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W. H. Brady Scholar
Charles Murray |
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It may be said with only a little exaggeration that policy analysts are happy describing the causes of problems while ignoring their solution, and politicians are happy proposing solutions to problems while ignoring their causes. At least, such is the case with poverty and income inequality. I fit the bill for the policy analyst, lacking any politically feasible solutions. But the articles of the three presidential candidates fit the bill too, written as if we have a set of solutions ready to go, awaiting only a chance, whether they be Hillary Clinton's home visitation program that produces 56 percent fewer arrests among participants than nonparticipants, Barack Obama's Harlem Children's Zone that is "literally saving a generation of children in a neighborhood where they were never supposed to have a chance," or John Edwards's million government-created "stepping stone jobs" that will get unemployed young men into work.
Variants of all such remedies have been tried repeatedly since 1964. They typically were greeted with early and well-publicized claims of success. When the technical evaluations were published (and seldom publicized), it turned out that the early successes were temporary or that they never really existed. It was this monotonous pattern that led Peter Rossi, the nation's leading scholar in the evaluation of social programs, to formulate Rossi's Iron Law of Program Evaluation: "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social
program is zero."
The cycle of optimistic promises and zero results will repeat itself, because once again the politicians are ignoring causes that don't fit the way they want the world to be. In the case of poverty, they ignore the causal role of the failure to marry. In the case of increasing income inequality, they ignore the causal role of the rising market value of brains.
Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar in Culture and Freedom at AEI.
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