Rob Henderson has had a couple of columns addressing an interesting, critical, and largely unacknowledged issue - childhood disruption and its consequences. Actually, the research exists on the topic but it is little discussed.
The two columns are America's Lost Boys and Me, and Why Are Poor Kids More Likely to Graduate Than Foster Kids?, both by Rob Henderson. Full of links to the underlying research.
His conclusions and the evidence from the research is that childhood instability, particularly instability in the birth to age six time-frame, is more causal of negative adult life outcomes than is poverty. Were it a single study, it would scarcely be worth discussing, but it is multiple studies of reasonable rigor.
While I see echoes of this issue in national debates and conversations with friends and acquaintances, I think it more useful to put it into the conversations of my city, Atlanta. In the Atlanta Journal & Constitution or on social media sites like NextDoor, whenever public policy is discussed vis-a-vis crime or homelessness or the like, the refrain is always the need to tackle root causes and eliminate poverty and/or income inequality.
It is an emotional argument but there is a constricted logic to it if you believe that crime is caused by poverty and that poverty can be eliminated through income transference.
Regrettably for the integrity of the argument, both propositions are flawed. There are plenty of places where poverty is widespread but which also have low crime. There are no success stories where poverty is eliminated through income transfers. There are plenty of examples where people/nations from low resource environments prosper dramatically.
These are complex systems loosely coupled with one another. But poverty does not inherently cause crime and poverty is not inherently caused by absence of resources.
Simply proving that the linkage between poverty and crime is weak and that the link between poverty and income is weak is an inadequate response. Disproving a model which makes bad forecasts is only the first step. It is desirable to replace the bad model with a better model.
What Henderson and others have been pointing out is that the better forecasting model is to look at childhood instability instead of childhood poverty. The most arresting statistic supporting this is that kids in poverty graduate high school at the same rate as other kids whereas kids in foster care graduate at significantly lower rates (about 20-25% lower rates). Since foster homes have minimum income requirements that ensure the child is not in an impoverished environment, foster kids should at least be graduating at the normal average as everyone else and certainly at higher rates than poor kids. But only if it is poverty which drives outcomes.
What is it that foster kids definitely have which kids in poverty do not? Life and home instability.
Coming back to Atlanta as a reasonably average example of public policy debate. Whenever we discuss crime, there is a loud orchestra of people in the conversation who are adamant we have to tackle root causes of crime. From that proposition they accept without examination that the root cause of crime is poverty and then we are quickly into discussions of housing subsidies and income supplements and universal basic income and the need for superior education, etc.
For people earning the money that would need to be taken to pay for those programs, there is obvious self-interested (and also principled) objections. They tend to focus on personal accountability and behavior and policing, etc.
This ends up feeling like, and realistically is to some degree, a simplistic shouting match between left and right, progressives and conservatives. Which is hardly useful.
It is Atlanta though, which is 72% registered Democrat. Interestingly, many of the debates have Democrats taking the position around law and order and personal accountability. It is easy to see this as a partisan or ideological issue but when one party is overwhelmingly larger than any other, and when almost all the debate is strictly within the dominant party, then you begin to understand there is a different dynamic going on.
Most everyone wants everyone else to have an equal opportunity to rise and prosper and most everyone wants most others to actually prosper. The challenge, though, is that we disagree on the causes of negative outcomes.
I think one of the reasons that people gravitate to the simplistic model of "all bad outcomes are due to poverty and inadequate access to resources" as an explanation is that it is simple. Add resources and everything is better.
Henderson and the research suggest otherwise. Create childhood stability, whether in poverty or not, and life outcomes become much better for everyone is their prescription. And there is evidence to support the claim. A pretty reasonable amount of evidence.
But now we are in difficult if not dangerous territory. In a country constructed on Age of Enlightenment principles such as individualism and constrained government and natural and inalienable rights, it is rather challenging to find support for the Government to be involved in changing the value systems of individuals or intervening in personal lives to change behaviors.
It is not impossible to make that argument but the odds are against it. Add race as a distracting element and it becomes almost impossible. In Atlanta, out-of-wedlock births are the great majority, the norm, and this is largely concentrated among the majority population which is black. Even conceptualizing a government role to change that norm is almost impossible.
Regardless, we know that it is stability, reasonably strongly enforced social norms and stable families which create environments for children to thrive. We all want children to thrive but we hardly agree on how to get there.
Charles Murray in his meticulously researched Coming Apart, which focused only on whites to remove the complicating factor of race, observed that one of our national weaknesses is that our prosperous elite refuse to
Preach what they practice.
In other words, regardless of political stripe, upper class whites practice all the sorts of things we know to enhance life outcomes. They get their education and start employment. They stay employed. They marry before they have children. They stay married. They exercise financial prudence, spending less than they earn. They value and invest in their children's education.
But what they often preach, or support in public policy, is extreme freedom. They support no-fault divorce even when children are involved and even though they do not themselves subscribe to it. They support the freedom to pursue dreams over sustained education or work, even though they prioritize work, family, education and income over dreams. They support alternate family structures even though the two-parent family is their norm. They refuse to condemn aspects of hedonism, especially when it involves drugs and alcohol, even though they are quite abstemious. Etc.
It is almost as if the prosperous elite wish to hide the secrets of their own success from everyone else.
We know what needs to be done (practice all those norms which are causally linked to good life outcomes), we just don't know quite how to bring that about. Abandoning that difficult work and defaulting to known shibboleths such as poverty causes crime is one of our principle weaknesses.
We need to engage with reality. If everyone were to practice the norms known to be causal in positive life outcomes, we would all be better off. We also know that redistributing income without changing behaviors or norms is futile.
But it is easier to argue for the latter than to practice the former.
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