They'll Just Spend it on Booze

Thirty studies across three continents looked at what happens when poor families receive cash. The myth that they spend it on booze did not survive a single one of these studies.

Ask someone what they think happens when you give cash to a person living in poverty. Watch for the pause before they answer. The polite version comes out as "but how do we know they will spend it well?" A less polite answer suggests the money is spent on alcohol, cigarettes, a lottery ticket, or at the bar.

It is the oldest objection in the book. It is also unequivocally wrong.

In 2017, two World Bank researchers, David Evans and Anna Popova, gathered the data from 30 studies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The question was simple: What happens to spending on alcohol and tobacco when poor households receive cash?

The answer was the same almost everywhere. Spending on so-called “temptation goods” stayed flat or went down. In some places it even dropped sharply. In none of the 30 studies did cash transfers lead to more drinking or smoking. The myth was busted 30 times in 30 places.

So what did people actually buy? Food. School fees. Medicine. A goat. Stock for a small shop. The unexceptional and ordinary things that make life work.

There Is Something Else Worth Noting

Let's pretend, against everything the evidence shows, that some of the money does go towards a drink now and then. We might not like it, but are we in a position to judge?

Picture a normal weekend in a comfortable household. A glass of wine on Friday as you cook together with a partner. A few beers with friends on Saturday. A round at the bar that costs more than a week of school fees in rural Sierra Leone. Nobody asks us to justify it. Nobody checks whether we earned the right to relax. For us, we consider a little enjoyment as a basic part of being human.

That is the part worth contemplating. We keep the small pleasures of a normal life for ourselves, then expect the poor not to enjoy any of theirs. We trust ourselves to handle money like adults and turn around and ask them to prove their competency first. The double standard is older than any of us, and most of the time we do not notice we have internalized it. 

When someone worries about cash being misused, they are saying something about themselves. It is an easier kind of generosity. It lets the comfortable feel two things at once. Kind, because we wanted to help. Safe, because if we decide they would waste it, we never actually have to give.

It lets us be reassured of our perceived kindness of wanting to help while, at the same time, falling back on perceived prejudices that relieve us of having to actually take action and give.