aid

I linked last week to Matthew Yglesias's Slate piece "The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty," which reports on a study that gave unconditional cash grants to poor young adults in Uganda and found that four years later, recipients of the grants had more business capital and higher earnings than those in a control group. I thought about the study again over the weekend as I listened to a Planet Money podcast about a charitable school-building project in Haiti that exemplifies how hard -- and potentially less effective -- it can be to give poor communities assets like schools rather…

One of the challenges we faced with our new blogosphere initiative, Silence is the Enemy, was how to mobilize people to do something about the plight of rape victims. It's not that people don't have empathy for rape victims; it's that the experience of living in a war-torn nation where rape and murder are routine facts of life is so foreign and horrifying to us, we tend to tune it out. Part of the way to deal with this is to give people a clear mission - something simple they can do; in our case, donating to Doctors without Borders (as I am for the month of June), or writing to Congress, or…