Welfare helps children

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/01/welfare_works_for_kids_children_whose_parents_get_money_grow_up_healthier.single.html

By Matthew Yglesias
Jan. 13 2014

“Think of the children.” It's a cliché, but at times it also serves as a powerful argument in debates over public policy. Welfare payments to the poor and jobless, for example, have often been unpopular in the United States because they are seen as subsidizing indolence or criminality. And even those most inclined to take a dim view of how poor adults ended up poor have to concede that poverty has blameless victims: children who had no role in deciding to have low-income parents. This is why protecting soldiers and mothers rather than childless civilians has long been the core focus of American social policy. And yet, while it’s easy to see that poverty is bad for children, it’s harder to know the extent to which anti-poverty programs succeed in ameliorating those ill effects.



That’s in part because social programs are rarely designed to produce proper experiments. But it’s also because a human life takes decades to run its course. To really get a sense of long-term impacts, you need to wait a long time.

That’s what makes new research into Mothers’ Pensions, one of America’s earliest welfare programs, so fascinating. These state-level programs for widows became popular in the early decades of the 20th century

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Anna Aizer, Shari Eli, Joseph Ferrie, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and a team of research assistants took a detailed look at kids who grew up in Mothers’ Pension households and drew some conclusions about the long-term benefits of modest cash transfers. The program is old enough that almost all the kids whose moms received money are dead now, allowing the researchers to conclude definitively that it increased life expectancy. What’s more, World War II draft records show that poor kids whose moms received pensions were substantially healthier, had more years of schooling, and earned higher incomes than similar kids whose moms didn’t get pensions.

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(Daughters are harder to track because of post-marital name-changing.) Using 1940 census records, draft records, and county-level death records, the researchers determined that the sons of the accepted had early adult incomes that were 20 percent higher than those of rejected mothers; these sons were also 35 percent less likely to be underweight as adults, lived a year longer, and had about a third of a year of additional schooling.

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