'Invisible Child' (NYT series on impoverished child/family)

I think you're exactly right in one sense ... that behavior is not likely to be that sensitive to that incentive.

But I wonder whether it's wrong -- not just economically unwise but morally wrong -- to continue a system that in all likelihood solidifies the cycle in which such children are trapped. Baron raised the issue of whether, if you take the family out of the picture, some poor child like Dasani will have nobody to love her. It is heartbreaking to think of such a thing. But it is just as heartbreaking to think of poor Dasani being almost condemned, by the circumstances of her birth, to one day having a houseful of children similarly vulnerable.

I was going to put this next thing in a PM, because I recognize that I run a really serious risk of being figuratively strung up over this. But I think this is a really, really important question and I think it merits some serious consideration. Here it is:

Is living with someone who loves her right now a luxury Dasani really can't afford? Put another way (and stipulating that Dasani's parents do love her), is knowing that she at least lives with someone who loves her worth the the life to which she's all but being sentenced?

 

That's actually a really great question, which boils down to this: Is love in a child's life actually overrated as a factor in future success? Anecdotal evidence: For millennia, children were treated like less than property by their parents, really. And human progress seemed to march onward nonetheless. I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of kids in coal mines. But I also don't know that it should be taboo to ask whether Dasani's future is almost provably brighter, via the data, without love as we think of it, but with structure.

 

Perhaps a better approach would be to stop what amounts to "punishment" when the working poor do something we consider to be a good thing.

Example: If somebody collecting certain government benefits opens an interest-bearing savings account, you immediately lose those government benefits. No ifs, and or buts about it.

That may not apply in the case of the family that's the subject of the NYT article, but that's part of the problem right there. The government looks at these benefits in terms of absolutes, not in terms of what should be temporary relief, while helping whoever collects these benefits to find a way to improve their situation, however that may be.

I personally believe the better approach is to ensure that we don't just simply take people who get these benefits and use what amounts to just treating them as somebody filling out paperwork and then we give a thumbs up or thumbs down.

For example: Why not require people who get such benefits to attend counseling sessions (which the government would pay for) to help them understand ways that might allow them to better their situation, and in our quest to try to get these people off the government-benefit rolls, we look at it less as "quit cold turkey" and look at it more as "gradually get them off as they find ways to better their situation."

As far as the children go, I really don't have an answer for that. But I've brought up this before and I'll bring it up again, even though it's almost always consider a taboo subject.

People have children because they have sex. People have sex because it's a free activity. Sex could also take their minds off the stress they go through in every day life. Any other activity that could allow them to relieve stress likely costs money. And you can only watch so much TV, not to mention that TV can stress you out just as much it might relax you.

In other words, the only way to really save the children is to stop people from having so much children in the first place -- but addressing that is far easier said than done, even if birth control is made free to all (and even then, there's no way you can force somebody to use it).

 

You can boil it down to that only if success in life is the only criteria. That moving children out of environments like this increases future success by X is probably true. It is also true that the love of the family structure has inherent value almost immune to this type of calculation. My kids would have a better future if I sold them to Bill Gates with an ironclad guarantee that he leave them $10 million dollars a piece and get them into the best schools. I still wouldn't do that, and I don't think they would want me too.

 

I know that people respond to incentives. Currently we pay more per child. Yet I agree that we can't punish the child. I have wondered if we should lock in the per child rate at its current number and take the current childless rate and increase it substantially. This would not be a net loss to the children and would provide an incentive for those in the system who don't have children to not have children. This would do nothing to address those in the system who already have children, nor would it keep them from having more.

 

When I say "future success," I don't simply mean career success. But also emotional success, whatever that might mean. Surely psychologists can measure it to some degree.

 

I just don't think poor people are having unprotected sex to take advantage of government benefits. Poor, gay blacks and Hispanics also have enormous HIV rates, and they don't get anything out of unprotected sex except a one-way ticket to the hospice.

Is the use of condoms stigmatized in black communities? I wonder.

 

As a follow-up to my point, let me emphasize that I was talking about the "living with" part of the deal. Is the fact that Dasani lives in a household nominally headed by her parents (stipulating that they love her) worth the obvious costs to her future (and perhaps current) happiness such an arrangement almost certainly entails?

 

I don't either. But I do think in the face of a different incentive behavior would change. In the status quo unprotected sex = more money. Under my plan protected sex would equal even more money. This would not stop all irrational behavior, but it would only need to stop some, since most people don't get pregnant the first time they have unprotected sex.

 

If you expect to die young anyway, in some ways it doesn't matter how it happens. Most people prefer having unprotected sex, or at least sex that doesn't involve a condom. Many people do it anyway, because the tradeoff isn't worth the cost of the "bad things" that can come with having unprotected sex. But if your life is a pretty much unrelenting series of "bad things," why put up with bad sex?

And I know that's overly simplistic, and there are a lot of other issues at play.

 

If they're not lucky, they'll get stuck with a lot worse than indifferent foster parents, sad to say.

 

Why does anyone believe separating kids from unfit parents is "harming" them? It certainly isn't in the long run.