Let Them Eat Sermons

Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a pond on the farm at Pindar's Corners. Still from the 2018 documentary by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich.

Hey,  David F. Brooks ("Why I Am Not a Liberal"), what up, man? How's the wife? Read anything interesting lately?

Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.

Notice he doesn't tell us which study he's talking about, or offer a link so we can check it out for ourselves, which is often a sign of something funky in Brooks's social science commentary, at the least that he hasn't read the paper he's talking about (which Dr. Google was able to identify pretty quickly: the. NBER report on the Baby's First Years experiment by Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan et al., The effect of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on children’s development at four years of age: A randomized controlled trial in the U.S.). In typical Brooks fashion he does link his source for Baby's First Years (BFY), a piece from two weeks ago in the Substack "abundance" mag The Argument, in the next paragraph, but without acknowledging it as source, in a reference to a different study—

These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security.

—he's trying, as ever, to hide how little he's read in the preparation of the column. But if he'd read more of her essay, or the excellent coverage of the experiment by Jason DeParle at the end of July in The New York Times, he could have learned that the question is a little more complex.

The experiment itself was a randomized control study,  which is a good thing, apparently the first time it's been done in the history of these tests of the effects of cash benefits on alleviating poverty, as well perhaps the first to focus on child development. In visits to hospital maternity wards in metropolitan New York, Omaha, New Orleans, and Minneapolis–St. Paul between May 2018 and June 2019, researchers recruited 1,000 women who had just given birth, offering them an unspecified monthly payment for the next 40 months in return for their cooperation in the study. All had incomes below the federal poverty line, most already had at least one child when the new baby was born, and most were unmarried. They were then randomly assigned to one of two groups, a control group of 600 mothers who would receive a token monthly payment of $20 on an electronic debit card activated in the hospital,  and an experimental group of 400 who would get $333 per month. There were no restrictions on how the money could be spent. In return, the babies were brought in for a variety of neurological and other tests, at 12,  24, 36, and 48 months; the report from last May that we're concerned with is on the 48-month testing.

Contrary to Brooks's assertion, there was plenty of reason to be surprised by the results. It's fairly well established from a series of studies in a wide range of low-income and middle-income countries that cash transfers improve families' economic well-being and mental health, and thus reduce stress on the families, not only reducing intimate partner violence but also giving parents more ability and time to contribute to their children's development, a formal hypothesis, the Family Stress Theory, which

posits that economic disadvantage creates economic pressure for caregivers, which has a detrimental effect on their personal mental health, then parenting practices, and hence the well-being of children and adolescents  

and which has dominated thinking on the subject in American sociology for 30 years.

Results from the 12-month testing seemed to corroborate this hypothesis in a remarkably precise way: EEG observations of babies in the experimental group showed significantly higher levels of brain activity of the kind associated with language, cognitive, and social-emotional development than those in the control group, which correlated directly with observations of the mothers' investment in their babies' development:

Gennetian et al.43 found that the unconditional cash transfers in the BFY study had selective impacts on the amount of time and money that mothers invest in their young children. Estimates suggest that mothers spent more time engaged in cognitively stimulating activities with their children. In addition, ~25% of the value of the cash gift was used on children’s books, toys, activities, clothing, diapers, and children’s electronic items/devices. However, there were no statistically significant impacts of the cash gift on core household expenditures such as food and rent, mothers’ participation in paid work or sources of other household income, or children’s time in child care. Gennetian et al.’s43 analysis shows a great deal of diversity in locations of debit cards transactions, including ATMs, big box stores, gas stations, restaurants, children’s stores, and phone bills.

And yet the 48-month testing suggested that none of this had any long-term effect (to the great pleasure of Brooks's friends at the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation). The neurological difference between the experimental and control groups didn't endure. The mothers didn't fritter their money away on themselves, DeParle writes, as conservatives might have predicted—

While critics have warned that parents might abuse the money, high-cash mothers spent negligible sums on alcohol and no more than low-cash mothers, according to self-reporting. They spent less on cigarettes.

Nor did they work less. While opponents say income guarantees could erode the work ethic, mothers in the two groups showed no differences across four years in hours worked, wages earned or the likelihood of having jobs.  

—but their babies did no better than the low-cash group in tests of vocabulary, executive function, pre-literacy skills, or spatial perception, seemed no better to their mothers in social and emotional behavior, and were just as likely to suffer from conditions like asthma.

“I was very surprised — we were all very surprised,” said Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine and one of six researchers who led the study.... “The money did not make a difference.”

What had gone wrong?

One obviously important thing that had nothing to do with the research design or the theory behind it was  the Covid-19 pandemic, which arrived for most of the children somewhere between their second and third birthdays (i.e., after the 12-month and before the 36-month rounds of testing), which was a source of some kind of traumatic stress for the whole society, and the subsequent monetary inflation, which made their gifts literally less valuable month after month; the mothers in the experimental group reported suffering more from stress anxiety than those of the control group, and perhaps that's what accounts for it: they'd become dependent on the extra money and it was hard to deal with the diminishing of its worth.

And then it wasn't worth all that much in the first place. It didn't "lift them out of poverty" at all (data are here, see Supplementary Table 1), unlike the Democrats' expanded child tax credit (which was given for each child in the household instead of just for the household, as was done in the BFY project). The expanded CTC really did lift families out of poverty, and the stress caused these families when it died in 2022 (thanks, Senators Manchin and Sinema) would be another addition to poverty problems in the study sample. So there is some reason to be doubtful about the findings as a whole, and some reason to hope that effects will start showing up in later testing as the kids, now 6 and 7, enter school—the project has been extended from its original 40-month span to 76 months.

Brooks hasn't heard anything about any of these matters, of course, though both Piper and DeParle do discuss them. His aim is to squeeze a David Brooks column out of the material, come hell or high water, and that is what he does, concluding, from the evident failure of Babies' First Years that the problem of child poverty in the United States is not economic but spiritual.

Well, that's not exactly what he says, but he does say that

reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion. That body of work teaches you, as Burke wrote, that manners and morals are more important than laws. You should have limited expectations about politics because not everything can be solved with a policy.

As ever, it's not his culture and moral norms and religious ideals he's talking about but those other people, who don't really have any because they haven't read enough of Brooks's lectures. With the implication that we shouldn't try to do anything about child poverty, because that's not a very spiritual conversation and has too much math in it.

The social sciences are great. I use them all the time. But when overly quantitative, they can misrepresent reality. They see only what can be quantified. They see only masses of people whose data can be tabulated, not unique individuals. 

He used to advise people to escape poverty by going to church, getting married, and moving to more prosperous towns while preserving the traditional culture they'd abandoned when they moved—well, he didn't really advise poor people, he really just told Times readers what poor people ought to do, it's a kind of Underpants Gnome solution—and now he's no longer even doing that. But he quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a "neocon" offering a "complex truth" that left and right alike, in his opinion, are missing:

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”

I assure you that Senator Moynihan, an academic sociologist and passionate believer in the ability of government policy to solve social problems, and unafraid of the quantitative aspect too, did not mean what Brooks seems to think he meant—that politicians should campaign on going to church and marrying early and the like in the hope of "changing culture" in any valuable way; he meant advocating for policy, math and all, as the thing his spirituality commanded, not yelling at poor people for being immoral but seeking ways in which government could enable them to seize the freedom and room to become their most unique selves. And when he fulminated against the 1996 welfare "reform" for its lifetime time limits—

“you’ll find appearing on your streets abandoned children—helpless, hostile, angry, awful—in numbers we have no idea”....“the most brutal act of social policy we have known since the Reconstruction” [I'll assume he meant the Republican abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876]

—he was not exercising Burkean "manners" but doing what Brooks is too diffident to call "the Lord's work" with a prophetic fierceness Brooks is scarcely capable of imagining.