The Way to Help the Poor

In Brief

Philanthropies often give away their money to projects without really knowing if they are successful.
Microloans, for instance, are not effective at increasing income on average for the poorest people on the planet.
Social scientists have begun to marshal the tools of big data to find out what works and what doesn’t. The goal is to turn philanthropy into a science, where money gets directed to programs for which there is strong evidence of their social effectiveness.