Give the Poor Money?  It Doesn’t Work

By Shlomo Maital

     OK, so – I am a liberal.  But my favorite erudite NYT columnist David Brooks is not!  He says so in the heading of his latest column (Sept. 5): “Why I am not a Liberal”. 

      And, why indeed is he not a liberal?  Because, apparently, liberals believe in giving poor people money – and the data show it does not work. 

      We’ve known this for a long time.  Ever since Susan Mayer’s 1997 book, “What Money Can’t Buy: Family Income and Children’s Life Chances.”   “Even if you double people’s incomes”,  Brooks summarizes, “the evidence is that it would have a limited effect on their children’s dropout and teenage pregnancy rates or other outcomes.”   

           What DOES matter?   Their parents’ characteristics.  Values. Education. Social skills. Family setting.  Etc.

           But progressives doubled down, insisting on creating and supporting a welfare state, which simply…gives the poor money.  

          This, at a time, as Brooks observes, when “most of our problems are moral, relational and spiritual more than they are economic.”

         And, as I boringly observe often, in the 1930’s Economist Lionel Robbins argued that “normative economics (involving right and wrong, good and bad) was wholly unscientific and should therefore be cast out of the field”.   Thus making economics utterly irrelevant, for almost a century.

         What does work for the poor?   Investing in great schools, for a start.  Narrowing the huge gap between, say, educational performance in Southern US states and those in the Northeast. 

         Many of my Jewish ancestors came penniless to North America – and rose to upper middle class standing, through hard work and aspiration.  They weren’t given money.  But they did instill key values in their children, i.e. myself and my sister. 

         At a time when ‘evidence-based’ is an accepted gold standard of policy,  how is it that the liberal supporters of the welfare state continue to back it?  When the evidence is against it.