Matt Bruenig is correct to shift the conversation from science to values, but his target is misplaced.

Bruenig needs to convince the broader American public, not Kelsey Piper, about the value of cash transfers in solving the problem of poverty.

In the pages of The Argument, a new publication, the liberal writers Matt Bruenig and Kelsey Piper had a bit of a fracas. Piper reported that recent studies of cash transfers in the US have found that they do not actually improve metrics of well-being and cognition for the people who receive them. Bruenig thought that Piper’s writing on the topic was irresponsible and she was missing the forest for the trees; the point of cash programs was not to improve the people who received it (aka, their “human capital”) but to make them less poor, period.

Bruenig was changing the topic from science (do cash transfer programs work?) to values (what even is the point of a cash transfer program?). But he was aiming for the wrong target. The fight over values cannot be directed at researchers who already believe that cash transfers are important. It should be instead directed towards the broader American public who are skeptical of cash transfers.

Bruenig versus Piper on cash transfers

First, let’s recap what the argument is really about. Piper, who writes about international development and global public health, published a long article about what she saw as the failure of recent randomized control trials (RCTs) on direct cash transfers to women with young children conducted in the United States. What these trials found was that direct cash to poor women with very young children produced very little in terms of concrete benefits. The children were no likelier to do better on cognitive measures than children whose mothers did not receive any such benefit; neither did the families themselves score higher on measures of well-being. On the other hand, Piper says that all of the participants were grateful for receiving this benefit which brought them “comfort, security, hope and steps toward a better future—just like you’d expect.”

We should clarify here what exactly Piper is talking about. The US has a variety of anti-poverty programs that are targeted at specific needs: SNAP hands out cash that recipients can only spend on food; Medicaid is a cash transfer from the government to medical providers when they treat poorer patients; Section 8 vouchers can only be used for housing; public schools are not exactly an anti-poverty program but they mean that the poor can send their children to the school district where they live, etc.

But the programs that Piper is discussing are non-targeted cash programs. The US doesn’t have many of these but of particular interest here is the child tax credit or CTC: ideally, this is a straight-up dollar amount per month given to parents of children below a certain age that parents can spend as they wish. In its current implementation in the US, it is structured as a tax credit rather than a straight-up cash payment as in some European states (where it is also more generous) though a scaled-up version of this was enacted as part of the pandemic relief measures and led to a stunning reduction in child poverty.

In practical terms, Piper is saying, channeling the researchers who carried out the RCTs, that giving cash to poor parents may bring them relief in particular ways but it’s not making an impact on measures we care about, especially their children’s cognitive development.

Bruenig doesn’t seem to dispute any of Piper’s characterization of the results of the RCTs she is discussing. Instead, he questions the underlying premise of these studies and he criticizes Piper for giving such prominence to these results in her writing.¹

Bruenig says that it is very clear that cash is a source of relief for poor families. And many years ago, this would have been enough of a justification for a generous cash benefit. But then, Bruenig says, there came the “human capital” folks led by people like the economist James Heckman:

[This] devolution in our understanding of poverty […] seems to have been driven in recent years by liberal policy thinkers obsessed with “human capital.” In the late 2000s, James Heckman led this charge by publishing research showing that public spending on things like high-quality early childhood education so dramatically improves kids’ brains that it pays for itself in the long run. In this new telling, the social benefit system should be understood, not strictly as an egalitarian project aimed at smoothing and compressing incomes and consumption, but rather as an investment in the future.

Only if you consider cash transfers as being “investments in the future” are you compelled to venture into studies like these, that aim to detect how people actually use cash-transfers and then understand precisely how they develop their human capital through this cash.

But the “human capital” approach makes a lot more sense, says Bruenig, in the context of the developing world where the problem is not just grinding poverty but also malnutrition, disease, and lack of education. “Cash benefit programs in high-income welfare states” however “exist for completely different purposes”:

These purposes are “maximize equality and level living standards, provide workers refuge from the labor market, and promote individual autonomy by making people less reliant on family transfers to get by. Cash benefits do all of those things, even if they don’t lead to “human capital improvements.”

But even if you did want to study cash transfer through the lens of human capital, says Bruenig, there are plenty of studies you can pick from which do show that cash is a good way to invest in the future. He cites a study that looked at a Finnish cash-transfer program:

One could even look to other countries, like Finland, where rigorous randomized research was recently done on a cash transfer program that showed positive results for various measures of well-being, including self-reported trust, satisfaction with life, confidence in one’s future, health, ability to concentrate, financial well-being, and stress. One quirk of the Finnish study is that the government ran it and was therefore able to literally force the randomly selected individuals to participate in it. The studies Piper cites rely on volunteers, which technically makes them nonrandom, despite the fact that they are called “randomized control trials.”

Bruenig says that Piper is wrong to frame her piece in this way, that she “doesn’t bother with pesky questions like what the purpose of the welfare state should be,” and that she “unreflectively adopts the Heckman-inflected approach to this whole area of policy.” His implication, I think, is that she should not have written this piece at all.

Bruenig focuses on values rather than science …

I’ll bring up Piper’s reply to this but I want to emphasize first that Bruenig is essentially deconstructing the studies that Piper writes about. He steps away from the findings of the studies themselves and asks about their underlying framing (the purpose of cash transfers is to develop “human capital”) and finds it lacking. He is moving the argument from the science (what do cash transfers do?) to values (what is, and should be, the purpose of cash transfers?).

But Bruenig also strongly implies that—perhaps I am wrong in this interpretation—that his particular values, that the purpose of cash transfers is to alleviate poverty rather than develop human capital, are widely shared. But are they?

Way back in 2022, when the expanded CTC was on the verge of expiring, the New York Times did a deep dive into why it was not more popular. The premise was that this was a cash payment to people with children and there is a broad agreement amongst the public that children should get as many opportunities as possible. But that wasn’t the case in the polling. The Times found that

[Extending the CTC] lagged the popularity of lowering costs for prescription drugs, expanding Medicare and other policies Democrats are seeking to pass.

But why? The article explores a variety of factors from the pandemic to the explanation that non-parents did not support it so much. But the key graph seems to be that it came down to a disagreement about “who is deserving”:

Broad evidence suggests many are skeptical of programs that provide cash without conditions. […] An August YouGov survey conducted for American Compass, a conservative think tank, found that increasing the value of the credit, making it available monthly and sending it to households without a working adult were all popular policy changes, but that sending it to nonworking families was the least popular of the three. And most Republicans, independents and voters without a four-year college degree whose households earn between $30,000 and $80,000 did not favor permanently sending payments to nonworking families. [my emphasis]

But the Democratic analyst David Shor suggests that there is another factor behind the relative unpopularity of the expanded CTC: many Americans feel that it benefits those who are already rich. Thus:

But I think it’s important to understand why voters opposed [the extension of the CTC expansion]. There’s this really strong sense within the Democratic Party that the CTC was unpopular because it was giving money to poor people. Which I think is a holdover idea from debates about welfare reform in the 1990s.

When we actually tested arguments for and against the CTC in our polls, it was super-clear that people didn’t object to the law covering poor people, but really opposed sending money to middle-class and upper-middle-class people. I think there is actually a lot of sympathy for the poor in the American electorate. […] But at the moment, most people disagree with this social-democratic vision that a middle-class person should be getting help from the government.

When it comes to cash transfers, then, the intuitions of the broader American public are somewhat narrowly instrumental: cash transfers are good if they are temporary and improve the recipient. This is unlike, say, healthcare, where the broader public believes that access to healthcare is a right, irrespective of its outcomes and whether it improves the recipient.

It turns out then that turning the argument away from the science towards values doesn’t actually solve the problem because the values are just as complicated: many, if not most, Americans are skeptical of cash transfers without conditions. In particular, they are skeptical of sending payments to parents who are not working. But they are also skeptical of sending payments to people who are already middle-class.

On this Substack, I have mostly been beating the drum about Daniel Sarewitz’s phenomenal paper “How science makes environmental controversies worse.” Sarewitz suggests that if only we could agree on the values, we could figure out the science and I think that is correct. But his point is that figuring out the value tradeoffs through politics is just as difficult as agreeing on the science. Indeed, that’s precisely why we ended up scientizing politics in the first place: it was a rationalist solution grounded in a misunderstanding both of how science works and how it relates to politics.

Indeed, when one focuses on the value disagreement, it seems like the great big missed opportunity of 2022 was to extend the CTC expansion with added work requirements and with means-testing. This was also the main concern of Senator Joe Manchin, who would have been the deciding Senate vote. Then the problem for the science would be to figure out what would count as a “work requirement” and what the income limit for those receiving the cash.

… but Bruenig directs his ire in the wrong direction

But that brings me to my main disagreement with Bruenig: he directs his rebuttal to the wrong place. When I read Bruenig, he seems to be lecturing Piper that it was irresponsible for her to write this piece. But the crux of Piper’s piece is not that she is uncovering something that no one is talking about. It’s that the researchers who did these studies found these results strange and dispiriting.

It seems fair to assume that the researchers who carried out this research and journalists like Piper who have covered it are very, very sympathetic to the idea of cash assistance.

In fact, I would argue that the emergence of the “human capital” thesis is what happens when politicians, policy makers, and researchers who are very sympathetic to the idea of cash assistance run into an atmosphere of public skepticism. Then, these technocrats invent the idea that might be used to continue with cash assistance: after all, if cash assistance helps people—or their children—develop their skills and eventually become self-sufficient, then it might just be able to squeak past the general public disapproval. In other words, they scientized a political question in order to implement a policy they very much believed in. But science has a logic of its own and when we have a plethora of scientific studies, we get more uncertainty, not less.

Bruenig says that “there is so much wrong with Piper’s piece that it is difficult to know where to begin.” But Piper replies that:

“Be Finland” is not a law that you can pass. Indeed, as Bruenig observes, in Finland, cash transfers seem to have lots of large and measurable effects on life satisfaction, stress, and health — all areas where I expected to see improvements from cash in the United States, but did not.

Since various Finnish policies do not seem to have the same effects here, I do not consider the success of Finnish policies in Finland sufficient grounds to reach Bruenig's conclusion: That actually having a just and effective welfare state isn’t complicated and doesn’t need further study. […]

Bruenig says that cash must be a part of any developed nation's welfare system — which I don’t even disagree with. What he does not seem to find an interesting question is whether cash is the best use of limited resources in the United States today. Does Bruenig think spending money on basic income for the homeless is better than other homelessness programs? Does he think giving cash to recent mothers is better than expanding their access to prenatal care clinics? [my emphasis in bold; Piper’s in italics]

What is not mentioned in this reply but forms the taken-for-granted background for Piper is that cash transfer programs are unpopular among the US electorate. Given this background condition, technocrats have no choice but to do rigorous studies trying to map what kind of cash assistance works and what doesn’t.

Bruenig is correct that it is better to focus on values. But he needs to change the values of the US electorate, not the researchers and technocrats who run these studies. Even if they stopped running these studies tomorrow, or if journalists like Piper stopped reporting on these studies, no cash assistance program is going to be passed.

Taking Bruenig’s argument seriously, then, would seem to imply that advocates of cash transfers have to go out and make a case for the American public. Bruenig shouldn’t be lecturing Piper about her lack of engagement with “pesky questions like what the purpose of the welfare state should be.” He should instead be trying to convince the broader American public about the purpose of the welfare state and the meaning of poverty.² That’s a much harder problem, but probably the more important one.

Another post of interest:

Is science bad for politics?

1. I’ll be honest: I thought Bruenig’s tone in the piece was unnecessarily harsh, certainly not how I would ever speak to a colleague and it seems odd to me that a new publication should highlight the tension between two contributors in this way. On the other hand, it says something that this was not an operation about killing a piece and getting a contributor fired that is mounted on internal Slack channels and was instead a honest-to-the-bones argument about the merits of the RCTs and the article publicizing their results.

2. I do agree with Bruenig that I don’t understand what Piper means by “ending the war on poverty.” Bruenig implies that 10% of the population is always going to be below the poverty level because poverty is not an affliction but rather a position that people rotate in and out of because of reasons like losing a job or having a disability or getting older. But I suspect that Piper’s point is that there is something like chronic poverty and there is also the possibility of reducing the number of people below the poverty line to much lesser than the aforementioned 10%.