Ruth Institute Blog

Among the many foolish programs in New York City, is one that pays poor people to behave well.  Here’s John Derbyshire acid description of the program:

Does giving money to poor people work? New York City, which surrounds our glittering headquarters here at Buckley Towers like peasants’ huts huddled round a medieval cathedral, has been engaged in an experiment to find out. For the last three years, the city has been monitoring a privately-financed pilot program that pays poor people to practice a middle-class lifestyle. They’ve paid adults $150 a month for holding a steady job, for example. Kids who attend school regularly have been getting $50 a month. A kid who passes the state exams gets $600. Everyone gets $100 for going to the dentist … and so on. Recipients are poor families living in New York City, 80 percent of them single-parent families. The inspiration for this was a similar program in Mexico. The ultimate idea was to set up a publicly funded city program on the same lines. Well, how did the pilot project work out? Not well. So not well, in fact, the city is now dropping the idea of a publicly financed version. This is all a bit odd, because the Mexican program that’s the model for New York’s, seems to work well. Here you see the defects of the liberal imagination. There is a key difference between poor single-parent families in New York City and poor peasants in Mexico. The latter possess next to nothing, and face huge institutional barriers to getting access to any social goods. In Mexico it is possible to be motivated, hard-working, future-oriented, and ambitious, yet still remain dirt poor. In New York City, it’s not. In New York City, if you’re motivated, hard-working, future-oriented, and ambitious, you’ll be in the middle class in no time. The barriers to personal achievement in Mexico are institutional, social, political, and cultural. The barriers in New York are personal, to do with individual psychology. If you’re poor in Mexico, you can’t afford to send your kids to school. You need them to help work in the fields, or pick over the garbage pile, or add appeal to your street begging. There is no person in New York who can’t afford to send his kids to school. In the mind of a liberal, poor people are just the same everywhere. Like so many notions that exist in the minds of liberals, this one is false.

If only there were a societal institution that could reliably help get poor Americans get out of poverty.  Oh, wait!  There is.  Heather Mac Donald describes it in her article.

But the best solution for poverty reduction is the one that is the least likely to pass the lips of liberal policy makers: marriage. As was already abundantly clear before the CCTs, single-parent households are the primary source of long-term poverty in New York City and the country. Looked at from a purely economic standpoint (the least relevant one), a married father provides his children with additional material support and manpower backup when all hell breaks out in a household, as it periodically will. A father also serves as a more credible authority figure than a mother, on average, something that boys particularly need. The recent outbreaks of anarchy in Philadelphia and New York by bands of inner-city youth suggests that the systematic disappearance of fathers from their children’s lives is taking an ever-greater toll on social order.

Family Rewards has cost $33.8 million so far. That amount could have been far better spent on a campaign to educate teenagers and parents about the essential role of fathers. It is by no means clear, of course, that external intervention can change the norms around child-rearing in the inner city. But it is worth a try. At least such a campaign would not undermine fundamental social values.

Of course, the Left favors equality over prosperity.  So, instead of promoting marriage to the underclass, they’re trying to redefine the institution out of existence.  Soon, I guess they’re hoping, the middle class will be just as dysfunctional as the underclass.  Equality will have been achieved!  Paradise awaits!