Is this a strong prior that many people have, re: decision making and poverty? I'd never heard of it until maybe 6-7 years ago, when NPR started touting it like it was Einstein's theory of relativity.
My gut feeling on why people want it to be true: a lot of us are psychologically wired for life in hunter gatherer tribes, which were egalitarian and redistributive out of necessity (e.g., you hunted and killed a pig today and I didn't; tomorrow our situations may be reversed, so we're both likely better off if we agree to share). As such, we are not comfortable with economic inequality; it just feels wrong, and we want to think of it as a problem that can be solved with the right set of social policies.
Hunter-gatherer tribes weren't especially egalitarian.
Australian Aboriginal groups, for instance, tended to be heavily (but not strictly) gerontocratic... I say not strictly because old age was no guarantee of being an "elder". There were some tribes where all the women and girls wound up as wives of a handful of old men.
Poverty causes low IQ scores mediated by stress sounds like an okay hypothesis, but given that children have many reasons to be stressed apart from parental poverty you'd think it ought to be easily measurable. For instance, kids who are bullied at school are far more stressed than kids who are reasonably popular, so there should be a strong correlation between popularity and test scores too.
Previous studies which I'm also suspicious of had linked poverty to more low-frequency and fewer high-frequency brain waves. I think they're working from a model of something like more stress/worse nutrition -> worse brain development -> different brain wave pattern.
It seems possible, but hardly a sure thing, that good/bad differences in brain development would manifest as a differences in brain wave patterns, but unless you have a model that predicts what kinds of brain wave differences you'd get from bad vs. good brain development, what sense does it make to measure EEG in this study? This study makes about as much sense as one that tests the effectiveness of a new antipsychotic drug by looking for EEG differences between treated and placebo schizophrenic groups. OK, so if the treated and placebo groups’ EEG’s are different, what do you really know? Only that the drug changes EEG’s, right? You’d get that result for a drug that changes brain waves and has no effects on psychosis. You’d even get it for a drug that changes brain waves and also makes psychosis way worse. So yeah, the drug’s Doing Something Real in the brain, but so what?
Back to the infants: Let’s say the parents of the infants in the high cash group but not the low cash group used the money to buy a bunch of crack and smoke that shit hours per day right next to the crib — I’ll bet you’d get some changed infant EEG’s there. (I’m not saying I think that’s how parents in the study likely spent the cast — this is just a thought experiment.)
There's lots of theories on why this is the case: Nutrition comes up a lot (but we could test that independently, no need for the wealth angle), as does some generalized "kids who grow up in high-stress environments have worse brain function" idea. Again, feel like we could test that without the middle man as well. Probably the right move would be to figure out what we think the mechanism is first, and test if poverty increases that.
The obvious case is people being malnourished/undernourished due to lack of money to buy (good) food. In this case more money for parent -> improved food for household including children -> improved brain function in children. But as walruss said this is really the concatenation of two hypotheses ("adding money to a representative poor person will result in their household getting better nutrition" + "better nutrition improves brain function").
I'll say what I say about all of these studies, which is that poverty is obviously bad and we shouldn't have to slap some quantifiable label on it in order to justify doing something about it.
If you don't agree poverty is bad, you've never experienced it.
I debated saying something like this, because the people I linked (Stuart, Andrew, etc) all included something like "obviously I'm still in favor of cash transfers and we should still all be against poverty".
I decided not to say this, because it felt icky. I shouldn't have to mouth agreement with the point of a false study in order to criticize it as false. It also feels like bad incentives - if people fudging studies in order to support a point causes lots of people to talk about how true that point is, then people will fudge their studies more often.
(this is similar to my policy of "when condemning terrorist attacks, don't mention that the terrorists' end goals are just". They might be, but talk about it any other time!)
I have defended cash transfers and anti-poverty programs in the past, and I'll defend them in the future, but I think it's important *not* to defend them in the process of reporting on how people use false arguments to support them.
"You're not going to solve this paradox with better science."
Okay, keep pretending that everyone is inherently identical and then go through the mental gymnastics of creating little just so explanations for why your policies don't work and inequality doesn't go away.
Well you can support direct wealth transfers as a kind of brute force poverty reduction, but this ignores all the various other factors at play. People in poverty are lower IQ on average, and IQ is negatively correlated with savings rate and and positively associated with likelihood of mortgage default, even after controlling for income. So the idea that you can force people not to be in poverty is fallacious.
Poverty is a lack of money by definition, so you absolutely can remove people from poverty by giving them money. It's actually the quickest and most efficient way to eliminate poverty.
"...you can support direct wealth transfers as a kind of brute force poverty reduction, but this ignores all the various other factors at play."
Sure. But so what? The transfers still reduce poverty. Are you proposing that we do nothing to reduce poverty until we've done a theoretical analysis that takes into account all those other factors? Even leaving aside that we don't know if that would lead us to something better anyway, I think we'd do a lot better overall to start the transfers now and improve things (if we can) later than to simply delay further.
An anecdote (but from a place of good faith): I think some of what we see as IQ is an optimization that gets diverted into other areas that don’t show up on IQ tests. Worked with a guy once who was innumerate, ie could not count beyond about three. Was with him in a truck that broke down in the middle of New Mexico. About three hours away from the nearest town and no cell signal. Cracked axle I told him it was impossible to fix. I tried to find higher ground to get a cell signal. He took a chain winch and to this day I’m not sure how, applied enough pressure on each side toward the center that we could still drive (without disturbing the winch).
I also once worked in a call center -high school level education- where the phone agents figured out that if they applied for vacation in bulk orders in certain patterns they could get any time off they wanted regardless of built in blocks around demand. It was a hack based on a rule that if a certain percentage of your time was approved all of it would be approved. Then they’d just delete the time they didn’t want. None of them could program or say what an algorithm is, but they figured it out.
All of this is to say: I’m not sure poverty abs low IQ isn’t something like an optimization for “keep trying this method that’s really unlikely because you don’t have anything else in your resource bag and maybe you can make it work.” Which once you have resources becomes a failure to use those resources economically, take too long on a test, etc.
"Direct cash transfers" sounds like the best thing we've come up with.
Surely better than "we'll educate them out of poverty" which has been the message for the past several generations, and as you say, we know that you can't fix that.
I disagree with you on both whammies. At least since Calvin started teaching people their success in life was a sign of their salvation in the afterlife and at least since Jakob Fugger required paupers to be devout, willing to work and abstain from begging in order to access his social housing project, a huge part of political disagreement on social policy in the west has not been around the question, whether poverty is bad, but *for whom* it is bad.
The right thinks that poverty is bad but necessary as it is mostly the "deserved" consequence of bad and/or immoral choices and fears helping poor people too much will lead to wrong incentives that are worse than the poverty itself. The left wants to help all poor people regardless of desert believing a certain minimum standard of living is basically a human right.
Naturally, the area of compromise has always been around helping the "undeservedly poor".
Even the most stone-hearted Rand reader can agree that child poverty is undeserved. This is why education is one area, where despite of huge disagreements about the means, both sides are willing to invest heavily and can even to a degree agree on the standards that should be used to measure success. Unfortunately, if Freddie deBoer is to be believed, this whole approach is also hopeless.
Another route, namely coercing parents into making good decisions for their children or limiting the authority parents have over their children is also politically blocked, as conservatives and also many on the left will have none of it.
The path that remains open is to somehow help the children by helping the parents. The right might be convinced if this is actually shown to be effective. For the left this would be the dream scenario enabling them to help a group of people the right would otherwise never allow them to help.
Hence any causal pathway from helping parents to helping children is extremely valuable. Instrumentally, because it enables us to do something we all agree is good: helping children; and politically, because it enables the left to help "deservedly" poor people.
And that is exactly why this paper was breaking news in the New York Times.
You seem to be assuming that working in fast food or for minimum wage necessarily makes you poor. Not so! A single person who works full time at $7.25/hr is above the poverty line. Two people who both work full time at the same wage can support two kids without falling below the poverty line.
The problem isn’t that fast food wages are too low, it’s a combination of people who for various reasons have a hard time sticking to a steady full time job and people who have kids before they are able to support them.
I do not care if the line is drawn such that $7.25/hour is legally considered "not poor". That doesn't reflect the actual meaning of poverty, that's just a political lie created so that the populace does not have to confront how many people in the so-called "land of plenty" are impoverished.
Above and beyond that- many people WANT to work full-time, but are not. Their employers have them work 39-and-a-half hours instead of 40 because then they can get all of the benefits of a full-time employee without any of the obligations. They will then ask someone to "cover a shift" so that they, in fact, get MORE than full-time labor without the commensurate compensation. You are very lucky if these, two of the most common anti-labor practices prevalent in the culture of low-wage labor, are completely unheard of for you.
I should have made it clearer that my post was descriptive (and a hugely oversimplifying caricature at that) and not an endorsement.
My point was merely: if you want to a) achieve better outcomes for poor children and b) give poor adults (working or not) money, then research that points to a positive causal connection from b) to a) is extremely useful.
Firstly, because achieving better outcomes in poor children (or any children for that matter) beyond a baseline is very hard and we don't know how to do it reliably; and secondly, because you will never sell b) to right-wingers on its own merits, but you may have a chance if it leads to a). Granted, you might not convince Peter Thiel, but you only need a small percentage of the more centrist voters.
Your other point I understand as saying that basically improving (educational) outcomes in children achieves nothing, as the economy is a zero-sum game where somebody has to do the low paying jobs. I disagree with this too. It's all about comparative cost advantages. If educational outcomes between rich and poor kids can be narrowed, this means that there are more jobs available to the poor kids. Wages for low-paying jobs would increase or those jobs would vanish (actually, I suspect that there are way more jobs that "the US could work without" than most people think). Inequality would decrease. A country's GINI-coefficient is not fixed for all eternity by some sort of economic law.
"You can tell every individual fast-food worker to boostrap their way out of making minimum wage, but the end-result of that is that there are no fast-food workers left."
I think "eliminate all the boring, low wage jobs" is what we've been charing towards en masse for the last century.
I don't think the person you're replying to is right, but
> You can tell every individual fast-food worker to boostrap their way out of making minimum wage, but the end-result of that is that there are no fast-food workers left.
is just a silly argument. Even it were possible, they weren't all about to simultaneously change themselves into architects next Tuesday. We'll keep on getting new fast-food workers who haven't changed into architects yet.
>You can tell every individual fast-food worker to boostrap their way out of making minimum wage, but the end-result of that is that there are no fast-food workers left.
If we could effectively cause this to happen, it would not result in no fast food workers. It'd result in fast food worker wages going up because supply for such workers would diminish while demand would increase (due to the ex-fast food workers being now able to afford to eat out more often).
>"The right thinks that poverty is bad but necessary as it is mostly the "deserved" consequence of bad and/or immoral choices and fears helping poor people too much will lead to wrong incentives that are worse than the poverty itself.
From what I understand the argument is also very much that the wrong incentives are not themselves bad, but lead to more and perpetuate poverty in the end. But since the welfare state is extremely old at this point, it cannot be logically consistent to assume that it is mostly "deserved" consequences.
It is imposed consequences from previous (or current) attempts to fix the very problem, that cause people to be born into bad fortune.
We are in hell and got there thru flawed policy, dictated by our (mostly) good intentions. And we are very stupid and generally don't learn from previous mistakes.
(or probably institutions act stupidly, because of public choice theory they are incapable of learning, because *mumblign something about* incentives again)
The welfare state never shrinks (as government programs never do) and always increases (because good intentions...).
Also you cannot cut government programs ever (it simply does not happen).
And trying to cut the welfare state specifically is impossible, as you would be accused of having bad intentions. (and given that the welfare state is as massive as it is, you would have to do incrementally peel it layer by layer and each one breaks a dependency and this hurts)
So the issue is that we are stuck in an inescapable, inadequate equilibrium.
The system will collapse before it can ever get fixed.
Something like that. Also what I described might be more of a right-libertarian version. And it's too hand-waivy, because I'm a bit too tired for this.
But your description is definitely too barren to do the position full justice.
>Another route, namely coercing parents into making good decisions for their children or limiting the authority parents have over their children is also politically blocked, as conservatives and also many on the left will have none of it.
NB: there are solid reasons for blocking this. The big one is that a multiparty democratic state in which parents' ability to counter state propaganda is too limited is unstable and will on a timescale of years to decades become a stable one-party state (specifically via someone being in power long enough to brainwash enough children to consolidate an unbeatable coalition). The obvious example is Hitler, although Putin's also managed it.
Think I agree with most of your points, but "Poverty is a necessity of an economic system, which at the same time is capable of feeding 10 billion people." is a pretty intense assertion, and I'm not sure what external source you'd use to try and back it up.
First, we need to define poverty as something which by definition won't always exist, no matter how rich everyone is.
Then, once we have a definition of poverty which is absolute, as opposed to relative (i.e. bottom 10% of income earners!), we can begin talking about the various solutions to that and who it is best to incentivize to actually accomplish them.
If these cash-transfer programs don't actually help in the long term, then we should be spending our money on other things that will help in the long term.
Poverty isn't "a necessity of an economic system". Poverty exists because some people are not very productive. If no one in society had an IQ below 115, and no one was mentally ill or addicted to drugs or suffered from impulse control disorders, the poverty rate would be very nearly 0.
Can you explain that last paragraph? How does that relate to the fact that two countries with the same average intelligence and substance abuse rates can have dramatically different poverty rates?
First off, no country meets the criteria I laid or, or even comes close.
Secondly, historical factors will result in different presents. A country that was under the thumb of socialists for decades will have stunted economic development relative to its neighbors. A country 300 years ago would be considered almost entirely poor by modern standards. Socialist countries were poor because socialism is an insane ideology with no basis in reality and severely damaged the economy. However, these sorts of historical patterns are temporary, as seen by the Asian Tigers, which emerged from underdeveloped status and became developed countries very rapidly.
Thirdly, "poverty rate" is defined in multiple different ways which vastly changes measured poverty.
The US has basically eliminated absolute poverty, for instance, once you take government assistance into account, and there are few people who actually live in material poverty after government assistance is taken into account.
I think my point is exactly that: it seems like researchers feel like they HAVE to fudge it, because if the negative effects of poverty aren't quantifiable then SOLUTIONS to poverty are not justifiable. I think the whole line of reasoning is toxic and reflects a deep social failing which in a funny way is connected to a veneration of STEM-based thinking about the world. It's a bit like pegging teacher pay to standardized test performance, as if the only learning that counts must be quantifiable.
This comment is... a very good example of the point G Retriever is making. Forget any individual case for now. The point is: we shouldn't assume that everything we care about can be easily and correctly quantified. When we use peer-reviewed studies as our only means to justify something, we're implicitly assuming that there are no effects (good or bad) that we can't/don't know how to quantify. And this is an obviously terrible assumption. This doesn't mean we stop caring about evidence, or we just go with our gut, or we don't try to quantify things. Just that it's important to remember that this one particular way of finding truth (peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals) is not The One True Source of All Knowledge.
I didn't say peer-reviewed studies are the only kind of evidence. I asked how do we know the unmeasured counts. Let's grant there's something you care about and can't quantify. How do you know anything you're doing is having any effect on that at all if you can't measure it?
You can't, directly, but the world is complex. Civilization functioned for thousands of years without trying to force every aspect of human life under the dissection lamp to be reduced to neat little columns of data.
Let's say there's no effect of poverty on intelligence. Instead you get 'street smarts' that help you stay alive. Would that be a reason NOT to end poverty?
Say there's no effect of poverty on propensity toward violent crime. Is that a reason NOT to end poverty?
Say there's no effect of poverty on a long list of ills we once thought were related to poverty. Do you need a reason to end poverty, or can we all just agree, "Poverty sucks, and we don't have to justify or quantify how much it sucks. Let's agree to work on the problem because we don't like it."
To me, another big problem with the study is that there is no hypothesized mechanism by which poverty supposedly retards brain development.
So if a correlation between an extra $330 and different brainwaves is found, there is no plausible explanation for why that would have happened. You have to imagine that the extra money somehow changed one or more other (unknown) variables that then, somehow, through an (unknown) process, that impacted brain waves.
Shouldn't the research first be directed at figuring out exactly what changes child brain development (nutrition, maternal attention, etc.)? And then researchers could look at how poverty might affects those variables. By contrast, this seems like an "advocacy study" that was designed to put the cart before the horse for political reasons.
Maybe using individual cases to build a rough model of the underlying dynamics.
For example an author is writing a story and wants it to be interesting. He probably has a model of what factors make a story interesting based on other things they've read, and so can test things they might write against their internal model of how stories work.
For public policy questions it would be the model of human nature under various circumstances. Less reliable than a high-powered study but maybe better than nothing.
For the education issue you questioned earlier for me this actually goes the other way. In my experience most people don't remember the vast majority of what they learned in school after a few years. If we get someone to "know" something during a final, then they forget it promptly after, what are we really achieving?
Not *all* education, but I'd argue that a huge proportion of modern education is useless for most people (aside from the signalling factor), and we also fail to teach them other things that would be more relevant to their lives.
Like, is chemistry still a thing that a huge % of the population should spend years in high school on? Sure you need it to *become* a doctor, but what % of doctors even remember how to do low-level chemistry work?
And why not teach basic medicine in high school, in an era where lifestyle diseases are everywhere?
There's tons of stuff like that, it feels like *how* we teach things gets all the attention when we should question *what* and *why* more.
The motte is that not everything that matters can be measured. The bailey that typically follows is that therefore my snakeoil that doesn't improve any measurable metrics should be used anyway because of my gut feeling that it helps. Similar thought processes held medicine back for centuries, and are still undermining education. It's good to invent ways to measure the things we don't yet know how to measure and actually prove whether the intervention improves those things.
Counterpoint: those clever little ways we invent to measure things have a large chance to turn out to be WRONG (see Scott's post about rationality's failures on the old blog, such as London vs. Chicago traffic). Sometimes moral intuitions are, in fact, right.
Effective medicine still contains a lot of things that are poorly understood, obviously work, and are extremely hard to capture in RCTs (see Scott's point about parachute RCTs).
The most extreme example would be physical therapy - every effective therapist is working off pre-EBM knowledge and getting results, while academia is chasing its own tail trying to prove the sky is blue. If you have lower back pain, in a majority of cases the best your EBM doctor can give you is a painkiller, and questions of etiology are met with "idk lol".
Extrapolating this to other fields is left as an exercise to the reader.
We could be like Freddie, who says (in effect) "you aren't going to find any effect on kids from pre-K because there is no effect. But letting people send their kids to pre-K makes their lives (both the kids and the parents) happier, so just do it already, and don't set ourselves up for failure when we don't find any results in 10 years."
If we want subsidized daycare and greater child-having subsidies in general we should just do that. They do it in Finland etc. You don't have to pretend it's for some irrelevant/dubious scientific purpose. Unless it's to trick people into something they don't really want. But that is where a lot of this ends up, morally. People with "noble goals" trying to herd the sheep and playing loose with the virtue of truth.
The other aspect is when it comes to the money spent, it's quite possible that "more daycare" (e.g. longer hours) is really the better economic direction than a bunch of educational attainment statistics in very small children. Plus it would affect the design of the facilities and just what it is that is healthiest for these children to be doing all day.
At whose cost? As another poster says, ice cream and chocolates make very many people happy. What's the line to be used to say for this we shall use tax money, and for that we shall not? To me it's quite clear that there has to be a significant externality or public good aspect involved.
people see their money go down a blackhole with education and welfare spending. I hardly think it unreasonable that they want some quantifiable measure
If literally no measure is practically knowable then the those whose money is being extracted would be in the right demanding that the spigot be turned off completely.
Why would that necessarily make them in the right? It certainly weakens the arguments that people in favor of education and/or welfare, but it doesn't eliminate them completely. Not all knowledge comes through measurement and analysis of the resulting quantitative data.
There are a number of outcomes that I will never expect to have a corresponding quantitative measure of a reasonably high quality (ex: a measure of how good the art produced by National Endowment of the Arts grantees is). There are a number of other outcomes where a reasonably good quantitative measure may be possible, but it wouldn't be practical due to the high expense of collecting the data relative to the expected benefits of collecting it (can't think of an example off the top of my head, unfortunately).
When collecting high-quality quantitative data either isn't possible or isn't practical, we don't have to throw our hands up in the air and stop attempting to answer the question. Rigorous, objective (or as objective as anything ultimately done by a person ever can be) analysis of qualitative data can be very informative!
If it ultimately isn't possible/practical to effectively quantify any of the outcomes of education/welfare spending (which seems improbable to me), this doesn't hand victory to people opposed to this spending. A lack of quantitative proof of the effectiveness of the programs isn't the same thing as a lack of proof of the effectiveness of the programs. It also isn't quantitative proof that the programs are ineffective. The quantitative effect is unknown/unknowable, not necessarily nonexistent. All that has changed is that the arguments for/against the policy in question have to be carried out in the somewhat fuzzier world of qualitative analysis.
The US has lots of anti-poverty programs and spends a significant amount of money on them. Most of them have been around for decades, too. SNAP spending alone was $55 billion for 2019, $1,548 per beneficiary per year, and the program dates back to the 1930's. I'm not sure why you think it would be necessary that researchers fudge statistics to justify anti-poverty interventions *now,* in 2022, coming up on a century after the New Deal was enacted.
Yes, there was, it was called "having strong communities". Sadly, in America at least, that ship has sailed- Americans are a fundamentally nomadic people who are more likely to view their neighbor as an enemy instead of an ally by multiple orders of magnitude.
The concern over being unable to support something that is obvious correct and apparent due to an inability to quantify it stems from learned helplessness and inability to simply accept things as they are perceived.
Scott is saying that despite not having numbers to back cash transfers, he still feels they are correct and supports them - that's great! The authors of this study are marginally more uncomfortable with their own judgement than he is, and preferred to support it with very questionable to avoid having their opinions stand on their own.
The fundamental issue is the blanket severe discomfort with simply declaring and accepting facts based on a posteriori lived experiences. It's interesting that on this issue both Scott is quick to state that he is comfortable supporting cash transfers, but otherwise tends to write from a very evidentiary perspective.
In a sense it's Gell-Mann Amnesia for knowledge; you arbitrarily decide that some things are so obvious you can ignore that studies are flawed, but then turn around and expect studies for others.
Yes. And doesn't that also go to the even bigger issue of publication bias. No one wants to publish a social science study that says: "life's a bitch, and there's nothing we can do about it." So those study results either disappear unpublished or get recycled (p-fished) for some (more hopeful) hypothesis.
Serious question: Does preregistration still allow researchers the option of just spiking their study if the data comes out "wrong"? I suppose it does. But this study apparently involved too much money and effort to tank (all those $330/mo. payments have to show some return on investment).
Some preregistrations come with a pre-publication agreement, but my sense is that most journals still aren’t willing to commit to publishing negative results.
The questions isn't a binary "solve poverty" vs. "don't solve poverty", but a question of how much effort* to spend on reducing on poverty. Reducing poverty more isn't costless**, so how much effort people support is a trade-off. Any data point can slightly shift what point to choose on that trade-off.
Even what to define as poverty at all is non-obvious. Most of the world, and for most of history all the world, would consider $20,000/year wealth, not poverty.
*: read: other people's money, usually
**: because if there are costless ways of reducing poverty that we know about, we're already doing them
Cash transfers are not solutions to poverty in any case. The largest reductions in poverty by many orders of magnitude have come from social and political institutions that allow for and encourage economic growth. This should be obvious if you look at the broad sweep of history, but it becomes painfully obvious if you consider the recent experience of China and India.
These are two very different effects. Yes, high growth in emerging economies is great for reducing poverty, but it’s not particularly applicable to reducing poverty in an advanced economy with lower growth rates.
It does not necessarily follow that cash transfers are either an optimal or universal solution. Perhaps they would work very well for parents who are financially savvy (my mother was incredibly good at handling budgets even when she financially struggled), but make things in the family worse if the parent is addicted and will buy more drugs instead. That happens; I knew enough alcoholics to know that their finances are a hopeless black hole with the other end at the local pub.
Of course, a careful policy based on each individual family's needs cannot be easily written into law, so it won't be pursued.
We don't. I lived in a block house with at least 7 other poorish families. That was the Rust Belt in Czechoslovakia when the Iron Curtain fell and the rusted old heavy industry went to the dogs. Loss of previously stable jobs was sudden and the city never really recovered.
It was fairly obvious that some were better at economic decisions than others.
Also, of the alcoholics I know right now, none is particularly needy. All middle class people who turn their earnings into booze.
Families of said alcoholics are miserable, though.
The question is how to keep that money out of the husband's hands and going to the needs of the wife and kids.
Also, studies of alcoholism indicate a strong genetic component. I am all for research into treatment of alcoholism, but contemporary psychologization of said disease helps only a few people. My friend was in a rehab; their success rate was about 15 per cent, less than with many cancers.
Maybe Scott could chime in, he is a psychiatrist after all. Is treating alcoholism with psychology modern shamanism (because it surely seems that alcoholics MUST have some underlying psychological issues) or real peer reviewed science?
Oh, it definitely isn't, but you seem to argue from a position that cash transfers are the optimal and universal solution to alleviate poverty, so whoever casts any doubt of them wants to enforce poverty.
Are they? Are you sure? After all, countries that elevated themselves from poverty to development - and there was a lot of them - didn't do so through funneling cash to all inhabitants.
I didn't see anybody here arguing that cash transfers were the _optimal_ decision. Just that it's a reasonable way to take out a substantial chunk of the problem. I feel as if you (and perhaps others here) are arguing to do nothing about the problem until we come up with a better solution than cash transfers. (If you already have a better solution, I'm all ears.)
Then please don't feel so. I never said anything like that explicitely and telepathy over TCP/IP does not work. If I wanted to gut certain types of spending, I would proclaim it openly; I have nothing to lose by being candid on the Internet.
I would be a great friend of a more personalized approach, though. One size fits nobody.
I realize that it would probably be *more* expensive, but I think those extra money could buy extra efficiency.
We're debating this like a majority of people in poverty are addicted and spending all of their money on alcohol instead of diapers - can we temper this with a statistic? Because if it's only, say, 5% or 10% of people in poverty with children are gratuitously neglecting them, then what about the the other 90% to 95% who aren't?
I agree with your position of refusing to mouth moral support for someone's goals as the price for criticizing their logic or data.
There should be a word for the rhetorical habit of reciting one's agreement with X as a predicate to establish one's bona fides to criticize Y. (E.g., "I hate Trump and white supremacy as much as the next guy . . . but . . .")
For one thing, the cumulative effect of these en passant pro-forma recitations of what is supposedly clear to everyone tend to have an "anchoring" effect on the Overton Window that may ultimately be more significant than the particular argument being made.
After reading this I feel bad about asking you to clarify your precise COVID vaccine resolution in line yesterday. Thanks for continuing to post despite well meaning people trying to vetocracy every sentence you make, and I hope my paying for your posts+this comment offsets the negative reinforcement I gave you yesterday!
IMO you made the right decision and your reasoning is sound. However, it comes with a trade-off. Many people, including (particularly?) "educated" people, weigh new information strongly by (partisan) identity. Failure to disclose tribal affiliation (or sympathy) means that those people will not consider your analysis.
A query: If all evidence gleaned from history were to indicate, beyond all doubt, that cash transfers have had no positive impact on the objective of reducing poverty; and if, on the contrary, all evidence made available by history, both American and worldwide, were to suggest that cash transfers actually prolonged poverty and exacerbated its symptoms--would it be fair to conclude that a position for cash payments is not compatible with a position against poverty?
"If you lift everybody below the 60% line to above it, then nobody is considered poor anymore, but also, the median income is not affected by this at all."
You're encouraging low IQ women to have more children, which makes society on net balance worse off.
"What's the point of being capable of feeding 10 billion people, if you then just decide to not do it?"
Because there's an absolute ton of negative externalities associated with having 10 billion people on earth, especially considering those additional people are almost assuredly going to be below average IQ.
Jeffrey, you seem to think IQ is only ever going to be relative and never absolute
Id like you to consider the fact that in our modern world, we can observe things people with higher IQs can do which those with lower IQs simply cannot do
Jeffrey do you really think in a world where those with lower IQs have successfully bred more, that we will have more or fewer people who can do high level skills?
Because it seems pretty clear to me, however which way you'd like to describe IQ, it does have absolute and not merely relative consequences in the world.
You seem to be arguing on that basic fallacy-that it is only relative and not something that produces absolute concrete results, independent of one's position on the general IQ distribution.
Well I'm sorry to say but your argument that what poor IQ women do is none of our business falls pretty flat here. It actually IS my business if I realize that helping a poor lady now will add to human suffering later on. I truly don't mind the spending. But somethings are too high of a cost.
I don't know why you keep bringing up this ten billion people thing. Poverty in the US isn't about lack of basic food, food costs a few bucks a day and is very easily obtainable from charity if you really need it for some reason. Food is solved.
If being below 60% median income is the definition as being poor, even if you don't count the transfer payments themselves as income, that means that you've defined poverty so that *by definition*, poverty will exist without transfer payments and the only way to alleviate it is with transfer payments.
Defining poverty that way, rather than as "unable to pay for food, shelter, etc." is a numbers gimmick to justify social spending.
Technically, that definition does not require poverty to exist without transfer payments. There is no requirement that people exist who earn less than 60% of the median income (i.e. if the median income is $100, there's no requirement that people exist who earn less than $60).
In practice, such people do exist in real distributions with significantly-nonzero Gini coefficients, but they are not required by definition.
I think you should understand my point. Yes, in theory if everyone earns similar amounts there may be nobody below 60% of the median. But that measure isn't a measure of poverty at all. It's contrived so that if everyone gets richer, this has no effect on the poverty level whatsoever; in fact, if one person gets richer, the poverty level is likely to go up. And it's defined so that poverty has no relation to whether people lack food, shelter, clothes, or ability to pay their bills. If Beverly Hills were a country, it would still have a large contingent of poor by this definition.
If raising children in poverty is bad, we could treat it like any other form of abuse and take the children and place them in foster care or up for adoption.
There are many forms of adversity children experience, poverty being just one of many. Removing children from their parents results in other forms of adversity, so the reason to remove them must be really egregiously life-threateningly bad, not just like not as great as what richer kids have.
Poverty is not a form of abuse by any stretch of the definition of abuse. Abuse and neglect have legal definitions and standards and it's a really good thing they are distinct from adverse experiences that kids have had forever -- including things like war, emigration, illness, disability or death of a parent, divorce. It's like saying we should take children away from their divorcing parents since divorce is hard on kids.
Kids whose parents move around a lot and have to change schools a lot experience bad impacts, including being more subject to bullying. Let's take those kids from their parents too for moving their kids around too much.
There's pretty good research showing that children of highly critical and perfectionist parents can suffer longer-term psychological impacts than ones who experienced some physical violence. I work with the grown kids of a lot of those kind of parents and I kind of wish I could take them away from those parents now because they are still causing harm. The grown kids I've worked with who grew up in poverty are way better off than the kids who grew up with well-off narcissistic parents.
They've tried this. Unless the child is in truly dire circumstances, this is actually a net negative for the child. Poverty isn't bad enough to outweigh the drawbacks of being put into the foster care system.
One way is by making transfers to poor women (perhaps ones who already have dependent children) conditional on receiving long-lasting injections preventing pregnancy.
Why wait until they have children? Why not just start forcibly mass-sterilizing people that the state decides shouldn't have children? Don't worry, I'm sure the state will make very good judgments, and the process will be fair and transparent and easily corrected for errors.
We don't have to rely on the state making good judgments, or being fair & transparent or prone to correcting its own errors. It's also easier if people are opting into the program for benefits rather than being forced in, requiring enforcement effort for those who want out.
If this is an utilitarian/consequentialist framework, then maybe deterrence is more than enough. Sacrifice a few poor people each year randomly in unusually cruel ways, eg. by not giving them insulin, imprison them for some extremely long time if they do some kind of victimless crime, or whatever...
Many people (particularly those worst off) tend to be hyperbolic discounters. Low probability high impact events get discounted. This was Gary Becker's greatest mistake:
Poverty itself encourages short-term thinking. If you want people to make better decisions, pushing them into further poverty isn't what you want to be doing.
And anyway, if they're already poor, and they're deciding to have kids they're likely to have trouble supporting, what on earth makes you think that that keeping them poor or making them even more poor will suddenly lead them to make the exact opposite decisions to the ones they've been making? You're inhabiting a world where you just wish harder and harder that these people are Homo economicus, and they're not.
What percentage of women actually choose to have children for the cash grab? Surely after all the outcry in the 80's about "welfare queens," we would have some statistic on the percentage that actually does this versus, say, endemic poverty cycles that have poor people who were raised poor as their only experience and then wanting their own families and figure they will somehow make ends meet because their mom did.
Is this a strong prior that many people have, re: decision making and poverty? I'd never heard of it until maybe 6-7 years ago, when NPR started touting it like it was Einstein's theory of relativity.
My gut feeling on why people want it to be true: a lot of us are psychologically wired for life in hunter gatherer tribes, which were egalitarian and redistributive out of necessity (e.g., you hunted and killed a pig today and I didn't; tomorrow our situations may be reversed, so we're both likely better off if we agree to share). As such, we are not comfortable with economic inequality; it just feels wrong, and we want to think of it as a problem that can be solved with the right set of social policies.
Hunter-gatherer tribes weren't especially egalitarian.
Australian Aboriginal groups, for instance, tended to be heavily (but not strictly) gerontocratic... I say not strictly because old age was no guarantee of being an "elder". There were some tribes where all the women and girls wound up as wives of a handful of old men.
Poverty causes low IQ scores mediated by stress sounds like an okay hypothesis, but given that children have many reasons to be stressed apart from parental poverty you'd think it ought to be easily measurable. For instance, kids who are bullied at school are far more stressed than kids who are reasonably popular, so there should be a strong correlation between popularity and test scores too.
Previous studies which I'm also suspicious of had linked poverty to more low-frequency and fewer high-frequency brain waves. I think they're working from a model of something like more stress/worse nutrition -> worse brain development -> different brain wave pattern.
It seems possible, but hardly a sure thing, that good/bad differences in brain development would manifest as a differences in brain wave patterns, but unless you have a model that predicts what kinds of brain wave differences you'd get from bad vs. good brain development, what sense does it make to measure EEG in this study? This study makes about as much sense as one that tests the effectiveness of a new antipsychotic drug by looking for EEG differences between treated and placebo schizophrenic groups. OK, so if the treated and placebo groups’ EEG’s are different, what do you really know? Only that the drug changes EEG’s, right? You’d get that result for a drug that changes brain waves and has no effects on psychosis. You’d even get it for a drug that changes brain waves and also makes psychosis way worse. So yeah, the drug’s Doing Something Real in the brain, but so what?
Back to the infants: Let’s say the parents of the infants in the high cash group but not the low cash group used the money to buy a bunch of crack and smoke that shit hours per day right next to the crib — I’ll bet you’d get some changed infant EEG’s there. (I’m not saying I think that’s how parents in the study likely spent the cast — this is just a thought experiment.)
There's lots of theories on why this is the case: Nutrition comes up a lot (but we could test that independently, no need for the wealth angle), as does some generalized "kids who grow up in high-stress environments have worse brain function" idea. Again, feel like we could test that without the middle man as well. Probably the right move would be to figure out what we think the mechanism is first, and test if poverty increases that.
The obvious case is people being malnourished/undernourished due to lack of money to buy (good) food. In this case more money for parent -> improved food for household including children -> improved brain function in children. But as walruss said this is really the concatenation of two hypotheses ("adding money to a representative poor person will result in their household getting better nutrition" + "better nutrition improves brain function").
I'll say what I say about all of these studies, which is that poverty is obviously bad and we shouldn't have to slap some quantifiable label on it in order to justify doing something about it.
If you don't agree poverty is bad, you've never experienced it.
I debated saying something like this, because the people I linked (Stuart, Andrew, etc) all included something like "obviously I'm still in favor of cash transfers and we should still all be against poverty".
I decided not to say this, because it felt icky. I shouldn't have to mouth agreement with the point of a false study in order to criticize it as false. It also feels like bad incentives - if people fudging studies in order to support a point causes lots of people to talk about how true that point is, then people will fudge their studies more often.
(this is similar to my policy of "when condemning terrorist attacks, don't mention that the terrorists' end goals are just". They might be, but talk about it any other time!)
I have defended cash transfers and anti-poverty programs in the past, and I'll defend them in the future, but I think it's important *not* to defend them in the process of reporting on how people use false arguments to support them.
"You're not going to solve this paradox with better science."
Okay, keep pretending that everyone is inherently identical and then go through the mental gymnastics of creating little just so explanations for why your policies don't work and inequality doesn't go away.
Well you can support direct wealth transfers as a kind of brute force poverty reduction, but this ignores all the various other factors at play. People in poverty are lower IQ on average, and IQ is negatively correlated with savings rate and and positively associated with likelihood of mortgage default, even after controlling for income. So the idea that you can force people not to be in poverty is fallacious.
Poverty is a lack of money by definition, so you absolutely can remove people from poverty by giving them money. It's actually the quickest and most efficient way to eliminate poverty.
"...you can support direct wealth transfers as a kind of brute force poverty reduction, but this ignores all the various other factors at play."
Sure. But so what? The transfers still reduce poverty. Are you proposing that we do nothing to reduce poverty until we've done a theoretical analysis that takes into account all those other factors? Even leaving aside that we don't know if that would lead us to something better anyway, I think we'd do a lot better overall to start the transfers now and improve things (if we can) later than to simply delay further.
An anecdote (but from a place of good faith): I think some of what we see as IQ is an optimization that gets diverted into other areas that don’t show up on IQ tests. Worked with a guy once who was innumerate, ie could not count beyond about three. Was with him in a truck that broke down in the middle of New Mexico. About three hours away from the nearest town and no cell signal. Cracked axle I told him it was impossible to fix. I tried to find higher ground to get a cell signal. He took a chain winch and to this day I’m not sure how, applied enough pressure on each side toward the center that we could still drive (without disturbing the winch).
I also once worked in a call center -high school level education- where the phone agents figured out that if they applied for vacation in bulk orders in certain patterns they could get any time off they wanted regardless of built in blocks around demand. It was a hack based on a rule that if a certain percentage of your time was approved all of it would be approved. Then they’d just delete the time they didn’t want. None of them could program or say what an algorithm is, but they figured it out.
All of this is to say: I’m not sure poverty abs low IQ isn’t something like an optimization for “keep trying this method that’s really unlikely because you don’t have anything else in your resource bag and maybe you can make it work.” Which once you have resources becomes a failure to use those resources economically, take too long on a test, etc.
I’ve met dumb poor people. Just not a lot.
"Direct cash transfers" sounds like the best thing we've come up with.
Surely better than "we'll educate them out of poverty" which has been the message for the past several generations, and as you say, we know that you can't fix that.
"little just so explanations"
I disagree with you on both whammies. At least since Calvin started teaching people their success in life was a sign of their salvation in the afterlife and at least since Jakob Fugger required paupers to be devout, willing to work and abstain from begging in order to access his social housing project, a huge part of political disagreement on social policy in the west has not been around the question, whether poverty is bad, but *for whom* it is bad.
The right thinks that poverty is bad but necessary as it is mostly the "deserved" consequence of bad and/or immoral choices and fears helping poor people too much will lead to wrong incentives that are worse than the poverty itself. The left wants to help all poor people regardless of desert believing a certain minimum standard of living is basically a human right.
Naturally, the area of compromise has always been around helping the "undeservedly poor".
Even the most stone-hearted Rand reader can agree that child poverty is undeserved. This is why education is one area, where despite of huge disagreements about the means, both sides are willing to invest heavily and can even to a degree agree on the standards that should be used to measure success. Unfortunately, if Freddie deBoer is to be believed, this whole approach is also hopeless.
Another route, namely coercing parents into making good decisions for their children or limiting the authority parents have over their children is also politically blocked, as conservatives and also many on the left will have none of it.
The path that remains open is to somehow help the children by helping the parents. The right might be convinced if this is actually shown to be effective. For the left this would be the dream scenario enabling them to help a group of people the right would otherwise never allow them to help.
Hence any causal pathway from helping parents to helping children is extremely valuable. Instrumentally, because it enables us to do something we all agree is good: helping children; and politically, because it enables the left to help "deservedly" poor people.
And that is exactly why this paper was breaking news in the New York Times.
You seem to be assuming that working in fast food or for minimum wage necessarily makes you poor. Not so! A single person who works full time at $7.25/hr is above the poverty line. Two people who both work full time at the same wage can support two kids without falling below the poverty line.
The problem isn’t that fast food wages are too low, it’s a combination of people who for various reasons have a hard time sticking to a steady full time job and people who have kids before they are able to support them.
I must point out that minimum wage and fast food jobs are far less likely to *be* 'full-time' jobs.
Bureau of Labor Statistics shows as of 2020 that out of workers paid federal minimum wage, 71% (175K) are part-time workers vs 29% (72K) full time workers: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
(also the idea that being above the federal poverty line is sufficient to confirm one is Not Poor is a whole other can of worms)
I do not care if the line is drawn such that $7.25/hour is legally considered "not poor". That doesn't reflect the actual meaning of poverty, that's just a political lie created so that the populace does not have to confront how many people in the so-called "land of plenty" are impoverished.
Above and beyond that- many people WANT to work full-time, but are not. Their employers have them work 39-and-a-half hours instead of 40 because then they can get all of the benefits of a full-time employee without any of the obligations. They will then ask someone to "cover a shift" so that they, in fact, get MORE than full-time labor without the commensurate compensation. You are very lucky if these, two of the most common anti-labor practices prevalent in the culture of low-wage labor, are completely unheard of for you.
I should have made it clearer that my post was descriptive (and a hugely oversimplifying caricature at that) and not an endorsement.
My point was merely: if you want to a) achieve better outcomes for poor children and b) give poor adults (working or not) money, then research that points to a positive causal connection from b) to a) is extremely useful.
Firstly, because achieving better outcomes in poor children (or any children for that matter) beyond a baseline is very hard and we don't know how to do it reliably; and secondly, because you will never sell b) to right-wingers on its own merits, but you may have a chance if it leads to a). Granted, you might not convince Peter Thiel, but you only need a small percentage of the more centrist voters.
Your other point I understand as saying that basically improving (educational) outcomes in children achieves nothing, as the economy is a zero-sum game where somebody has to do the low paying jobs. I disagree with this too. It's all about comparative cost advantages. If educational outcomes between rich and poor kids can be narrowed, this means that there are more jobs available to the poor kids. Wages for low-paying jobs would increase or those jobs would vanish (actually, I suspect that there are way more jobs that "the US could work without" than most people think). Inequality would decrease. A country's GINI-coefficient is not fixed for all eternity by some sort of economic law.
"You can tell every individual fast-food worker to boostrap their way out of making minimum wage, but the end-result of that is that there are no fast-food workers left."
I think "eliminate all the boring, low wage jobs" is what we've been charing towards en masse for the last century.
I don't think the person you're replying to is right, but
> You can tell every individual fast-food worker to boostrap their way out of making minimum wage, but the end-result of that is that there are no fast-food workers left.
is just a silly argument. Even it were possible, they weren't all about to simultaneously change themselves into architects next Tuesday. We'll keep on getting new fast-food workers who haven't changed into architects yet.
>You can tell every individual fast-food worker to boostrap their way out of making minimum wage, but the end-result of that is that there are no fast-food workers left.
If we could effectively cause this to happen, it would not result in no fast food workers. It'd result in fast food worker wages going up because supply for such workers would diminish while demand would increase (due to the ex-fast food workers being now able to afford to eat out more often).
>"The right thinks that poverty is bad but necessary as it is mostly the "deserved" consequence of bad and/or immoral choices and fears helping poor people too much will lead to wrong incentives that are worse than the poverty itself.
From what I understand the argument is also very much that the wrong incentives are not themselves bad, but lead to more and perpetuate poverty in the end. But since the welfare state is extremely old at this point, it cannot be logically consistent to assume that it is mostly "deserved" consequences.
It is imposed consequences from previous (or current) attempts to fix the very problem, that cause people to be born into bad fortune.
We are in hell and got there thru flawed policy, dictated by our (mostly) good intentions. And we are very stupid and generally don't learn from previous mistakes.
(or probably institutions act stupidly, because of public choice theory they are incapable of learning, because *mumblign something about* incentives again)
The welfare state never shrinks (as government programs never do) and always increases (because good intentions...).
Also you cannot cut government programs ever (it simply does not happen).
And trying to cut the welfare state specifically is impossible, as you would be accused of having bad intentions. (and given that the welfare state is as massive as it is, you would have to do incrementally peel it layer by layer and each one breaks a dependency and this hurts)
So the issue is that we are stuck in an inescapable, inadequate equilibrium.
The system will collapse before it can ever get fixed.
Something like that. Also what I described might be more of a right-libertarian version. And it's too hand-waivy, because I'm a bit too tired for this.
But your description is definitely too barren to do the position full justice.
Thanks, that's very interesting!
>Another route, namely coercing parents into making good decisions for their children or limiting the authority parents have over their children is also politically blocked, as conservatives and also many on the left will have none of it.
NB: there are solid reasons for blocking this. The big one is that a multiparty democratic state in which parents' ability to counter state propaganda is too limited is unstable and will on a timescale of years to decades become a stable one-party state (specifically via someone being in power long enough to brainwash enough children to consolidate an unbeatable coalition). The obvious example is Hitler, although Putin's also managed it.
Think I agree with most of your points, but "Poverty is a necessity of an economic system, which at the same time is capable of feeding 10 billion people." is a pretty intense assertion, and I'm not sure what external source you'd use to try and back it up.
First, we need to define poverty as something which by definition won't always exist, no matter how rich everyone is.
Then, once we have a definition of poverty which is absolute, as opposed to relative (i.e. bottom 10% of income earners!), we can begin talking about the various solutions to that and who it is best to incentivize to actually accomplish them.
We have limited resources.
If these cash-transfer programs don't actually help in the long term, then we should be spending our money on other things that will help in the long term.
Poverty isn't "a necessity of an economic system". Poverty exists because some people are not very productive. If no one in society had an IQ below 115, and no one was mentally ill or addicted to drugs or suffered from impulse control disorders, the poverty rate would be very nearly 0.
Can you explain that last paragraph? How does that relate to the fact that two countries with the same average intelligence and substance abuse rates can have dramatically different poverty rates?
First off, no country meets the criteria I laid or, or even comes close.
Secondly, historical factors will result in different presents. A country that was under the thumb of socialists for decades will have stunted economic development relative to its neighbors. A country 300 years ago would be considered almost entirely poor by modern standards. Socialist countries were poor because socialism is an insane ideology with no basis in reality and severely damaged the economy. However, these sorts of historical patterns are temporary, as seen by the Asian Tigers, which emerged from underdeveloped status and became developed countries very rapidly.
Thirdly, "poverty rate" is defined in multiple different ways which vastly changes measured poverty.
The US has basically eliminated absolute poverty, for instance, once you take government assistance into account, and there are few people who actually live in material poverty after government assistance is taken into account.
Oh boy. Our cruxes are so far back that we're not going to get anywhere, but thanks for elaborating.
I think my point is exactly that: it seems like researchers feel like they HAVE to fudge it, because if the negative effects of poverty aren't quantifiable then SOLUTIONS to poverty are not justifiable. I think the whole line of reasoning is toxic and reflects a deep social failing which in a funny way is connected to a veneration of STEM-based thinking about the world. It's a bit like pegging teacher pay to standardized test performance, as if the only learning that counts must be quantifiable.
If we can't measure the learning, then how do we know it counts?
This comment is... a very good example of the point G Retriever is making. Forget any individual case for now. The point is: we shouldn't assume that everything we care about can be easily and correctly quantified. When we use peer-reviewed studies as our only means to justify something, we're implicitly assuming that there are no effects (good or bad) that we can't/don't know how to quantify. And this is an obviously terrible assumption. This doesn't mean we stop caring about evidence, or we just go with our gut, or we don't try to quantify things. Just that it's important to remember that this one particular way of finding truth (peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals) is not The One True Source of All Knowledge.
I didn't say peer-reviewed studies are the only kind of evidence. I asked how do we know the unmeasured counts. Let's grant there's something you care about and can't quantify. How do you know anything you're doing is having any effect on that at all if you can't measure it?
You can't, directly, but the world is complex. Civilization functioned for thousands of years without trying to force every aspect of human life under the dissection lamp to be reduced to neat little columns of data.
Let's say there's no effect of poverty on intelligence. Instead you get 'street smarts' that help you stay alive. Would that be a reason NOT to end poverty?
Say there's no effect of poverty on propensity toward violent crime. Is that a reason NOT to end poverty?
Say there's no effect of poverty on a long list of ills we once thought were related to poverty. Do you need a reason to end poverty, or can we all just agree, "Poverty sucks, and we don't have to justify or quantify how much it sucks. Let's agree to work on the problem because we don't like it."
To me, another big problem with the study is that there is no hypothesized mechanism by which poverty supposedly retards brain development.
So if a correlation between an extra $330 and different brainwaves is found, there is no plausible explanation for why that would have happened. You have to imagine that the extra money somehow changed one or more other (unknown) variables that then, somehow, through an (unknown) process, that impacted brain waves.
Shouldn't the research first be directed at figuring out exactly what changes child brain development (nutrition, maternal attention, etc.)? And then researchers could look at how poverty might affects those variables. By contrast, this seems like an "advocacy study" that was designed to put the cart before the horse for political reasons.
Maybe using individual cases to build a rough model of the underlying dynamics.
For example an author is writing a story and wants it to be interesting. He probably has a model of what factors make a story interesting based on other things they've read, and so can test things they might write against their internal model of how stories work.
For public policy questions it would be the model of human nature under various circumstances. Less reliable than a high-powered study but maybe better than nothing.
For the education issue you questioned earlier for me this actually goes the other way. In my experience most people don't remember the vast majority of what they learned in school after a few years. If we get someone to "know" something during a final, then they forget it promptly after, what are we really achieving?
Not *all* education, but I'd argue that a huge proportion of modern education is useless for most people (aside from the signalling factor), and we also fail to teach them other things that would be more relevant to their lives.
Like, is chemistry still a thing that a huge % of the population should spend years in high school on? Sure you need it to *become* a doctor, but what % of doctors even remember how to do low-level chemistry work?
And why not teach basic medicine in high school, in an era where lifestyle diseases are everywhere?
There's tons of stuff like that, it feels like *how* we teach things gets all the attention when we should question *what* and *why* more.
The motte is that not everything that matters can be measured. The bailey that typically follows is that therefore my snakeoil that doesn't improve any measurable metrics should be used anyway because of my gut feeling that it helps. Similar thought processes held medicine back for centuries, and are still undermining education. It's good to invent ways to measure the things we don't yet know how to measure and actually prove whether the intervention improves those things.
Counterpoint: those clever little ways we invent to measure things have a large chance to turn out to be WRONG (see Scott's post about rationality's failures on the old blog, such as London vs. Chicago traffic). Sometimes moral intuitions are, in fact, right.
I felt the urge to agree but what if one day I am the one with a strong intuition that goes against the imperfect measurements?
Effective medicine still contains a lot of things that are poorly understood, obviously work, and are extremely hard to capture in RCTs (see Scott's point about parachute RCTs).
The most extreme example would be physical therapy - every effective therapist is working off pre-EBM knowledge and getting results, while academia is chasing its own tail trying to prove the sky is blue. If you have lower back pain, in a majority of cases the best your EBM doctor can give you is a painkiller, and questions of etiology are met with "idk lol".
Extrapolating this to other fields is left as an exercise to the reader.
We could be like Freddie, who says (in effect) "you aren't going to find any effect on kids from pre-K because there is no effect. But letting people send their kids to pre-K makes their lives (both the kids and the parents) happier, so just do it already, and don't set ourselves up for failure when we don't find any results in 10 years."
If we want subsidized daycare and greater child-having subsidies in general we should just do that. They do it in Finland etc. You don't have to pretend it's for some irrelevant/dubious scientific purpose. Unless it's to trick people into something they don't really want. But that is where a lot of this ends up, morally. People with "noble goals" trying to herd the sheep and playing loose with the virtue of truth.
The other aspect is when it comes to the money spent, it's quite possible that "more daycare" (e.g. longer hours) is really the better economic direction than a bunch of educational attainment statistics in very small children. Plus it would affect the design of the facilities and just what it is that is healthiest for these children to be doing all day.
Well fuck it, I'd be happier with free ice cream. Should the government give out free ice cream?
At whose cost? As another poster says, ice cream and chocolates make very many people happy. What's the line to be used to say for this we shall use tax money, and for that we shall not? To me it's quite clear that there has to be a significant externality or public good aspect involved.
people see their money go down a blackhole with education and welfare spending. I hardly think it unreasonable that they want some quantifiable measure
It's unreasonable if such a measure is not practically knowable.
If literally no measure is practically knowable then the those whose money is being extracted would be in the right demanding that the spigot be turned off completely.
Why would that necessarily make them in the right? It certainly weakens the arguments that people in favor of education and/or welfare, but it doesn't eliminate them completely. Not all knowledge comes through measurement and analysis of the resulting quantitative data.
There are a number of outcomes that I will never expect to have a corresponding quantitative measure of a reasonably high quality (ex: a measure of how good the art produced by National Endowment of the Arts grantees is). There are a number of other outcomes where a reasonably good quantitative measure may be possible, but it wouldn't be practical due to the high expense of collecting the data relative to the expected benefits of collecting it (can't think of an example off the top of my head, unfortunately).
When collecting high-quality quantitative data either isn't possible or isn't practical, we don't have to throw our hands up in the air and stop attempting to answer the question. Rigorous, objective (or as objective as anything ultimately done by a person ever can be) analysis of qualitative data can be very informative!
If it ultimately isn't possible/practical to effectively quantify any of the outcomes of education/welfare spending (which seems improbable to me), this doesn't hand victory to people opposed to this spending. A lack of quantitative proof of the effectiveness of the programs isn't the same thing as a lack of proof of the effectiveness of the programs. It also isn't quantitative proof that the programs are ineffective. The quantitative effect is unknown/unknowable, not necessarily nonexistent. All that has changed is that the arguments for/against the policy in question have to be carried out in the somewhat fuzzier world of qualitative analysis.
The US has lots of anti-poverty programs and spends a significant amount of money on them. Most of them have been around for decades, too. SNAP spending alone was $55 billion for 2019, $1,548 per beneficiary per year, and the program dates back to the 1930's. I'm not sure why you think it would be necessary that researchers fudge statistics to justify anti-poverty interventions *now,* in 2022, coming up on a century after the New Deal was enacted.
"Necessary" Isn't the right word per-se. The researchers may or may not feel a moral obligation to do so, regardless of current politics.
As a side note, SNAP is the most basic, fundamental sort of anti-poverty program in that its literally there to prevent families from starving.
Did families regularly starve to death before SNAP? Otherwise there was presumably a more basic anti-poverty system on place before.
Yes, there was, it was called "having strong communities". Sadly, in America at least, that ship has sailed- Americans are a fundamentally nomadic people who are more likely to view their neighbor as an enemy instead of an ally by multiple orders of magnitude.
The concern over being unable to support something that is obvious correct and apparent due to an inability to quantify it stems from learned helplessness and inability to simply accept things as they are perceived.
Scott is saying that despite not having numbers to back cash transfers, he still feels they are correct and supports them - that's great! The authors of this study are marginally more uncomfortable with their own judgement than he is, and preferred to support it with very questionable to avoid having their opinions stand on their own.
The fundamental issue is the blanket severe discomfort with simply declaring and accepting facts based on a posteriori lived experiences. It's interesting that on this issue both Scott is quick to state that he is comfortable supporting cash transfers, but otherwise tends to write from a very evidentiary perspective.
In a sense it's Gell-Mann Amnesia for knowledge; you arbitrarily decide that some things are so obvious you can ignore that studies are flawed, but then turn around and expect studies for others.
Yes. And doesn't that also go to the even bigger issue of publication bias. No one wants to publish a social science study that says: "life's a bitch, and there's nothing we can do about it." So those study results either disappear unpublished or get recycled (p-fished) for some (more hopeful) hypothesis.
Serious question: Does preregistration still allow researchers the option of just spiking their study if the data comes out "wrong"? I suppose it does. But this study apparently involved too much money and effort to tank (all those $330/mo. payments have to show some return on investment).
Some preregistrations come with a pre-publication agreement, but my sense is that most journals still aren’t willing to commit to publishing negative results.
The questions isn't a binary "solve poverty" vs. "don't solve poverty", but a question of how much effort* to spend on reducing on poverty. Reducing poverty more isn't costless**, so how much effort people support is a trade-off. Any data point can slightly shift what point to choose on that trade-off.
Even what to define as poverty at all is non-obvious. Most of the world, and for most of history all the world, would consider $20,000/year wealth, not poverty.
*: read: other people's money, usually
**: because if there are costless ways of reducing poverty that we know about, we're already doing them
Cash transfers are not solutions to poverty in any case. The largest reductions in poverty by many orders of magnitude have come from social and political institutions that allow for and encourage economic growth. This should be obvious if you look at the broad sweep of history, but it becomes painfully obvious if you consider the recent experience of China and India.
These are two very different effects. Yes, high growth in emerging economies is great for reducing poverty, but it’s not particularly applicable to reducing poverty in an advanced economy with lower growth rates.
Poverty is bad. No doubt about it.
It does not necessarily follow that cash transfers are either an optimal or universal solution. Perhaps they would work very well for parents who are financially savvy (my mother was incredibly good at handling budgets even when she financially struggled), but make things in the family worse if the parent is addicted and will buy more drugs instead. That happens; I knew enough alcoholics to know that their finances are a hopeless black hole with the other end at the local pub.
Of course, a careful policy based on each individual family's needs cannot be easily written into law, so it won't be pursued.
We don't. I lived in a block house with at least 7 other poorish families. That was the Rust Belt in Czechoslovakia when the Iron Curtain fell and the rusted old heavy industry went to the dogs. Loss of previously stable jobs was sudden and the city never really recovered.
It was fairly obvious that some were better at economic decisions than others.
Also, of the alcoholics I know right now, none is particularly needy. All middle class people who turn their earnings into booze.
Families of said alcoholics are miserable, though.
The question is how to keep that money out of the husband's hands and going to the needs of the wife and kids.
Also, studies of alcoholism indicate a strong genetic component. I am all for research into treatment of alcoholism, but contemporary psychologization of said disease helps only a few people. My friend was in a rehab; their success rate was about 15 per cent, less than with many cancers.
Maybe Scott could chime in, he is a psychiatrist after all. Is treating alcoholism with psychology modern shamanism (because it surely seems that alcoholics MUST have some underlying psychological issues) or real peer reviewed science?
Trying to solve addiction by enforcing poverty doesn't seem like a winner.
Oh, it definitely isn't, but you seem to argue from a position that cash transfers are the optimal and universal solution to alleviate poverty, so whoever casts any doubt of them wants to enforce poverty.
Are they? Are you sure? After all, countries that elevated themselves from poverty to development - and there was a lot of them - didn't do so through funneling cash to all inhabitants.
Cash transfers was Scott's position, not mine.
I didn't see anybody here arguing that cash transfers were the _optimal_ decision. Just that it's a reasonable way to take out a substantial chunk of the problem. I feel as if you (and perhaps others here) are arguing to do nothing about the problem until we come up with a better solution than cash transfers. (If you already have a better solution, I'm all ears.)
Then please don't feel so. I never said anything like that explicitely and telepathy over TCP/IP does not work. If I wanted to gut certain types of spending, I would proclaim it openly; I have nothing to lose by being candid on the Internet.
I would be a great friend of a more personalized approach, though. One size fits nobody.
I realize that it would probably be *more* expensive, but I think those extra money could buy extra efficiency.
We're debating this like a majority of people in poverty are addicted and spending all of their money on alcohol instead of diapers - can we temper this with a statistic? Because if it's only, say, 5% or 10% of people in poverty with children are gratuitously neglecting them, then what about the the other 90% to 95% who aren't?
I agree with your position of refusing to mouth moral support for someone's goals as the price for criticizing their logic or data.
There should be a word for the rhetorical habit of reciting one's agreement with X as a predicate to establish one's bona fides to criticize Y. (E.g., "I hate Trump and white supremacy as much as the next guy . . . but . . .")
For one thing, the cumulative effect of these en passant pro-forma recitations of what is supposedly clear to everyone tend to have an "anchoring" effect on the Overton Window that may ultimately be more significant than the particular argument being made.
Mandatory throat clearing
After reading this I feel bad about asking you to clarify your precise COVID vaccine resolution in line yesterday. Thanks for continuing to post despite well meaning people trying to vetocracy every sentence you make, and I hope my paying for your posts+this comment offsets the negative reinforcement I gave you yesterday!
IMO you made the right decision and your reasoning is sound. However, it comes with a trade-off. Many people, including (particularly?) "educated" people, weigh new information strongly by (partisan) identity. Failure to disclose tribal affiliation (or sympathy) means that those people will not consider your analysis.
A query: If all evidence gleaned from history were to indicate, beyond all doubt, that cash transfers have had no positive impact on the objective of reducing poverty; and if, on the contrary, all evidence made available by history, both American and worldwide, were to suggest that cash transfers actually prolonged poverty and exacerbated its symptoms--would it be fair to conclude that a position for cash payments is not compatible with a position against poverty?
Hypothetically speaking, of course.
I agree that poverty is bad, which is why we should condemn rather than reward women who irresponsibly choose to have children while impoverished.
You get what you incentivise, which means that incentivising poor women for having children is one of the most horrible things you can possibly do.
"If you lift everybody below the 60% line to above it, then nobody is considered poor anymore, but also, the median income is not affected by this at all."
You're encouraging low IQ women to have more children, which makes society on net balance worse off.
"What's the point of being capable of feeding 10 billion people, if you then just decide to not do it?"
Because there's an absolute ton of negative externalities associated with having 10 billion people on earth, especially considering those additional people are almost assuredly going to be below average IQ.
Jeffrey, you seem to think IQ is only ever going to be relative and never absolute
Id like you to consider the fact that in our modern world, we can observe things people with higher IQs can do which those with lower IQs simply cannot do
Jeffrey do you really think in a world where those with lower IQs have successfully bred more, that we will have more or fewer people who can do high level skills?
Because it seems pretty clear to me, however which way you'd like to describe IQ, it does have absolute and not merely relative consequences in the world.
You seem to be arguing on that basic fallacy-that it is only relative and not something that produces absolute concrete results, independent of one's position on the general IQ distribution.
Well I'm sorry to say but your argument that what poor IQ women do is none of our business falls pretty flat here. It actually IS my business if I realize that helping a poor lady now will add to human suffering later on. I truly don't mind the spending. But somethings are too high of a cost.
I don't know why you keep bringing up this ten billion people thing. Poverty in the US isn't about lack of basic food, food costs a few bucks a day and is very easily obtainable from charity if you really need it for some reason. Food is solved.
Almost 14 million households in the U.S. had food insecurity during 2020: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/key-statistics-graphics/#foodsecure
Not quite yet solved I'd say.
Poverty is inversely correlated with number of children. If you want "low IQ women" to have less children: give them money!
Also, as it happens, its a good moral choice. And also it makes my personal living better because I have to deal less with homeless people.
Inversely correlated with money? Or being the kind of person who can make decisions which lead to having money?
This is a very well documented effect across and within populations. So there is probably even a decent chance of it being causal. Here is my data
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-by-gdp-per-capita
Where's the evidence that the causation is "have money" -> "less kids"?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-by-gdp-per-capita
If being below 60% median income is the definition as being poor, even if you don't count the transfer payments themselves as income, that means that you've defined poverty so that *by definition*, poverty will exist without transfer payments and the only way to alleviate it is with transfer payments.
Defining poverty that way, rather than as "unable to pay for food, shelter, etc." is a numbers gimmick to justify social spending.
Technically, that definition does not require poverty to exist without transfer payments. There is no requirement that people exist who earn less than 60% of the median income (i.e. if the median income is $100, there's no requirement that people exist who earn less than $60).
In practice, such people do exist in real distributions with significantly-nonzero Gini coefficients, but they are not required by definition.
I think you should understand my point. Yes, in theory if everyone earns similar amounts there may be nobody below 60% of the median. But that measure isn't a measure of poverty at all. It's contrived so that if everyone gets richer, this has no effect on the poverty level whatsoever; in fact, if one person gets richer, the poverty level is likely to go up. And it's defined so that poverty has no relation to whether people lack food, shelter, clothes, or ability to pay their bills. If Beverly Hills were a country, it would still have a large contingent of poor by this definition.
Even if you wanted to do this, how would you do it without also harming the children?
If raising children in poverty is bad, we could treat it like any other form of abuse and take the children and place them in foster care or up for adoption.
Brilliant. Definitely no chance for horrible unintended consequences with this idea.
There are many forms of adversity children experience, poverty being just one of many. Removing children from their parents results in other forms of adversity, so the reason to remove them must be really egregiously life-threateningly bad, not just like not as great as what richer kids have.
Poverty is not a form of abuse by any stretch of the definition of abuse. Abuse and neglect have legal definitions and standards and it's a really good thing they are distinct from adverse experiences that kids have had forever -- including things like war, emigration, illness, disability or death of a parent, divorce. It's like saying we should take children away from their divorcing parents since divorce is hard on kids.
Kids whose parents move around a lot and have to change schools a lot experience bad impacts, including being more subject to bullying. Let's take those kids from their parents too for moving their kids around too much.
There's pretty good research showing that children of highly critical and perfectionist parents can suffer longer-term psychological impacts than ones who experienced some physical violence. I work with the grown kids of a lot of those kind of parents and I kind of wish I could take them away from those parents now because they are still causing harm. The grown kids I've worked with who grew up in poverty are way better off than the kids who grew up with well-off narcissistic parents.
They've tried this. Unless the child is in truly dire circumstances, this is actually a net negative for the child. Poverty isn't bad enough to outweigh the drawbacks of being put into the foster care system.
One way is by making transfers to poor women (perhaps ones who already have dependent children) conditional on receiving long-lasting injections preventing pregnancy.
Why wait until they have children? Why not just start forcibly mass-sterilizing people that the state decides shouldn't have children? Don't worry, I'm sure the state will make very good judgments, and the process will be fair and transparent and easily corrected for errors.
“Why do A when you can do B, which is horrible and how dare you suggest doing B”
I don’t find this to be the best form of argument.
We don't have to rely on the state making good judgments, or being fair & transparent or prone to correcting its own errors. It's also easier if people are opting into the program for benefits rather than being forced in, requiring enforcement effort for those who want out.
If this is an utilitarian/consequentialist framework, then maybe deterrence is more than enough. Sacrifice a few poor people each year randomly in unusually cruel ways, eg. by not giving them insulin, imprison them for some extremely long time if they do some kind of victimless crime, or whatever...
Oh wait.
Many people (particularly those worst off) tend to be hyperbolic discounters. Low probability high impact events get discounted. This was Gary Becker's greatest mistake:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/what-was-gary-beckers-biggest-mistake.html
Poverty itself encourages short-term thinking. If you want people to make better decisions, pushing them into further poverty isn't what you want to be doing.
And anyway, if they're already poor, and they're deciding to have kids they're likely to have trouble supporting, what on earth makes you think that that keeping them poor or making them even more poor will suddenly lead them to make the exact opposite decisions to the ones they've been making? You're inhabiting a world where you just wish harder and harder that these people are Homo economicus, and they're not.
What percentage of women actually choose to have children for the cash grab? Surely after all the outcry in the 80's about "welfare queens," we would have some statistic on the percentage that actually does this versus, say, endemic poverty cycles that have poor people who were raised poor as their only experience and then wanting their own families and figure they will somehow make ends meet because their mom did.