>Unconditional cash transfers (accounting for spillovers) lead to 48% fewer infant deaths before age one and 45% fewer child deaths before age five.

Heard about this via the NYT: A New Way to Reduce Children’s Deaths: Cash https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/health/cash-transfer-keny... archive: https://archive.is/ct2o0

They write:

>Those are much bigger drops than have been credited to routine immunizations, for example, or bed nets to prevent malaria.

>“This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I’ve seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty,” said Harsha Thirumurthy, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the work.

Though reading the linked paper[1] gave me a more concise definition:

>Intrinsically disordered or unstructured proteins (IDPs) exist as highly flexible polypeptide chains in vivo behaving as an ensemble of conformational states with no stable tertiary structure

To me this suggests "disordered" is as poor a name as "junk" was for DNA. Rather these are just proteins that don't have a fixed tertiary structure.

And that changing shapes doesn't need to reflect "disorder", rather it sounds like it more likely allows the proteins to function in more complex, dynamics ways. So something like "dynamic" might be a better term to me.

Typical case of humans labeling something they don't understand easily as worthless.

[1]https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/41/D1/D508/1069637

Paper (subject of the NYT article): https://www.nber.org/papers/w33844

Because this violates my priors, and appears a high-quality RCT, I found this very interesting.

>The researchers specified in advance seven measures on which they thought children in high-cash families would outperform the others. But after four years they found no group differences on any of the yardsticks, which aimed for a comprehensive look at child development.

There are several reasons to discount the evidence, such as the Covid pandemic conditions. But... there are always reasons to discount, that's how post-hoc bias works.

So seems like important evidence to learn from, especially if you still believe in transfers and want them to provide a good ROI.

>While researchers publicized the earlier, more promising results, the follow-up study was released quietly and has received little attention. Several co-authors declined to comment on the results, saying that it was unclear why the payments had no effect.

Sad response, but understandable if I were in their shoes. Kudos to NYT for covering it despite their bias.

This book sounds great, added to my list. I hope the review here didn't spoil too many of the findings.