Big news in the cash assistance research space this week: there’s a new working paper out that looks at the effects of unconditional cash aid on the cognitive development of children in poverty. Surprisingly, and perhaps disconcertingly to advocates of cash aid such as myself, the study finds that children in families receiving cash assistance were no better off on a variety of cognitive and socioemotional indicators than children in families that did not receive such assistance. This news has made quite a splash, because it seems to contradict both previous research and common sense about the benefits of higher income.
This new study, to briefly summarize, randomly assigned the families of about 1,000 children born into poor families in 2018 and 2019 to either receive $333 per month or $20 per month. After four years, the researchers evaluated the children on a variety of cognitive and socioemotional measures and found no statistically significant difference between children in the two groups on any outcome. The authors posit several reasons why they may have found null impact, including that the pandemic could have disrupted development and that government assistance during the pandemic may have swamped the impact of the cash aid in the study.
Sometimes, a study highly critical of cash aid will be published and it will be clear that the authors had an agenda in mind. That does not appear to be the case here—the list of authors does not include any of the anti-aid usual suspects, and in interviews the authors seem genuinely surprised by their findings. The New York Times did interview some gleeful conservative think tankers who were all too happy to declare cash assistance dead: Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation said that this study “blows the arguments for unconditional cash aid out of the water.”
I think the debate about why the study found what it found is an interesting one. I’m sure that there will be more takes and counter-takes as it goes through the publishing process, and I’ll be following that closely. However, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think this result should matter. Even if it is in fact true that cash assistance does not improve the cognitive function of children in low-income families, it does not undermine my support for such assistance at all. The need to find some extra benefit to cash assistance, something beyond just helping people afford the necessities to life, strikes me as another example of the “economic style of thinking.” Not everything needs to be about the return on investment or the ratio of benefits to costs.
Children—all children—deserve to grow up free from want and economic precarity. Moms and dads—all moms and dads—deserve to be confident that they will be able to provide for their kids. We have a duty as the richest country in the history of the world to do what we can to create a comfortable life for everyone who lives here, especially children. I remember reading an article in 2021 about the expanded CTC which quoted a mom overcome with happiness about being able to finally afford an Xbox for her son. I choked up reading it, and it still makes me emotional to think about now (unfortunately I can’t find the article right now). That Xbox probably won’t help that kid do better on a math evaluation, but it doesn’t matter. Childhood should be about more than just test scores. Kids should be able to be kids. Cash assistance can help make that easier for poor families, regardless of any other effects it might have.
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