Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.
These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security. A study that gave $1,000 a month did not produce better health, career, education or sleep outcomes or even more time with their children.
Way back in 1997, Susan E. Mayer, a University of Chicago sociologist and behavioral economist, published “What Money Can’t Buy.” She began her research believing that cash transfers would make a big difference in people’s lives but was persuaded by the evidence that even if you doubled a family’s income, it would have a limited effect on their children’s dropout and teenage pregnancy rates or other outcomes. She stated her findings clearly: “The results in this book imply that once children’s basic material needs are met, characteristics of their parents become more important to how they turn out than anything additional money can buy.”
She added, “Parental income is not as important to children’s outcomes as many social scientists have thought.” Rising out of poverty also requires the nonmaterial qualities we now call human capital, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health and reliability. Mayer concludes, “Children of parents with these attributes do well even when their parents do not have much income.”
As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty. As a result, we do an OK job supporting people who are in long-term poverty but a poor job of helping them lift out of poverty. As Piper noted in a subsequent post, we spend more money combating poverty today than the entire U.S. G.D.P. from 1969, yet “the share of Americans whose pretransfer income places them in absolute poverty has barely fallen.”
Piper’s essay kicked up a bit of an internet storm. You might have thought the progressive reaction would have been: We need to keep giving poor people money, but we also need to focus on the human and behavioral factors that will enable them to build comfortable, independent lives. But that wasn’t the reaction. The progressives I saw doubled down on the thesis: Poor people just need money.
Matt Bruenig’s contention, also in The Argument, was typical. He scorned the very idea that focusing on human capital is a good way to improve social mobility. He wrote, “Cash is the key part of every welfare state in the developed world and absolutely critical for keeping poverty down.” We shouldn’t make fighting poverty overly complicated, he argued. “As a policy matter, these are mostly solved problems.” Just write people checks.
This is consistent with something I’ve noticed all my life — the materialist bent of progressive thought: the assumption that material conditions drive history, not cultural or moral ones. A couple of decades ago, Thomas Frank published “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” based on befuddlement that Kansans were apparently voting against their economic self-interest. Doesn’t economics drive voting behavior? Progressives have often argued that improving schools is mostly about spending more money, that crime is mostly the product of material deprivation.
Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion. That body of work teaches you, as Burke wrote, that manners and morals are more important than laws. You should have limited expectations about politics because not everything can be solved with a policy.
Many years ago, I came across a study that neatly illustrated the power of culture. The researcher Nima Sanandaji calculated the poverty rate of Americans with Swedish ancestry. It was 6.7 percent. They also looked at the poverty rate in Sweden, using the American standard of poverty, and it was also 6.7 percent. Different political systems, same outcome.
Neoconservatism came along and took conservative insights and applied them to policymaking. During the Iraq war the word “neocon” came to mean the opposite of its real meaning, but originally it was a movement within the Democratic Party to correct the policy failures of the Great Society. Thinkers like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer had been poor immigrant kids. They were willing to spend money to fight poverty, but they wanted the programs to nurture the values that they had seen firsthand help people rise: hard work, family and community cohesion, reliability, a passionate commitment to education. These values tend to inhere in communities before they are transmitted to individuals.
Progressives, by contrast, are quick to talk about money but slow to talk about the values side of the equation. That’s in part for the best of reasons. They don’t want to blame the victims or contribute to the canard that people are poor because they are lazy.
But there’s something deeper. Progressivism emerges from a different lineage. Karl Marx influenced many people who are not Marxist, and he saw the world through a material-determinism lens — people’s consciousnesses are shaped by their material conditions.
Since the dawn of the Progressive movement over a century ago, the left has been more technocratic. Those early Progressives tried to make a science of society and govern according to scientific principles.
Today the social sciences are the narrow doorway all of human knowledge has to pass through if it’s going to influence policymaking. We want studies! The social sciences are great. I use them all the time. But when overly quantitative, they can misrepresent reality. They see only what can be quantified. They see only masses of people whose data can be tabulated, not unique individuals. As Christian Smith, a Notre Dame sociologist, has been arguing for decades, the social scientists obliterate the subjective experiences of the people they study. Human agency disappears if research subjects are reduced to a bunch of variables that can be correlated. People who overly rely on social science knowledge are going to tend to focus on money because it can be counted more easily than culture. People who rely on government to solve problems will tend to overemphasize the power of money because that’s the thing government most easily controls.
This materialistic bent leads to all sorts of bad judgments. For example, Joe Biden and his team had one job: to make sure Donald Trump never set foot in the White House again. They tried to accomplish that the only way they knew how: throw money at the problem. The vast bulk of the new Biden spending went to red states to employ workers without college degrees. Politically, the project was a complete failure. Populism is not primarily economic; it’s about respect, values, national identity and many other things. All that spending did not win anybody over.
Today most of our problems are moral, relational and spiritual more than they are economic. There is the crisis of disconnection, the collapse of social trust, the loss of faith in institutions, the destruction of moral norms in the White House, the rise of amoral gangsterism around the world.
I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”
If you can find some lefties who are willing to spend money fighting poverty but also willing to promote the traditional values and practices that enable people to rise, you can sign me up for the revolution.
This stat jumps out:
We spend more money combating poverty today than the entire U.S. G.D.P. from 1969, yet “the share of Americans whose pretransfer income places them in absolute poverty has barely fallen.”
@bradstevens I love this stuff. Today is my favorite day. Raining. Drunk. Football and futbol on. Minion just playing with toys. So I want to circle back and will.
in short Joe Biden is the dumbest worst president we’ve had in my lifetime. I’m sure arguments can be made ever. The progressive block are dumber than shit. Virtue signaling social workers masquerading as politicians. That’s the women. The men. Beta cucks. Walz creeps.
BUT. liberals. I have worked with on boards for 25 years. Care. They give up a lot to try to help. They sacrifice. Far more than conservatives. It’s not even close. Libs try to help those in need. They care. Program people. All lefties. All hearts of gold. Trying. Their entire working careers. if the libs weren’t doing it no one would.
so when sober I will share where the problem exists imo And yes we have thrown a shit ton of money to it but it’s these programs and outcomes that call into question whether this is HOW we should be spending
Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now.
Don’t agree. Care to explain further?
@bradstevens I love this stuff. Today is my favorite day. Raining. Drunk. Football and futbol on. Minion just playing with toys. So I want to circle back and will.
in short Joe Biden is the dumbest worst president we’ve had in my lifetime. I’m sure arguments can be made ever. The progressive block are dumber than shit. Virtue signaling social workers masquerading as politicians. That’s the women. The men. Beta cucks. Walz creeps.
BUT. liberals. I have worked with on boards for 25 years. Care. They give up a lot to try to help. They sacrifice. Far more than conservatives. It’s not even close. Libs try to help those in need. They care. Program people. All lefties. All hearts of gold. Trying. Their entire working careers. if the libs weren’t doing it no one would.
so when sober I will share where the problem exists imo And yes we have thrown a shit ton of money to it but it’s these programs and outcomes that call into question whether this is HOW we should be spending
Conservatives donate far more to charity.
Quick typing trying not to miss any game.
First, Brooks says that there is no improvement after basic needs are met. So, that suggests there is improvement over basic needs not being met. Isn't that pretty much what anti poverty programs do? Maybe some get speed boats and Porsches but I don't think so.
There are studies that disagree with him. From a study linked below "Our estimates imply that a $1,000 increase in income raises math test scores by 2.1% and reading test scores by 3.6% of a standard deviation."
I won't have time to look for others during the game but they appear to exist in my search.
Lastly, just owning books seems to increase reading scores. That is the type of luxury that many very poor cannot afford without assistance. Dolly Parton has had a program trying to get books to poor.
The problem with that study is that the increase in income and the better math and reading scores are probably a product of the same cause.
here is another study specifically looking at free breakfast programs for the poor.The problem with that study is that the increase in income and the better math and reading scores are probably a product of the same cause.
A new study from the University of Iowa reinforces the connection between good nutrition and good grades, finding that free school breakfasts help students from low-income families perform better academically.
https://now.uiowa.edu/news/2015/03/better-breakfast-better-grades
@bradstevens I love this stuff. Today is my favorite day. Raining. Drunk. Football and futbol on. Minion just playing with toys. So I want to circle back and will.
in short Joe Biden is the dumbest worst president we’ve had in my lifetime. I’m sure arguments can be made ever. The progressive block are dumber than shit. Virtue signaling social workers masquerading as politicians. That’s the women. The men. Beta cucks. Walz creeps.
BUT. liberals. I have worked with on boards for 25 years. Care. They give up a lot to try to help. They sacrifice. Far more than conservatives. It’s not even close. Libs try to help those in need. They care. Program people. All lefties. All hearts of gold. Trying. Their entire working careers. if the libs weren’t doing it no one would.
so when sober I will share where the problem exists imo And yes we have thrown a shit ton of money to it but it’s these programs and outcomes that call into question whether this is HOW we should be spending
Conservatives donate far more to charity.
Not far more. 30% more. Do you know why?
@bradstevens I hate to be both repetitive and pessimistic, but I for one do not believe that cash handouts will rescue us from poverty. I do believe that cash handouts will keep all of us fed in the post-job AI-dominated future.
here is another study specifically looking at free breakfast programs for the poor.The problem with that study is that the increase in income and the better math and reading scores are probably a product of the same cause.
A new study from the University of Iowa reinforces the connection between good nutrition and good grades, finding that free school breakfasts help students from low-income families perform better academically.
https://now.uiowa.edu/news/2015/03/better-breakfast-better-grades
Feeding children properly should be the low bar that we can all get over. Not sure that's the debate here.
Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.
These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security. A study that gave $1,000 a month did not produce better health, career, education or sleep outcomes or even more time with their children.
Way back in 1997, Susan E. Mayer, a University of Chicago sociologist and behavioral economist, published “What Money Can’t Buy.” She began her research believing that cash transfers would make a big difference in people’s lives but was persuaded by the evidence that even if you doubled a family’s income, it would have a limited effect on their children’s dropout and teenage pregnancy rates or other outcomes. She stated her findings clearly: “The results in this book imply that once children’s basic material needs are met, characteristics of their parents become more important to how they turn out than anything additional money can buy.”
She added, “Parental income is not as important to children’s outcomes as many social scientists have thought.” Rising out of poverty also requires the nonmaterial qualities we now call human capital, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health and reliability. Mayer concludes, “Children of parents with these attributes do well even when their parents do not have much income.”
As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty. As a result, we do an OK job supporting people who are in long-term poverty but a poor job of helping them lift out of poverty. As Piper noted in a subsequent post, we spend more money combating poverty today than the entire U.S. G.D.P. from 1969, yet “the share of Americans whose pretransfer income places them in absolute poverty has barely fallen.”
Piper’s essay kicked up a bit of an internet storm. You might have thought the progressive reaction would have been: We need to keep giving poor people money, but we also need to focus on the human and behavioral factors that will enable them to build comfortable, independent lives. But that wasn’t the reaction. The progressives I saw doubled down on the thesis: Poor people just need money.
Matt Bruenig’s contention, also in The Argument, was typical. He scorned the very idea that focusing on human capital is a good way to improve social mobility. He wrote, “Cash is the key part of every welfare state in the developed world and absolutely critical for keeping poverty down.” We shouldn’t make fighting poverty overly complicated, he argued. “As a policy matter, these are mostly solved problems.” Just write people checks.
This is consistent with something I’ve noticed all my life — the materialist bent of progressive thought: the assumption that material conditions drive history, not cultural or moral ones. A couple of decades ago, Thomas Frank published “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” based on befuddlement that Kansans were apparently voting against their economic self-interest. Doesn’t economics drive voting behavior? Progressives have often argued that improving schools is mostly about spending more money, that crime is mostly the product of material deprivation.
Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion. That body of work teaches you, as Burke wrote, that manners and morals are more important than laws. You should have limited expectations about politics because not everything can be solved with a policy.
Many years ago, I came across a study that neatly illustrated the power of culture. The researcher Nima Sanandaji calculated the poverty rate of Americans with Swedish ancestry. It was 6.7 percent. They also looked at the poverty rate in Sweden, using the American standard of poverty, and it was also 6.7 percent. Different political systems, same outcome.
Neoconservatism came along and took conservative insights and applied them to policymaking. During the Iraq war the word “neocon” came to mean the opposite of its real meaning, but originally it was a movement within the Democratic Party to correct the policy failures of the Great Society. Thinkers like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer had been poor immigrant kids. They were willing to spend money to fight poverty, but they wanted the programs to nurture the values that they had seen firsthand help people rise: hard work, family and community cohesion, reliability, a passionate commitment to education. These values tend to inhere in communities before they are transmitted to individuals.
Progressives, by contrast, are quick to talk about money but slow to talk about the values side of the equation. That’s in part for the best of reasons. They don’t want to blame the victims or contribute to the canard that people are poor because they are lazy.
But there’s something deeper. Progressivism emerges from a different lineage. Karl Marx influenced many people who are not Marxist, and he saw the world through a material-determinism lens — people’s consciousnesses are shaped by their material conditions.
Since the dawn of the Progressive movement over a century ago, the left has been more technocratic. Those early Progressives tried to make a science of society and govern according to scientific principles.
Today the social sciences are the narrow doorway all of human knowledge has to pass through if it’s going to influence policymaking. We want studies! The social sciences are great. I use them all the time. But when overly quantitative, they can misrepresent reality. They see only what can be quantified. They see only masses of people whose data can be tabulated, not unique individuals. As Christian Smith, a Notre Dame sociologist, has been arguing for decades, the social scientists obliterate the subjective experiences of the people they study. Human agency disappears if research subjects are reduced to a bunch of variables that can be correlated. People who overly rely on social science knowledge are going to tend to focus on money because it can be counted more easily than culture. People who rely on government to solve problems will tend to overemphasize the power of money because that’s the thing government most easily controls.
This materialistic bent leads to all sorts of bad judgments. For example, Joe Biden and his team had one job: to make sure Donald Trump never set foot in the White House again. They tried to accomplish that the only way they knew how: throw money at the problem. The vast bulk of the new Biden spending went to red states to employ workers without college degrees. Politically, the project was a complete failure. Populism is not primarily economic; it’s about respect, values, national identity and many other things. All that spending did not win anybody over.
Today most of our problems are moral, relational and spiritual more than they are economic. There is the crisis of disconnection, the collapse of social trust, the loss of faith in institutions, the destruction of moral norms in the White House, the rise of amoral gangsterism around the world.
I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”
If you can find some lefties who are willing to spend money fighting poverty but also willing to promote the traditional values and practices that enable people to rise, you can sign me up for the revolution.
Intuitively it makes sense. If someone can't provide the basics to themselves, I don't know why people would think giving them something free would help them gain more goods and services (in the long term) that are even harder to obtain. They literally can't provide food to themselves. You would have to make the argument that their is a misallocation of capital to those people, which there isn't. The best way to help the poor is by driving down costs for goods and services.
@snarlcakes when biden was pretending ot give out covid relief which was a pretense for just a welfare bonanza an ancillary impact was that the poverty rate was the lowest in decades. an analogy i've used often is the worthlessness of our soul train here. addicts. shootings. the train is shit. so you spend all this money on programs and give vouchers and a woman has to put her life at risk to get two buses and a train ride that's still 15 miles from a job she might want an employer wants to get her. if she had money for a down payment on a car she wouldn't have to mess with public transit, we wouldn't have to fund it, and she'd driver herself ot that better paying job. doesn't translate everywhere but htere are examples like this throughout the welfare state