10 ms·

New Findings from War on Poverty: Just Give Cash

128 points by joe5150 11y ago

joe5150 11y ago
"We examine how a positive change in unearned household income affects children’s emotional and behavioral health and personality traits. Our results indicate that there are large beneficial effects of improved household financial wellbeing on children’s emotional and behavioral health and positive personality trait development...Parenting and relationships within the family appear to be an important mechanism. We also find evidence that a sub-sample of the population moves to census tracts with better income levels and educational attainment." Signs and wonders....
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
JorgeGT 11y ago
> giving poor families money, on top of the benefits they already receive, improves their children’s behavior I don't think anyone questions that extra money does good. The big question in the fight against poverty is: given X available welfare dollars per family, what is the optimum allocation between giving them as benefits or giving them as hard cash?
- CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
  Well theres also reason to question the size of x. If substantial amounts of money are wasted in the effort of allocating x, might it be better to just use that money to increase x and go for a simpler allocation model. For example equal amounts to everyone. After that you must consider the systematic effects. If you do manage to increase x and allocate it to the poor. What will it do to the economy? There is a chance that it will feedback into increased tax revenue, which again raises x. More money allocated to the poor means more money spent on things needed by the poor, which means increased demand for certain goods and so forth. It's also possible that the same poor, now equipped with secure funding, starts new business to fill that demand which creates jobs and more taxable incomes.
asuffield 11y ago
There's more depth here than "just give cash". What we've seen in study after study is that if you take low-income people who are struggling and give them more money, they use it in ways that improve their lives, they become more productive, and this has profound long-term impact. At the same time, I don't think anybody really disputes that giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives. They need medical treatment before anything else. I've never seen a study which looked at extra cash injections for long-term unemployed. That would be an interesting one. I would be unsurprised to find that cash alone was insufficient to solve their problems; the most obvious thing they need is education. My point here is that cash clearly helps in some - probably most - circumstances. But "just give cash" is insufficient; we still need to work on all the other things as well.
- clessg 11y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here. I know many people who may not be where they are without government assistance as a child, myself included. But I also see my alcoholic sister who uses almost all of her child benefits for liquor. That said, without the direct payments, I would expect her to turn to prostitution. So there's that at least.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Our social structure is broken. In a world that wasn't falling apart, such cases would be the responsibility of the family, and the family would have the authority to see it dealt with adequately. That's the way it's supposed to work, and the way it has worked through most of successful human history. As many Westerners have stopped realizing what family life is, they have done all they can to offload these familial responsibilities onto the state so that they can have greater individual independence. A big loss for us, and I don't think we can hang on much longer. To be clear, I'm not saying you're not doing enough, as I obviously don't know you or your family. I'm commenting that even if you were doing all you could (and you probably are), the social support isn't there to make it work.
- Cowen 11y ago
  I forgot who exactly put it this way, but I like the idea of thinking of direct cash transfers as the "index investing" of poverty interventions. It won't guarantee the absolute best return, but it can effectively guarantee a very respectable average return.
afarrell 11y ago
I'm also curious if we could reduce the number of children born into poverty by offering to pay men $2,500 plus medical costs to get a vascectomy.
- digimarkup 11y ago
  While avoiding the "should this idea be implemented" question for a second, I'm wondering about the engineering issues here: is it more efficient to pay men for vasectomies or women for tied tubes. Women are subject to meaningful rate limits. Ultimately the number of women determine the rate at which a population can reproduce. A man can mate with many women, so eliminating a single man from the reproductive pool might have a significant impact. However, the women that man could impregnate might simply end up impregnated by someone else. Not entirely sure how to model this.
  - meric 11y ago
    Just pay subsidy to both.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    While not a perfect analogue, my understanding has it that with strays spaying has a much greater effect on population than neutering, presumably for the reason you suggest.
  - jholman 11y ago
    When you get around to building a statistical model, make sure you take into account that vasecotomies cost about 1/4 as much to perform (e.g. $700 vs $2800, in the US), and have are something like 20x less likely to have complications (although complication rates are low for both). source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435
    - afarrell 11y ago
      It would be cheaper to do IUDs than tubal ligation for women. There was a bill that proposed this in Arkansas, but it was shot down for being coercive. I think that the argument from "avoiding coercion" is silly. First, because that isn't what literal coercion means. But moreover, At federal minimum wage, that money only takes 350 hours to earn. Over 18 years, thats 20 hours a year. If someone doesn't value being a parent enough to work an extra 23 minutes a week, then it doesn't seem like that is a right they value particularly highly. Also, there are laws that, taken together, coerce parents into working more than 23 minutes a week to support and care for their children. If we aren't willing to get rid of laws against child neglect, why are we worried about coercion in this case?
littletimmy 11y ago
Isn't this exactly what Milton Friedman advocated for some 40 years ago? Why is this just being "discovered" now?
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Likely because welfare in general is unpopular and a subject of much antagonism. Particularly in the case of a Friedmanite negative income tax, it would create an unconditional basic income for people of lower income brackets, with all the moral and economic arguments there are against that.
- kragen 11y ago
  Basic income guarantees have been advocated by many people in many centuries. One issue is that we don't know how they would work out in practice in modern societies, and the question is very controversial, which makes it hard to get good information on. This is some information that tells us that they might work out pretty well.
  - crocal 11y ago
    Err... There are plenty modern countries with basic income guarantees already.
    - kragen 11y ago
      Could you name one, then?
- asuffield 11y ago
  It's a lot older than that, and is also the normal practice for governments in most civilised societies: even in the US, there is a progressive tax system and various forms of tax credits and cash benefits to give low-income people more money than they would have otherwise had. That argument has been had in the past by people like Friedman and, at least to some extent, won. What's more recent is that we've got a few long-term studies like this one providing results showing that no-strings cash benefits do give strong beneficial results. This was long suspected, but that suspicion is now supported by evidence.
rtehfm 11y ago
Money is a mechanism that, in a way, insulates us from a variety of problems that, when reduced, allows us to focus on other things. For instance, when you're not worried about where your next pay check is coming from, you can invest that energy elsewhere. Reading, continued education, practicing your craft, etc. When one is no longer burdened by the hunt, he's available to venture into other activities.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
There is unfortunately a large political danger with giving cash. If you give cash, then it becomes possible for pundits to agitate for more assistance on the theory that "you can't live on $X". When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats, it's pretty hard to argue that they are somehow lacking anything necessary to live. Based on this article, there is also no reason to believe that cash assistance rather than in-kind assistance is necessary. The proposed mechanism is "Parents are happier because they have more money, leading to less fighting within the family. This lowers stress on kids..." But in-kind assistance would also lower stress since parents wouldn't need money. In-kind assistance has the added benefit that parents can't divert public assistance intended for children's welfare into other goods (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, drugs, junk food).
- smt88 11y ago
  > When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats What if someone inherited a place to live, but has no money? What if she grows her own food, but she can't afford the suit she needs to interview for jobs? Premise 1: Each person's situation is distinct. In other words, there is no standard group of benefits that would solve everyone's problems. Premise 2: Poor people will use cash to improve their lives in the long term, rather than just blowing the money on short-term pleasures. That second premise is exactly what's being demonstrated in small studies, national programs outside the US, and surveys.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    What if someone inherited a place to live, but has no money? If someone has wealth I'd generally expect them to consume that wealth before receiving wealth transfers. But more generally, if people have some of their needs being met but not all, then they can consume only some of the available in-kind benefits. E.g., a wealthy person with no income (like you described above) might provide their own housing but get their food from the government cafeteria. Premise 2 is both debunked in the US. Google the consumer expenditure survey and witness poor folks spending money on short term pleasures. Your premise 2 also conflicts with the article: Even if bad behavior does make poverty worse, it’s also the case that poverty causes bad behavior in the first place. Now you can try to improve the choices that poor folks make. But you can also just eliminate the bad choices and directly manage their lives until they develop the ability to manage their own life.
raykaye47 11y ago
Poor people are ALREADY given cash. Its called EBT and you see them squandering it on junk food and trading it for cigarettes.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  You don't actually know any poor people, do you.
jluxenberg 11y ago
It seems that we can give money to those in need, and see a "return" on that money in terms of increased employment and generation of value. Sounds like an investment to me. The government is the unique position; they are able to realize a gain on this via income tax revenue. Maybe this can be done via basic income? Could we pass a basic income bill as an "investment in America" and is there a model where the government actually makes a return on this investment?
scholia 11y ago
Did anybody actually read the story? The key observation is that a study published in Nature "found a correlation between child brain structure and family income. Simply put, family income is correlated with children’s brain surface area, especially among poor children. More money, bigger-brained kids." This is supported by the Cherokee study: when the families became a bit better off ($4,000 a year) the kids did better when they grew up. So it's missing the point to argue about how grown-ups might (or might not) "waste" money and whether cash is better than other forms of welfare. The point is that bringing up children in poverty creates a worse outcome for society as a whole. The fact is that $4,000 a year for 20 years is a very small amount compared with the cost of US police, courts, and prisons. If a poor kid grows up, gets a job and pays taxes, that's a massive win for society compared with the same kid growing up in the sort of deprivation that leads to a life of crime and jail.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  Is correlation, causation? Perhaps if you're taking good care of your children, a) they will have bigger brains and b) you probably had more resources to take good care of your children than people who don't, which means you probably have more family income.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Will the average Cherokee child consume $80k of police/court/prison services during their lifetime? That's breakeven. Assuming "massive win" means another $80k of cost savings, that means that absent this intervention, the average Cherokee will cost society $160k over their lifetime. Is this really true? Is the average Cherokee a criminal who spends 3 years in prison (google suggests prison costs a bit under $50k/year)?
  - ddlatham 11y ago
    Agreed that it seems unlikely an average child would grow up to use $80k less in police/court/prison services, but much more persuasive to me would be a case that they produce $80k more value to the rest of society, from less use of such services to paying more taxes, to being better neighbors, employees, employers, and citizens.
zerebubuth 11y ago
Many of these studies appear to be variations on the form "We selected some people, gave them some money and told them we'd be back to check up on how they were doing." I wonder if there's a significant effect from the expectation that being part of the study will improve one's life. Perhaps receiving attention from authority figures (PhD or MD), and potentially their judgement, might alter behaviour in similar ways to the "honesty box" experiment [1]. It seems like there might also be some bias in selection - presumably one has to consent (in writing) to be part of a long-term study. Perhaps this encourages participants to think of the future and might influences decision-making away from short-term goals and towards "investment" uses of the money rather than ephemeral ones. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of their differential experiment, and whether there's as much difference between the $333 and $20 groups as there is between the $20 group and the "$0 group" of the general population. [1] http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412 http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412
unclebucknasty 11y ago
These studies seem to crop up now and again. What's funny is that we have devised this completely contrived way of divvying up the world's resources, including this notion of private ownership over key natural resources. But, in truth, no one needs to go hungry, without shelter, water, etc. There is enough. But, then, we step back and say, "what if we give these people, who currently cannot subsist under this scheme, some marginal share of the resources we've convinced them by fiat are someone else's to give them in the first place?" Then, of course, we measure their outcomes within the context of the same scheme, and ponder other ways to help them. Yet, the scheme itself is much more seldom questioned. That one person can earn bilions from what's pulled from the earth we all inhabit, while others die from lack of access to the same should be expected to create irreparable distortions in outcomes. But, it's somehow accepted as an unchangeable, almost natural premise, even as we search for solutions.
- hugh4 11y ago
  I've always been confused as to how a forum for entrepreneurs wound up with so many honest-to-fuck communists.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    Some people engage themselves in critical thinking, and thus discover some creative alternatives between the extremes of outright communism and an unfettered capitalism that routinely produces soul-crushing poverty.
  - CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
    I'm confused by why criticism of or current ownership model must be bundled up as communism. How about geo-libertarianism? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
    - unclebucknasty 11y ago
      Well said. Slightly off-topic, but I am reminded of a certain personality type [1] that has an almost reflexive reaction to any questioning of the status quo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism
rgovind 11y ago
A related view expressed by India's central bank governor http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-11/rajan-urges-cash-transfers-to-dilute-power-of-indian-oligarchs http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-11/rajan-urge... "Cash would empower the poor to choose where to buy goods, providing an alternative to government-run monopolies and creating competition in the private sector"
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
fiatmoney 11y ago
Did the "better outcomes" actually result in a net increase in tax revenues / reduction in welfare spending (ie, more than the 4k)?
cm2187 11y ago
Parents stimulating their children does probably more to the brain structure than a check in the mail. And educated parents tend to better stimulate their kids. I remember a French statistics from the 90s showing that about 25-30% of the kids going to the Ecole Polytechnique (top engineering school in the country) come from families which do not own a television. Not sure there is a direct effect between watching TV and success but there is a direct effect between good parenting and success. This is why a good education system is fundamental to make up for what sometimes the parenting does not provide. The other possibility, though not a politically correct one is genes. Rationally I find it hard to believe that genes play no role in our intellectual capacity, and they would mechanically self perpetuate poverty. Without any hard science to back it, my intuition is that a brain is like a muscle, people are born with different muscle structure, largely driven by genes (but with a certain degree of randomness). So not everyone can make it to the olympics. But going to the olympics also requires hard work and training. If all one does is eat burgers and watch TV, the only outcome is to become obese irrespective of the muscle structure.
- ryandamm 11y ago
  >Without any hard science to back it I think this is the problem. Here's research that's trying to find some quantitative data about this issue, trying to cut through our received wisdom and intuition. And the response is... rooted in received wisdom and intuition. (I don't mean to dispute your proposed model -- merely to suggest that us sitting here and speculating about models is precisely the wrong way to understand these issues.) Frankly, I'm a little disappointed with the tenor of the discussion on this site; it seems the collective will to libertarianism is stronger than the belief in empiricism. I'm happy to be proven wrong, though.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    Only science can really close this debate, but we don't really understand how the brain works, what drives intellectual capacity, character, sexual preferences, etc. So I don't see how we can do anything else than invoke what each of us think is our common sense to form an opinion until science tells us what really happens.

128 points by joe5150 11y ago

"We examine how a positive change in unearned household income affects children’s emotional and behavioral health and personality traits. Our results indicate that there are large beneficial effects of improved household financial wellbeing on children’s emotional and behavioral health and positive personality trait development...Parenting and relationships within the family appear to be an important mechanism. We also find evidence that a sub-sample of the population moves to census tracts with better income levels and educational attainment." Signs and wonders....

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

JorgeGT 11y ago

> giving poor families money, on top of the benefits they already receive, improves their children’s behavior I don't think anyone questions that extra money does good. The big question in the fight against poverty is: given X available welfare dollars per family, what is the optimum allocation between giving them as benefits or giving them as hard cash?

CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
Well theres also reason to question the size of x. If substantial amounts of money are wasted in the effort of allocating x, might it be better to just use that money to increase x and go for a simpler allocation model. For example equal amounts to everyone. After that you must consider the systematic effects. If you do manage to increase x and allocate it to the poor. What will it do to the economy? There is a chance that it will feedback into increased tax revenue, which again raises x. More money allocated to the poor means more money spent on things needed by the poor, which means increased demand for certain goods and so forth. It's also possible that the same poor, now equipped with secure funding, starts new business to fill that demand which creates jobs and more taxable incomes.

asuffield 11y ago

There's more depth here than "just give cash". What we've seen in study after study is that if you take low-income people who are struggling and give them more money, they use it in ways that improve their lives, they become more productive, and this has profound long-term impact. At the same time, I don't think anybody really disputes that giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives. They need medical treatment before anything else. I've never seen a study which looked at extra cash injections for long-term unemployed. That would be an interesting one. I would be unsurprised to find that cash alone was insufficient to solve their problems; the most obvious thing they need is education. My point here is that cash clearly helps in some - probably most - circumstances. But "just give cash" is insufficient; we still need to work on all the other things as well.

clessg 11y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here. I know many people who may not be where they are without government assistance as a child, myself included. But I also see my alcoholic sister who uses almost all of her child benefits for liquor. That said, without the direct payments, I would expect her to turn to prostitution. So there's that at least.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Our social structure is broken. In a world that wasn't falling apart, such cases would be the responsibility of the family, and the family would have the authority to see it dealt with adequately. That's the way it's supposed to work, and the way it has worked through most of successful human history. As many Westerners have stopped realizing what family life is, they have done all they can to offload these familial responsibilities onto the state so that they can have greater individual independence. A big loss for us, and I don't think we can hang on much longer. To be clear, I'm not saying you're not doing enough, as I obviously don't know you or your family. I'm commenting that even if you were doing all you could (and you probably are), the social support isn't there to make it work.
Cowen 11y ago
I forgot who exactly put it this way, but I like the idea of thinking of direct cash transfers as the "index investing" of poverty interventions. It won't guarantee the absolute best return, but it can effectively guarantee a very respectable average return.

afarrell 11y ago

I'm also curious if we could reduce the number of children born into poverty by offering to pay men $2,500 plus medical costs to get a vascectomy.

digimarkup 11y ago
While avoiding the "should this idea be implemented" question for a second, I'm wondering about the engineering issues here: is it more efficient to pay men for vasectomies or women for tied tubes. Women are subject to meaningful rate limits. Ultimately the number of women determine the rate at which a population can reproduce. A man can mate with many women, so eliminating a single man from the reproductive pool might have a significant impact. However, the women that man could impregnate might simply end up impregnated by someone else. Not entirely sure how to model this.
- meric 11y ago
  Just pay subsidy to both.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  While not a perfect analogue, my understanding has it that with strays spaying has a much greater effect on population than neutering, presumably for the reason you suggest.
- jholman 11y ago
  When you get around to building a statistical model, make sure you take into account that vasecotomies cost about 1/4 as much to perform (e.g. $700 vs $2800, in the US), and have are something like 20x less likely to have complications (although complication rates are low for both). source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435
  - afarrell 11y ago
    It would be cheaper to do IUDs than tubal ligation for women. There was a bill that proposed this in Arkansas, but it was shot down for being coercive. I think that the argument from "avoiding coercion" is silly. First, because that isn't what literal coercion means. But moreover, At federal minimum wage, that money only takes 350 hours to earn. Over 18 years, thats 20 hours a year. If someone doesn't value being a parent enough to work an extra 23 minutes a week, then it doesn't seem like that is a right they value particularly highly. Also, there are laws that, taken together, coerce parents into working more than 23 minutes a week to support and care for their children. If we aren't willing to get rid of laws against child neglect, why are we worried about coercion in this case?

littletimmy 11y ago

Isn't this exactly what Milton Friedman advocated for some 40 years ago? Why is this just being "discovered" now?

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Likely because welfare in general is unpopular and a subject of much antagonism. Particularly in the case of a Friedmanite negative income tax, it would create an unconditional basic income for people of lower income brackets, with all the moral and economic arguments there are against that.
kragen 11y ago
Basic income guarantees have been advocated by many people in many centuries. One issue is that we don't know how they would work out in practice in modern societies, and the question is very controversial, which makes it hard to get good information on. This is some information that tells us that they might work out pretty well.
- crocal 11y ago
  Err... There are plenty modern countries with basic income guarantees already.
  - kragen 11y ago
    Could you name one, then?
asuffield 11y ago
It's a lot older than that, and is also the normal practice for governments in most civilised societies: even in the US, there is a progressive tax system and various forms of tax credits and cash benefits to give low-income people more money than they would have otherwise had. That argument has been had in the past by people like Friedman and, at least to some extent, won. What's more recent is that we've got a few long-term studies like this one providing results showing that no-strings cash benefits do give strong beneficial results. This was long suspected, but that suspicion is now supported by evidence.

rtehfm 11y ago

Money is a mechanism that, in a way, insulates us from a variety of problems that, when reduced, allows us to focus on other things. For instance, when you're not worried about where your next pay check is coming from, you can invest that energy elsewhere. Reading, continued education, practicing your craft, etc. When one is no longer burdened by the hunt, he's available to venture into other activities.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

There is unfortunately a large political danger with giving cash. If you give cash, then it becomes possible for pundits to agitate for more assistance on the theory that "you can't live on $X". When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats, it's pretty hard to argue that they are somehow lacking anything necessary to live. Based on this article, there is also no reason to believe that cash assistance rather than in-kind assistance is necessary. The proposed mechanism is "Parents are happier because they have more money, leading to less fighting within the family. This lowers stress on kids..." But in-kind assistance would also lower stress since parents wouldn't need money. In-kind assistance has the added benefit that parents can't divert public assistance intended for children's welfare into other goods (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, drugs, junk food).

smt88 11y ago
> When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats What if someone inherited a place to live, but has no money? What if she grows her own food, but she can't afford the suit she needs to interview for jobs? Premise 1: Each person's situation is distinct. In other words, there is no standard group of benefits that would solve everyone's problems. Premise 2: Poor people will use cash to improve their lives in the long term, rather than just blowing the money on short-term pleasures. That second premise is exactly what's being demonstrated in small studies, national programs outside the US, and surveys.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  What if someone inherited a place to live, but has no money? If someone has wealth I'd generally expect them to consume that wealth before receiving wealth transfers. But more generally, if people have some of their needs being met but not all, then they can consume only some of the available in-kind benefits. E.g., a wealthy person with no income (like you described above) might provide their own housing but get their food from the government cafeteria. Premise 2 is both debunked in the US. Google the consumer expenditure survey and witness poor folks spending money on short term pleasures. Your premise 2 also conflicts with the article: Even if bad behavior does make poverty worse, it’s also the case that poverty causes bad behavior in the first place. Now you can try to improve the choices that poor folks make. But you can also just eliminate the bad choices and directly manage their lives until they develop the ability to manage their own life.

raykaye47 11y ago

Poor people are ALREADY given cash. Its called EBT and you see them squandering it on junk food and trading it for cigarettes.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
You don't actually know any poor people, do you.

jluxenberg 11y ago

It seems that we can give money to those in need, and see a "return" on that money in terms of increased employment and generation of value. Sounds like an investment to me. The government is the unique position; they are able to realize a gain on this via income tax revenue. Maybe this can be done via basic income? Could we pass a basic income bill as an "investment in America" and is there a model where the government actually makes a return on this investment?

scholia 11y ago

Did anybody actually read the story? The key observation is that a study published in Nature "found a correlation between child brain structure and family income. Simply put, family income is correlated with children’s brain surface area, especially among poor children. More money, bigger-brained kids." This is supported by the Cherokee study: when the families became a bit better off ($4,000 a year) the kids did better when they grew up. So it's missing the point to argue about how grown-ups might (or might not) "waste" money and whether cash is better than other forms of welfare. The point is that bringing up children in poverty creates a worse outcome for society as a whole. The fact is that $4,000 a year for 20 years is a very small amount compared with the cost of US police, courts, and prisons. If a poor kid grows up, gets a job and pays taxes, that's a massive win for society compared with the same kid growing up in the sort of deprivation that leads to a life of crime and jail.

13thLetter 11y ago
Is correlation, causation? Perhaps if you're taking good care of your children, a) they will have bigger brains and b) you probably had more resources to take good care of your children than people who don't, which means you probably have more family income.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
Will the average Cherokee child consume $80k of police/court/prison services during their lifetime? That's breakeven. Assuming "massive win" means another $80k of cost savings, that means that absent this intervention, the average Cherokee will cost society $160k over their lifetime. Is this really true? Is the average Cherokee a criminal who spends 3 years in prison (google suggests prison costs a bit under $50k/year)?
- ddlatham 11y ago
  Agreed that it seems unlikely an average child would grow up to use $80k less in police/court/prison services, but much more persuasive to me would be a case that they produce $80k more value to the rest of society, from less use of such services to paying more taxes, to being better neighbors, employees, employers, and citizens.

zerebubuth 11y ago

Many of these studies appear to be variations on the form "We selected some people, gave them some money and told them we'd be back to check up on how they were doing." I wonder if there's a significant effect from the expectation that being part of the study will improve one's life. Perhaps receiving attention from authority figures (PhD or MD), and potentially their judgement, might alter behaviour in similar ways to the "honesty box" experiment [1]. It seems like there might also be some bias in selection - presumably one has to consent (in writing) to be part of a long-term study. Perhaps this encourages participants to think of the future and might influences decision-making away from short-term goals and towards "investment" uses of the money rather than ephemeral ones. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of their differential experiment, and whether there's as much difference between the $333 and $20 groups as there is between the $20 group and the "$0 group" of the general population. [1] http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412 http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412

unclebucknasty 11y ago

These studies seem to crop up now and again. What's funny is that we have devised this completely contrived way of divvying up the world's resources, including this notion of private ownership over key natural resources. But, in truth, no one needs to go hungry, without shelter, water, etc. There is enough. But, then, we step back and say, "what if we give these people, who currently cannot subsist under this scheme, some marginal share of the resources we've convinced them by fiat are someone else's to give them in the first place?" Then, of course, we measure their outcomes within the context of the same scheme, and ponder other ways to help them. Yet, the scheme itself is much more seldom questioned. That one person can earn bilions from what's pulled from the earth we all inhabit, while others die from lack of access to the same should be expected to create irreparable distortions in outcomes. But, it's somehow accepted as an unchangeable, almost natural premise, even as we search for solutions.

hugh4 11y ago
I've always been confused as to how a forum for entrepreneurs wound up with so many honest-to-fuck communists.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  Some people engage themselves in critical thinking, and thus discover some creative alternatives between the extremes of outright communism and an unfettered capitalism that routinely produces soul-crushing poverty.
- CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
  I'm confused by why criticism of or current ownership model must be bundled up as communism. How about geo-libertarianism? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    Well said. Slightly off-topic, but I am reminded of a certain personality type [1] that has an almost reflexive reaction to any questioning of the status quo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism

rgovind 11y ago

A related view expressed by India's central bank governor http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-11/rajan-urges-cash-transfers-to-dilute-power-of-indian-oligarchs http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-11/rajan-urge... "Cash would empower the poor to choose where to buy goods, providing an alternative to government-run monopolies and creating competition in the private sector"

deleted 11y ago

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fiatmoney 11y ago

Did the "better outcomes" actually result in a net increase in tax revenues / reduction in welfare spending (ie, more than the 4k)?

cm2187 11y ago

Parents stimulating their children does probably more to the brain structure than a check in the mail. And educated parents tend to better stimulate their kids. I remember a French statistics from the 90s showing that about 25-30% of the kids going to the Ecole Polytechnique (top engineering school in the country) come from families which do not own a television. Not sure there is a direct effect between watching TV and success but there is a direct effect between good parenting and success. This is why a good education system is fundamental to make up for what sometimes the parenting does not provide. The other possibility, though not a politically correct one is genes. Rationally I find it hard to believe that genes play no role in our intellectual capacity, and they would mechanically self perpetuate poverty. Without any hard science to back it, my intuition is that a brain is like a muscle, people are born with different muscle structure, largely driven by genes (but with a certain degree of randomness). So not everyone can make it to the olympics. But going to the olympics also requires hard work and training. If all one does is eat burgers and watch TV, the only outcome is to become obese irrespective of the muscle structure.

ryandamm 11y ago
>Without any hard science to back it I think this is the problem. Here's research that's trying to find some quantitative data about this issue, trying to cut through our received wisdom and intuition. And the response is... rooted in received wisdom and intuition. (I don't mean to dispute your proposed model -- merely to suggest that us sitting here and speculating about models is precisely the wrong way to understand these issues.) Frankly, I'm a little disappointed with the tenor of the discussion on this site; it seems the collective will to libertarianism is stronger than the belief in empiricism. I'm happy to be proven wrong, though.
- cm2187 11y ago
  Only science can really close this debate, but we don't really understand how the brain works, what drives intellectual capacity, character, sexual preferences, etc. So I don't see how we can do anything else than invoke what each of us think is our common sense to form an opinion until science tells us what really happens.