the report says. "Across 52 countries, average real wages of nearly 800 million workers have fallen. These workers have lost a combined $1.5tn over the last two years, equivalent to 25 days of lost wages for each worker."

Mirroring the fortunes of the super rich, it also says business profits have risen sharply despite pressure on households amid the cost of living crisis. It finds 148 of the world's biggest corporations together raked in $1.8tn in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52% jump compared with average net profits in 2018-21.

Calling for a wealth tax to redress the balance between workers and super-rich company bosses and owners, the report says such a levy on British millionaires and billionaires could bring in £22bn for the exchequer each year, if applied at a rate of between 1% to 2% on net wealth above £10m.

Julia Davies, an investor and founding member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, a nonpartisan group of British millionaires campaigning for a wealth tax, said levies on wealth were "minuscule" compared with taxation on income from work.

"Just imagine what £22bn a year invested in public services and infrastructure could pay for; improving the lives of every one of us who live in the UK and providing our elderly, young and vulnerable with the care and support they need and deserve," she said.

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Oxfam said the most recent Gini index - which measures inequality - found that global income inequality was now comparable with that of South Africa, the country with the highest inequality in the world.

The world's richest 1% own 59% of all global financial assets - including stocks, shares and bonds, plus stakes in privately held business. In the UK, the richest 1% own 36.5% of all financial assets, with a value of £1.8tn.

Aleema Shivji, Oxfam's interim chief executive, said: "These extremes cannot be accepted as the new norm, the world can't afford another decade of division. Extreme poverty in the poorest countries is still higher than it was pre-pandemic, yet a small number of super-rich men are racing to become the world's first trillionaire within the next 10 years.

"This ever-widening gulf between the rich and the rest isn't accidental, nor is it inevitable. Governments worldwide are making deliberate political choices that enable and encourage this distorted concentration of wealth, while hundreds of millions of people live in poverty. A fairer economy is possible, one that works for us all. What's needed are concerted policies that deliver fairer taxation and support for everyone, not just the privileged."

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World's five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer

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Oxfam predicts first trillionaire within a decade, with gap between rich and poor likely to increase

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An NPR article, looking at the results of a huge experiment in tackling poverty, by giving people a universal basic income. 

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An NPR article, looking at the results of a huge experiment in tackling poverty, by giving people a universal basic income. 

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It's an unprecedented - and massive - experiment: Since 2017 the U.S.-based charity GiveDirectly has been providing thousands of villagers in Kenya what's called a "universal basic income" - a cash grant that's the equivalent of about $50, delivered every month, with the commitment to keep the payments coming for 12 years. It is a crucial test of what many consider one of the most cutting-edge ideas for alleviating global poverty. This week a team of independent researchers who have been studying the impact released their first results.

Their findings cover the first two years of the effort and compare the outcomes for about 5,000 people who got the monthly payments to nearly 12,000 others in a control group who got no money. But, just as significantly, the researchers also compared the recipients to people in two other categories: nearly 9,000 who received the monthly income for just two years, without the promise of another decade of payments afterward; and another roughly 9,000 people who got that same two years' worth of income but in a lump-sum payment.

NPR has been covering this effort from the start - traveling to Kenya early into the launch at a village near Lake Victoria. During a community meeting that day people's phones suddenly began to ping with a text alert, notifying them that their monthly grant had just been sent to their mobile bank accounts. The crowd erupted in cheers. Some of the younger women broke into song. The joy was a reflection of just how much people in the community had been struggling: The year before this experiment started, 85% of recipients reported experiencing hunger.

So how much of a difference has the experiment made so far? Here are five takeaways from the first batch of findings:
1. Giving cash aid in a lump sum has some major advantages over parceling it out.
When it came to measures of well-being such as consumption of protein or spending money on schooling, all of the groups who were given cash were better off than people in the control group who got no money. This fits with previous studies of no-strings cash aid, which find that poor people generally use the money productively rather than wasting it on alcohol, cigarettes or other vices.

But the big news came on a different measure: people's likelihood of starting a business. On this front, those who got the money in a lump sum vastly outperformed people who were promised the same amount for just two years but received it in monthly installments. For instance lump-sum recipients had 19% more enterprises - businesses such as small shops in local markets, motorbike taxis and small-scale construction concerns. And the lump sum recipients' net revenues from their businesses were a whopping 80% higher.

A member of the research team, MIT economist Tavneet Suri, says these results add to the evidence that many poor people are trapped in poverty by a lack of capital for precisely the kinds of transformative investments they would need to vault them into higher incomes.

"I might have this amazing opportunity to invest that's going to get me great returns," says Suri. "But there's no way to borrow. I don't have title to my land, so I can't use my land as collateral. Or I just don't have great ways to save money - because putting it under my mattress is not a great way to save." In short, without an intervention like the lump-sum grants, she says, an individual struggling with poverty might think, "I can't make this investment that would help get me out of poverty."
2. Lump sums are so useful that even those who didn't get them have banded together to create their own version.
GiveDirectly's head of research, Miriam Laker-Oketta, notes that it wasn't all that surprising that the study team, which worked independently of her organization, found that the lump-sum recipients were more likely to make investments compared with those who got paid in monthly installments. Prior studies of smaller scale cash-aid programs - including an earlier experiment arranged by GiveDirectly itself - have pointed to similar results.

But this new experiment tests, for the first time, both the lump sums and the two years worth of monthly installments against the much larger promise of 12 years of income, again delivered in monthly installments.

So it's notable that here too, the lump-sum recipients did best in the matchup - opening more businesses and earning more money from them even when compared to those who knew they'd be getting monthly payments for the full 12 years.

Andrew Zeitlen, an economist at Georgetown University who studies cash aid, says it's an impressive finding of a "well-executed study." After all, says Zeitlin, who was not involved with the research, "the long-run value of that universal basic income substantially exceeds the value of the lump sum transfers. It's an order of magnitude difference." So, the fact that lump sums had more impact even than this much bigger eventual payout points to the advantage of giving money at once instead of piecemeal.

Just as important, says Suri, is a second twist: Those who were promised 12 years of monthly payments still out-performed people who could only count on two years of payments. And - here's the key - the way that the 12-year-group was able to invest more in their enterprises was by effectively converting their monthly payments into a lump sum.

They did this by making use of a creative financing tool known as a "rotating savings club." Every month members of the club pool their money and then take turns getting the entire payout from that pot.

Rotating savings clubs are enormously popular among Kenyans who don't have access to traditional banking. Even people who got the monthly income for just two years managed to put about 8% more money in a rotating savings club than those who got no aid.

But people in the 12-year-monthly income group used the clubs at an astonishing rate - contributing nearly 70% more money than those in the control group.

Suri says one explanation could be that people who were promised a full 12 years of monthly income knew their neighbors would also be getting the income because every adult in the village was made that same promise. This expectation of years of income to come for everyone involved likely provided people the confidence needed to invest in a savings club: After all, says Suri, you're relying on your fellow members to keep contributing to the pot after they've gotten their own payout.

3. Making the benefit 'universal' - by paying every adult in the village - seems to have greatly increased the impact.
This broad-based, "universal" nature of the aid may also help explain another surprising finding, says Suri: The fact that people who chose to invest their cash grants did so by starting businesses.

"I thought we would see tons of investment in agriculture" - basically improvements to the tiny plots on which many villagers raise subsistence crops, she says. "Go buy fertilizer. Go buy a pump to bring in more water."

That's what earlier studies suggested.

But the prior interventions that those studies had analyzed were not "universal" in the sense that, instead, the aid was given to only a subset of people in a community. By contrast, this experiment - by providing the aid to every adult in a given village - "allows us to learn about the interdependence between people," says Zeitlin. In particular, he says, it shows how the aid could boost businesses not just with capital but also by creating a large pool of new potential customers.

Suri says anecdotal evidence suggests this is precisely what happened. "It's everybody getting the aid, and everybody knows that," she says.
4. The grants did not seem to fuel inflation
Despite the sudden influx of money into these impoverished communities, Suri says that so far the data suggests that inflation there did not go up.

One possible reason, she says, is that while people did buy more things, this extra spending was distributed over a wide range of products, depending on the relative wealth of the person getting the aid.

"So it's not all going into one commodity," says Suri. "And that's the advantage of spreading it universally."
5. The big remaining question is whether the benefits of lump-sum payments actually last.
Suri says the findings thus far already have potential implications for policy. For instance, at present, "a lot of cash transfers that the World Bank runs in poor countries tend to be of the monthly-for-two-years kind of style." And this new data adds substantial evidence to the view that, in fact, "the short-term [parceled out aid] is probably not such a smart policy. Because you could take the money and give it in a lump sum and get much bigger effects."

What remains to be seen, she says, is whether the relative benefits of the lump-sum payments endure. Are the businesses that people start durable? Do they generate enough income to actually lift people out of poverty?

"The lump sum and the long term [monthly payments] look similar at two years," Suri says. "But the question is, does the lump sum [impact] fade after year five? Year six? Does it just disappear? Or was this enough to keep [the impacts] going forever?"

Because if so, she adds, "Then we're good. I don't have to spend 12 years of money. I just have to spend two years' worth and just structure it correctly."

To find the answers, Suri says she's committed to continuing this study for as long as it takes.

"For the rest of my life," she says, laughing. "You know, most people want to write a will for their assets - like, who are they going to leave their money to? I'm like, 'Who am I going to leave the universal basic income project to?' It's maybe the most valuable thing I have as a researcher."

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It's one of the biggest experiments in fighting global poverty. Now the results are in

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The study focuses on a universal basic income and spans 12 years and thousands of people in Kenya. How did the money change lives? What's better: monthly payouts or a lump sum.

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A Nature report, arguing that ending extreme poverty has a negligible impact on global greenhouse gas emissions.

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A Nature report, arguing that ending extreme poverty has a negligible impact on global greenhouse gas emissions.

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Ending extreme poverty has a negligible impact on global greenhouse gas emissions - Nature

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Global emissions associated with the economic growth needed to alleviate extreme poverty are limited.