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Why are you framing this as being about the parents? School is an investment in the children. Society benefits from well-educated children, regardless of parent quality. Society benefits from well-fed children in much the same way. I doubt you would have any problem with the government feeding children in orphanages. Just extend that logic to children unlucky enough to have shitty, but still-living parents.
This is the fairest critique of school lunches. But here the problem is pretty clearly the lack of health, not the presence of lunches. If only Michelle obama was president...
School lunches still have an empirical net benefit in spite of that. And frankly, you're probably underestimating their reach, since the linked report estimates that they made up 50% of children's daily calories on average. Anyway, if this is an issue, it's probably downstream of the above problem.
You seem particularly dedicated to this issue so I don't think marshaling studies in the other direction will be a fruitful endeavor for me. Suffice to say, I disagree with basically all your points.
I don't think modern schooling is an investment in children, it is childcare with extra expenses.
I don't think has ever been even a small cohort (perhaps there was a tiny <1%) of underfed children in America during the era that school lunches were adopted.
The problem with school lunches being unhealthy could not be solved by Michelle Obama or anyone as president. The problem is that healthy food is considered inedible by exactly the population you are targeting. Only kids like my son get excited by broccoli and peas followed by some chicken and mushrooms and can agree to wait till after dinner for a treat.
You linked a far left wing think tank as your source somehow thinking it would be persuasive, despite the many cues one gets when you land at the website that this isn't an academic study, its propaganda (and leftist at that, just aesthetically) trying to mimic research, poorly.
Everything is downstream of the problem that the kids are kids of bad parents. They get that genetically and in early childhood development. This is why school interventions are typically dumb and expensive. They are too late. The only reason people think of things like school lunches is because we already have this massive left-of-center institution known as public school, and so its easy to append additional spending programs to it and use "think of the children" as an excuse.
I posted a source. Dismissing it on its face is extremely poor form. You can criticize the modeling assumptions, or go and find a countersource, but it is frankly bad faith to say, "that's cool but I don't believe you" without even specifying a threshold of what you would believe. Why should I make the additional effort to find a high-quality unbiased source when what you've posted here makes it seems like you'll dismiss any contradictory source as leftist propaganda?
You're correct that simply posting a a few countersources won't be convincing, but only because I would then look for the counter-counter-sources that I'm sure are out there, but am unwilling to pre-emptively expend the effort to track down. But if I fail to climb the escalation ladder-- if it terminates well below where I expect it to rise-- then I guarantee you that I will become less sure of my position. That might take the form of me saying, "I'm unconvinced of your point," rather than a full capitulation, but anything short of, "I remain completely convinced in my position" should be a win for an anti-free-lunch partisan.
edit: and if you want a specifically conservative source, I think it's interesting that cato institute's takedown of the institution completely fails to address the central claim of these pro-free-lunch studies: that they provide a net profit per dollar. Absence of evidence/evidence of absence, and all that, but it's telling that they talk a lot about cost and yet never actually come out and claim that the return on investment is less than one dollar per dollar.
The capture of the institutions has made such "poor form" necessary for intellectual hygiene. Consider, perhaps, if there'd been a dispute about whether smoking causes cancer and someone posted an authoritative-looking study from the Council for Tobacco Research saying otherwise.
That's cope and you know it. Either address my point or concede it. I'm not doing a gish gallop; I made an argument around a single point and provided concrete evidence to support it. I'm not trying to troll you-- or at least, as per the rules of the motte, you should assume in good faith that I'm not, and you should report me if you find evidence otherwise. It's fair to say that on the internet you need to be wary about expending way more effort than an opponent who just wants to provoke a response, but it should be obvious that that's not the situation you're currently in. You put in some effort to make an argument. I put in some effort to counter it, and a little on top of that to find a source. You can surely afford to put in a little little more, knowing that if I fail to respond after that point I have effectively conceded the argument.
If someone sincerely believed in the benefits of smoking and took the effort to post a source in support, the least I could do is post a single study countering.
It's very much not cope. The capture of the institutions means those who have captured them can, at will, produce "authoritative" studies supporting or opposing any proposition they care to support or oppose, regardless of the truth value of those propositions. That, in turn, means the probative value of studies from such institutions is zero or close to it, and such studies are correctly dismissed out of hand.
You are wasting so much time attacking my source in principle instead of just addressing it directly. Either put up or shut up. I'm not asking you for blind faith, I'm asking for you to put as much effort into a counterargument as I put into my argument. If the only method to mantain intellectual hygene is to dismiss opponents out of hand, then symmetrically I should do the exact same thing for any evidence conservatives propose to me-- including any evidence about institutional capture. But I don't believe in that, and I don't think you do either, because we are on a discussion forum. So, discuss!
anti-dan already attacked your source. I'm defending the idea of dismissing such sources. I know it's really annoying to have someone go through all this effort to put up the form of something that should be really persuasive, then have people see through it and realize it is only the form and the thing is not persuasive at all, but it's absolutely the right thing.
No, he didn't. He attacked the people responsible for the source, and acted like that was sufficient to dismiss the source itself. That's a textbook ad hominem.
Buddy, I am really not asking for much. I'm not asking you to make an hour-long takedown of the study's contents, I'm just asking you to find a concrete problem with it or find a contradictory source. Take my response to the CATO article as an example: I didn't go in and question every single stat, I just raised a single, salient problem.
You don't have to find the perfect source or argument, you just need to do a little bit better than I did. I probably won't be convinced on the spot-- but it'll force me to either give up on convincing you or do even better. In the latter case, even if neither of us ultimately manage to convince the other, at least we'll both have better knowledge of the subject that's tested against oppositional analysis. Which is still a pretty great outcome, for anyone who believes in the value of reasoned, good-faith debate. And if you don't believe in that value, why are you on the motte? If you just want people to agree with you without regard for truth value there are other, better platforms.
(also I just realized that you and anti-dan aren't the same person. Which is honestly kind of sad. You have the energy to dogpile me, but not the energy to find a single source to the anti-school-lunch position?)
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