Debates about poverty reduction become technical very quickly. While economists and policymakers argue over program design and eligibility rules, research on direct cash transfers shows long-term improvements.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Annie Lowrey examines both historic welfare programs and modern guaranteed-income pilots, revealing a consistent pattern: Direct cash transfers improve lives, especially for children and families, even when some effects only become measurable years or decades later.Short-Term Pilots: What They Showed and Didn’t Show

Recent pilot programs in the U.S., like Baby’s First Years, the Denver Basic Income Project, the Compton Pledge and the OpenResearch Unconditional Income Study, have drawn criticism for showing limited short-term effects on stress, health, psychological well-being, or child development. As one summary put it, “thousands of dollars… and it’s practically invisible in the data.”

Yet these programs did achieve one undeniable outcome: participants had more money. Families spent it on essentials like housing, food, and transportation; mothers in Baby’s First Years were less likely to live in poverty. In other words - an anti-poverty tool reduced poverty.

The limited short-term impact on more complex outcomes can largely be explained by the context. The pilots ran during and after the pandemic, when families already received large federal transfers. They occurred amid high inflation and soaring housing, child care and healthcare costs. Small monthly transfers in wealthy cities could not by themselves reshape long-term economic outcomes.

Short-term studies may understate the power of cash because the most profound benefits often take years or decades to emerge

Long-Term Evidence: Decades of Results

Lowrey highlights hundreds of studies over the past 50 years examining cash transfers. These studies consistently show wide-ranging benefits: Healthier children, reduced malnutrition, better cognitive and physical development in childhood, higher educational attainment, lower incarceration rates, higher lifetime earnings, and reduced inequality.

Many of the most transformative effects take years, or even decades, to emerge. Historical programs like Mothers’ Pensions (1910s–1930s) illustrate this: While effects on the mothers were mostly hidden, their children later achieved higher lifetime earnings, more education and better long-term outcomes. Cash works. But some of the  most important benefits simply take time to appear.

Context Matters: Poverty, Costs, and Scale

Cash transfers have much larger impacts where deprivation is severe. In low-income contexts, even modest transfers can be life-changing. In wealthy urban areas, structural costs like rent, childcare, and health expenses limit the impact of small transfers. That does not make cash ineffective, it shows that context, scale, and timing matter.

The Takeaway

The takeaway from Lowrey’s article is not that cash transfers have failed, but that we are judging them with the wrong expectations and with the wrong timeframe. Cash does exactly what it is supposed to do: reduce poverty and create the conditions for long-term improvement. And history shows those long-term improvements can be significant, even if they only become visible decades later.

Cash transfers are powerful because they give people and their families the resources to meet today’s needs while building the foundation for a better future.