"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."
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's several types of "errors" here: (1) failing to help a person in need, (2) trying to help a person in need and failing, or (3) trying to help a person and instead enabling destructive behaviors.
Different people weight these two errors differently. Some people think it's really terrible to fail to help an honest person in need, but don't care as much about the cost of enabling a self-destructive person. Others don't care much about (1), and would in fact not help a single person rather than let (3) happen once.
Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.)
Unfortunately the 'loss function' of the different types of errors is what really gums up most honest debate on these issues. A lot of these are evaluated on moral principles more than economic costs, which further complicates the story. I disagree with them, but there's a lot of people that think there should be harsh penalties in the world for using drugs, no matter the societal costs. Or that giving anybody a handout from taxpayer money is wrong, even if it ends up saving taxpayer money in the future.
Drug users sometimes engage in acquisitive crime to get money to buy drugs. Or they become sex workers. The public health burden of (unregulated) sex work is considerable.
So giving these people cash reduces the crime they commit, and reduces the need for them to become sex-workers. Often just giving them the cash is far cheaper than the legal system alternatives - the police investigation and the trial is likely to be expensive. (I accept your point that some people just don't care about saving that tax money, they want "tough on crime" policies)
> Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.)
This is so simplistic it's almost hateful.
It's a failure to understand the complex drivers of a lot of severe drug addiction.
Whoa, I didn't intend to advocate for any particular interventions, just giving some of the difficulties of talking about these in the US political environment, and that short parenthetical list is the sort of interventions that are often brought up tin these discussions.
If you're also providing them with a treatment programme, yes.
It's clearly nonsensical to withhold money from them that they would otherwise have received. It also doesn't sound like a good idea to expect them to pay for their own treatment from the money you gave them. We need both for this to work.
The longer term effect is to me whats most interesting here, and I too would love to see some studies in that area.
But here is another way too look at it.
People with rich parents might not become as successful as their parents but they are rarely ending at the bottom of society.
Even if money alone doesn't motivate you (which I think is entirely fair to belive), you are more likely to try and use them for something useful if you feel like it's within your reach to do so.
The motivation isn't the money itself but rather opportunity within your reach.
"just give cash" is sufficient, because the other things are just as likely to be fall-out from the bad choices that may have been the best of a bad situation (heroin usage, dealing, theft, etc, etc...).
There is another comment below about giving in-kind stuff instead of the more fungible cash, but the problems with that (and with your example) boil down to that being moralizing. People want to moralize rather than enable. If a person has the means and doesn't use them, then and only then, can we claim some other problems remain to be fixed, but we cannot even logically conclude that the problems are blocking something debatably-desirable at this point. We can't have a non-armchair/inherently-smug-and-preachy discussion until everyone has a basic income.
This problem isn't going away, and is only for lack of numbers. Even someone who wants to die by heroin would be better off being allowed to, than forcing them to harm others (or themselves differently) in order to get there.
I'm sorry, I don't think you fully understood my point, as you appear to be presenting arguments against making financial support conditional on other things, which I was not endorsing here (that is a whole barrel of complicated which I don't want to open).
My point was rather than a financial-assistance-only approach is insufficient: we also need, at minimum, strong education and healthcare support, because there clearly exist groups of people who need them.
How about giving people money, and if they are a heroin addict, let them have access to free heroin as well.
I would imagine that a stable supply of the substance to which one is addicted, plus money off which to live, would form an excellent foundation for being a non-destructive member of society.
A case could certainly be made for providing easier, socially-accepted access to such substances, on individual humanitarian grounds, but also on the grounds that the current proprietors are majorly-violent criminals who are already at the extremes (who, rather than die/"go home", said "fuck it" and "went big"). The way things are, substantial capital is already flowing to murderers and other violent or tangibly-wrong actors. I think it's reasonable to expect non-profit distribution would cut into that, which sounds appealing.
Just who is 'moralizing','smug and preachy' here? 'People want to moralize rather than enable'. Gosh! That's the debate over isn't it? Don't review current and awaited evidence just 'enable'.
Purely anecdotal but please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities (and a big thank you to whoever is continuing them for my sake). Fortunately I'm an odd-ball and no one else anywhere would even think to behave as I would. So, my story is not only anecdotal but completely irrelevant.
> please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities
Interestingly, I keep reading HN and sometimes pause to make a new account with 0 karma, in order to contribute (hopefully) compelling comments and conversation when I am so inspired to, despite the karma/profit-motive. I actually think the presence of karma encourages me to be argumentative and act out indulgently, self-destructively, and even anti-socially, in the same way I see people in poverty do.
> Purely anecdotal but please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities (and a big thank you to whoever is continuing them for my sake). Fortunately I'm an odd-ball and no one else anywhere would even think to behave as I would. So, my story is not only anecdotal but completely irrelevant.
You'll get bored shitless after a week of doing nothing with your life improvements to make a point, and suddenly you'll be back here having a productive input in the society, be it arts or engineering, services or thinking. But maybe you do really want to make a point and decide to just drink and be merry. That would still be a significant improvement for the society over having you perform "economic activity" in advertising or other bullshit industry we keep because we're too big on puritan values to even consider that slaving away your life for food and shelter isn't the optimal way of living.
"Just give cash" strips people of their dignity and practically ensures they will become permanent wards of the state, as they are left to wallow in shame and without the guidance they need to substantially improve their situation.
Every welfare recipient should have a shrewd case worker that dispenses welfare as needed, sees that the recipient is really doing all they can to be self-sufficient, and creates opportunities where the recipient can make a contribution back for the gifts they receive (like volunteering at the food bank once a week), tailored specifically to the recipient's condition.
If there is just a tiny bit of truth in the stories about the Hartz IV system from Germany, it's actually the means tested welfare system and its case workers (who don't have much time per case) that strip people of their dignity. Up to the point that you think the whole system is designed to punish rather than to help.
Just getting some extra cash with no strings attached certainly doesn't strip you of your dignity, and if it does, you can always refuse and demand food stamps instead. In Germany, getting food stamps is what strips you of your dignity. You hold up the queue at checkout while they figure if they can accept those and if they are allowed to give you change, etc.
Real life points to the contrary. It's conditional welfare that strips people of their dignity, to the point of many eligible not seeking it out of shame. I know some examples of that first-hand.
"Just getting cash" strips one of dignity no more than "just getting water from the river" or "fruits from a tree" stripped humans of their dignity in the past. Nature provides for us unconditionally. No one is truly independent from the systems they're embedded in, and the assumption that a baseline amount of resources that can form a stable foundation will make one forgoe "improving their situation" is, frankly, offensive to me as a human being.
I don't know that I'd agree that education, at least in the general sense of a 4 year degree, is obviously more effective that cash. We have an enormous number of people with bachelor degrees that are serving food, and PhDs that are slinging building websites(which is challenging but is not a skill much improved by a Ph.D.)
For long-term unemployed? They usually don't have marketable skills. Bachelors degrees are clearly not the right answer, since those don't usually teach you any.
The usual package in Europe is a combination of remedial math/english/science and apprenticeships in professional trades - things which no plausible "basic income" recipient could afford to get via private tuition, but which can be easily affordable as an organised programme.
> giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives
It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary. But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective.
That's an interesting experiment, although the sample is too small and uncontrolled to give much confidence in the results (I'm completely confident that if I could pick which people received the money, I could find a hundred people in London who would show the same pattern; to really prove the case we need a controlled random sample). Still, this experiment lends weight to the idea that somebody should run that study.
> It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary
This is an interesting and subtle case: they gave out money, and did some amount of aid work (the article indicates £50k was spent, of which £39k was the handouts, and it's not clear what the rest was spent on), in a city where addiction treatment is free and readily available to anybody who's willing to take it. That combination of things worked, at least in these cases, and I think that's consistent with my expectations that we need combined financial, healthcare, and education support to get really good results. To get more insight we'd need a study which ran the same programme in many locations, including ones where these things are not readily available.
> But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective.
And therein lies the tricky part: it's definitely true that if you give somebody enough money, it will solve all these problems for them. Unfortunately it's just unaffordable to raise everybody to the median income. Can we afford enough to make a difference at the population level, even if it's not enough to make all their problems go away? I don't know, and we should keep running more and larger experiments to find out.
> I'm completely confident that if I could pick which people received the money, I could find a hundred people in London who would show the same pattern
And I'm completely confident that I could as well -- not because I'm a good judge of character just because I'd simply replicate this study grab 100 long term homeless addicts at random and give it to them.
If you have the resources to do this then please do, and collect the data and write it up. I'll just note that you wouldn't be replicating this study, which was not randomised (they picked 13 people that the charity was already engaged with). This kind of larger scale randomised experiment is exactly what we need to prove the hypothesis.
> 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.
True, but if it indeed helps in most circumstances, then we should just go ahead and do it. Right now people are searching for increasingly obscure cases where cash handouts won't help to block the entire idea. It's an easy excuse to make that enables one to do nothing.
I think that it takes a very special kind of deliberate wrongness to hear somebody say "we need healthcare and education in addition to financial support" and conclude "okay, so let's do none of these things".
I don't think that it helps anybody to offer endlessly reduced compromises in an effort to find common ground with people who are willing to do that. Let's not lose sight of the fact that the status quo - even in the US - is already a combined package of financial, medical, and education support. How about just continuing to improve all of them? We already know that they all work well.
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.
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.
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).
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?
We could start by making it easier for American women who want a tubal ligation to get one. Currently, if you are under age 25 and/or do not already have 2 kids, it is a huge uphill battle. My recollection is that there are federal laws that impact this. I wrote a college paper for a law class on this some years ago. The last time I wanted to discuss it on the Internet, I was not able to determine if these laws had changed. I was able to determine that, yea, verily, women are still treated in a patronizing way, like they will surely regret deciding to close off their options and will obviously want kids later. This winds up being a huge problem for some women. I have personally known women who ended up trapped in long term poverty in part because of the reluctance of the American medical establishment to let them get their tubes tied. It's really gross.
In contrast, an American man can decide to get a vasectomy at age 18 and, yeah, sure, we will do that. No problem.
The problem is that extremely poor women are often in a situation where they cannot afford birth control and are sleeping with assholes who will neither provide condoms themselves nor help her in any way if she turns up pregnant. Turning up pregnant can make long term poverty an inescapable fact of life.
I don't think denying men who are old enough to serve in the military the right to reproductive choice remedies the situation in any way.
From an abstract frame, it seems fine. From the frame of, I don't know, the USA's political economy, it's "eugenics to keep down the black and hispanic population".
Another idea I heard once, that I think is pretty sensible, and which could be implemented in the future as contraception techniques progress, is to have every kid rendered unable to reproduce for free with a reversible procedure that they could then have undone (again, for free) on demand after reaching legal age, when they feel like having kids. This would remove unwanted teenage pregnancies which also tend to contribute to poverty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
If someone has wealth I'd generally expect them to consume that wealth before receiving wealth transfers.
You don't need to make it so complicated. Just tax people on their wealth and income, then pay everybody the basic income. Those at the very top will end up paying far more in taxes than what they receive in basic income.
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.
That's extremely gross. Most poor people are poor in part because of serious health problems. Giving people "3 square meals/day" implies forcing them to accept some standard issue, probably godawful cafeteria food that they have no control over. This can make health problems far, far worse, driving up medical expenses and driving down their ability to be productive.
To me, that sounds like a) hell and b) permanent underclass in the making.
And if you think in-kind assistance cannot be diverted to other goods, you are really, really clueless as to how creative people can be about converting the things they can get into the things they want to get. The reason we have all kinds of laws about how you can use food stamps is because so many people find ways to convert them to guns, alcohol, you name it.
"Most poor people are poor in part because of serious health problems."
Citation needed? There was a study a while back purporting to state that most bankruptcies in the United States were due to medical costs, but that turned out to not be the case upon further examination.
Not a citation and not a proof, just pointing out an additional group - there is a whole class of mental problems that can lead one to poverty and keep them there. They often need money and stable situation (have time to visit a doctor, have money to buy drugs OR have a job to have an insurance to get drugs) to be kept at bay, and if they force you into bad situation it becomes very hard to get out of it.
Some people are employable only because huge inefficiencies that exist in job market (e.g. it's easy to pass a programming test and hard for your employer to determine your actual productivity) and that would be better off on an UBI, providing some value without the stresses of not getting paid for being unable to e.g. maintain 9-5 schedule, or your employer not understanding that you have random periods of downtime due to depression.
Also note that "bankruptcy" is not directly correlated to "poor". You can go bankrupt while pulling in six figures, and be able to supply your family's basic needs throughout the process. Bankruptcy just puts a legal stop to debt collection.
I don't have a citation handy. I had a college class on homelessness some years ago. I have read a fair amount about poverty. I am currently homeless. My medical handicap is a primary underlying cause of my lack of housing and challenges involved in trying to resolve that.
It is too late to edit the comment. It may not be "most" poor people (ie more than 50%) but it is certainly many.
I can also confidently state that a high percentage of homeless individuals have either a medical or a mental health condition that is an underlying cause of homelessness hy substantially interfering with their ability to make their life work. I believe that for the homeless population this is well over 50%, though I don't have a citation for that either. However, my previous college class and firsthand experiences suggest that health problems lead to homelessness. I know that once you are on the street, it can be hard to take care of yourself and homelessness often does cause or worsen health issues. I think this reality masks the degree to which health problems both precede and contribute to incidence of homelessness. I think most people think people on the street are ill because they are on the street. But everything I have seen indicates most of them were ill before they became homeless and that fact contributed to them ending up on the street or outright caused their homelessness. In many cases, being on the street does cause a worsening of their health, but that should not be misconstrued as "Well, they are only ill because they are homeless."
Everyone I have ever known reasonably well who had a serious health crisis experienced significant financial stress as a consequence, above and beyond the high medical expenses per se. Some things I have heard over the years: Job loss, time away from the job, passed over for promotion, took a demotion to a lower paying position. There are also additional expenses incurred beyond the medical expenses, such as higher food costs due to being too sick to work, transportation expenses if they need to travel to get care, etc.
I also recall reading in an article that the most common factor in cases where women were on welfare for very long periods and could not seem to get off welfare was that she was de facto responsible for providing care for a relative with high needs of some sort, either a special needs child or elderly parent in poor health or similar scenario.
Among the things I needed — and had — when I was growing up, but that aren't on your list: books, a computer, a bicycle, moving away from the kids who were beating me up, a root canal, fillings, tooth sealant, an appendectomy, methylphenidate, clothes that weren't itchy, electronic components, music recordings, travel out of the inner city to get into nature and visit family members, a telephone number. My parents got those things with money. In many cases, they were better ways of spending money than more government-issue poor-people sweats would have been.
It might surprise you that putting poor people into gray government housing devoid of life or joy and under the control of administrators not accountable to those people generally results not only in abuses but also in crime inside that housing. But that's what you find, not only in the housing projects you're proposing, but also in military barracks (often in the form of gang rape) and in prisons.
It turns out that, in practice, parents do a better job of assigning resources to their children's welfare than governments do. This is true despite both the occasional glaring exception and the general situation that nearly all parents spend some money on things like tobacco or junk food.
Of course, it would be great to have government or community institutions that serve as a safety net for the kids whose parents aren't providing their needs, for whatever reason. Unfortunately, as a society, we do a terrible job of providing accountability to any kind of institution whose job is ostensibly to care for people without political power — whether we're talking about mental hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, housing projects, or schools. Public schools are only as good as they are because of pressure from parents.
Your reply demonstrates perfectly why in-kind benefits are politically superior to cash. You've now demanded that specific goods be added to the list and we can explicitly have a debate on the merits of those goods.
I've lived in housing far worse, in terms of material living conditions, than what I'm proposing. I'll happily do it again, most likely next Jan.
The main problem you describe (people committing gang rapes) is a problem with the people rather than the environment. Folks aren't materially deprived, they are just bad people. Now consider these folks: http://www.zostel.com/media/photo/Jaipur_Zostel_Common_Room_... Suddenly, materially worse living conditions don't seem so bad. Instead of "gray government housing devoid of life or joy", it's a fun youth hostel.
(In contrast, my experience staying in real poverty (aka a nice building in an average Maharashtran village) was far less fun. The lack of mosquito netting, power, internet and running water made life quite unpleasant.)
I am disappointed that you think that I was "demand[ing] that specific goods be added to the list", and given that level of incomprehension, I don't think engaging further with you on this will be productive.
The only way many people can stay mentally coherent to ideological positions is if they don't read dissenting positions too closely. They try to slot opposing opinions into pre-formed straw-man arguments, then they reiterate their pre-fabricated counter-arguments.
It's a pattern you see almost universally in the user comment sections of political journalism. People who want to think find the comment section's tone hostile, because it's filled with ideologues with Pavlovian responses and pre-canned arguments. The ideologues don't need to read what the other side's ideologues have written - they just need a few key words and they're salivating. Political comment sections are a write-only platform.
I don't think this phenomenon is specific to any political ideology, mind. I think it's fairly universal.
I honestly don't know whether to upvote you for describing an important phenomenon or to downvote you for semi-implicit accusation of intellectual dishonesty towards a long-time HN user.
Personally, I disagree with 'yummyfajitas conclusions, but I wouldn't go as far as to imply motivated reasoning.
You're right up to the point where you believe that the government should be dispensing cash to the parents. The parents must become self-sufficient if they're to adequately govern their home. People in dire need can be presented with necessities, but should probably not be presented with cash. A welfare case worker should be in charge of identifying "necessities" and given broad leeway to do so, so the family can lift out.
Did you read the article? Your point seems to be in direct contradiction to it. And it seems to be based entirely upon your own ideas with no supporting evidence.
While your abstract theory is very interesting, it's not really addressing my point, which is that, in practice, parents mostly seem to do a better job than welfare case workers of identifying necessities and allocating money to them. I was giving some anecdotes to clarify how this works in practice, but also I think this article provides another useful piece of empirical evidence showing that it does.
So maybe instead of coming up with social prescriptions based on abstract bullshit theories that sound good to you, which is because they flatter your preconceptions or because you've heard them repeated frequently, you should open your eyes to the things that are actually happening in the actual world, and see what happens in reality.
I agree that parents are better at determining their needs, but that's why they need to become self-sufficient. While they're not self-sufficient, they should be given only non-cash contributions so that they can survive while becoming self-sufficient, which makes them truly free to make determinations for their family. A parent can't really say he/she is doing that while they're on anyone's dole.
I've seen the model I've advocated work well dozens of times in reality.
Please understand that all of the groveling before "empirical results" is thinly-veiled hypocrisy. How many times does someone see a dense academic document and say "Oh, this totally changes my opinion on this controversial issue"? Almost never; if they agree with the outcome, they beat everyone over the head with it and call them denialist for not accepting it, and if they disagree, they insist that the outcome is biased, that there were "flaws in the methodology", etc.
If I did give you an article, study, or paper that supported my claims, don't pretend like it would matter. 98% of the time, people will accept propaganda that supports their existing opinion on controversial issues, and nothing else. It's why our media is the way it is.
I'm going to guess you're assuming that 'non-self-sufficient' parents are so because of some of their moral failings. Like they aren't "hard-working enough" or "responsible enough". If I guessed wrong, then feel free to ignore the rest of my comment.
If you could assume, for just a moment, that those moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes - like environment, continued bad material situation, stress, perhaps bad upbringing - would you then, in that world, see giving direct support as preferable to waiting for people in need to "get their shit together"?
If so, then consider that we're likely to live in that latter world - continued studies of human behaviour show that we're much more influenced by our conditions than our inner character. This is actually pretty positive, because it means we can actually fix things on a systemic level (and it also means things can be broken on it).
As I point out elsewhere, lots of folks (backpackers, college students) suffer similar material deprivation, environment and stress. Yet they don't make the same bad choices.
Nearly all of India lives in far worse conditions than American poor folks and also don't make the same bad choices.
Your theory doesn't seem to be predicting the world very well.
would you then, in that world, see giving direct support as preferable to waiting for people in need to "get their shit together"?
The post you are responding to explicitly favors giving direct support - just in-kind rather than cash.
...continued studies of human behaviour show that we're much more influenced by our conditions than our inner character.
> As I point out elsewhere, lots of folks (backpackers, college students) suffer similar material deprivation, environment and stress. Yet they don't make the same bad choices.
Short-term, voluntary material deprivation and stress, both of which you can end instantly at any time you want if you so choose, isn't the same thing as poverty.
> Nearly all of India lives in far worse conditions than American poor folks and also don't make the same bad choices.
Exactly my point. No sane person would call nearly all of Indians a nation of lazy, irresponsible people, and yet it's a popular sentiment towards the poor in western countries. I think my theory predicts the world pretty good.
> The post you are responding to explicitly favors giving direct support - just in-kind rather than cash.
I should have wrote "unconditional support", by which I mean support that doesn't make assumptions about what the helpee really needs based on helper's view of personal virtue.
> [citation needed]
Start with "fundamental attribution error" and continue from there; it's pretty well-studied area.
Short-term, voluntary material deprivation and stress, both of which you can end instantly at any time you want if you so choose, isn't the same thing as poverty.
How do you define "poverty"? Apparently it's not material deprivation, harsh environment or stress. So what is it?
I think my theory predicts the world pretty good.
Your theory predicts that intelligent Asian professionals, when faced with material deprivation, environment and stress will make good choices? Similarly for upper middle class Americans temporarily placed in an educational situation?
And it's only a narrow set of people who will actually wind up making bad choices?
I guess I totally misread your post. So in fact, it's not true that "moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes"?
The fundamental attribution error is not a magic incantation to ward off all evidence of bad decisionmaking or moral failure.
> How do you define "poverty"? Apparently it's not material deprivation, harsh environment or stress. So what is it?
It's being stuck in material deprivation. My theory is that it's most often caused by harsh environment or medical conditions. "Harsh environment" includes being born into poverty.
My theory predicts that even intelligent Asian professionals will make bad choices faced with enough material deprivation, environment and stress. People backpacking and students are doing it out of their own choice and can always stop backpacking and go home / drop out or change university to a less demanding one. Unless they're doing either to escape poverty, at which point you can clearly see it's not the conditions of backpacking/education that are the source of one's problems.
> I guess I totally misread your post. So in fact, it's not true that "moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes"?
My point is that there's much less moral failings happening at all than people (usually in a better situation) like to think. That is - a person X is not poor because he's lazy, he's poor because he is malnourished and so stressed that he doesn't have spare cognitive capacity to educate himself and get a better job. My theory predicts that if you solve his direct financial needs for a predictable while (for him; as opposed to random, one-off, non-repeating, small help that doesn't let him plan), he'll most likely recover and start to improve his condition.
> The fundamental attribution error is not a magic incantation to ward off all evidence of bad decisionmaking or moral failure.
No, but it's a name for when people are too eager to see bad decisionmaking or moral failure where there is none. Also, I pointed it out as a starting point - articles describing the concept in detail cite studies about the effects of environment on human behaviour and elaborate on how predictable humans are if you can set up the external conditions.
I'm sorry I am not linking to anything concrete, but I'm writing from a crappy hotel over Great Chinese Firewall. I am asking you to trust that if you start from fundamental attribution error, you'll end up reading about relevant studies :). It's 5 minutes for you, 5 minutes per site for me :(.
My theory predicts that even intelligent Asian professionals will make bad choices faced with enough material deprivation, environment and stress.
In that case, India falsifies your theory. Virtually all of India - including the professional class - is stuck in material deprivation vastly worse than American poverty - the average American poor consumer unit consumes $20k/year, while Indian GDP/Capita is $6k/year (adjusted for cost of living).
They don't usually make the same bad choices. They get educated, save money for a rainy day, mostly avoid drugs, etc.
Actually, now that I think of it, English literature adjuncts are another counterexample.
My theory predicts that if you solve his direct financial needs for a predictable while...
Why financial? Why not just fix malnourishment directly?
I did google the fundamental attribution error, but I did not find any studies showing that certain specific environmental conditions will cause all sorts of people to engage in the same bad behaviors that poor Americans engage in.
The most I found is studies showing things like "people will attribute a basketball player's poor shooting success to ability rather than reduced lighting." This suggests a bias is present, but doesn't come close to proving your thesis.
I guess we're talking a bit past each other and I'm talking myself into a circle as well, but let me try and clarify:
> In that case, India falsifies your theory. Virtually all of India - including the professional class - is stuck in material deprivation vastly worse than American poverty - the average American poor consumer unit consumes $20k/year, while Indian GDP/Capita is $6k/year (adjusted for cost of living).
Here by "bad" choices I meant "bad from comfortable western observer's point of view". The decisions are probably mostly good from the POV of the poor person involved. People in India are stuck im material deprivation because of the environment - the state in phase space in which their society is in. Similarly, many poor people in western countries.
> Actually, now that I think of it, English literature adjuncts are another counterexample.
Sadly, I don't know anything about this class of people.
> Why financial? Why not just fix malnourishment directly?
I don't think anybody will say that this isn't helpful. It is. Hell, it's almost as good as giving money away, assuming you cater to his particular needs - take into account what foods he absolutely dislikes, his time schedule, his allergies, etc. Because if you don't, if it's MIL-STD-01 meal pack 3 times a day, this is robbing one from dignity and in case of people with allergies / some types of mental conditions it's stress-inducing.
People generally have a need of control over their own fate. It's a base Maslovian need. Most of the in-kind conditional help as implemented in today's welfare denies the beneficiaries such control. This has a serious psychological impact, and you don't have to look further than mental institutions and care houses to see the problems it causes. Or even observe how people abuse welfare or even refuse it at all in order to cling to any semblance of control over their lives they have left. Handing out cash empowers people. They can chose their meal, chose what they invest in, chose their direction.
Another keyword (an almost-synonym to FAE) I forgot about - correspondence bias. The general direction I'm trying to point towards is the one presented by things like Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Conformity Experiment, FAE/correspondence bias, the entire economy and game theory - that people's decisions and outcomes are generally predictable based mostly on things external to them. That people follow incentives, determined by things like their mental state, stress, environment, available opportunities, etc. - and that explaining something away as "laziness" or "bad character" or "irresponsibility" is in most cases counterproductive.
If I manage to get hold of a semi-decent Internet connection (allowing to load anything better than plaintext) tomorrow I'll look for links to some sources.
I don't understand the conservative desire to centrally manage the lives of the poor, taking away choice and freedom in favor of centralized bureaucracy.
What? I assure you that the the meddling, micromanaging social services bureaucracies are not run by "conservatives". Far from it.
A conservative or libertarian model would tend more toward a negative income tax or guaranteed basic income than what we have now. In fact, Milton Friedman was a big advocate of the NIT.
Neither of which are examples of centralised bureaucracy?
That aside, conservative politicians aren't famous for demanding that the poor be given free money.
The current British conservative government seems intent - quite literally - on starving the poor to death. That seems to be more usual for conservatives than aggressive agitation for a guaranteed basic income.
What? I assure you that the the meddling, micromanaging social services bureaucracies are not run by "conservatives". Far from it.
Yes, they are. These services are known as prisons and you will find no greater a champion of their construction and expansion than among the most hard right wing members of the Republican party.
Prisons are the largest form of welfare in the US. They provide food, clothing, shelter and medical care to millions and millions of people who would otherwise be out in the cold. You don't have to search very far to find tons of examples of ex-cons who deliberately commit crimes in order to be sent back to prison.
FYI, corrections was about $70b in 2006 versus just social security spending was about $550b.
You can get a subsidized housing, free food, free medical care, and direct deposit cash every month from the government, and you don't need to be a felon to do it. In fact, you must not be a felon to be eligible.
>>"They provide food, clothing, shelter and medical care to millions and millions of people who would otherwise be out in the cold"
That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that they entrap many people who don't deserve to be there and would be productive members of society if it weren't for some ridiculous punishment on a nonsensical law.
I think it's unreasonable to believe that even half the people in an American prison would be homeless without it.
The desire springs from the idea that if someone is not self-sufficient, they need a manager to oversee their resource management and consumption until they become self-sufficient. It's delusional to say that there's not a large number of poor people whose economic status is directly related to their poor money management skills, poor employability, or other "real problems" that need fixed, not just band-aided by free cash.
In the same way that conservatives want to "micromanage" the lives of welfare recipients, liberals want you to believe everyone's problem is that they don't have infinity money and that there's no such thing as an imprudent expenditure. Liberals usually do not put any weight on independence or self-sufficiency, so they're OK with a society where everyone is on the dole.
By contrast, conservatives believe that people who are not self-sufficient need help to become self-sufficient. Conservatives believe this is micromanagement to the same extent that liberals believe gun control to be micromanagement. To each party, it's the obvious, common sense solution, and it's not about patronizing or babysitting, it's just about supervising people who obviously need supervision.
I would disagree on the relative merits of in-kind vs. cash assistance, for reasons that have mostly been explored by other replies. There is a specific problem, I see though, and it's what all of these quotes have in common:
"When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats"
"You've now demanded that specific goods be added to the list and we can explicitly have a debate on the merits of those goods."
"then they can consume only some of the available in-kind benefits"
"But you can also just eliminate the bad choices and directly manage their lives until they develop the ability to manage their own life."
All of these things have massive overhead at the administrative, procurement, and distribution tiers. Each of these things costs a lot of money:
1. Deciding on what to distribute
2. Subsequently arguing with recipients over the addition of items to the available benefits, and subsequently approving new items
3. Selecting and procuring the available options for each benefit item or type.
4. Distributing each item.
5. Tracking inventory of each in-kind benefit.
6. Negotiating returns of each in-kind benefit.
7. Balancing stock levels of available benefits to match the partial consumption of some recipients.
While I haven't seen a specific evaluation, I would be completely flabbergasted if this overhead was somehow a lesser cost than the potential loss of cash benefits to pleasure spending.
EDIT: To summarize, why manage this all centrally instead of relying on market dynamics that are well understood and efficient retail and distribution infrastructures that already exist?
Once the minimum benefit is determined, you can of course rely on market dynamics to provide it. The government can put out an RFP for caring for poor people and the lowest bidder can service the contract.
As for determining the actual minimum benefit, that's really just the job for a few bureaucrats. Once the basics are specified, the rest reverts to (free) political pundits - e.g., kragen arguing that books should be included.
And note that the losses due to pleasure spending can be HUGE in some cases, mainly relating to location. For example, consider the various housing projects in the east village, upper west side, etc. The cost of pleasure spending is $manhattan 2 bedroom - $cheaper location dormitory (living in Manhattan without roommates is a consumption choice).
Market forces will guarantee that any bidding for an RFP will maximise profit and minimise actual social spending.
It's bad enough trying to manage IT procurements through RFPs. When you try to manage social spending through RFPs, the result is madness.
This is empirical, and not just opinion. The UK has made a policy of outsourcing all kinds of critical social services to "market forces", and the results are predictably unsatisfactory.
Why would they be anything else when you have a direct and clear conflict of interest between maximising shareholder returns and providing effective services?
I think it's really spurious to imply that moving to a luxury apartment would be high on the list of priorities for anyone receiving a small cash infusion instead of in-kind benefits. I see no reason to expect even a small number of people receiving assistance to squander it on overpriced housing.
Is there any evidence to suggest that cash assistance to poor families is wasted at anywhere near the rate you're describing? I can understand being uncomfortable with the amount that may get spent on alcohol or other vices, but I still think that any reasonable amount to expect would be much lower than the amount wasted on administering in-kind and similar benefit programs. Just think about how much it costs us as a society to administer EBT systems -- it raises the cost of food for everyone, not just the benefit recipients.
Assuming an average market rent of $2,000 (a huge underestimate), and assuming dormitories could be provided in distant brooklyn/queens/bronx for $700 (an overestimate), that means we are wasting 70M/month on luxury goods for poor folks in one county alone.
Are you really trying to claim that the cost of administration would exceed $1300/month per housing unit?
Across the entire nation, the cost of administration doesn't need to exceed 1300/mo to be a worse option than cash benefits. It just needs to be greater than whatever waste recipients generate in aggregate. Manhattan low-income housing: 53,809 units, per your above claims, from one of the most expensive places to live in the entire country. 46.7 million Americans were below the poverty line in 2014:
The vast majority of the US is quite a bit cheaper than NYC. Further, we don't need to provide cash assistance to match an area's rent -- thus achieving the same "ship out the poor people" policy you seem to espouse above. If someone can spend their $500 monthly benefit on Manhattan rent, or spend that same benefit on NJ rent, many will choose the latter and thus avoid the waste you claim is inevitable.
And you've still cited no evidence which makes me think that the waste you're citing could exist on a national scale anywhere close to the administrative burden of an in-kind program.
'"Water dumping" involves buying beverages that require a container deposit and immediately dumping out the contents in order to return the container and receive the deposit credit in cash.'
besides being given cash they government fees that people below a certain threshold of income need to be adjusted. There are far too many such fees which hammer the income of those least able to afford it.
> 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".
I should clarify. I don't see the problem with pundits saying "You can't live on $X" when you really, demonstrably can't raise children well on $X, where "raising children well" is defined as positive psychological and employment outcomes. The article suggests that this is the situation we're in right now; therefore I'm fine with people agitating to improve that situation.
If, as you fear, America should at some point find itself giving too much to the poor, then perhaps proposals to limit that would be appropriate, but right now (and for most of recorded history) we have the opposite problem, and your fear does not look at all realistic.
Why is the minimum wage never sufficient? Do you think it'll actually stop at $15/hr? It's insufficient because people always want more free money, and there are always politicians that are willing to exploit that for personal gain.
The minimum wage is never sufficient because it's never, to date, been enough to comfortably support a family, as the article we're commenting on demonstrates. Fortunately for you, your "damn these lazy, greedy poors" rhetoric is still quite popular.
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?
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.
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)?
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.
80k is roughly the cost of jailing one US adult for two years.
"In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population."
That analysis is too linear. As a basic rebuttal, supposing some small percentage of Cherokee children is averted from a path of violent crime, the reduction in violent crime brings an outsized benefit (especially to would-be victims) which is worth the cost. You're looking at the middle of curve, and ignoring the narrowing of the extreme bottom. And presumably the entire curve is shifting to the right, so there's gradual gains at the extreme top as well.
First, I don't think "cost to society" is something that can currently be precisely calculated by a balance sheet. What's the "cost" or "savings" from x hours of y humans suffering (or not)?
Secondly, going on math alone, you're missing many variables: the (taxed) income of the free individual, hours volunteered, money donated, "positive influence" ripple effect, etc.
According to Wikipedia US human lives are valued at 50-100k a year so if it provides the equivalent of 2 good years above what they would have otherwise it's plus.
Will the average Cherokee child consume $80k of police/court/prison services during their lifetime? That's breakeven
You can't talk about "breakeven" without considering opportunity cost of not taking the choice - in this case, taxes and other returns that better outcomes would produce. It doesn't take much increase in outcomes to arrive with a benefit worth $80k over a whole lifetime.
Exactly! Unfortunately people are quick to react to short term costs ($4,000 a year to improve society) rather than seeing that the long term benefits far outweigh them.
Also, people are quick to weasel out by assuming someone's problems are caused by their lack of virtue ("if only they worked harder", "had more discipline", etc.) instead noticing the environmental factors that can actually be improved.
When I saw that the argument was based on the outcomes at an Indian reservation I became very, very skeptical of the findings. Reservations are not an ideal arrangement, and there's plenty of evidence that many of their problems came out of "free cash" from the government or casinos. I personally think that over a large enough population free cash undermines the motivation to seek education or employment. Many of the youth there have severe drug and alcohol problems, far greater than global statistics that their rural demographic would suggest.
In the case of the Lumbee, there's still a strong sense of helping out folks that need it, but the help is at the discretion of the tribe, not a government (or casino). Furthermore, they've built that system without much federal help.
Note that I'm not arguing for an all or nothing approach here, I think it's reasonable for the federal government to help the tribe financially. I don't think it's reasonable to have the government give money directly to individuals in the tribe.
> I don't think it's reasonable to have the government give money directly to individuals in the tribe.
Well, in some tribes there is economic inequality due to local corruption. So this isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution. It works out well when the local government is actually working for the people (vs. just for itself + relatives).
> The point is that bringing up children in poverty creates a worse outcome for society as a whole.
I see your point, but it’s important to note that the authors still haven’t established causation, but are planning a follow-up to do so. The authors aren’t making quite as strong of a claim as you’re making here -yet.
Point taken, but causation is hard if not impossible in this kind of area (we're not dealing with physics here), and do you want to wait 20 years to see the results?
The immediate problem is that the costs of US courts and prisons are extremely high (1) and they are still growing quite rapidly. Jailing one criminal for three years costs over $100,000 (aside from the other social costs that other people have pointed out), which would cover a substantial amount of intervention.
Further, US prisons hold very large numbers of poor people, because poor people have the biggest motive to commit crimes (nothing to lose), and the least ability to pay for bail, lawyers or other treatments (eg for mental illness). I'll take correlation if it shows that interventions help poor children to avoid this fate.
(1) Quoting Wikipedia: "Judicial, police, and corrections costs totaled $212 billion in 2011 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2007, around $74 billion was spent on corrections according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics."
"In 2014, among facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the average cost of incarceration for federal inmates in fiscal year 2014 was $30,619.85."
"In California in 2008, it cost the state an average of $47,102 a year to incarcerate an inmate in a state prison. From 2001 to 2009, the average annual cost increased by about $19,500."
The argument that all a kid needs to turn out OK is money is absurd, and yet, it seems to be a cornerstone in Millennial thinking. We do everyone a disservice when we pretend that all of our problems stem from not giving everyone free money. Maybe we are too far removed from the Soviet era for the whippersnappers to understand how very not-well these strategies turned out 30+ years ago. Stop worshipping money.
Correlation is not causation. What, pray tell, is the direct link that causes a child's brain size to increase in relation to the parents' bank account? Perhaps the reason wealthier children are healthier is because their parents have discipline and work hard to provide a safe, healthy, stimulating environment for their children, which includes retaining steady gainful employment and using the proceeds from that employment to provide food, shelter, and education for the children. This will not magically happen among poor children if you give the parents some baseline income.
I'm not speaking in absolute terms; there is definitely some crossover with good parents who are down on their luck and bad parents who have way too much money. But boiling the problem down to "give poor people more money to fix kids' brain structures" is too lazy, and preaching this about like it's some fundamental righteous principle is highly distasteful.
What I'm hearing you say is this (correct me if I'm wrong):
You are resistant to early, empirical results that poverty causes negative outcomes for children, and you will require stronger evidence to overcome this resistance.
Fair I suppose, but it says a lot about your politics. And I'll leave it there.
A more charitable interpretation would be that while poverty is one thing that harms children (and that can be fixed by giving them cash) there's a bunch of other stuff that harms children, and these don't seem to be fixable with cash. EG parents with addiction to alcohol doesn't seem to be something that's fixed with cash hand outs.
The argument that all a kid needs to turn out OK is money is absurd
Yes, that argument nobody is making is indeed absurd.
Perhaps the reason wealthier children are healthier is because their parents have discipline and work hard to provide a safe, healthy, stimulating environment for their children, which includes retaining steady gainful employment and using the proceeds from that employment to provide food, shelter, and education for the children. This will not magically happen among poor children if you give the parents some baseline income.
Did you RTFA? The improvements happened after families started gaining an extra $4k from a new casino that was opened in the area.
So yes, it did magically happened after the parents got a baseline income increase.
> The argument that all a kid needs to turn out OK is money is absurd, and yet, it seems to be a cornerstone in Millennial thinking.
I don't know; your argument seems to be actually the typical response, the kind of thing most people say when they see something that can be pattern-matched to "give money".
There are of course many non-material things that are important to growth of a children, but why dismiss this one so easy? Is it because it "sounds too simple"? Personally, I think we seriously overstate effectiveness of methods appealing to virtues, morality and "if only people would...". A lot of things in life are indirectly related to material wealth, you can improve pretty much anything by throwing more money at it. And we also know that things like "hard work" and "discipline" are overrated; people usually behave the way they do because of the environment they're in, and you can manufacture discipline by a mix of glucose and (in more extreme cases) some anti-ADHD medication.
I think we're as a society ignoring the obvious because it's easier to blame someone's lack of virtue than actually invest resources into solving their problems.
Repeated actual peer reviews studies are showing the same thing namely that poor people are poor not because of their moral failing but because they don't have any money.
So you argue that instead of actually using the results of research we should focus our welfare using understanding based upon 19th century moralizations.
> poor people are poor not because of their moral failing but because they don't have any money.
My parents put together made less than $4,000 a year when I was born. Yet, today they are not poor and neither am I. Nobody gave them any free money, why wouldn't I be skeptical of these studies?
Your parents were lucky. They are probably also hard working and intelligent but unless they were lucky they could not have escaped from the poverty you describe (unless you're missing some details like having helpful rich friends or family etc). It's too easy for something to go wrong e.g. an illness or injury, a car accident, a broken appliance or two and your knocked back down again and if you have no money and no income you can't recover.
They didn't even have a car or appliance to break...
My parents were poor because they were born in a shitty country with a shitty economic system and there wasn't anything they could do except leave. That's bad luck.
If you're born healthy in the US you start with opportunity and have to actively fuck it up.
> My parents were poor because they were born in a shitty country with a shitty economic system and there wasn't anything they could do except leave. That's bad luck.
Ahh so $4000 had rather more purchasing power than in the US then. I wondered about a salary that low.
I don't understand your reference to the soviet era. When I think of what characterized the Soviet Union, "giving everyone free money" is not what comes to mind at all, especially since one of the major things that did characterize it was crushing poverty and shortages for many.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
You have far too much faith in "science". Academics are human, and subject to human frailties. Studies are often sponsored or otherwise "encouraged" by outside parties with a certain interest. Academics often modify their reports until they get a result that "demonstrates" their desired outcome. Conventional wisdom, supported by the day's best "science", is regularly disproved.
Consider that every side in every political debate believes the evidence supports their opinion, and that the evidence the other guys are using is a sham. Although academics have a bias in aggregate, which should not automatically be mistaken as valid consensus, you can usually find at least a few outlying reports to support any desired political position.
What it boils down to is that people believe whatever they want, probably for emotional reasons, and they can't really be convinced otherwise. They're only ready to come to the table when those emotional links have been severed by something in their life experience.
> Parents stimulating their children does probably more to the brain structure than a check in the mail.
Yes; a check in the mail does not raise a kid, parents do. But what a check in the mail can do is enable one of the parents to stay home and do the kidraising instead of having to seek another job so that the family can have heat in the winter. That's why it is useful.
>Yes; a check in the mail does not raise a kid, parents do. But what a check in the mail can do is enable one of the parents to stay home and do the kidraising instead of having to seek another job so that the family can have heat in the winter. That's why it is useful.
Replace that with one of the parents working less. Or in case of single-parent households, with the parent working two shifts instead of three. Additional income helps one redirect some time from work to children, in one way or another, and kids benefit from that time.
I can't talk for the US but in Europe at least, the image of blue collar workers working really long hours is more of a XIX century cliche. The vast majority of blue collar workers today work fixed hours, usually 35-38 hours a week, which is ample time to raise kids. It's not a matter of time spent. White collar workers are the one doing very long hours in modern societies. Though their kids somehow seem to still get better parenting.
In many poor, underprivileged environments, children are not encouraged to do these things with income. Furthermore, a lot of the socially encouraged spending patterns make it more likely for indoctrinated children to fall back into patterns of poverty even if they have the motivation and capability otherwise to get out.
I'm not sure if you've seen how kids interact much but peer pressure is extremely strong and if you're off reading books and playing with Legos at an early age there's little guarantee that it will persist into puberty and beyond. Plenty of friends I grew up with early on had a lot of these interests but most fell into a typical lower/lower-middle class trap of drugs and sex (with partying linking both together, of course). There were some middle-upper/upper class kids that participated a little, but there are different forces at work for those kids entirely that makes it quite easy for them to escape a bad cycle with merely competent parenting skills compared to a completely overworked, overwhelmed single parent or split parent household that defines a great deal of lower income household living situations.
It's a bit exhausting to have to pick up all the citations but I can certainly find a good reference or two for the first part if you know a couple phrases. Firstly, there's a couple papers on the phenomenon of "acting black" that shows how even gifted black kids are held back by themselves almost http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2008/03/acting-black-hinders-gift... or perhaps as a set of papers by a Harvard professor that grew up poor and black in a rough area http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/me... This other paper explores how drug use is correlated with peer drug use but can be mitigated by relationship strength with the mother, which can be rather darn hard if she's working 12-hour days http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.darnell/peer_pressure_and_dru... If you add in anti-social behaviors, being poor translates quickly into anti-social behaviors as the sort of "unproductive behaviors" that is being banded about in the thread http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232460627_Poverty_Pa...
We're not here on HN trying to solve the world's problems or something in comment threads anyway, so being a bit qualitative and subjective is something that goes with the territory of a lot of social science. We could go really rigorous but measuring people and behavior is really, really hard to do well without making the results of papers so narrow they're irrelevant for making meaningful social commentary arguments.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadSigns and wonders....
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It won't guarantee the absolute best return, but it can effectively guarantee a very respectable average return.
Different people weight these two errors differently. Some people think it's really terrible to fail to help an honest person in need, but don't care as much about the cost of enabling a self-destructive person. Others don't care much about (1), and would in fact not help a single person rather than let (3) happen once.
Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.)
Unfortunately the 'loss function' of the different types of errors is what really gums up most honest debate on these issues. A lot of these are evaluated on moral principles more than economic costs, which further complicates the story. I disagree with them, but there's a lot of people that think there should be harsh penalties in the world for using drugs, no matter the societal costs. Or that giving anybody a handout from taxpayer money is wrong, even if it ends up saving taxpayer money in the future.
I meant really that being clean shouldn't be a precursor
Drug users sometimes engage in acquisitive crime to get money to buy drugs. Or they become sex workers. The public health burden of (unregulated) sex work is considerable.
So giving these people cash reduces the crime they commit, and reduces the need for them to become sex-workers. Often just giving them the cash is far cheaper than the legal system alternatives - the police investigation and the trial is likely to be expensive. (I accept your point that some people just don't care about saving that tax money, they want "tough on crime" policies)
> Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.)
This is so simplistic it's almost hateful.
It's a failure to understand the complex drivers of a lot of severe drug addiction.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/21/drug-ad...
Whoa, I didn't intend to advocate for any particular interventions, just giving some of the difficulties of talking about these in the US political environment, and that short parenthetical list is the sort of interventions that are often brought up tin these discussions.
It's clearly nonsensical to withhold money from them that they would otherwise have received. It also doesn't sound like a good idea to expect them to pay for their own treatment from the money you gave them. We need both for this to work.
But here is another way too look at it.
People with rich parents might not become as successful as their parents but they are rarely ending at the bottom of society.
Even if money alone doesn't motivate you (which I think is entirely fair to belive), you are more likely to try and use them for something useful if you feel like it's within your reach to do so.
The motivation isn't the money itself but rather opportunity within your reach.
There is another comment below about giving in-kind stuff instead of the more fungible cash, but the problems with that (and with your example) boil down to that being moralizing. People want to moralize rather than enable. If a person has the means and doesn't use them, then and only then, can we claim some other problems remain to be fixed, but we cannot even logically conclude that the problems are blocking something debatably-desirable at this point. We can't have a non-armchair/inherently-smug-and-preachy discussion until everyone has a basic income.
This problem isn't going away, and is only for lack of numbers. Even someone who wants to die by heroin would be better off being allowed to, than forcing them to harm others (or themselves differently) in order to get there.
My point was rather than a financial-assistance-only approach is insufficient: we also need, at minimum, strong education and healthcare support, because there clearly exist groups of people who need them.
I agree with that collection of policies, based on my understanding of current economic thinking and research.
I would imagine that a stable supply of the substance to which one is addicted, plus money off which to live, would form an excellent foundation for being a non-destructive member of society.
Purely anecdotal but please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities (and a big thank you to whoever is continuing them for my sake). Fortunately I'm an odd-ball and no one else anywhere would even think to behave as I would. So, my story is not only anecdotal but completely irrelevant.
Interestingly, I keep reading HN and sometimes pause to make a new account with 0 karma, in order to contribute (hopefully) compelling comments and conversation when I am so inspired to, despite the karma/profit-motive. I actually think the presence of karma encourages me to be argumentative and act out indulgently, self-destructively, and even anti-socially, in the same way I see people in poverty do.
You'll get bored shitless after a week of doing nothing with your life improvements to make a point, and suddenly you'll be back here having a productive input in the society, be it arts or engineering, services or thinking. But maybe you do really want to make a point and decide to just drink and be merry. That would still be a significant improvement for the society over having you perform "economic activity" in advertising or other bullshit industry we keep because we're too big on puritan values to even consider that slaving away your life for food and shelter isn't the optimal way of living.
Every welfare recipient should have a shrewd case worker that dispenses welfare as needed, sees that the recipient is really doing all they can to be self-sufficient, and creates opportunities where the recipient can make a contribution back for the gifts they receive (like volunteering at the food bank once a week), tailored specifically to the recipient's condition.
What makes you believe this is true, beyond simple assertion?
Just getting some extra cash with no strings attached certainly doesn't strip you of your dignity, and if it does, you can always refuse and demand food stamps instead. In Germany, getting food stamps is what strips you of your dignity. You hold up the queue at checkout while they figure if they can accept those and if they are allowed to give you change, etc.
"Just getting cash" strips one of dignity no more than "just getting water from the river" or "fruits from a tree" stripped humans of their dignity in the past. Nature provides for us unconditionally. No one is truly independent from the systems they're embedded in, and the assumption that a baseline amount of resources that can form a stable foundation will make one forgoe "improving their situation" is, frankly, offensive to me as a human being.
What type of education did you have in mind?
The usual package in Europe is a combination of remedial math/english/science and apprenticeships in professional trades - things which no plausible "basic income" recipient could afford to get via private tuition, but which can be easily affordable as an organised programme.
This was done in London. Here you go: https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...
> giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives
It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary. But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective.
> It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary
This is an interesting and subtle case: they gave out money, and did some amount of aid work (the article indicates £50k was spent, of which £39k was the handouts, and it's not clear what the rest was spent on), in a city where addiction treatment is free and readily available to anybody who's willing to take it. That combination of things worked, at least in these cases, and I think that's consistent with my expectations that we need combined financial, healthcare, and education support to get really good results. To get more insight we'd need a study which ran the same programme in many locations, including ones where these things are not readily available.
> But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective.
And therein lies the tricky part: it's definitely true that if you give somebody enough money, it will solve all these problems for them. Unfortunately it's just unaffordable to raise everybody to the median income. Can we afford enough to make a difference at the population level, even if it's not enough to make all their problems go away? I don't know, and we should keep running more and larger experiments to find out.
And I'm completely confident that I could as well -- not because I'm a good judge of character just because I'd simply replicate this study grab 100 long term homeless addicts at random and give it to them.
True, but if it indeed helps in most circumstances, then we should just go ahead and do it. Right now people are searching for increasingly obscure cases where cash handouts won't help to block the entire idea. It's an easy excuse to make that enables one to do nothing.
I don't think that it helps anybody to offer endlessly reduced compromises in an effort to find common ground with people who are willing to do that. Let's not lose sight of the fact that the status quo - even in the US - is already a combined package of financial, medical, and education support. How about just continuing to improve all of them? We already know that they all work well.
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.
source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435
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?
In contrast, an American man can decide to get a vasectomy at age 18 and, yeah, sure, we will do that. No problem.
I don't think denying men who are old enough to serve in the military the right to reproductive choice remedies the situation in any way.
Nonsense.
https://www.google.com/webhp?q=doctors%20refuse%20vasectomy
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
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).
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.
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.
You don't need to make it so complicated. Just tax people on their wealth and income, then pay everybody the basic income. Those at the very top will end up paying far more in taxes than what they receive in basic income.
That's extremely gross. Most poor people are poor in part because of serious health problems. Giving people "3 square meals/day" implies forcing them to accept some standard issue, probably godawful cafeteria food that they have no control over. This can make health problems far, far worse, driving up medical expenses and driving down their ability to be productive.
To me, that sounds like a) hell and b) permanent underclass in the making.
And if you think in-kind assistance cannot be diverted to other goods, you are really, really clueless as to how creative people can be about converting the things they can get into the things they want to get. The reason we have all kinds of laws about how you can use food stamps is because so many people find ways to convert them to guns, alcohol, you name it.
Citation needed? There was a study a while back purporting to state that most bankruptcies in the United States were due to medical costs, but that turned out to not be the case upon further examination.
Some people are employable only because huge inefficiencies that exist in job market (e.g. it's easy to pass a programming test and hard for your employer to determine your actual productivity) and that would be better off on an UBI, providing some value without the stresses of not getting paid for being unable to e.g. maintain 9-5 schedule, or your employer not understanding that you have random periods of downtime due to depression.
It is too late to edit the comment. It may not be "most" poor people (ie more than 50%) but it is certainly many.
I can also confidently state that a high percentage of homeless individuals have either a medical or a mental health condition that is an underlying cause of homelessness hy substantially interfering with their ability to make their life work. I believe that for the homeless population this is well over 50%, though I don't have a citation for that either. However, my previous college class and firsthand experiences suggest that health problems lead to homelessness. I know that once you are on the street, it can be hard to take care of yourself and homelessness often does cause or worsen health issues. I think this reality masks the degree to which health problems both precede and contribute to incidence of homelessness. I think most people think people on the street are ill because they are on the street. But everything I have seen indicates most of them were ill before they became homeless and that fact contributed to them ending up on the street or outright caused their homelessness. In many cases, being on the street does cause a worsening of their health, but that should not be misconstrued as "Well, they are only ill because they are homeless."
Everyone I have ever known reasonably well who had a serious health crisis experienced significant financial stress as a consequence, above and beyond the high medical expenses per se. Some things I have heard over the years: Job loss, time away from the job, passed over for promotion, took a demotion to a lower paying position. There are also additional expenses incurred beyond the medical expenses, such as higher food costs due to being too sick to work, transportation expenses if they need to travel to get care, etc.
I also recall reading in an article that the most common factor in cases where women were on welfare for very long periods and could not seem to get off welfare was that she was de facto responsible for providing care for a relative with high needs of some sort, either a special needs child or elderly parent in poor health or similar scenario.
It might surprise you that putting poor people into gray government housing devoid of life or joy and under the control of administrators not accountable to those people generally results not only in abuses but also in crime inside that housing. But that's what you find, not only in the housing projects you're proposing, but also in military barracks (often in the form of gang rape) and in prisons.
It turns out that, in practice, parents do a better job of assigning resources to their children's welfare than governments do. This is true despite both the occasional glaring exception and the general situation that nearly all parents spend some money on things like tobacco or junk food.
Of course, it would be great to have government or community institutions that serve as a safety net for the kids whose parents aren't providing their needs, for whatever reason. Unfortunately, as a society, we do a terrible job of providing accountability to any kind of institution whose job is ostensibly to care for people without political power — whether we're talking about mental hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, housing projects, or schools. Public schools are only as good as they are because of pressure from parents.
I've lived in housing far worse, in terms of material living conditions, than what I'm proposing. I'll happily do it again, most likely next Jan.
The main problem you describe (people committing gang rapes) is a problem with the people rather than the environment. Folks aren't materially deprived, they are just bad people. Now consider these folks: http://www.zostel.com/media/photo/Jaipur_Zostel_Common_Room_... Suddenly, materially worse living conditions don't seem so bad. Instead of "gray government housing devoid of life or joy", it's a fun youth hostel.
(In contrast, my experience staying in real poverty (aka a nice building in an average Maharashtran village) was far less fun. The lack of mosquito netting, power, internet and running water made life quite unpleasant.)
Pardon me, but you remind me of the "What have Romans ever done for us?" scene from the Life of Brian.
It's a pattern you see almost universally in the user comment sections of political journalism. People who want to think find the comment section's tone hostile, because it's filled with ideologues with Pavlovian responses and pre-canned arguments. The ideologues don't need to read what the other side's ideologues have written - they just need a few key words and they're salivating. Political comment sections are a write-only platform.
I don't think this phenomenon is specific to any political ideology, mind. I think it's fairly universal.
Personally, I disagree with 'yummyfajitas conclusions, but I wouldn't go as far as to imply motivated reasoning.
Surely none of us is without sin when it comes to intellectual dishonesty.
YF may not have been dishonest, but the post was also not worth engaging.
So maybe instead of coming up with social prescriptions based on abstract bullshit theories that sound good to you, which is because they flatter your preconceptions or because you've heard them repeated frequently, you should open your eyes to the things that are actually happening in the actual world, and see what happens in reality.
I've seen the model I've advocated work well dozens of times in reality.
Please understand that all of the groveling before "empirical results" is thinly-veiled hypocrisy. How many times does someone see a dense academic document and say "Oh, this totally changes my opinion on this controversial issue"? Almost never; if they agree with the outcome, they beat everyone over the head with it and call them denialist for not accepting it, and if they disagree, they insist that the outcome is biased, that there were "flaws in the methodology", etc.
If I did give you an article, study, or paper that supported my claims, don't pretend like it would matter. 98% of the time, people will accept propaganda that supports their existing opinion on controversial issues, and nothing else. It's why our media is the way it is.
If you could assume, for just a moment, that those moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes - like environment, continued bad material situation, stress, perhaps bad upbringing - would you then, in that world, see giving direct support as preferable to waiting for people in need to "get their shit together"?
If so, then consider that we're likely to live in that latter world - continued studies of human behaviour show that we're much more influenced by our conditions than our inner character. This is actually pretty positive, because it means we can actually fix things on a systemic level (and it also means things can be broken on it).
Nearly all of India lives in far worse conditions than American poor folks and also don't make the same bad choices.
Your theory doesn't seem to be predicting the world very well.
would you then, in that world, see giving direct support as preferable to waiting for people in need to "get their shit together"?
The post you are responding to explicitly favors giving direct support - just in-kind rather than cash.
...continued studies of human behaviour show that we're much more influenced by our conditions than our inner character.
[citation needed]
Short-term, voluntary material deprivation and stress, both of which you can end instantly at any time you want if you so choose, isn't the same thing as poverty.
> Nearly all of India lives in far worse conditions than American poor folks and also don't make the same bad choices.
Exactly my point. No sane person would call nearly all of Indians a nation of lazy, irresponsible people, and yet it's a popular sentiment towards the poor in western countries. I think my theory predicts the world pretty good.
> The post you are responding to explicitly favors giving direct support - just in-kind rather than cash.
I should have wrote "unconditional support", by which I mean support that doesn't make assumptions about what the helpee really needs based on helper's view of personal virtue.
> [citation needed]
Start with "fundamental attribution error" and continue from there; it's pretty well-studied area.
How do you define "poverty"? Apparently it's not material deprivation, harsh environment or stress. So what is it?
I think my theory predicts the world pretty good.
Your theory predicts that intelligent Asian professionals, when faced with material deprivation, environment and stress will make good choices? Similarly for upper middle class Americans temporarily placed in an educational situation?
And it's only a narrow set of people who will actually wind up making bad choices?
I guess I totally misread your post. So in fact, it's not true that "moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes"?
The fundamental attribution error is not a magic incantation to ward off all evidence of bad decisionmaking or moral failure.
It's being stuck in material deprivation. My theory is that it's most often caused by harsh environment or medical conditions. "Harsh environment" includes being born into poverty.
My theory predicts that even intelligent Asian professionals will make bad choices faced with enough material deprivation, environment and stress. People backpacking and students are doing it out of their own choice and can always stop backpacking and go home / drop out or change university to a less demanding one. Unless they're doing either to escape poverty, at which point you can clearly see it's not the conditions of backpacking/education that are the source of one's problems.
> I guess I totally misread your post. So in fact, it's not true that "moral failings are in fact mostly results of external causes"?
My point is that there's much less moral failings happening at all than people (usually in a better situation) like to think. That is - a person X is not poor because he's lazy, he's poor because he is malnourished and so stressed that he doesn't have spare cognitive capacity to educate himself and get a better job. My theory predicts that if you solve his direct financial needs for a predictable while (for him; as opposed to random, one-off, non-repeating, small help that doesn't let him plan), he'll most likely recover and start to improve his condition.
> The fundamental attribution error is not a magic incantation to ward off all evidence of bad decisionmaking or moral failure.
No, but it's a name for when people are too eager to see bad decisionmaking or moral failure where there is none. Also, I pointed it out as a starting point - articles describing the concept in detail cite studies about the effects of environment on human behaviour and elaborate on how predictable humans are if you can set up the external conditions.
I'm sorry I am not linking to anything concrete, but I'm writing from a crappy hotel over Great Chinese Firewall. I am asking you to trust that if you start from fundamental attribution error, you'll end up reading about relevant studies :). It's 5 minutes for you, 5 minutes per site for me :(.
In that case, India falsifies your theory. Virtually all of India - including the professional class - is stuck in material deprivation vastly worse than American poverty - the average American poor consumer unit consumes $20k/year, while Indian GDP/Capita is $6k/year (adjusted for cost of living).
They don't usually make the same bad choices. They get educated, save money for a rainy day, mostly avoid drugs, etc.
Actually, now that I think of it, English literature adjuncts are another counterexample.
My theory predicts that if you solve his direct financial needs for a predictable while...
Why financial? Why not just fix malnourishment directly?
I did google the fundamental attribution error, but I did not find any studies showing that certain specific environmental conditions will cause all sorts of people to engage in the same bad behaviors that poor Americans engage in.
The most I found is studies showing things like "people will attribute a basketball player's poor shooting success to ability rather than reduced lighting." This suggests a bias is present, but doesn't come close to proving your thesis.
> In that case, India falsifies your theory. Virtually all of India - including the professional class - is stuck in material deprivation vastly worse than American poverty - the average American poor consumer unit consumes $20k/year, while Indian GDP/Capita is $6k/year (adjusted for cost of living).
Here by "bad" choices I meant "bad from comfortable western observer's point of view". The decisions are probably mostly good from the POV of the poor person involved. People in India are stuck im material deprivation because of the environment - the state in phase space in which their society is in. Similarly, many poor people in western countries.
> Actually, now that I think of it, English literature adjuncts are another counterexample.
Sadly, I don't know anything about this class of people.
> Why financial? Why not just fix malnourishment directly?
I don't think anybody will say that this isn't helpful. It is. Hell, it's almost as good as giving money away, assuming you cater to his particular needs - take into account what foods he absolutely dislikes, his time schedule, his allergies, etc. Because if you don't, if it's MIL-STD-01 meal pack 3 times a day, this is robbing one from dignity and in case of people with allergies / some types of mental conditions it's stress-inducing.
People generally have a need of control over their own fate. It's a base Maslovian need. Most of the in-kind conditional help as implemented in today's welfare denies the beneficiaries such control. This has a serious psychological impact, and you don't have to look further than mental institutions and care houses to see the problems it causes. Or even observe how people abuse welfare or even refuse it at all in order to cling to any semblance of control over their lives they have left. Handing out cash empowers people. They can chose their meal, chose what they invest in, chose their direction.
Another keyword (an almost-synonym to FAE) I forgot about - correspondence bias. The general direction I'm trying to point towards is the one presented by things like Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Conformity Experiment, FAE/correspondence bias, the entire economy and game theory - that people's decisions and outcomes are generally predictable based mostly on things external to them. That people follow incentives, determined by things like their mental state, stress, environment, available opportunities, etc. - and that explaining something away as "laziness" or "bad character" or "irresponsibility" is in most cases counterproductive.
If I manage to get hold of a semi-decent Internet connection (allowing to load anything better than plaintext) tomorrow I'll look for links to some sources.
[proceeds to ignore comment]
A conservative or libertarian model would tend more toward a negative income tax or guaranteed basic income than what we have now. In fact, Milton Friedman was a big advocate of the NIT.
That aside, conservative politicians aren't famous for demanding that the poor be given free money.
The current British conservative government seems intent - quite literally - on starving the poor to death. That seems to be more usual for conservatives than aggressive agitation for a guaranteed basic income.
Milton Friedman is just about the most famous conservative/libertarian economist there is. Nobel Prize, even.
Yes, they are. These services are known as prisons and you will find no greater a champion of their construction and expansion than among the most hard right wing members of the Republican party.
Nice attempt to shift the goal posts, but I'm not going to bite.
We're talking about welfare reform, not prison reform.
You can get a subsidized housing, free food, free medical care, and direct deposit cash every month from the government, and you don't need to be a felon to do it. In fact, you must not be a felon to be eligible.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that they entrap many people who don't deserve to be there and would be productive members of society if it weren't for some ridiculous punishment on a nonsensical law.
I think it's unreasonable to believe that even half the people in an American prison would be homeless without it.
No, they are not. Prisons and welfare are for totally different purposes.
In the same way that conservatives want to "micromanage" the lives of welfare recipients, liberals want you to believe everyone's problem is that they don't have infinity money and that there's no such thing as an imprudent expenditure. Liberals usually do not put any weight on independence or self-sufficiency, so they're OK with a society where everyone is on the dole.
By contrast, conservatives believe that people who are not self-sufficient need help to become self-sufficient. Conservatives believe this is micromanagement to the same extent that liberals believe gun control to be micromanagement. To each party, it's the obvious, common sense solution, and it's not about patronizing or babysitting, it's just about supervising people who obviously need supervision.
"When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats"
"You've now demanded that specific goods be added to the list and we can explicitly have a debate on the merits of those goods."
"then they can consume only some of the available in-kind benefits"
"But you can also just eliminate the bad choices and directly manage their lives until they develop the ability to manage their own life."
All of these things have massive overhead at the administrative, procurement, and distribution tiers. Each of these things costs a lot of money:
1. Deciding on what to distribute
2. Subsequently arguing with recipients over the addition of items to the available benefits, and subsequently approving new items
3. Selecting and procuring the available options for each benefit item or type.
4. Distributing each item.
5. Tracking inventory of each in-kind benefit.
6. Negotiating returns of each in-kind benefit.
7. Balancing stock levels of available benefits to match the partial consumption of some recipients.
While I haven't seen a specific evaluation, I would be completely flabbergasted if this overhead was somehow a lesser cost than the potential loss of cash benefits to pleasure spending.
EDIT: To summarize, why manage this all centrally instead of relying on market dynamics that are well understood and efficient retail and distribution infrastructures that already exist?
As for determining the actual minimum benefit, that's really just the job for a few bureaucrats. Once the basics are specified, the rest reverts to (free) political pundits - e.g., kragen arguing that books should be included.
And note that the losses due to pleasure spending can be HUGE in some cases, mainly relating to location. For example, consider the various housing projects in the east village, upper west side, etc. The cost of pleasure spending is $manhattan 2 bedroom - $cheaper location dormitory (living in Manhattan without roommates is a consumption choice).
It's bad enough trying to manage IT procurements through RFPs. When you try to manage social spending through RFPs, the result is madness.
This is empirical, and not just opinion. The UK has made a policy of outsourcing all kinds of critical social services to "market forces", and the results are predictably unsatisfactory.
Why would they be anything else when you have a direct and clear conflict of interest between maximising shareholder returns and providing effective services?
Is there any evidence to suggest that cash assistance to poor families is wasted at anywhere near the rate you're describing? I can understand being uncomfortable with the amount that may get spent on alcohol or other vices, but I still think that any reasonable amount to expect would be much lower than the amount wasted on administering in-kind and similar benefit programs. Just think about how much it costs us as a society to administer EBT systems -- it raises the cost of food for everyone, not just the benefit recipients.
There are 53,809 NYCHA housing units in Manhattan alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authorit...
Assuming an average market rent of $2,000 (a huge underestimate), and assuming dormitories could be provided in distant brooklyn/queens/bronx for $700 (an overestimate), that means we are wasting 70M/month on luxury goods for poor folks in one county alone.
Are you really trying to claim that the cost of administration would exceed $1300/month per housing unit?
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/
The vast majority of the US is quite a bit cheaper than NYC. Further, we don't need to provide cash assistance to match an area's rent -- thus achieving the same "ship out the poor people" policy you seem to espouse above. If someone can spend their $500 monthly benefit on Manhattan rent, or spend that same benefit on NJ rent, many will choose the latter and thus avoid the waste you claim is inevitable.
And you've still cited no evidence which makes me think that the waste you're citing could exist on a national scale anywhere close to the administrative burden of an in-kind program.
This can always be done, sometimes at tremendous inefficiency.
http://www.fns.usda.gov/tags/water-dumping
'"Water dumping" involves buying beverages that require a container deposit and immediately dumping out the contents in order to return the container and receive the deposit credit in cash.'
I'm not clear why that's a problem.
If, as you fear, America should at some point find itself giving too much to the poor, then perhaps proposals to limit that would be appropriate, but right now (and for most of recorded history) we have the opposite problem, and your fear does not look at all realistic.
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?
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.
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)?
"In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Secondly, going on math alone, you're missing many variables: the (taxed) income of the free individual, hours volunteered, money donated, "positive influence" ripple effect, etc.
You can't talk about "breakeven" without considering opportunity cost of not taking the choice - in this case, taxes and other returns that better outcomes would produce. It doesn't take much increase in outcomes to arrive with a benefit worth $80k over a whole lifetime.
As a counter point, you could look at the success of Native American tribes that receive government grants or casino payouts, vs those that don't, such as the Lumbee Indians. http://www.nativetimes.com/index.php/business/features/2470-...
In the case of the Lumbee, there's still a strong sense of helping out folks that need it, but the help is at the discretion of the tribe, not a government (or casino). Furthermore, they've built that system without much federal help.
Note that I'm not arguing for an all or nothing approach here, I think it's reasonable for the federal government to help the tribe financially. I don't think it's reasonable to have the government give money directly to individuals in the tribe.
Well, in some tribes there is economic inequality due to local corruption. So this isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution. It works out well when the local government is actually working for the people (vs. just for itself + relatives).
I see your point, but it’s important to note that the authors still haven’t established causation, but are planning a follow-up to do so. The authors aren’t making quite as strong of a claim as you’re making here -yet.
The immediate problem is that the costs of US courts and prisons are extremely high (1) and they are still growing quite rapidly. Jailing one criminal for three years costs over $100,000 (aside from the other social costs that other people have pointed out), which would cover a substantial amount of intervention.
Further, US prisons hold very large numbers of poor people, because poor people have the biggest motive to commit crimes (nothing to lose), and the least ability to pay for bail, lawyers or other treatments (eg for mental illness). I'll take correlation if it shows that interventions help poor children to avoid this fate.
(1) Quoting Wikipedia: "Judicial, police, and corrections costs totaled $212 billion in 2011 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2007, around $74 billion was spent on corrections according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics."
"In 2014, among facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the average cost of incarceration for federal inmates in fiscal year 2014 was $30,619.85."
"In California in 2008, it cost the state an average of $47,102 a year to incarcerate an inmate in a state prison. From 2001 to 2009, the average annual cost increased by about $19,500."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Correlation is not causation. What, pray tell, is the direct link that causes a child's brain size to increase in relation to the parents' bank account? Perhaps the reason wealthier children are healthier is because their parents have discipline and work hard to provide a safe, healthy, stimulating environment for their children, which includes retaining steady gainful employment and using the proceeds from that employment to provide food, shelter, and education for the children. This will not magically happen among poor children if you give the parents some baseline income.
I'm not speaking in absolute terms; there is definitely some crossover with good parents who are down on their luck and bad parents who have way too much money. But boiling the problem down to "give poor people more money to fix kids' brain structures" is too lazy, and preaching this about like it's some fundamental righteous principle is highly distasteful.
You are resistant to early, empirical results that poverty causes negative outcomes for children, and you will require stronger evidence to overcome this resistance.
Fair I suppose, but it says a lot about your politics. And I'll leave it there.
Yes, that argument nobody is making is indeed absurd.
Perhaps the reason wealthier children are healthier is because their parents have discipline and work hard to provide a safe, healthy, stimulating environment for their children, which includes retaining steady gainful employment and using the proceeds from that employment to provide food, shelter, and education for the children. This will not magically happen among poor children if you give the parents some baseline income.
Did you RTFA? The improvements happened after families started gaining an extra $4k from a new casino that was opened in the area.
So yes, it did magically happened after the parents got a baseline income increase.
I don't know; your argument seems to be actually the typical response, the kind of thing most people say when they see something that can be pattern-matched to "give money".
There are of course many non-material things that are important to growth of a children, but why dismiss this one so easy? Is it because it "sounds too simple"? Personally, I think we seriously overstate effectiveness of methods appealing to virtues, morality and "if only people would...". A lot of things in life are indirectly related to material wealth, you can improve pretty much anything by throwing more money at it. And we also know that things like "hard work" and "discipline" are overrated; people usually behave the way they do because of the environment they're in, and you can manufacture discipline by a mix of glucose and (in more extreme cases) some anti-ADHD medication.
I think we're as a society ignoring the obvious because it's easier to blame someone's lack of virtue than actually invest resources into solving their problems.
So you argue that instead of actually using the results of research we should focus our welfare using understanding based upon 19th century moralizations.
My parents put together made less than $4,000 a year when I was born. Yet, today they are not poor and neither am I. Nobody gave them any free money, why wouldn't I be skeptical of these studies?
My parents were poor because they were born in a shitty country with a shitty economic system and there wasn't anything they could do except leave. That's bad luck.
If you're born healthy in the US you start with opportunity and have to actively fuck it up.
Ahh so $4000 had rather more purchasing power than in the US then. I wondered about a salary that low.
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
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism
I've always been confused as to why some people can't see any possible middle ground between fuck-the-poor Randianism and burn-the-rich Stalinism.
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"
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.
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.
Consider that every side in every political debate believes the evidence supports their opinion, and that the evidence the other guys are using is a sham. Although academics have a bias in aggregate, which should not automatically be mistaken as valid consensus, you can usually find at least a few outlying reports to support any desired political position.
What it boils down to is that people believe whatever they want, probably for emotional reasons, and they can't really be convinced otherwise. They're only ready to come to the table when those emotional links have been severed by something in their life experience.
Yes; a check in the mail does not raise a kid, parents do. But what a check in the mail can do is enable one of the parents to stay home and do the kidraising instead of having to seek another job so that the family can have heat in the winter. That's why it is useful.
Nobody does that any more.
If the first, s/check in the mail/electronic transfer/; if the second, well, global warming and stuff...
When you give someone cash you give them the ability to buy books, or go to places, or buy lego, that stimulate a child.
I'm not sure if you've seen how kids interact much but peer pressure is extremely strong and if you're off reading books and playing with Legos at an early age there's little guarantee that it will persist into puberty and beyond. Plenty of friends I grew up with early on had a lot of these interests but most fell into a typical lower/lower-middle class trap of drugs and sex (with partying linking both together, of course). There were some middle-upper/upper class kids that participated a little, but there are different forces at work for those kids entirely that makes it quite easy for them to escape a bad cycle with merely competent parenting skills compared to a completely overworked, overwhelmed single parent or split parent household that defines a great deal of lower income household living situations.
We're not here on HN trying to solve the world's problems or something in comment threads anyway, so being a bit qualitative and subjective is something that goes with the territory of a lot of social science. We could go really rigorous but measuring people and behavior is really, really hard to do well without making the results of papers so narrow they're irrelevant for making meaningful social commentary arguments.