No. of Recommendations: 18
The best predictor in the US of a child's future income is their parent's income. Other things matter, but nothing as much as that.Sure. Because their parents' income correlates with a
lot of attributes that their parents have. Educational attainment, attitudes towards work and education, etc. Children who grow up in households with parents that have all of the things that help make someone fit better into the modern world are themselves going to fit better into the modern world.
What specifically are these traditional values and practices and how do we promote them?Work hard. Defer gratification. Fulfill your responsibilities. Save for future needs. Invest in yourself. Make good choices. Be part of a larger community. Etc.
I don't think Brooks is referring to the sorts of
societal values that underlie a lot of political debates, but more individual traits. What conservatives might refer to as "bourgeois values."
The study Brooks cited shows giving people a small amount of money doesn't do much. For good or bad, it's not just that one study. Once we actually started studying whether just giving people money actually resulted in improved life outcomes, it wasn't really close:
Many of the studies are still ongoing, but, at this point, the results aren’t “uncertain.” They’re pretty consistent and very weird. Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment. Treated participants do work a little less, but shockingly, this doesn’t correspond with either lower stress levels or higher overall reported life satisfaction.
Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it's practically invisible in the data. On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid.
I cannot stress how shocking I find this and I want to be clear that this is not “we got some weak counterevidence.” These are careful, well-conducted studies. They are large enough to rule out even small positive effects and they are all very similar. This is an amount of evidence that in almost any other context we’d consider definitive. https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/giving-people-mon...One can make the argument that if we gave them
gobsmackingly large amounts of money the results would be different. But there's two main problems with that. First, the amounts of money under consideration weren't gobsmackingly large, but they were pretty big relative to the incomes of the people they were being given to - and the absence of even
small benefits from that size grant doesn't augur for a better outcome with bigger transfers. And second, gobsmackingly large transfers aren't on offer. They weren't plausible even before these studies all came back negative - and now that there's a scholarly body of work showing that just giving money doesn't help people's life outcomes (or those of their kids), there's virtually no chance of big transfers ever happening.
I wonder why Brooks "forgot" to mention the EITC?Probably because that's baked into the analysis of the studies. They all take place in the context of a massive social safety net - net federal transfers to households in the bottom quintile are somewhere north of $20,000 per year or so. Brooks isn't arguing that those things should go away - he's arguing that progressives are going to have to come to terms that there's not much that
adding to the dollars or material goods that go to lower-income households is going to accomplish to fight generational poverty.
The core argument is that people who are suffering these negative life outcomes -
and their children - are unlikely to be helped by giving them more money. They are lacking critical elements that are not remediated by more money. Back when I was learning econ, the fashion was to call that "human capital" - the accumulation of knowledge, skills, personality traits, mental health, physical health, and everything else that enables and encourages someone to be a self-sufficient and economically stable member of society. If parents don't have that human capital, their kids are less likely to have it either. If absence of human capital is a more material determinant of these social ills than absence of money, then trying to fight social ills by using money transfers is unlikely to be successful.
