Since our recommendation of GiveDirectly last year, we’ve seen a fair amount of pushback and skepticism. We’ve recently been speaking with donors who have supported our other top charities – and not GiveDirectly – to get a better sense of what their reservations are.

This post lays out what we see as the most common objections people have expressed to our recommendation of GiveDirectly, and our responses to such objections. Most of our responses have already been written up previously, so to a large extent this post simply attempts to consolidate them.

At this point, we feel that we have put substantial effort into understanding and responding to people’s reservations about cash transfers, and after considering all objections we fully stand behind our ranking of GiveDirectly. We encourage those who continue to disagree with us to comment on this post, highlighting which objections they find most important (including any we may have missed) and laying out what they see as weaknesses in our responses.

A final objection to our recommendation of GiveDirectly is along the lines of, “Even if GiveDirectly has important advantages relative to other groups you’ve looked at, it just doesn’t pass the smell test that giving money directly to the poor is the 2nd-best way to help them. It seems like an overly simple solution; there must be something (other than bednets) that’s better.”

In some sense we agree with this: we believe there is probably some giving opportunity out there that beats all of our current top charities, and we’re looking actively for it via GiveWell Labs. Given the information we have and the approach we’ve taken today, however – looking for interventions that have strong evidence behind them and concrete room for more funding (taking into account that some of the best-proven interventions have already attracted the funding needed for straightforward rollouts) – we think it’s fairly clear that GiveDirectly’s work makes the short list.

We’ve frankly been puzzled by the amount of pushback we’ve received on GiveDirectly, relative to SCI, since the evidence on deworming looks no better than the evidence on cash transfers and since we’ve voiced what we see as more serious concerns about SCI. We’ve seen a level of skepticism applied to evidence on cash transfers that we haven’t seen applied to anything else we’ve written – which is largely a good thing (we want skepticism applied to our work), but also raises the question of whether there are deeper-seated, more intuitive objections to GiveDirectly than what’s been explicitly voiced. One guess we’ve made is that to many, what’s exciting about GiveWell is the idea of using extraordinary analysis to produce extraordinary results. People expect “the best option of all” to look more like “saving lives for absurdly low amounts of money” than like “getting money directly to the poor and letting them spend it as they will.”

Our response to this line of thinking is that the challenges of analyzing and solving problems half a world away, at scale, are real and significant – not so significant that we should drop all attempts to do better than cash transfers, but significant enough that we shouldn’t assume we’ll see much better options than cash transfers either. Having looked far and wide for underfunded yet evidence-backed interventions, we’ve concluded that having a high enough level of technocratic knowledge to do “better than cash” isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. The bar is high, and we’ve only found one charity that (not overwhelmingly) clears it. And to us, doing extraordinary analysis means being willing to embrace that result, as many less informed donors (who end up taking charities’ bold claims at face value) will not.

With that said, we also don’t think cash transfers should be seen as either an “easy” or an “unexciting” intervention. The difference between wealthy developed-world citizens and the world’s poorest people is massive, and I find it continually stunning how high a percentage of someone’s income I can provide by giving a small percentage of my own. To me, being able to send my dollars directly to the world’s poorest people, living half a world away – with only ~10% diverted to costs along the way – is an astonishing opportunity.