If you want to help poor people, and the only information you have is that they literally are without money, the only conclusion you can get from this data is that if you give them some money, you will make them less poor... well, at least in the short term.
Having information about how specifically these people are and remain poor shows opportunities for other interventions, some of which might be more effective. Thus I would like to know the most frequent "templates" for poverty.
The linked article describes a person who studies and works at two jobs, and lives in an area far away from many useful or cheap things. This can give some specific ideas about helping them. For example giving them enough money to keep only one job; or providing them a free ride to the nearest city. Some of these ideas may be more effective than others; for example if there are more people in the same area with the same problem, you could drive them to the city together by bus, instead of each of them in a separate car. Or a big refrigerator shared among multiple families. Or an advice about how to solve unusual situations that happen once in a while and they have no time to research.
Then there are people who are poor because they don't have a job, and don't even have the education necessary for the job. In that case, completely different specific ideas may be helpful; for example providing them the education or a simple work experience they could mention at a job interview. Or educating their children for free if they fail to understand something at school. Or perhaps teaching them how to do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, if free time is not a constraint. There are possible projects where they provide the work, and you pay for the materials and tools they need. Etc.
I always imagined the latter to be a typical example, and didn't think much about the former. Now that I think about it, all the information I have on the former are from USA, while I have a lot of information on the latter from my country, so maybe it's something country-specific. But maybe it's just my limited information.
EDIT: The original article which inspired these thoughts was a hoax, so whatever conclusions were built on the provided information are extremely unreliable.
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.