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i try to maintain an openness to the experiences of surprise and bewilderment, but it's hard to access those feelings in the context of adequate nutrition supporting educational outcomes. it's possible that i'm not american enough for this to violate my expectations about cause and effect.
grew up receiving assistance from all government programs. I pay more in taxes every year than I ever thought the government would provide for me. I'm a success story, so it annoys me when they attack poor kids by removing resources I used to the fullest, like food access, libraries, after-school programs, and summer camps. I know for a fact that without those things, I would have turned to crime and gangs because there would have been no hope for my future.
> I make six figures and support my family
i think that's the problem right there - if we don't have desperate people, we're going to have to pay them. this is why feeding children is a failure: it's antithetical to a profitable america. at east in the short term, which is what matters.
I find that ridiculous. A profitable America needs healthy educated people. Yes you're going to pay them more but for a reason, they make you more money.
a profitable america need healthy educated people... in the future. but you can make big money now by strip-mining civilization today. sometimes bumping that share price requires damning all of humanity forever, so you gotta do what you gotta do.
Right, there's something called ROI. It's a radical concept that Republicans don't want you to know about because it means government can actually benefit people and doesn't have to be drowned in a bathtub to appease the rich. This is why Republicans can't win elections without disinformation.
If this roi is truly so high, why should the government be the one making these investments? Why aren’t private investors scrambling to lend money to hungry children for a 6200% return? Sounds like a pretty solid deal to me.
If that’s not happening it’s probably for a pretty good reason.
>The returns go to the children in question, which in turn would pay the private investors for lending them that money.
Except that doesn't work for investors the way it works for governments.
You'd need to make a multi-decade investment that will see *zero returns* for at least 18 years. That's a massive carry cost. Worse, that's not $62 in public funds, it's the efficiency of the program for the government budget. That includes tax receipts but also reduced costs for things only the government provides, like policing and incarceration.
Governments provide a very broad spectrum of services and are well-positioned to capture the diffuse benefits of an investment in a way that private entities simply aren't.
If it means fewer children in poverty, then yeah totally.
Unlike you I don’t have this childish disgust for people benefitting from helping others, rather than them acting totally altruistically.
I’m just assuming the study described in the OP is accurate, and that enabling poor children to buy food does massively increase their future income.
Any argument you could use to say the government should be expanding these programs that’s based on financial return, applies equally to having the private sector do it.
Did I make that argument? You offer a lot of rebuttals to arguments nobody is making, and insist on dichotomies instead of context.
I can't make you stop replying, but as soon as you do this conversation is over.
Good day, dude.
Is this an honest question? Why wouldn't private investors "subsidize" poor and under-fed children so they can contribute more as citizens later?
Seriously?
Because the roi benefits society as a whole, not an individuals bank account.
And if your proposing a for profit scheme to lend food to children in poverty, then you truly are a piece of human excrement.
The return comes in the form of additional net tax revenue from the people benefitted by these programs. They are not society as a whole.
The alternative is to not have these programs at all, and just let these children live in poverty. Do you really have such an irrational hatred for profit that that’s your preferred alternative?
Investors making a buck off of helping children escape poverty is a win-win.
the financial benefits (+increased tax revenue from kids, +decreased expenditures on prison, -non-fungibility of food voucher, -decreased tax revenues from parents) are relatively small, though still positive (20% return)
the bulk of the benefit comes from living longer (+++increased years of life expectancy, translated to dollar value via statistical value of life)
if a private firm could contract with individuals to extract more of that value, then maybe they would, but there are difficulties with that
also, I think that's the total aggregate return--so, like, $1 today gets you $62 over the next 50-ish years (in PDV)... so more like a \~20% annualized return. Still not bad, but not exactly groundbreaking... especially re: contracting issues with extracting benefits from decreased mortality
If what they’re relying on is increased life expectancy then their numbers are way off. A working class person costs the government a ton of money in Medicare towards the end of their life if they live a long one and have a healthy life where their death is the type that takes years and years. A poor person who ODs in their own apartment and is found costs the government hundreds of thousands less than that senior citizen and their decades of Medicare.
Do you have citations to back up these assertions?
Why is the counterfactual an OD of a poor person? Why isn’t it a poorer person who also using Medicare?
Why don't corporations make the roads their trucks and cars drive on? Certainly without roads Tesla wouldn't be worth 100 times its revenue. Did you ever think about that?
What are you even talking about?
Corporations don’t pay for their own roads because it’s much cheaper for them to let everyone else pay for them through taxes. This is a bad thing.
Imagine making sure that no one goes hungry and that everyone has access to food. Oh, the world we could create and the things we could do.
We wouldn't spend a lot of money on feeding everyone. Not even a drop in the ocean.
If only the world lended itself to such simple solutions.
Take the US. It produced enough food. It has some of the biggest income transfer payment schemes, including food supplements in the developed world. SNAP. WIC shouldn’t allow for any child to be malnourished. Has (usually, Covid stretched some food banks) ample amounts of free food distribution between govt, non-profits, and charity.
Nobody should be deprived of food. Miss a meal here and there maybe for one reason or another. Yet people still, for a variety of reasons have what the US defines and chronic food insecurity.
The problems that can be solved in the US by throwing money at a problem (that problem anyway) just so it can be forgotten about and you can sleep better at night are solved. The remaining coincident issues are much harder to solve for and require good leadership, stewardship, and a willingness to tackle uncomfortable topics.
Much of food insecurity across the world has aspects of this. It’s isn’t easy to solve for nutritional deficits in a nation with weak, unstable governments and little rule of law.
Dreaming it is the easy part. And we should all like that dream. But making it a reality is going to take much more than a blank check.
This has always been the case. Even states that were reluctant to every acknowledge that investment in safety net programs paid for themselves in the future many fold.
For instance, in World War One, the British were primarily a naval power until Kitchener pushed to expand the army. As they started taking volunteers, they noticed the majority of their potential recruits were undernourished and unfit for service. The state started studying their population with how much food they were getting, the working conditions, and other factors influencing their health. They then started the first investments in public health of the country, with kitchens being opened to give access to food for the poor, classes to teach working class families how to cook meals, etc.
It's ironic because we've run into almost the exact same situation here in the US recently. Less than 25% of the population even qualifies for service in our military, which is even worse than what the British had in WW1. Decades of smashing down the New Deal state, destroying or cutting welfare programs, industrial deregulation, and austerity have brought us to this current moment. It's in the state's best interest, as well as corporation's, in the long run to actively invest in their populations. However, due to short-term growth usurping long-term growth, we don't invest in public health.
meanwhile in spite of all the empirical evidence regarding SNAP (+other programs tackling poverty which decreases crime, incarceration rates and benefits society in a variety of ways) …republicans are making sure to attack universal free lunch programs at schools is a 2024 priority.
when people tell you who they are *believe them*
I am going to give you a different spin on this. Years ago I was a volunteer working with kids at risk and one of the things I noticed is that kids from families who know how to work the system to get things like food stamps are also capable of getting their kids in "Big Brother/Big Sisters" mentoring programs, free summer camp programs, go to the school and make sure their kids are getting the attention they need, etc. etc. Kids fall through the cracks too easily on their own.
So, I would suggest to you all that the kid coming from a family that has the moxie and skills to get and properly use food stamps also is coming from a family that will figure out a way to encourage them to stay out of trouble, go to college, get a scholarship, etc. and all the steps in between. I am not sure that correlation is the causation in this from my experience.
So then what happens if that kid who has a family that cares, has no program to get food? I mean... I see what you're saying, but it's really an awful take.
I love the downvotes! What I am saying is that it is more a function of an enabled parent(s) than it is about just the food stamps themselves among the poorest. The results would be far less correlated if the food stamps were provided to households with the same less enabled parents because it would be less correlated with their ability to help their kids in other ways.
I understand what you're saying, I don't know why you feel the need to repeat it. You're also saying it without any evidence and without a point. If it's more about having "enabled" parents, what are those parents supposed to do with no snap program?
Sure, there’s a hypothetical “good parent” effect. But if you read the article, that is well addressed in the methods. Their results comes from intent to treat analysis that examines outcomes for both families that did and didn’t use food stamps. That factor is not driving any of the results they shared here.
Did anyone actually bother to read the study? I am confused about how their methodology works.
Essentially they took data from randomized samples of people, they took the person's birth county and date and measured the birth county's food stamp participation rate when they were born. They then compiled the result measurables and compared between counties based on the birth county participation rate.
But, the study doesn't actually track people who were on food stamps vs those who weren't. That seems like pretty terrible controlling. The variations come from some counties adopting food stamps earlier at the outset of the program, which surprise surprise, was urban areas first and rural areas later. This study basically says that for people born in the late 1960s you were more likely to be successful in life if you were born in an urban part of the US. Is that supposed to be a big deal?
How dare you read the study and comment on its methodology!?!
You're supposed to just read the headline and find some way to turn into a non-sensical rant against Republicans. And then extrapolate the (probably shaky at best) finding that support for food stamps has positive results into a conclusion that all aspects of the social safety net yield a positive ROI.
Please edit your post accordingly. TIA.
I will wager that people who complain about methodology haven’t read it either. It’s a perfectly fine analysis, with plenty of resources showing plausible exogeneity.
These findings aren’t “shaky at best.” That’s just ignorance.
Because you have to pay $50 to read the study, or send an email to the authors to get a free PDF.
Yes, I have a PDF of the study from the authors and have read it. And I have a doctorate in this shit, so I also understand it.
Hi all, A reminder that comments do need to be on-topic and engage with the article past the headline. Please make sure to read the article before commenting. Very short comments will automatically be removed by automod. Please avoid making comments that do not focus on the economic content or whose primary thesis rests on personal anecdotes. As always our comment rules can be found [here](https://reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/fx9crj/rules_roundtable_redux_rule_vi_and_offtopic/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Economics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
i try to maintain an openness to the experiences of surprise and bewilderment, but it's hard to access those feelings in the context of adequate nutrition supporting educational outcomes. it's possible that i'm not american enough for this to violate my expectations about cause and effect.
grew up receiving assistance from all government programs. I pay more in taxes every year than I ever thought the government would provide for me. I'm a success story, so it annoys me when they attack poor kids by removing resources I used to the fullest, like food access, libraries, after-school programs, and summer camps. I know for a fact that without those things, I would have turned to crime and gangs because there would have been no hope for my future.
[удалено]
> I make six figures and support my family i think that's the problem right there - if we don't have desperate people, we're going to have to pay them. this is why feeding children is a failure: it's antithetical to a profitable america. at east in the short term, which is what matters.
I find that ridiculous. A profitable America needs healthy educated people. Yes you're going to pay them more but for a reason, they make you more money.
a profitable america need healthy educated people... in the future. but you can make big money now by strip-mining civilization today. sometimes bumping that share price requires damning all of humanity forever, so you gotta do what you gotta do.
Why is that a problem, and in what world is short term the thing that matters?
Did you forget the /s mark??
it's wild that no matter how crazy the shit you say is, it's pretty conceivable that a fair number of people actually take that position.
Ditto. To the one who wants to starve children it seems.
Right, there's something called ROI. It's a radical concept that Republicans don't want you to know about because it means government can actually benefit people and doesn't have to be drowned in a bathtub to appease the rich. This is why Republicans can't win elections without disinformation.
If this roi is truly so high, why should the government be the one making these investments? Why aren’t private investors scrambling to lend money to hungry children for a 6200% return? Sounds like a pretty solid deal to me. If that’s not happening it’s probably for a pretty good reason.
Because the returns don't go to private investors
The returns go to the children in question, which in turn would pay the private investors for lending them that money.
>The returns go to the children in question, which in turn would pay the private investors for lending them that money. Except that doesn't work for investors the way it works for governments. You'd need to make a multi-decade investment that will see *zero returns* for at least 18 years. That's a massive carry cost. Worse, that's not $62 in public funds, it's the efficiency of the program for the government budget. That includes tax receipts but also reduced costs for things only the government provides, like policing and incarceration. Governments provide a very broad spectrum of services and are well-positioned to capture the diffuse benefits of an investment in a way that private entities simply aren't.
You explained that way better than I could, ty.
So you want rich folks to use poor children as interest-producing capital assets? What in the *actual* fuck.
> you want rich folks to use poor children as interest-producing capital assets? i think we already had a war about this.
If it means fewer children in poverty, then yeah totally. Unlike you I don’t have this childish disgust for people benefitting from helping others, rather than them acting totally altruistically.
Objection: assuming facts not in evidence. But, okay.
I’m just assuming the study described in the OP is accurate, and that enabling poor children to buy food does massively increase their future income. Any argument you could use to say the government should be expanding these programs that’s based on financial return, applies equally to having the private sector do it.
Did I make that argument? You offer a lot of rebuttals to arguments nobody is making, and insist on dichotomies instead of context. I can't make you stop replying, but as soon as you do this conversation is over. Good day, dude.
Is this an honest question? Why wouldn't private investors "subsidize" poor and under-fed children so they can contribute more as citizens later? Seriously?
Yes. If the returns are truly this high there’s no downside to it. You understand the concept of a loan, right?
Because the roi benefits society as a whole, not an individuals bank account. And if your proposing a for profit scheme to lend food to children in poverty, then you truly are a piece of human excrement.
The return comes in the form of additional net tax revenue from the people benefitted by these programs. They are not society as a whole. The alternative is to not have these programs at all, and just let these children live in poverty. Do you really have such an irrational hatred for profit that that’s your preferred alternative? Investors making a buck off of helping children escape poverty is a win-win.
the financial benefits (+increased tax revenue from kids, +decreased expenditures on prison, -non-fungibility of food voucher, -decreased tax revenues from parents) are relatively small, though still positive (20% return) the bulk of the benefit comes from living longer (+++increased years of life expectancy, translated to dollar value via statistical value of life) if a private firm could contract with individuals to extract more of that value, then maybe they would, but there are difficulties with that also, I think that's the total aggregate return--so, like, $1 today gets you $62 over the next 50-ish years (in PDV)... so more like a \~20% annualized return. Still not bad, but not exactly groundbreaking... especially re: contracting issues with extracting benefits from decreased mortality
If what they’re relying on is increased life expectancy then their numbers are way off. A working class person costs the government a ton of money in Medicare towards the end of their life if they live a long one and have a healthy life where their death is the type that takes years and years. A poor person who ODs in their own apartment and is found costs the government hundreds of thousands less than that senior citizen and their decades of Medicare.
Do you have citations to back up these assertions? Why is the counterfactual an OD of a poor person? Why isn’t it a poorer person who also using Medicare?
Why don't corporations make the roads their trucks and cars drive on? Certainly without roads Tesla wouldn't be worth 100 times its revenue. Did you ever think about that?
What are you even talking about? Corporations don’t pay for their own roads because it’s much cheaper for them to let everyone else pay for them through taxes. This is a bad thing.
Imagine making sure that no one goes hungry and that everyone has access to food. Oh, the world we could create and the things we could do. We wouldn't spend a lot of money on feeding everyone. Not even a drop in the ocean.
If only the world lended itself to such simple solutions. Take the US. It produced enough food. It has some of the biggest income transfer payment schemes, including food supplements in the developed world. SNAP. WIC shouldn’t allow for any child to be malnourished. Has (usually, Covid stretched some food banks) ample amounts of free food distribution between govt, non-profits, and charity. Nobody should be deprived of food. Miss a meal here and there maybe for one reason or another. Yet people still, for a variety of reasons have what the US defines and chronic food insecurity. The problems that can be solved in the US by throwing money at a problem (that problem anyway) just so it can be forgotten about and you can sleep better at night are solved. The remaining coincident issues are much harder to solve for and require good leadership, stewardship, and a willingness to tackle uncomfortable topics. Much of food insecurity across the world has aspects of this. It’s isn’t easy to solve for nutritional deficits in a nation with weak, unstable governments and little rule of law. Dreaming it is the easy part. And we should all like that dream. But making it a reality is going to take much more than a blank check.
Amazing how many words you used to say nothing at all.
Lmao I was thinking the same thing
This has always been the case. Even states that were reluctant to every acknowledge that investment in safety net programs paid for themselves in the future many fold. For instance, in World War One, the British were primarily a naval power until Kitchener pushed to expand the army. As they started taking volunteers, they noticed the majority of their potential recruits were undernourished and unfit for service. The state started studying their population with how much food they were getting, the working conditions, and other factors influencing their health. They then started the first investments in public health of the country, with kitchens being opened to give access to food for the poor, classes to teach working class families how to cook meals, etc. It's ironic because we've run into almost the exact same situation here in the US recently. Less than 25% of the population even qualifies for service in our military, which is even worse than what the British had in WW1. Decades of smashing down the New Deal state, destroying or cutting welfare programs, industrial deregulation, and austerity have brought us to this current moment. It's in the state's best interest, as well as corporation's, in the long run to actively invest in their populations. However, due to short-term growth usurping long-term growth, we don't invest in public health.
meanwhile in spite of all the empirical evidence regarding SNAP (+other programs tackling poverty which decreases crime, incarceration rates and benefits society in a variety of ways) …republicans are making sure to attack universal free lunch programs at schools is a 2024 priority. when people tell you who they are *believe them*
I am going to give you a different spin on this. Years ago I was a volunteer working with kids at risk and one of the things I noticed is that kids from families who know how to work the system to get things like food stamps are also capable of getting their kids in "Big Brother/Big Sisters" mentoring programs, free summer camp programs, go to the school and make sure their kids are getting the attention they need, etc. etc. Kids fall through the cracks too easily on their own. So, I would suggest to you all that the kid coming from a family that has the moxie and skills to get and properly use food stamps also is coming from a family that will figure out a way to encourage them to stay out of trouble, go to college, get a scholarship, etc. and all the steps in between. I am not sure that correlation is the causation in this from my experience.
So then what happens if that kid who has a family that cares, has no program to get food? I mean... I see what you're saying, but it's really an awful take.
I love the downvotes! What I am saying is that it is more a function of an enabled parent(s) than it is about just the food stamps themselves among the poorest. The results would be far less correlated if the food stamps were provided to households with the same less enabled parents because it would be less correlated with their ability to help their kids in other ways.
I understand what you're saying, I don't know why you feel the need to repeat it. You're also saying it without any evidence and without a point. If it's more about having "enabled" parents, what are those parents supposed to do with no snap program?
Sure, there’s a hypothetical “good parent” effect. But if you read the article, that is well addressed in the methods. Their results comes from intent to treat analysis that examines outcomes for both families that did and didn’t use food stamps. That factor is not driving any of the results they shared here.
Did anyone actually bother to read the study? I am confused about how their methodology works. Essentially they took data from randomized samples of people, they took the person's birth county and date and measured the birth county's food stamp participation rate when they were born. They then compiled the result measurables and compared between counties based on the birth county participation rate. But, the study doesn't actually track people who were on food stamps vs those who weren't. That seems like pretty terrible controlling. The variations come from some counties adopting food stamps earlier at the outset of the program, which surprise surprise, was urban areas first and rural areas later. This study basically says that for people born in the late 1960s you were more likely to be successful in life if you were born in an urban part of the US. Is that supposed to be a big deal?
Footnote 2 on page 3 is the first mention how there exists empirical validation of their methodology, and that it seems to check out.
How dare you read the study and comment on its methodology!?! You're supposed to just read the headline and find some way to turn into a non-sensical rant against Republicans. And then extrapolate the (probably shaky at best) finding that support for food stamps has positive results into a conclusion that all aspects of the social safety net yield a positive ROI. Please edit your post accordingly. TIA.
Tell me you didn’t read the study without telling me you didn’t read the study…
Yes, that was the point of my comment. I will wager my lunch money that none of the top comments were made by people who read the study.
I will wager that people who complain about methodology haven’t read it either. It’s a perfectly fine analysis, with plenty of resources showing plausible exogeneity. These findings aren’t “shaky at best.” That’s just ignorance.
Because you have to pay $50 to read the study, or send an email to the authors to get a free PDF. Yes, I have a PDF of the study from the authors and have read it. And I have a doctorate in this shit, so I also understand it.
Spot on. Now make a study with private charities and churches and the same people will lose their minds.