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| 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.
