Is In-kind Kinder than Cash? The Impact of Money vs. Food Aid on Social Emotions and Aid Take-up
Samantha Kassirer, Ata Jami, & Maryam Kouchaki (Northwestern University)
GPI Working Paper No. 12-2024, winner of the Fellowship 2024 Paper Prize and forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
There has been widespread endorsement from the academic and philanthropic communities on the new model of giving cash to those in need. Yet the recipient’s perspective has mostly been ignored. The present research explores how food-insecure individuals feel and respond when offered either monetary or food aid from a charity. Our results reveal that individuals are less likely to accept money than food aid from charity because receiving money feels relatively more shameful and relatively less socially positive. Since many experts endorse the relative effectiveness of monetary over in-kind aid, we hope this research encourages scholars and practitioners to examine strategies to remove the shame associated with the take-up of monetary aid from charity.
Other working papers
How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role – Carl Shulman (Advisor, Open Philanthropy) and Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. …
Desire-Fulfilment and Consciousness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I show that there are good reasons to think that some individuals without any capacity for consciousness should be counted as welfare subjects, assuming that desire-fulfilment is a welfare good and that any individuals who can accrue welfare goods are welfare subjects. While other philosophers have argued for similar conclusions, I show that they have done so by relying on a simplistic understanding of the desire-fulfilment theory. My argument is intended to be sensitive to the complexities and nuances of contemporary…
Existential risks from a Thomist Christian perspective – Stefan Riedener (University of Zurich)
Let’s say with Nick Bostrom that an ‘existential risk’ (or ‘x-risk’) is a risk that ‘threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development’ (2013, 15). There are a number of such risks: nuclear wars, developments in biotechnology or artificial intelligence, climate change, pandemics, supervolcanos, asteroids, and so on (see e.g. Bostrom and Ćirković 2008). …