I'm so glad to share this. Because here in the trenches of poverty we watch our neighbors get up at midnight on trash days to comb the barrels for cans and bottles so they can get a bottle themselves. Or some smokes.
You see when we get cash we spend it. And we spend it quickly because generally our housing costs are inverse to our income. So all or at least eighty percent of our money go towards housing and basic needs like bus passes and laundry soap.
And again for the record alcohol and tobacco are drugs and they are used widely as a coping mechanism for an intolerable situation. In other words a symptom of poverty and rarely a cause. But it is a continuing meme because there are oodles of snake oil salesmen with salvation to sell. And you need to be at fault so you can be redeemed.
Back to the story after the Fleur-de-Kos
So looking at studies done extensively and world wide it was found that very few used their cash donations for alcohol and tobacco. Which makes sense. If you get a windfall you don't fritter it away, you take care of looming expensive you would not otherwise be able to cover.
They also looked at another 4 studies that asked people who had received transfers if they used the money for alcohol or tobacco. On average, only 1.2 percent said they did; the biggest percentage any study found was 6 percent, and that study was an outlier from the other three. Another two studies asked respondents the percentage of transfer payments being used on alcohol and tobacco; both found an average percentage below 0.5 percent.
"We have investigated evidence from around the developing world, including Latin America, Africa, and Asia," Evans and Popova conclude. "There is clear evidence that transfers are not consistently used for alcohol or tobacco in any of these environments. This is particularly true when relying on randomized trials."
So there you have it: money sent to poor people abroad doesn't get wasted on booze or cigarettes. But it's worth asking whether we should even care how it's spent, ultimately. There's something more than a little unseemly about Westerners casting judgment on poor people halfway across the world for having a beer or a smoke. As the authors' World Bank colleague Jishnu Das once put it, "'does giving cash work well' is a well-defined question only if you are willing to say that 'well' is something that WE, the donors, want to define for families whom we have never met and whose living circumstances we have probably never spent a day, let alone a lifetime, in."
It is important to show how the poor are at fault for their inequality. My guess is this lie will continue.