Psychologists, in my experience, are generally decent sorts, so it's no surprise that they've suggested various ingenious ideas to help in the fight against poverty. You can "nudge" people on low incomes to save more, for example, with schemes that round up your grocery shopping to the nearest pound, transferring the difference to a savings account. You can redesign cities to stop pockets of poverty from emerging, or train teachers to counteract mindsets that hold back poorer students. But when it comes to addressing the fact that millions of people don't have enough money, there's a remarkably effective tactic that isn't ingenious at all: just give them some more money, no strings attached.
A fortuitous natural experiment in the US, reported recently in the New York Times, adds to the mounting evidence that "unconditional cash transfers" can work well, however unpopular they are these days with governments. In 1996, the Cherokee of North Carolina opened a casino, and voted to share some of the profits equally among tribe members. Poor native Americans thus started receiving several thousand dollars a year, while other local poor people didn't. The result? The cash injections have slashed poverty, psychiatric problems and child behavioural issues. And the benefits persist: after a few years, an economic analysis concluded, the sums end up paying for themselves, because Cherokee kids are less of a burden on the public purse. Another natural experiment: in Uganda in 2008, some young adults received roughly a year's annual wage. Four years later, they were earning 41% more than those who hadn't.
Some people will always object to this kind of approach on moral grounds – even if it "works", they argue, it's still wrong. It can certainly be much more expensive, to start with, than nudges. But it's hard not to wonder whether there isn't another reason these simple solutions get overlooked. Frankly, they seem too obvious. Surely there has to be a catch? Isn't the one indisputable lesson of modern psychology that we're often irrational, that we don't always act in our best interests, that unintended consequences abound? Besides, offbeat ideas are simply more fun to think about. (This column pleads guilty.) Nobody buys books with subtitles that read The Not Remotely Surprising Science Of…
This problematic preference for the non-obvious also crops up (with less serious consequences) in the daily frustrations of those of us lucky enough not to be poor. Faced with an overstuffed schedule, it's tempting to hope there's some devilishly clever productivity trick that's waiting to be discovered, when maybe really you'll just have to find ways to work less. Perhaps the secret of happiness, for you, is just a decent-ish partner and an OK house? Or perhaps not; the point isn't that all those counterintuitive alternatives are necessarily wrong. It's that their non-obviousness gives them an additional, unearned allure. Which means, in an annoyingly paradoxical sense, that the obvious options actually become non-obvious, because it's hard to remember they're options in the first place. As George Orwell observed, in a different context: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." Sometimes, the surprising truth about the truth is that it isn't surprising at all.
• oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com; twitter.com/oliverburkeman
