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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo

An empirically correct (though not, as of the current year, large) example of a causal impact of child poverty on adult criminality is via lead exposure. Childhood lead exposure causes reduced IQ and conscientiousness in adults, which causes crime. Childhood lead exposure is strongly correlated with poverty, and giving money to poor parents will generally cause them to reduce their children's lead exposure (in the leaded petrol era, by moving to nicer places with less traffic pollution, in the modern era where most lead exposure is via peeling paint, by maintaining their homes better or moving to more expensive rentals with less shitty landlords).

The "people commit acquisitive crime because they have no other way of meeting basic needs" version of "poverty causes crime" is something of a weakman - I don't think I have seen it pushed in channels where everyone respects everyone else's intelligence. (I agree it is being pushed by expensively credentialled basic white chicks on social media). The most common sophisticated versions of the theory are the Spirit Level guys' theory (felt - i.e. relative - poverty stresses people out, making them more likely to commit crimes) and the adverse childhood experiences theory (chaotic upbringing affects children in a way which makes them more likely to commit crimes, and a lack of money can cause chaos in relevant ways).

Poverty causes bad parenting causes fucked-up kids causes crime is actually plausible - the evidence for near-zero shared environmental effects comes from twin and adoption studies, and most career criminals come from a family background that is sufficiently messed-up that it would get them excluded from twin and adoption studies.

‘Effed up parenting produces criminals’ is probably true, but I don’t think ‘poverty causes effed up parenting’ is, I think that the sorts of people who will seriously eff up being parents eff up everything else too, and are poor as a result.

'Effed up parenting is the wrong idea - the problem is providing a grossly inadequate environment for the child. Homelessness* does that for example, and poverty is causative of homelessness. (So, of course, is NIMBYism). In fact inadequate housing in all its many forms (lead is just the best studied example) is a fairly obvious case where poverty causes inadequate environments that wouldn't show up in twin and adoption studies, and could plausibly affect adult IQ.

Childhood malnutrition is another obvious example - this was a known issue 100 years ago (certainly in the UK a major driver of the early expansion of the welfare state was the number of army recruits who were medically unfit due to the effects of childhood malnutrition) but I don't know how significant it is in the contemporary US (it isn't a big issue in Western Europe). In third world countries there is pretty good evidence that you can reduce childhood malnutrition by giving people money.

"Are there practically significant ways in which giving poor parents money would improve childhood environments in a way which produces long-term benefits?" is a profoundly important and hard empirical question to which the answer is "Yes" in the third world, but which we can't answer in the first world because asking the question correctly involves crimethink-adjacent ideas like "A naive correlational analysis is genetically confounded enough to be worthless." If you think the answer is obviously "Yes" or obviously "No, with the partial exception of lead abatement" then you are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

* Homelessness as in living in shelters, sleeping in cars, couchsurfing etc. Street homelessness has complex causes with drug addiction and untreated mental illness being major factors, but simple homelessness is either caused by a short-term emergency (like a messy breakup or a house fire) or by not being able to afford housing.

Thanks for the clarification.

In third world countries there is pretty good evidence that you can reduce childhood malnutrition by giving people money.

I believe that(a diet of 90% gruel is after all not very appetizing or nutritious and you'd fix it pretty quickly if you could afford something else), but I'm pretty sure that the dominant case of childhood malnutrition in the US is either shitty parenting(it's just easier to let them eat sweets instead of insisting on dinner) or poor cultural practices(blacks and underclass whites don't eat fruit and will only eat vegetables in highly specific forms that have much of the nutrition leached out, so picky kids miss out on important nutrients). It has the same causes as food deserts- people from certain backgrounds would eat steak if they could afford it but they can't so they eat cheap sausage, bread, and desserts with a soda, and it never occurs to them to eat veggies rice and chicken.