NYT surprised by the unsurprising

A study found that monthly, unconditional cash payments didn't improve child outcomes. That should not come as a shock.

In this column:

• The Left, fairness, and free money

• The shocking study that’s not shocking

• Exposure to different opinions prevents unnecessary surprise

Justice as (a Kind of) Fairness

Even if you barely follow domestic-policy issues, you know that America’s left has long supported lots of spending. More “investment,” they have argued, is needed in education, social services, and on and on.

Nearly as consistent as this “spend more” refrain is the evidence that it simply doesn’t work as well as we’re led to believe. Great-Society welfare programs didn’t solve poverty. Major spending increases in K-12 education didn’t fix schools. A host of other high-dollar and high-profile initiatives failed to produce the results needed and/or caused a rash of regrettable unintended consequences.

Equality and fairness, however, are generally top priorities for liberals/progressives. They often reason that since the disadvantaged have fewer resources, equality and fairness require us to provide more resources. Indeed, a few years ago, I was in a meeting about the failure of lots of pandemic-era spending programs. The gathering included those from the left and right. After the failures were catalogued and the conservatives vented, one of the progressives angrily, sarcastically announced, “Forgive me for believing that people needing money should get more money!” This generated applause from the left.

I realized that the two sides were speaking different languages. We conservatives were incredulously asking, “How can you not see that all this money isn’t solving the problems we need to solve!?!” The progressives were incredulously asking, “How can you not see that justice demands we equalize the distribution of resources?!?”

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The left’s fairness-and-equality-fueled approach to cash payments and redistribution can be seen in many contemporary debates: Support for a universal basic income, work-free child allowances, the forgiveness of student loans, free childcare, and so on. Some farther on the left support Marxism, which seeks state control of resources to guarantee fair redistribution. A lite version of that (“social democracy”) would aim to accomplish redistribution through a panoply of social programs.

To be clear, none of this is to say that the left doesn’t care about outcome measures. They often do. The point here is the significant force behind the progressive impulse to spend and redistribute in the name of fairness.

And this, I believe, is at the heart of the left’s cognitive dissonance when big spending programs fail. “We believe in justice. Justice is the fair distribution of resources. The fair distribution of resources will make the world a much better place. What do you mean that our effort to more fairly distribute resources did not make the world a much better place???”

And this is why, I believe, the New York Times was incredulous that a serious, multi-year study found that giving free money to low-income families had zero impact on all seven measures of child well-being studied.

The Unsurprising Surprise

The introduction of the podcast episode in question made it sound like researchers had found that gravity doesn’t actually exist or that water isn’t wet. The findings were presented as nearly inconceivable. How is it possible that giving no-strings-attached money to financially needy families didn’t have any effect on any of the child outcomes we care about?

I encourage you to listen to the whole episode. It is eye-opening. Several moments underscore the NYT’s unfortunate tendentiousness, including the discussion of why you haven’t heard more about this study (“I think there’s also some concern among the group about publicizing these data for fear that others will use them as an argument or a pretext to cut government aid”) and the reporter’s concluding thoughts that make the non-surprising findings seem as mysterious and unsettling as quantum entanglement.

If you don’t have the time to listen, let me just underscore how devastating the findings are for the more-spending argument. Families received monthly unconditional cash payments for four years. Compared to the control group, the kids in the study’s treatment group fared no better on any of the measures. Here’s the straightforward description in the study itself:

After the first four years of the intervention (n=891), we find no statistically significant impacts of the cash transfers on four preregistered primary outcomes (language, executive function, social-emotional problems, and high-frequency brain activity) nor on three secondary outcomes (visual processing/spatial perception, pre-literacy, maternal reports of developmental diagnoses).

At the end, after offering possible explanations for why the payments didn’t work, the study offers the following:

Finally, the lack of impacts on age-4 child outcomes raises the possibility that income alone may not affect children’s early development […] Our strong test of the impacts of four years of unconditional cash transfers on the development of young children living in low-income families finds consistent null results, which may indicate that cash income alone does not have a causal effect on young children’s development in the contemporary policy context.

These findings are NOT surprising for those of us on the right who’ve spent time in the worlds of policy and policy research. We know that 1) social problems are caused by far more than a lack of resources, and 2) those causes are seldom responsive to government spending programs.

I suspect that I’m not the only one really frustrated that the NYT discussed the study’s results as though they never could’ve been imagined.

Insular Journalism and Forestalled Conversations

I want to conclude with two brief points.

First, this isn’t the first time the NYT—because of its insularity—described intuitive research findings as perplexing. Late last year, two of its journalists discussed their surprise that research was showing that the mass, rapid decriminalization of marijuana was leading to really bad consequences, particularly for young people. But serious people had been warning about the dangers of marijuana use for ages. The findings would only be a surprise to people who didn’t want those findings to be true or those who refuse to engage with a variety of perspectives. Indeed, the reporter discloses that she had illegally used the drug for years, and the host admits, “I have to say I was really surprised to hear that, that people could be addicted to marijuana. And frankly, I guess I was like a little skeptical when we were discussing and planning this episode.”

Journalism produced by journalists in a bubble is generally bad journalism.

Second, when we relentlessly focus on spending, we forestall conversations about interventions that might actually solve the problem. If we only talk about welfare spending, we aren’t talking about all of the reasons welfare spending is needed and what else we might need to do to ensure that people are self-sufficient. If we only talk about K-12 spending, we aren’t talking about all of the other things we need to do to make sure students learn more.

Consider this example from the NYT article on the free-money study:

It has long been clear that children from affluent families exhibit stronger cognitive development and fewer behavioral problems, on average, than their low-income counterparts. The question is whether their advantage comes from money itself or from related forces like parental health and education, neighborhood influences or the likelihood of having two parents in the home.

The first option (money alone is the explanation) is a crisp articulation of the hand-out-funding approach to social policy. This framing shows how convincing people that money is all that matters can distract us from talking about elements in the second option—things like parental behavior, family structure, and community conditions.

I’m not saying that the narrow focus on resource redistribution is a purposeful strategy to keep us from having difficult conversations about other factors. But it absolutely can—and does—have that effect.