Money follows success, not the other way around.
It's an unsurprising, but dispiriting reality. Giving people cash, which is easy, does not lead to better outcomes. Improving people's lives is hard.
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 28, 2025
Ever since the beginning of the Enlightenment, a conceit developed that there are technical solutions to human problems. The enormous success of the scientific method in the physical realm led people to wonder whether applying the same intellectual framework could be used to solve human problems.
The short answer is: not really. It's not that Enlightenment thinkers have contributed nothing to improving society — quite the opposite — but their fundamental insights, which essentially began and ended with the development of liberal democracy based on a few simple principles, not a comprehensive science of human social development.
Despite the efforts of the social sciences, it's challenging to find policy proposals as straightforward as "promote free markets, individual responsibility, and provide a good practical education" that have proven effective in the real world. Even the Founders' brilliant design of the federal system is really more a set of compromises and kludges that work moderately well by setting interests against each other. It's not a finely-tuned machine.
A great example of this fact is the excitement many people had for the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), which was intended to provide enough breathing room for families to do more than just tread water economically.
Social scientists have been certain that even modest income supports would lead to much better outcomes for children and families, while critics have been skeptical that the predicted benefits would materialize in the real world.
If the government wants poor children to thrive, it should give their parents money. That simple idea has propelled an avid movement to send low-income families regular payments with no strings attached.
Significant but indirect evidence has suggested that unconditional cash aid would help children flourish. But now a rigorous experiment, in a more direct test, found that years of monthly payments did nothing to boost children’s well-being, a result that defied researchers’ predictions and could weaken the case for income guarantees.
After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development.
“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, called Baby’s First Years. “The money did not make a difference.”
Dispiriting, but it should not be unexpected. The reality is that people are not poor because they lack money. They don't have money because they live and act like poor people. Other experiments using even larger sums of monthly subsidies had no effect other than providing more money for vacations and suchlike.
More money doesn't make poor people act like wealthier people; it makes them poor people with a bit more cash.
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.
A landmark study in 2019 from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine found that “poverty itself causes negative child outcomes” and aid programs often help. But most of the evidence came from studies of noncash benefits, like food stamps or Medicaid, or the earned-income tax credit, a subsidy for parents with jobs. Some of the studies were decades old, when the safety net was smaller and expansions might have had larger effects.
For a more precise test of cash guarantees, Baby’s First Years raised about $22 million from the National Institutes of Health and private foundations and recruited 1,000 poor mothers with newborns in New York, New Orleans, greater Omaha and Minneapolis-St. Paul. More than 80 percent were Black or Latino, and most were unmarried.
After randomly dividing the parents, researchers gave one group $333 a month while the other got a nominal $20. Random-control testing is considered an especially rigorous form of evaluation.
The researchers specified in advance seven measures on which they thought children in high-cash families would outperform the others. But after four years they found no group differences on any of the yardsticks, which aimed for a comprehensive look at child development.
Children in the families getting the higher cash payments did no better on tests of vocabulary, executive function, pre-literacy skills or spatial perception. Their mothers did not rank them more highly on assessments of social and emotional behavior. And they were no more likely than the children in the low-cash group to avoid chronic health conditions like asthma.
Many social ills are not susceptible to technocratic solutions because the problems are not technical, but spiritual, or, if you prefer, behavioral.
Aristotle spoke of virtues being habits, and he is right.
Children from wealthier families--and by this I mean members of the lower-middle classes and above--are more likely to succeed and be healthy because their parents live lives that are conducive (on average) to raising children well. Parents who read to their children, pay attention to their health and intellectual development, and instill values that lead to health and wealth will, on average, produce healthier and happier children more likely to succeed.
The money is there to make this possible because the parents live lives more conducive to economic success than those in the lower-income strata. Handing people money doesn't change the behavior of those with bad habits — it feeds those bad habits with more resources.
We can argue whether people raised badly and who are raising their kids badly should be held morally responsible for their bad habits--that's an argument that has been around for longer than I have been alive--but ignoring the fact that behavior and attitudes are at the core of the poverty problem is a sure route to failure.
Unbelievable!😠This woman has her two sons helping her steal clothes & things for school! It would have been a theft charge but then she pulled a gun & it became an armed robbery to get the clerk to not stop her!🤨I hope she’s charged with theft at least! pic.twitter.com/U5ZHPmyPy8
— PammsyNow (@NowPammsy) July 26, 2025
I don't "blame" children for growing up in dysfunctional families, and I don't think that--on average--poor kids have an inherently lower natural ability to succeed and should be abandoned to their fate. But I also don't think we should pretend like poverty is primarily an economic issue, because it isn't. Poor people don't suddenly become middle-class with bourgeois values when they get a check, and bourgeois values are those that lead to at least modest economic success and stability.
There is no technocratic solution to poverty, and every technocratic solution tried has tended to make things worse. Welfare has been a social atom bomb for the poor in the United States, creating generational poverty for tens of millions. That's because technocrats don't see the people behind the statistics--they are treating symptoms, not causes, of poverty.
Of course, treating symptoms is not nothing. When people are starving, you feed them. But if you have a population that starves whenever others don't feed them, you need to find a solution that goes beyond handing out food. The solution is not subsidizing poverty, but finding ways to get people out of it.
Technocrats aren't equipped to do that, whatever they think.
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