Some of your posts came through because the Spam Karma plugin overrode the Wordpress blacklisting system, but I’ve added your details to the Spam Karma blacklist as well, so in theory at least you’ll be unable to post until further notice.

As a long-time BI person, I’m bemused to see Murray on board even if I think the man is a dishonest toad.

Paul is right to point to the main issues with a BI, but a couple of points he makes are a feature rather than a bug. We’re rich enough to afford more leisure – what’s wrong with giving those who sufficiently hate poorly renumerated drudgery a very modest competence to let them explore other ways of life? Or with giving workers more ability to transfer rents from employers by reducing the cost of job loss? Also I’m not at all convinced that a heavy but linear tax would have the dire incentive effects that opponents predict (though that’s a long story for a different thread).

Certainly a BI is the diametric opposite of the currently fashionable “welfare to work” approach (IMO the latter is in practice a conservative – even reactionary – policy that those who consider themselves libertarian or liberal oughtn’t to touch with a barge pole). But it really does depend on what your vision of the good society is – this goes way beyond a technical question of aggregate labour supply. Unfortunately my vision of the good society is not the same as the median voters’ vision; that’s why no government has tried a BI (as Paul points out) and why I expect they never will.

http://securities.stanford.edu/1015/SCIL00/nonef1complaint082200.htm

http://www.fastforword.com.au/Content_Common/internal.aspx?Id=755376FE-6457-4A50-B761-0D3AE7C7B819

As can be seen from the diagram, there is a small improvement of the non-control over the control. Yet if you dig further, you will notice the control group does nothing in-between. This is a poor design, and my bet (in fact, it’s not really a bet, I’ve collected similar data in a big government study, and I know of other people that have too) is that all they are finding is a motivational effect — if the control kids had done say, a maths condition that was equally as demanding , they would have improved on “literacy” too. Thats nice, but nothing to do with literacy. Its also data collected by themselves. I’m not saying its been diddled or anything — but you can’t do that for things like drug testing and the like, for obvious reasons. Compounding this is that I also believe there are restrictions on publishing scientific data using this program.

You might also like to click on all the neuroscience papers. All these papers show is that you get brain activation changes. Thats nice, but since it isn’t clear what those activation changes actually mean in terms of cognitive function, they’re basically spin designed to impress an ignorant public.

I don’t know of any other programs with better data than this, or perhaps I’m just ignorant of the data — thats why I asked you, as you obviously must.

“In this study, we conducted the first cost-benefit analysis of the federally financed Title I Chicago Child-Parent Center (CPC) Program. The major question addressed was: Do program benefits exceed costs? The CPC program is a school-based preschool and early school-age intervention for low-income children that emphasizes parent involvement and the development of literacy skills. Previous studies have indicated that program participation beginning in preschool is independently associated with higher school achievement, higher rates of school completion through age 20, lower rates of school dropout, lower rates of juvenile arrest for violent and non-violent charges, and with less need for school remedial services (see Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2001, and Reynolds, 2000).

….

Given limited financial and human resources for health and educational interventions, greater levels of public investments in programs with demonstrated cost-effectiveness are warranted. Unlike most other social programs, the Child-Parent Center Program provides benefits to society that far exceed costs and is routinely implemented through a large urban school district. The present value of public benefits of the preschool program for the 1,000 study children totaled $26 million. Since 100,000 children have been served by the program to date, these benefits translate to as much as $2.6 billion in public savings since the program opened (1998 dollars). As states and localities increase access to early childhood care and education programs, public schools appear to be the location of choice for these initiatives. The findings of this study show the long-term payoffs that these public programs can provide.”

http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/cls/cbaexecsum4.html

You will find further studies confirming the efficacy of early childhood intervention programs if you peruse my earlier link and also that provided by Don Arthur in his post.

The fact that some badly planned, poorly funded, half-arsed interventions have not yielded such good results is to be expected and it doesn’t invalidate the well established fact that well designed, funded and implemented programs do work.

Murray and the conga line of Libertarian suck-holes who deliberately ignore the evidence are (a) ideological zealots, (b) dishonest or (c) both a and b.

Once again we see Libertarianism falsified and Social-Democratic interventionism triumphant.

This seems like one blanket comment versus another. Obviously all government programs are great, I’ll believe that — I might quit my job and go on work for the dole, just for the benefits of such a great program. More seriously, the idea that early childhood intervention programs work is highly disputed (and another blanket statement), and the programs themselves are non-homogenous in terms of the types of things they are trying to target. Hundreds of millions of dollars in the US, for example, is spent on various literacy programs (e.g., Fast Forword), yet the benefit is tiny if anything, and many of the evaluation studies are extremely poorly run.

If the is evidence is really so conclusive, as you say, I’ll be impressed if you can provide evidence of a single study looking at early literacy programs that has been run with a proper design (i.e., randomized groups, one-control group doesn’t do any other study and a second group that gets a task of a similar nature in terms of demands but not to do with literacy — e.g., mathematics program) that finds any reasonably large effect.

Anyone who wants to get an idea of what’s wrong with the analysis in the Bell Curve can click the link in the first paragraph. They’ll find criticisms by Stephen Jay Gould, Howard Gardner, and Leon Kamin.

The fact that James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning Chicago economist, disagrees with Murray’s analysis shows how far outside the mainstream Murray’s views are. Heckman is notoriously pessimistic about the effectiveness of government programs, yet even he thinks that Murray goes too far. In his Reason Magazine article he writes:

Operating on the empirical playing field chosen by Murray and Herrnstein, a die-hard interventionist could find much credible evidence to support an active social policy to eliminate skill differentials. Their implicit claim that ability drives the economic return to education, and the recent increase in the economic return to education, fails to pass empirical muster.

Over at Catallaxy I’m being attacked because of the way I disapprove of Murray’s work.

- think of the cost. If you dont want to seriously reduce welfare levels, you’re going to have to give every adult over 18 at least 10,000 AUS per year. Also, you’re going to have to give everyone with dependent children a blanket subsidy (most of the disincentives come in via taper rates on the benefits for the kids), in the order of 6,000 per dependent child. That’s 32,000 AUS for your average 2-adult, 2-kids family. For the whole of Australia (some 15 million adults and 6 million kids) that would be a bill around 186 billion AUS per year. That’s 20% of GDP, whereas the current bill is about 7% of GDP. Murray’s solution to welfare problems is thus to trebble welfare!

- think of the desincentives. A negative income tax means telling every kid and adult that if they dont want to work later in life, the state will look after them without any stigma involved (since the whole population gets welfare). And this is supposed to help work incentives?

- think of the desincentives, part 2. How are the extra costs going to be financed? By additional taxes on those that work of course. Hence the plan would involve massive work desincentives for those currently working as well as opening up the attractive option to welfare for everyone. Hmmm.

- dont believe that this is the end of the problem. The costs above are not the only costs. The state would still bear the continuing costs of schooling, health, retirement, and all the rest of it.

Though negative income taxes have long been the darling of the economic community, the reality is that their introduction would amount to a massive expansion of the state and an increase in work desincentives. The idea that one can get rid of the incentive problems associated with welfare by having more welfare is silly and strongly misleading. Whilst I sympathise with much of the analysis of the problem, Murray is not seriously talking about solutions. He’s not the only one though to pretend to offer policy solutions to hard problems that are in reality not a solution at all.

I’m a little surprised to see you quoting approvingly from The Bell Curve. I seem to recall that that had been extensively debunked.

Doing a quick Google I see my recollection is correct. Searching on the terms “the bell curve” and “fallacy” you’ll get 32,200 hits.

“An extensive body of research indicates that high quality early intervention for at-risk infants, toddlers and young children and their families is a sound economic investment. Studies have found a number of long-term cost savings in terms of decreased grade repetition, reduced special education spending, enhanced productivity, lower welfare costs, increased tax revenues, and lower
juvenile justice costs.” http://www.nectac.org/~pdfs/pubs/econbene.pdf

In respect of IQ (which in any event isn’t as significant as Murray indicates), I suspect that female children helped by a successful intervention program are less likely as adults to give birth prematurely or to engage in risky behaviours like poor diet or drug and alcohol consumption.

You are being to kind when you say Murray “seems suspiciously eager to give up on government programs”. I suggest he is just another dishonest Libertarian sleaze.

The Libertarian mantra about the evils of Government intervention is a fraud as the empirical evidence in so many areas, including the efficacy of early childhood interventions for “at risk” kids, is incontrovertible.

If there’s one parent, and he or she is incompetent, the child is going to struggle.