Paul Niehaus: World’s Fastest Growing Charity Gives Cash Directly
Summary:
In this episode, we speak to Paul Niehaus. Paul is an economist and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder, director, and former president of GiveDirectly, the leading international NGO specializing in cash transfers, and rated one of the most impactful ways to give. He is also an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego, which works on anti-poverty programs around the world. He holds a PhD in Economics from Havard. He professionally always wanted to do something that would reflect his Christian background and would make the world better, and this drove him to co-found GiveDirectly to tackle global poverty, as well as fintech non-profits.
Some things we touch on in this episode:
How poverty alleviation through direct cash transfers works.
Whether people receiving direct cash transfers use funds appropriately.
Whether poverty alleviation is about meeting spiritual or physical needs.
How much we need to give to end extreme poverty.
The role of the local Church.
Paul’s career advice to young Christians looking to be impactful in the world.
Articles, organizations, and other media discussed in this episode
GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization operating in East Africa that helps families living in extreme poverty by making unconditional cash transfers to them via mobile phone.
Segovia is a financial technology company co-founded by Paul that improves the efficiency of aid by making it faster, cheaper, and more secure to transfer funds directly to vulnerable populations.
Kiva is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, that claims to allow people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students in 80 countries.
The Global Innovation Fund is a non-profit, impact-first investment fund that invests in the development, rigorous testing, and scaling up of new products, services, business processes, or policy reforms that are more cost-effective than current practice and targeted at improving the lives of the world's poorest people.
GiveWell is an independent nonprofit focused on helping people do as much good as possible with their donations.
Development Innovation Venture is USAID's open innovation program that funds breakthrough solutions to the world's toughest development challenges.
Development in Mission by Rob Gailey is a book that encourages Christians to respond to Jesus’ words "Blessed are you who are poor" by embracing a holistic approach to poverty alleviation.
When Helping Hurts by Brian Fikkert is a book that articulates a biblically based framework concerning the root causes of poverty and its alleviation.
EconTalk podcast, a weekly podcast where Russ Roberts interviews authors, economists, innovators, and people from all walks of life.
Happier Lives Institute connects donors, researchers, and policymakers with the most cost-effective ways to increase global well-being.
Shrewd Samaritan by Bruce Wydick covers the root causes of poverty, on the mindset that flows from the teachings of Jesus.
Episode Highlights:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim good news to the poor”
[00.04.44] “‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim good news to the poor’…and right there that’s an essential centerpiece of the ministry of Jesus. So it’s just a very easy choice for Christians as well.”
Just simply giving money to people living in extreme poverty just seemed to work
[00.08.23] “Just simply giving money to people living in extreme poverty just seemed to work a whole lot better than we were led to believe… There was a huge gap between people’s perceptions and the reality.”
Creating a healthy balance between humility and ambition
[00.11.33] “ We felt this tension where on the one hand the ambition of saying let’s really think big and consider dramatic changes to the way we fight extreme poverty and at the same time this humility of saying, it’s largely not going to be us we are just an intermediary vehicle through which money can flow to other people and it is going to be them and their efforts and the things that they do… thus creating a healthy balance between humility and ambition.”
Others will praise God because they see your generosity
[00.13.09] “ Others will praise God because they see your generosity inspired by your faith in the Gospel. Let your light shine before men…I think that’s a big issue, I don’t think that people of today look at Church and say ‘Wow! It’s surprising how generous they are so there must be something to it so I think that’s a wake-up call for the Church and something to take very seriously. ”
We have a core challenge that people don’t give enough.
[00.23.20] “ We have a core challenge that people don’t give enough, we’re just nowhere near generous enough to seriously address Global Poverty. ”
“Forget what I like and what I wanna do.
[00.41.42] “I think we’ve got to find some way to get to communities that are much more like people getting together and saying ‘forget what I wanna do. What is God doing? How can I be a part of that? What is He inviting me into and calling me into?;’”
Be open to the possibility that an idea could have an impact through any one of those institutional mechanisms or challenges
[00.52.45] “It’s wonderful if you can not define yourself by any one of those sectors but sort of be open to the possibility that an idea could have an impact through any one of those institutional mechanisms or challenges… be open to all of those things and not to narrow yourself too early.”
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JD (00:02)
I'm JD, and this is the Christians for Impact podcast. We talk to Christians about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to impact them during and after university. Today, I'm speaking with Paul Nihaus about extreme poverty and how to stop it with cash transfers. Paul is an economist, an entrepreneur. He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard. He is cofounder former president and current director at a nonprofit called GiveDirectly. It's the leading international NGO specialized in cash transfers, and it's rated as one of the most impactful ways to give. His, which he co founded while still a grad student, has now simply given, no strings attached, over a billion dollars to people living in extreme poverty. We talk about how that works, whether people use funds appropriately, whether poverty alleviation is primarily about meeting physical or spiritual needs, and how much we would all need to give to end extreme poverty. Finally, we touch on the role of the local church. So, fascinating conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. All, thanks so much for coming on.
Paul (01:19)
Thanks, JD, it's great to be here.
JD (01:21)
Could you take a moment to share a bit about your background, your studies, and also your faith?
Paul (01:25)
Yeah. I grew up Christian and a Christian family going to church and I think always had a clear sense that whatever I did professionally should in some sense be reflective of that. And so for me, there was not a big ara moment or an epiphany where I decided I wanted to work on global development. It evolved pretty naturally for me as I grew up and thought about what to study in school and so forth. So we went to college. I was looking for something quantitative that I thought would be useful for making the world better. And so I was thinking about things like engineering and also economics, and got started doing economics as an undergrad and just loved it. We can talk more about why that is and whether or that love has been sustained or whether my appreciation of it has changed over the years. But yeah, I had a great time and went on to grad school. It was right at the time when people were starting to do a bunch of experimental testing, which I think we'll talk about. So there was also a tremendous amount of energy and excitement around that.
Paul (02:19)
I felt like there was a real opportunity, a real promise, using those tools to tackle global poverty, which is what I've been doing since just briefly in terms of what I've done professionally, what I do now. I'm an economist at UC San Diego, and in that capacity, I do work on anti poverty programs around the world, trying to understand how to make them work better and work better for the people that we're trying to help. And then I've also started a series of companies, a nonprofit, Give, directly. And then a couple of for profits in the fintech space and the payment space, segovia and top taps and all very different endeavors, but all in some sense about trying to amplify capital flows to people living in extreme poverty.
JD (02:58)
That's great. Thanks so much. When I think about, as a Christian having an impact in the world and advancing God's kingdom, I don't often think about economics. At least I do now. I suppose when I was younger, this EAS a bit foreign to me, this idea. It's often considered a dismal science. It can be a bit dry, a bit business like why were you drawn to economics? And why would you say it's important for having a Christ centered social impact?
Paul (03:21)
Yeah, dismal science land is sort of a weird one. It has like, bizarre origins in some essay by Thomas Carlyle. I don't think there's anything dismal about economics per se. It can certainly have a sort of a bit of a hard nosed pragmatism to it at times. I think some of that comes from the sort of seriousness with which we take causality and trying to get good answers to the sort of causal impact of things we care about. Some of it is the formalism as well. But, I mean, if you look at the things that economists do, like if you actually came and sat in some seminars and some conference talks and things, people are looking at things like how do we reduce malnutrition among kids? How do we reduce domestic violence? How do we make labor markets work better for people and help people find jobs that are fulfilling and rewarding for them? So it's all very human stuff that I think we care deeply about.
JD (04:07)
And why extreme poverty as a cause area for you? What in your background drew you to this? I know many Christians feel called to tackle different problems and you would consider extreme poverty, if I understand correctly, to be perhaps the main cause that you are tackling. Why that?
Paul (04:23)
Yeah, I think that sort of question is why not? Right? It's sort of an obvious thing in the sense that, first, if you were to just look analytically at our world today through a purely secular lens and say, what are the big challenges facing humanity? The causes in which it would be exciting to devote one's career, that's obviously one of them. But then second, it's obviously just so central to the biblical narrative, to the gospel message. To be sure, throughout the Gospels, the way Jesus spoke and the way he interacted with people and the kinds of people that he interacted with. I really love Luke Four, which is sort of there's this passage where he comes back from the wilderness and shows up in synagogue for the first time to sort of announce the beginning of his ministry. And he reads this passage from Isaiah that says, the Spirit of the Lord is on me to proclaim good news to the poor. It's kind of right there from the start that that's going to be a centerpiece of his ministry and that that's going to be an essential characteristic of this inbreaking kingdom of God that he's proclaiming.
Paul (05:17)
So just a very easy choice for Christians as well.
JD (05:21)
So give directly what you're most known for. It's operated now on a very large scale. I think it gives somewhere around $300 million a year to the world's poorest people. And that's a very direct form of poverty alleviation. I'm curious how, as a Christian, you see it perhaps also in a spiritual way. Jesus came to proclaim good news for the poor. Do you see this as material good news, spiritual good news, some combination of both?
Paul (05:51)
Yeah. I mean, primarily materials, just to be very direct. I think that we're integrated beings. And so the sort of hard separation between our sort of physical material selves and our spiritual selves isn't the right way to think. It's just not a counterfactual or it's not the right way to think about reality. And so I think there are kind of clear relationships between these. And if you look at some of the research on the impact of cash transfers, you see some of that sort of spreading out of impact from the purely material outcomes. Like, are people getting enough food to eat? Do they have a roof over their heads? Are they finding jobs that work for them? These sorts of things to some of these other things like people's mental health right, or the quality of their relationship. So there's a literature that looks at the impacts of cash transfers on domestic violence, which is a really serious issue in some of these places. So I think you sort of clearly see that sort of integration, that wholeness in some of that. But I wouldn't say that sort of the purpose or the intent with cash transfers is we think this is the best way to kind of improve people's relational or their spiritual lives.
Paul (06:49)
It's saying there's going to be integration and connection between all of those things. But this is primarily as with addressing sickness, right? Or as with addressing poverty. It's about addressing sort of people's material needs.
JD (07:02)
Could you give us a sense of the arc of give directly? You can also mention your other projects as well, but mostly give directly how that started and what it's doing now to meet those needs that you mentioned.
Paul (07:15)
Yeah, well, we started in a proverbial garage, I guess the garage being grad school in this case. There are four of us. We're all doing graduate degrees in development economics. As I mentioned. It was a time when there was a bunch of new experimental work being done, and that's now a big part of our world. It was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2019 for the sort of leaders of that movement. But at the time it was very novel. And I think I want to emphasize that because I think a lot of us have this idea that we've been doing global development work for 60, 70 years now. And so presumably we know a lot and we don't. For a very long time we had a lot of theories of change which were sometimes plausible and interesting, maybe important, but actually very little evidence that I would consider credible of what actually worked. I had a lot of anecdote, personal experience, things like that. It's only in the last 20 years or so with the advent of this experimental movement that in my opinion, we sort of have put these theories of change to the test.
Paul (08:12)
So we were in a grad school at a time when all this was starting. One of the things that really struck us was how in a lot of these early tests, just simply giving money to people living in extreme poverty seemed to work a whole lot better than we had been led to believe. That was really striking. And a lot of other lessons, of course, that have come out from that. And cash transfer is what was the best answer, all the sort of caveats that you'd expect. But we really felt like there was a huge gap between people's perceptions and the reality there. And then second, that there was no way for individual people like us to give and that there ara to be. So that was the basis on which we found to give directly. The other kind of key factor was it was at a moment where the digital payments technology to do this safely was getting much, much better. So we started out using mobile money technology, the Safari.com system in Kenya, that sort of thing is now essentially ubiquitous. So I would sort of think of the world we live in now as one in which, more or less we can send money safely to anybody we want to.
Paul (09:07)
And the question is whether we should. So we started give directly, started out Friends and Family 2011. We opened it up to the public. I led for the first five years or so. We grew up to $50 million a year in revenue. My co founder Michael Fay took over at that point and grown from there. As you say. We're now sort of at around $300 million a year. Rory Stewart joined us this year as our new CEO. It's very exciting. And so we're thinking very big and very ambitiously. We sort of think to us, the sort of the space in which we're playing is the sort of global poverty gap, right? The sort of $100 billion a year so that it would take to get everybody living under the extreme poverty line up to it. And we're saying, how big of a part of that can we be and how can we inspire others to be the rest of it?
JD (09:49)
How big of a part of that can you be? What are you dreaming up to you, Rory, Michael, the whole team. And you went from a few million a year to 300 million a year in just, what, ten years. What do the next ten years look like?
Paul (10:02)
Yeah, so this is very rapid growth for the nonprofit sector, and I think it's the fastest, one of the fastest growing nonprofits over that time. These numbers are still small by private sector skills, and the biggest international NGOs are sort of a billion, maybe $2 billion a year in revenue. So we have to be realistic about that and say we could be ten times as big as the biggest guy, and we still wouldn't be the entirety of the global poverty gap. So, absolutely, let's have that ambition to try to get to that scale. But let's also recognize that there's got to be a role for the public sector, for governments in these countries where we work. That's a big part of it as well, and that's always the hardest part to quantify of what we've been doing. But I think there has been a sort of perceivable shift in the narrative about cash transfer. It's much less skepticism now than there was when we started out ten years ago. And I think that undeniably. By just doing it and then defending making the case for doing it, I think we've contributed to some extremely that.
JD (10:54)
It'S been a really remarkable story of growth so far, and a blessing, and I'm really grateful for the progress that GiveDirectly has been able to make. I'm curious how you, as a Christian think about ambition and tackling big projects. So there is perhaps risk or warnings in Scripture about dreaming too big, about building a Tower of Babel, about assuming through human hubris that we can accomplish all there's some kind of tension there with a certain kind of simple trusting of God, childlike faith and meekness. How do you reconcile that tension when you're dreaming big for Give directly?
Paul (11:32)
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I think we've always felt that as well, in the sense that give directly is a secular organization. But we felt this tension between, on the one hand, the ambition of saying, let's really think big and consider dramatic changes to the way we fight extreme poverty, and at the same time this humility of saying, it's largely not going to be us. We are just an intermediary of vehicle through which money can flow to other people, and it is going to be them and their efforts and the things they do. And so I think there is a sort of healthy balance between ambition and humility that's sort of built in to give directly to ethos and model, which I appreciate. So I think all of that is right. I think that you're right as well, that as Christians, there's sort of an extra layer of that that we should bring to it. But I see both of those things in the Gospels, in the New Testament, I see Paul's ambition and at the same time his acceptance and his ability to be content in all circumstances. And he seems to me to be sort of an outlier in both of those dimensions.
Paul (12:25)
And I think that for us personally, that's something to aspire to.
JD (12:29)
You mentioned Paul. Thanks for that. And looking at one thing that Paul said in his second letter to the Corinthians, he makes a comment that one reason for giving is not only supplying the needs of the poor, but also to allow the recipients the opportunity to give, quote, many thanksgivings to God. This is in two Corinthians 912. So how do you think this ought to affect the way that Christians think about the mechanism of cash and service delivery?
Paul (12:55)
Yeah, I don't know if there's an application to sort of give directly to specifically, I think, as I sort of understood that passage, you know, then goes on to sort of elaborate, I think, and say that others will praise God because they see your generosity inspired by your faith in the gospel, this sort of idea. So I sort of think it's sort of essentially a let your light shine before men point that EAS sort of people see this, they're going to say, there's a real thing here because these people are being surprisingly generous and so there must be something to it. Right? And I think that's a big issue. Right. I don't think that people today sort of look at the church and say, wow, it's surprising how generous they are. So there must be something to it. So I think that's a bit of a wakeup call for the church and something to take very seriously. There is also for me this sort of interesting tension between that and this sort of teaching about sort of avoiding the search, the quest for public recognition individually in our giving. Right. This idea of not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing when you give.
Paul (13:47)
And so I haven't seen sort of a lot of thoughts on that. I haven't seen a lot of discussion about how we balance those two things in church and in the faith. But I think that that's to me the essence of it.
JD (14:00)
Yeah, I think there is a tension there because you have that verse, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. But you also have the other math. I think it's a Matthew verse, right? Let your light shine before men so they can yeah, see your Father in heaven and rejoice. Right. So, yeah, I think that is a tension. One perspective I've heard to try to resolve that tension is that when we give, it's good to give in community so that we individually don't take credit for it, but the community with some kind of Christian Christian identity gets credit for it and through that, Christ gets credit for it. So that's one motivation of the christian campaign for Effective Charity, which is trying to direct money to give directly and to give well, charities, really effective charities in Christ's name, although some might see it as well. We don't have to give through a Christian fund or a Christian community to really help the poor and to give God glory. So, yeah, I think those are interesting themes. And how much do we need to make clear in this life? How much will be made clear a judgment day when we all see Jesus face to face and all the intentions of all of our hearts and all of our deeds are made known in front of a God who loves us?
JD (15:14)
I think those are really tricky themes. Do you have any more thoughts on that?
Paul (15:18)
No, that's been my answer as well, I think the sort of the aggregation idea and so I think that's right. It reminds me a little bit of I don't know if at one point on Kiva you could create these clubs and sort of give us groups and there was for a while at least, the two that were competing for the top spot were the Christians and the atheists. So I always thought that was fun.
JD (15:36)
Do you know who won that one?
Paul (15:38)
We should check on Kiva.
JD (15:39)
We should. Kiva. This is the micro loan cash transfer service.
Paul (15:45)
Exactly.
JD (15:46)
Great. Speaking about micro loans and about Christians getting credit or being a part of helping the poor. A lot of Christians in the US, I think most evangelical Christians, see this drive to help the poor as something that is is part of the gospel and cannot be separated from the gospel. That both need to be done in the same program in many ways together, that the local church should be a part of delivering services to the poor. One person who represents this you is Brian Fickert. In his book When Helping Hurts, he talks about all these different ways that charity can go wrong. It very much aligns with what you said earlier about how little we really know about development and what works. But then he goes on to say that we need to make sure that the local church is a direct part of I don't want to misframe his argument here, but he does put a strong emphasis on the local church. He's a bit skeptical of secular institutions that try to alleviate poverty. When poverty is such a multi dimensional thing. How do you wrestle with those arguments? Do you think the local church needs to be involved in the delivery of services?
JD (17:02)
And sorry for the loaded question, but is it possible as a Christian to support secular programs that don't mention the gospel and still be faithful to the gospel?
Paul (17:11)
Great. Yeah, there's a ton of ground in there, so I'll pick a few things to respond to and you can follow up on anything else that you want us to be sure we address first. I think there's just this sort of very basic point that Brian makes in his book, which is we shouldn't assume that because we intend, well, it's going to work out the way we want it. And there has to be some account accountability, some test of whether it's actually doing the things we hope for. And I think that I couldn't agree more with, I hope we would all agree with. And I think that's been a big part of the last 20 years. It meant a lot of the time since Brian wrote his book, which we just have a lot more data now on the impact that various things have. And so Brian's actually been very helpful and supportive and give directly and sort of helping us kind of get to know more people in his community. So I think he's been supportive of the concept and the idea. I think the second there's this question of integration versus separation in what we do and I find this hard to answer because there's frankly so little of the sort of empirical evidence that I look for on the impact of these words, the spiritual impact, I guess, of the more integrated or spiritual activities.
Paul (18:13)
And so I don't think that that sort of evidence is the only basis on which we make decisions. It could be that somebody's very poorly called to do a thing and you do it. So I'm confined with that. But in some sense I think it is hard to compare. But I guess I would say that there are like many, many cases in the gospel where Jesus very clearly just addresses some of the nice material issue and then says don't tell anybody, right, or your faith has made you well. And that's it. I don't know that there necessarily always has to be sort of integration between the two things. I think for me personally, if I had the opportunity to say here's why I'm doing it, I would want to be able to do that, that would be great. So I would really welcome and value that. But I don't think that there's sort of a bright line that it has to be one or the other. The last question sort of an institutional question about the sort of the institutional frameworks within which we do this. And so my understanding is that over the last decades there has been sort of a big move away from churches, sort of managing ministries, EAS you will sort of service delivery ministries themselves towards partnering with parachurch organizations that do those things right.
Paul (19:14)
And I think there are a bunch of reasons why, but that's sort of been the overall arc and the trajectory on which we're headed. And so I think that they're probably both good and bad drivers for that. But that's sort of the world we live in today, that there aren't a lot of churches that have a ton of institutional capacity to do a lot of service delivery themselves. And so I think that probably start there.
JD (19:37)
So we mentioned Brian Figurt, and we had the chance to talk to Brian on an earlier episode. And Brian was critical of randomized control trials being the end all, be all in development. He asserted that they are useful and we should use them as Christians, but we should know their proper place, what they can and can't tell us. And I think in particular, he was a bit critical of the kind of fickleness with which the international development community would weigh in and weigh out of interventions based off of what the latest round of evidence happened to say from RCTs. I think, although he maybe didn't mention it, he might have been referring also to microcredit and the place of micro loans in helping the poor. How would you see the place of randomized control trials doing a B testing, trying to do these scientifically rigorous ways of measuring poverty? How do you see the place of that? Because when there's so much data out there and so many things that we can't measure, should we really be focusing all our efforts on RCTs?
Paul (20:45)
I just think that that's a bit of a straw man. Like we're not close to focusing all of our efforts on RCTs. The vast share of development spending doesn't get evaluated rigorously at all. So it's certainly true that you could go too far with it. I just think we're so far on the other side of the curve, and microcredit is actually a great example of that. So I'm not sure what the conversation with Brian was, but microcredit grew to become a massive global movement, an enormous bandwagon, before there was any experimental evaluation of it at all. And when the kind of first round of experimental evaluations were actually finally done, they were somewhat less positive than I think people had hoped. Not terrible, but it was sort of essentially saying that there's a subset of the population for whom this helps them to grow a business they already had. A lot of other people are using it more for things like consumption smoothing, kind of like helping to get through a tough time when somebody is sick or lost a job or something like that. So it's just a much more nuanced picture about what people do with it.
Paul (21:34)
It posed to this very simplistic narrative of, like, everybody's a micro entrepreneur and they just need a loan to start a business and thrive and all these kinds of things, right? So to me, that's a classic example of the way in which the industry tends to get ahead of itself if there is not some sanity check, some reality check that forces us to say, like, our theory is right, do they actually work? I have plenty of criticisms and critiques of the way RCTs are done or play out in practice, which I'm happy to share, but I think sort of at a high level. We're just way on the other side of the curve. Like, we need more, not less.
JD (22:04)
You said that very little is done with RCTs, and RCTs are maybe not the only way to do good development or have an impact on global poverty. But roughly what percentage of development do you think is guided by how should I put this? Let me put it this way. If you had $10 million to research the best ways to tackle the development problems in ways that we haven't so far, it sounds like RCTs already that's been well researched through the 90s up to now. There's still more being found out about that. What does the future look like with regards to finding high impact interventions in global development?
Paul (22:50)
Yeah, I think there's lots of good stuff that happens. Somebody has an idea and there are mechanisms now for financing tests of it. There are sort of smart funders like the Global Innovations Fund or GiveWell Development Innovations Ventures that will fund a test to see if people's new ideas actually work. So I think that sort of ecosystem has developed and is not in terrible shape. To me, something that would be really exciting is to kind of tie an evidence generating or research agenda sort of to some kind of broader word chain goal that we think we could mobilize people around. Because I think the core we have a core challenge that people don't give enough. Right? We're just nowhere near generous enough to seriously address global poverty. And so a thing that I would love to do with $10 million is to say, I want to do the math to figure out what it would take to end extreme poverty. How much money would we have to give every year and how much is that, JD, as a percentage of your income and my income? Like, if we all gave X percent of our income, what X would it take to end extreme poverty?
Paul (23:47)
And to do that, I would need to do some calculations that would involve some there might be some experimental work to understand things like what are the macroeconomic impacts of transfers on that kind of scale, which would be really large. And there would also be some statistical work right. Doing things like how well can I predict how much money it takes to get JB out of poverty if I see some things about him? Right? So it would be a range of things, not just RCTs, but I think you could build a really exciting and comprehensive research agenda around a concrete actionable question like that, which to me would then sort of make our moral obligations much clearer where instead of saying, just keep giving because there's always more need, I can say, like here's what it would take for all of us to do our part to ending this global problem. To me, sort of a research agenda like that, that's focused on some sort of ultimate. Action is really exciting and compelling.
JD (24:33)
What's, like the Fem estimate of how much we would need to all give in order to stop global poverty or stop extreme poverty? Lift everybody out of that one dollars 90 a day threshold. If you did the math real quick, what would that world look like? And how different is that from the world we live in today? From from like, the west perspective, or from a giving perspective even? Would it even cost much?
Paul (25:01)
Yeah. Gutted my head right now. My guess is 2%.
JD (25:05)
If we all gave 2% to give to cash transfers or the most effective programs we could yeah.
Paul (25:11)
Doing it in a purely mechanical way, which is every year we all give 2% and then we sort of allocate that money up among the people who are living in extreme poverty based on what we think we know about their standards of living. I think that's my guess. So we got to actually do the math more carefully than that, but I think it's going to be in that ballpark.
JD (25:26)
Right, so then it's a question, a social science question of how we get uptake from people to give more to give more effectively as well.
Paul (25:35)
Yeah. And that's the point, right. That I think there's this sense that it's this, like, horrible, huge intractable problem. You probably know this if you survey people and ask them, has poverty been getting better or worse? Most people think it's been getting worse, and since the pandemic, there's been a setback. Right. But I mean, up until then, the answer is, like, overwhelmingly that it's been getting much better. People are getting up. So there's just this massive misperception. And I think we need very simple, concrete ways of countering that and saying, no, we can do this. You should do your bid.
JD (26:02)
So right now, there's something like six or 700 million people living under $2 a day. Most of these ara are in in the 1040 window or SubSaharan Africa and ara. There other places that come to mind where extreme poverty is most clustered.
Paul (26:19)
Yeah. I mean, that's broadly, right. The challenging areas are increasingly areas where there's serious conflict. Right. So you're kind of increasingly seeing poverty in places where governance is weak and it's hard to sort of actually get in. So that's sort of like but if we get to that point, right, where those are the places that we can't do something about because we've already solved it in all the places where there's an effective state, then that would be a good problem to have.
JD (26:40)
So if we all gave enough to just send cash to people who are extremely poor, how do we know that they're going to use this money well? How do we know that it's not going to get expropriated by corrupt authorities? How do we know that people aren't going to spend it? Some people accuse others of spending it on drugs and alcohol or something. That wouldn't lead to their flourishing. I know you've done a lot of research on this. How would you summarize what you found?
Paul (27:10)
Yeah, so that was the point, even when we started that at that point, there had been a number of these really well done studies and since then there have been an order of magnitude more. And so there's an enormous amount to summarize. But I'd say a very fair high level synthesis is we generally just don't see the sorts of, on average, the kinds of negative impacts that people had feared about people spending money on alcohol, tobacco, people working less, things like that. In general, if anything, you see a bit of the opposite, people working a bit more, people spending a bit less on alcohol, things like that. There are certainly people out there who received cash transfers and went out and bought boots. And so part of the dynamic here is that you can always find stories that are good or that are bad about any particular intervention. And so if those stories are what we talk about, you can argue any case, but that's been the overall impact in the studies and then lots of positive impacts that are very varied depending on the setting, depending on the family. That's sort of the point that there isn't going to be any one thing that happens when you give money to people living in extreme poverty, because they're all different, their circumstances are different, their goals are different, their opportunities are different, and so forth.
Paul (28:13)
And so I think there's a kind of a very compelling case based on that and it sort of looks like these are people on average, they're people. Like the donors are people as well. Sometimes they make good decisions, sometimes they make mistakes, but generally speaking, they're better off than they would be without the money.
JD (28:28)
I appreciated the point you or Michael made on the Econ Talk podcast you did about thatched roofs versus tin roofs. When people got more money, they spent it on thatched roofs or tin roofs instead. Could you share a little bit about that and how you reacted to that before and after you learned why?
Paul (28:45)
Right, yeah. The context there is we started out working in a part of Kenya where sort of a lot of better off people will have a roof made out of metal sheeting and a lot of less well off people will have a roof made out of that. And it was actually such a sort of clear divider between the somewhat better off and somewhat worse off families that we were using it as an eligibility criteria. So we would target transfers to the people with the thatch roofs because generally they tend to be the poorer families, community within a community. One of the things that was really striking in the early RCTs is a lot of people would then take the money and buy metal roofs and replace their batch of metal. And so that hadn't really been on our radar beforehand as sort of the thing that people opt to do to get out of poverty or to kind of advance out of poverty. And so we were interested in it. And it turns out there are a lot of benefits to this. You can sort of sleep better at night because the roof doesn't leak on you.
Paul (29:33)
You can collect clean drinking water from it if you want to, instead of having to trek 2 miles to the river. But a very simple way to think about the economics of it is that the thatch deteriorates, and you have to replace it or repair it. Every so often, the metal lasts a lot longer. And so you can calculate the sort of implied ROI, the internal rate of return on the investment. And we think it worked out to something like 2020 5% a year. So that's one very specific example. What's the point? The point is there is this pretty high rate return investment that was just nowhere on our radar as outsiders coming in, but which was a pretty obvious thing to these people to do because they live there and they know what they're doing. And so I think that was a good example of this broader point, that it's sort of easy to come in as outsiders and say, oh, well, you ought to buy livestock or buy a motorcycle or do this or that, and miss a really high return investment opportunity. That's obvious to the people who live there.
JD (30:21)
It's also a good reminder of this other point you were mentioning about how material and spiritual poverty aren't that far apart from each other. It was either you or Michael who mentioned that the recipients of these grants who went in and bought a tin roof, when asked why they did that, they would often just mention that they were sick and tired of seeing their kids getting wet when it rains, just seeing the water go through those fast roofs. And that's a huge challenge to human dignity. And, like, I can barely imagine what that kind of living would be, where day in, day out, water gets through on my kids.
Paul (30:58)
Yeah.
JD (30:59)
Were there any other shocking a story like that really just hammers home how far removed? A lot of speaking as an American, a lot of Americans like myself are from those kinds of extreme living standards. I think sometimes we're tempted to think about helping those who are poor is helping those who are essentially homeless in the US or by US. Standards, or helping people who don't have enough money to get a new car or a nice house or something like that. How would you paint a picture of the life of extreme poverty for those who are living under $2 a day?
Paul (31:45)
I don't think I can. And I've been really struck by this. I'll do my best, obviously, since you asked, but I just want to be upfront. I've been really struck all the course of my career. I go to many meetings, conferences, discussions about extreme poverty. And I don't think I've been to one where there was somebody there who had actually experienced it. You know, it's just like that divorce is so great. And so even for people that are sort of considered experts such as myself in this area, that gap is so great. I think the things that are probably important to try to appreciate are the things such as those you mentioned, the sorts of relational and emotional impact of it. The sort of constant stress of having to juggle a bunch of different balls to make sure that there is food on the table and the fear that you might have to put kids to bed hungry and have to apologize to them for not being able to feed them. Or the stress of having to decide which kid gets to go to school and which kid has to go to work. I think those are the sorts of things which, if you think about them, you can perhaps start to cultivate some appreciation for what the emotional and spiritual experience of it might be like.
Paul (32:48)
But the honest answer is I haven't experienced it. I don't know. So I can understand it through the stories and the statistics as best as I can.
JD (32:57)
What do you say to criticisms of cash transfers that go something like this? Cash transfers are good. We know that they are on average effective. But we know that some things are even better. That by some metrics you can have much more impact by saving a life from malaria nets or by providing group talk therapy that's better for people's spiritual or emotional well being. And there's been a lot of, I guess, news around this not only from Give Wells analyses, but also more recently from Happier, Happier Lives Institute. They've introduced a new metric for measuring. Wellbeing. How do you respond to that?
Paul (33:38)
Yeah, I mean, at first I absolutely think there are, in some circumstances, some places, things that will do better. And I support that. One of the things I like about economics is that we have this framework for thinking about when ought to be able to do better than just transferring money directly to people. And that leads our attention to what economists call externalities public goods. So classic example of an externality sort of a setting where what I do has much broader impacts on the people around me than just on me myself, you know, would be an infectious disease setting. And so, you know, if I use a bed net, that not only reduces the chance that I get sick, but it also reduces the risk that other people in my community get sick as well. And so therefore, we expect that I'm probably less likely to use a bed net than I really ought to be because I don't, in fact, love my neighbor as much as I love myself, although we would like that. And so it makes perfect sense to me that the kinds of things GiveWell has recommended over the years, in addition to cash transfers, have been things that look very much like that, things that deal with infectious disease, things like where there's a clear externality.
Paul (34:36)
So I think that's all to the good. I think the thing I push back against is once you start thinking about these questions that you raised, which are tough, right? Like, how do I think about quality of life versus mortality, risk versus happiness and all these sorts of things, I really don't feel comfortable putting myself in the position to make those choices. I think that's kind of giving myself too close to Godlike powers over other people's lives. I'd much rather other people be given the opportunity to make those choices and trade offs themselves and to kind of bear the moral responsibility that comes with that as much as possible. There are times when I think there's a case to be made, but I think that we too often sort of start from the default position that we are the ones who are going to determine the ethical weights and make those trade offs as opposed to questioning whether we should be in the first place.
JD (35:24)
So you mentioned ethical weights. GiveWell does have these moral weights, which are ways of comparing the goodness of two different outcomes, say, comparing the goodness of saving the life of someone who is five years old from malaria compared to the goodness of doubling a household's income for a year. And we do our best from the outside looking in to make an informed decision about what might be good for the people we're trying to help. So you say that it doesn't feel like we're in a position to do that properly, but does that mean we shouldn't try? And if we see great potentials to improve well being, we might not be sure that it's as good as what people would spend the money on themselves. But is it always paternalistic to make that choice if there's a clear case that something might be just phenomenally effective in a way that just you're not able to communicate that if you're giving them a cash transfer? I think of water chlorination, malaria nets is a great example. I don't want to put words in your mouth because you didn't use the word paternalistic, but some might say it's always paternalistic to prefer these things over just directly giving cash.
JD (36:46)
Is there any point where you would push back against that?
Paul (36:49)
Yeah, I guess. I think in terms of the way we design our decision making processes and say I would prefer a process where there's sort of a strong presumption that if we're trying to help JD, JD should have a meaningful say in that. And if I can't convince JD that something is in his best interest there should be a high bar for them to going ahead and saying, well, even though this isn't what JD thinks is best for him, I'm going to do it anyway. And I'm okay with the possibility that sometimes that would be the outcome of the process. But I would like a process where there is that starting point or that presumption that JD should have some voice in it. But I think that both is more likely to lead to sort of consequentially good outcomes and also matters procedurally per se.
JD (37:28)
Right? So it's respecting my dignity and in a sense you're following a duty to give me this choice, but also it leads to better outcomes and consequences. If we allow me this choice, in the long run that will lead to.
Paul (37:41)
A better I think it often would. Right. I think it would have avoided a lot of the sort of really egregious mistakes or silly things that we've done over the years in international development if the people we were trying to help had more say in how the money got spent.
JD (37:53)
So I think some would hear this and say, well then the local church needs to be a part of what's happening in global development and being a part of these decisions of where the money goes and what it's being spent on. Is there any way that local churches can partner with give directly or partner with doing cash transfers? I know micro loans have become fashionable among local church development programs or sorry, international development programs that local churches partner with. Do you see any opportunities for churches to support give directly or to replicate it in some way?
Paul (38:31)
Yeah, I've been mulling this as well and so I think it's interesting to think about together first. I think that there's a sense in which sort of church to church direct transfers were sort of the original model. Right. As far as I can tell, when you look at churches helping each other out in the New Testament, it was not that they were sort of designing holistic programs to address each other's development problems, they would just sort of send money to communities that were having a hard time. We don't have the details in terms of how that thing got used or divided up. Right. But I think that was relatively simple. I think there's totally scope for things that are more like that. I would think of GiveDirectly as being a really sort of high quality, well run, professional, reliable option for doing that, but also there being a lot of long term value in building relationships within sort of international churches and parachute organizations that will let us do that as well, I think would be great. And so I've seen some discussion of that in sort of big international denominations. As cash transfers have become more and more salient.
Paul (39:28)
I think you're right that there's still much more we're still sort of maybe a decade behind in terms of the relative emphasis of that compared to microcredit some of these other things that were like super hip a decade ago. But I think there's like lots of opportunities to go in that direction.
JD (39:42)
Do you think there are any initiatives in the US. That could get people more excited about giving? We talked about this earlier that if everyone could just give 2% to tackle extreme poverty in effective ways, we could we could transform things with God's help. I remember growing up, I went to the 30 hours Famine. You might have mentioned this as well in in a previous conversation we had where we would not eat for 30 hours. We'd raise money to buy canned goods to give to the poor. I think that's organized by World Vision. What's the next 30 Hours famine? What are the next kind of social entrepreneurial things we could do to just inspire Christians to have this radical love for the poor to get excited about this?
Paul (40:30)
Yeah, well, as I said, I think that giving people sort of very clear measurable goals that we could achieve together and sort of showing people how this is collectively within our reach is, I think and hope, one way. I also have a lot of doubt in this area. There are great resources out there right now. There are a couple of good books in the last few years for churches that want to engage with this stuff. Shrewd Samaritan by my friend Bruce Weiden is a wonderful book. Development admission, co authored by my friend Rob Gilly, is a great, very thorough book. It has a full theology of giving to work in international development as well. EAS a kind of very thoughtful review of the evidence. The thing that I feel somewhat broken hearted about is I just don't think there's nearly as much demand for these things as you think there ought to be. And I worry that we need to go deeper than just asking about how do we get people to engage with global poverty, that there's this much deeper issue of the way our mentality towards church in the first place. That if sort of people are thinking about church as I'm going to find a place that has the kind of music that I like and the kind of preaching that I like.
Paul (41:28)
And I'm going to go once a week and then afterwards we'll have a chat about what I liked or didn't like, about the sermon that just feels so far removed from the gospel of Jesus's life and the communities that he built. And so I think we got to find some way to get to communities that are much more like people getting together and saying, like, forget what I like or what I want to do. What is God doing? How can I be a part of that? What is he inviting me into and calling me into and doing stuff like that. So I think there are some examples of that. I really love the Praxis community, for example. Praxis is a group that the community is sort of built around. This concept of redemptive entrepreneurship, brings together people, philanthropists, investors, entrepreneurs to work on that. That, to me, feels more like church, I guess, in some sense, than church often does. So I think there's stuff like that that's exciting, but I feel like there'd have to be more of that in the first place for there to be receptivity to some of the stuff that you and I are talking about on the scale that I'd like to see.
JD (42:25)
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, that would be fantastic to see. Just to see churches centered not only about talking about God's love for us and for the poor, but also living that out, demonstrating with our lives, testifying to the power of Christ through our actions that Christ has changed us. And with the love that we have from God, we can give that back. And that's the reason we give. We give because he first loved us and is also the model for what a whole life looks like, what a fulfilled life looks like. I think with a lot of these questions about should we give to save a life, or give to extend a life or give to improve a life? If we look to Jesus, we get so much inspiration as Christians about what it means to live a truly wonderful life, but not in the ways you'd expect. And we might say Jesus had different purposes for coming and he had a different role to fulfill, but in his words, we find so much inspiration for doing that, it doesn't seem like many of us. Ara really picking up the mantle today. And if you're listening to this right now and you're wondering, how can I pick up the mantle?
JD (43:34)
How can I radically show Jesus's love for the poor? What are some other options for people to get involved? You mentioned giving. There are giving pledges, like a 10% giving pledge. That's something we recommend. Would you recommend an earning to give path where people and I guess you were transitioning into careers? Would you recommend careers for Christians to try to earn money to give to support the poor? Or do you think maybe a more direct path doing something similar to what you're doing would be optimal?
Paul (44:05)
Yeah, no, I think it's great. I mean, at first, I do think you can sort of rethink the way you do church and community. Church is expensive, right? So this number really stuck with me. Right, so like, the typical sort of church costs around $2,000 a year per person to run. Not because we're sort of extravagant or over the top, it's just that's what it costs to rent buildings and have full time staff and things like that. And so that number sticks with me because that's in the ballpark of what GiveWell thinks it costs us to save a life. So if you have a church that's 100 people community church, that's like the opportunity cost of that is 100 lives saved per year, you could find some other way every year. And I realize that's a bit of a harsh comparison, but I do think it's thought provoking and we're thinking about in terms of our priorities, right, and putting our money where God's mouth is at.
JD (44:48)
If I can interject. Do you go to Sunday service? Do you ever see, I don't know, an extravagant new guitar on the stage? And you wonder, well, that right there is what could be be the family in sub Saharan Africa for one year.
Paul (45:04)
I don't think it's extravagant. I mean, I've been part of community church for a while during the pandemic. I've been doing essentially house church with a group. And one thing that's been nice about that is we've been able to give more internationally because we don't have full time staff or spaces. We meet in homes and we prepare messages and conversations ourselves. So I think there's a lot to be said for that and for more of that. But I guess what I'm saying is I'm not trying to critique there is extravagance, right? There is sort of like sort of fireworks and things, but it's not to critique that. I don't think that's the modal thing. It's just to say that even just doing sort of basic community church in the US is expensive. So I think there's that they're sort of thinking about how we do church and what it says about our priorities. I think in terms of career, which you asked about, I think there are sort of lots of things that are exciting to get into. As a Christian, I don't sort of have, I think, 80,000 hours reviews are very thoughtful of this stuff.
Paul (45:57)
I like those a lot. I generally think that sort of private enterprise is probably a relatively underrated bucket, that people sort of have this instinctive assumption that if you're thinking about global poverty and doing good, that means nonprofit or public policy. And I think there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in sort of for profit space, multinational or sort of local to the countries. And there's a humility with that of saying, if I'm going to try to work in a country that I haven't been to, I'm going to have a steep learning curve and I'm not going to know what I'm doing at the start. But I think that that's definitely a good option to consider. Another resource that I think is really exciting and I would recommend to people is a lot of the sort of really thoughtful funders, like GiveWell or like Craxis, for example, will both support things and then also put out lists of things we wish we could support that don't exist. And so I think you should always be looking at those. It's really interesting to see what kinds of things they say, like, it would be really great if there was an organization doing this that we can support if you're interested in potentially doing something entrepreneurial.
Paul (46:51)
And so I would not replicate what I have done. I doubt that's what's needed. When I was in college, we joked because Microcredit was so popular and there were like five Microcredit clubs on campus at that point because everybody wanted to be the founder of a Microcredit club, you know, so it's like, don't don't do that. But but there's always need for more and for new entrepreneurial things as well. So I think that's a good place to go. I'll share one last thought, which is, like, super speculative. And so I don't know if this is true, but one thing that I think a lot about, as I think we all do, is the sort of importance of narrative and the fact that we interpret life and the world around us through stories. The Bible is a great example of that. It's this beautiful collection of stories which together fit this comprehensive whole. I don't know that there's sort of good storytelling about international development that helps to bridge the gap you described the fact that we just can't really understand and appreciate the challenges people face and the realities of their lives and sort of then think about how something like cash transfers might fit into that.
Paul (47:48)
And so I think there's potentially space for better storytelling as well. It could be useful. There are a few good books out there, but I think not enough.
JD (47:55)
When you say pursuing entrepreneurship, EAS a path for impact, do you mean entrepreneurship in areas where we can create solutions to help the poor things like what Tap Tap, Send is doing or other for profit businesses that are serving social needs?
Paul (48:12)
Yeah, so, I mean, absolutely all of the above, I think, essentially, right. I think that this is like an awful month to be talking about sort of like for profit entrepreneurship in order to give. And yet I think that is in fact a good path and that many people have pursued that. I think if you look at the membership of the Giving Pledge and the kinds of things they've supported, there are many, many people who have done that and done that well and are having a big impact through it. And there's like, one very prominent example right now of someone who broke the rules in the process of doing that. And that's raising good questions that we should ask. But I still think that's a great path. One important fact about the nonprofit sector is that sort of fundraising is very linear. It's very hard. I think that GiveDirectly and that the other things that GiveWell recommends are fantastic. IFP those were, like, products in for profit marketplaces, they would capture 90% of the market because they're so much better than the other stuff out there. And in the philanthropic world, because there's no. Way for the donor to know the quality of the thing that's being delivered on the ground, they get 1% of the market, something like that.
Paul (49:10)
Right. So rather than saying, how can I raise more and more money in the philanthropic marketplace, I think there's often these sort of much higher exponential returns to earning it, producing it in some other way.
JD (49:21)
Do you have any recommendations for conferences or events for young Christians who want to learn about careers or opportunities impacting extreme poverty? A lot of people might be sitting at home listening to these podcasts or reading online, but don't have this opportunity to engage in experiences. You mentioned in another podcast, an experience where you went to the communities that you were serving and you just saw firsthand what that was like. Would you recommend that kind of short term trip, or are there other conferences that can replicate some of that experience or even just learning about opportunities?
Paul (49:54)
Yeah, I mean, definitely if you're interested in working on extreme poverty, you want to go and spend time. I think it's really good to go. There are these sort of short term missions trips or short term service trips where there's this idea that we're going to contribute something. And I actually sort of really like the idea of going with the assumption that you're going to add zero value. If anything, you're going to be negative.
JD (50:11)
Value, because we should change the name like learning trips or something.
Paul (50:14)
It's a learning trip, right? It's a learning and exposure trip. And I think if you just unabashedly call it that and go and say, I just want to try to understand as much as I can about a world that's totally foreign and alien to me with a humble posture, I think that would be great. So I would absolutely endorse doing that. I think that more so than like conferences and events. I think there's a lot you can do to sort of analyzing the networks of dollars and people that are out there. So I often advise people, if you're interested in this space, maybe start with the Smart Funders and then look at the organizations that they're funding and then get into LinkedIn and look at the people who work at those organizations and look at the paths they took to get there. Potentially reach out to some of them to ask for input and advice. I think that that is a way of sort of getting seeing what's happening and getting connected might be more effective, and going to hear people give public.
JD (50:57)
Talks, reverse engineer the trajectory, the path of people who are doing the next generation of promising work. Yeah, got it. And would you give any specific advice, EA? EA for Christians living in Africa, I have several friends who are in Nigeria, also in Kenya, in Nairobi, who are really passionate about meeting these needs. One of them said to me that JD unemployment in Nigeria is an existential issue. I know many people who live under four or $5 a day. What opportunities do you think might be available to them that aren't available to Americans or other Westerners looking to help?
Paul (51:40)
Yeah, well, I think mostly I would say no, I wouldn't give advice to them. I think we should ask them for advice. I think that's the problem. Right. I imagine that if we would get into the details of any of those conversations, there might be some good ideas we could brainstorm together and some things that would come out of it. But I think generically, the model of, like, me sitting here in Southern California and offering advice to one of those guys is a bad idea.
JD (52:03)
Point taken. Any final advice you would give for Christians looking to use their career, their vocation to have an impact in this space, or even just how they can discern an impact and hear God's voice in a time with many complicated signals?
Paul (52:18)
Yeah, sure. Well, I guess I'll say sort of to one broad theme that I think has been important for me. And then one story that I really love. Broad theme is that I've worked in all these different sectors, and I think because of that had this sort of very open mindset to ideas into problems in terms of thinking like is this an idea for a research paper? Is it an idea for a for profit? Is it an idea for a nonprofit? Is it an idea for a public policy? And so I think it's wonderful, if you can, to not define yourself by any one of those sectors, but to sort of be open to the possibility that an idea could have an impact through any one of those institutional mechanisms or challenges. And so it doesn't necessarily mean you're actually going to work in all those sectors, but I would just encourage you to be open to all those things and not narrow yourself too early. The other thing, this kind of to your point question about sort of a combination of data and inspiration or vocation, is a story that I really love from Purpose Driven Church.
Paul (53:12)
And I didn't expect to like purpose Driven church very much because of all the reasons I gave above that. I was sort of very into small church, and I thought there were a lot of things that were fantastic about it. And Rick Warren tells the story of how it was that he came to plant a church in Saddleback. And he says he did all of the statistical analysis, so he kind of got all the census data and figured out within the next 510 years, like, what is going to be the most under churched area of the entire country. And he came to the conclusion that it was Saddleback. And so he said, all right, I'm going to Saddleback. And he wrote to the regional director to ask IFP they would support him to plant a church in Saddleback. And his letter crossed with a letter from the regional director asking him if he'd be open to plant a church in Saddleback. And so it was this beautiful combination of analysis, I think, and sort of divine vocation that I love. And I wish it was always that simple, the two things lined up that way.
Paul (54:02)
But there's a story to say that maybe sometimes they can.
JD (54:06)
Yeah, thanks for mentioning that. And I really feel challenged to explore more about what it would look like to have church communities that maybe weren't against things, weren't against maybe running an expensive office, or just being against, in a reactionary way, some of the excesses we see from American lifestyle, but really being for the poor and really being for Christ, living out his calling. And it sounds like house churches is one potential option. If you have time, it's fine if you don't. Could you share maybe your thoughts about how EAS that worked for you? Many people are worried about missing out on the worship, or missing out on being spiritually fem in one way or another, missing out on maybe more institutional safeguard that we might get in a normal church. It seems in some ways too good to be true to just have a small get together at someone's house.
Paul (55:08)
Yeah, I think all those things that you've said are true. I think my experience of not being part of first of all, I very much missed corporate worship, but I think we all did during the pandemic anyway, so that just hasn't been an option. And I think that doing that in a small group with a guitar around a fire at night, whatever, is a pretty wonderful experience as well, even if the production value of the music isn't quite as high. So I think there's space for that as well. I think that the nakedness of it, if you will. The fact that you're really sort of on your own in terms of asking like, what does it actually look like to live out my faith? What does it mean to follow in the way of Jesus, and that there isn't a structure that lays it all out for you is pretty scary. I think it's really comforting to sort of be part of a big established thing that seems like it's well run and that it makes sense. Everybody else here seems like they know what they're doing, so I must know what I'm doing. And I think sort of the vulnerability of just being with a few people and saying, what does it look like to follow Jesus together is kind of unsettling.
Paul (56:13)
But I think for me, it's been unsettling in a very good way. And I think many of the things that you spoke about, JD, there's actually great content out there, right? You can stream the best teaching from anywhere in the world, and you can also do poor amateur versions of these things that are very authentic. I can sit down and play the piano. I don't sing very well, I don't play all that well. But it's very meaningful and authentic, I think, to worship in that way. So I think there's a lot to be said for it, and I don't think it's the only thing that we should have. But I think that at least for a time, the experience of following Jesus in that way is really formative in a good way.
JD (56:49)
Thank you so much. And for those interested in House Church, there is something called Worldwide House Church, which I haven't fully vetted, but I know it's a thing that a friend of mine has started that for these very reasons, for the purposes of helping the poor, in Christ's name, he started, jason Dijkstra started. And they have guides on how to set up your own and how to give effectively as well. So, interesting model. Again, I'm not vouching for it, but I think it's an interesting thing that we should be considering when we ask how can we be most like Jesus? And also in a self sacrificial and minimal way. So, Paul, thank you so much for coming on. If there are Christians who want to support you and support your work and pray for you, how can we be doing that best?
Paul (57:37)
Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. JD. I would say if you go back to the conversation that we had earlier about ambition, I think I've been through a phase in my life that was very much about ambition and building and sort of first half of life sort of phase. And it was awesome. It was very exciting, and I think all of it was kingdom work. But I think I'm in a season now of sort of trying to be less about myself and putting points on the board and more about what I can inspire and facilitate in other people around me. And that's really cool and exciting and challenging as well. And so I think prayers for that and for a sort of humble heart through that transition will be very welcome.
JD (58:19)
Absolutely. And if they want to learn more about GiveDirectly or your other enterprises, how can they do that?
Paul (58:26)
Yes. I mean, GiveDirectly.org. We're online. I think we're easy to find. You can find all the coverage and the discussion about it.
JD (58:32)
Awesome. Thanks so much, Paul.
Paul (58:34)
Okay. Thanks, JD.
JD (58:37)
Hi, listeners. I hope you enjoyed this episode. As you know, poverty is not just a lack of money. It's not being able to realize your full potential EAS a child of God because of resource constraints. And it's something that Jesus came to address. If you want to provide hope for the poor, if you want to use your vocation to help carry their burdens, we want to help you with this. We have a step by step guide on how to find a career that tackles extreme poverty. And we have many mentors who are professionals in many different spaces tackling extreme poverty. Whether that's entrepreneurship, whether that's development, research, earning to give we would love to support you to support the global poor. And you can go to our website to find more about that. That's Christiansforimpact.org.
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