Hilary
Hoynes is a University of California at Berkeley economist who wrote a
particularly notable paper last year. Instead of increasing dependency,
as conservative critics have repeatedly claimed, Hoyen’s paper showed
that, for women at least, food stamp use during pregnancy and early
childhood has exactly the opposite impact of what conservatives allege:
It actually
economic self-sufficiency when children grow up, in the next generation.
,”
which Hoynes co-authored with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas
Almond. As stated in the paper’s abstract, access to food stamps
for women leads to “increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in
educational attainment, earnings, and income, and decreases in welfare
participation).” Hoynes and her colleagues took advantage of the fact
that food stamp programs were established county-by-county over a period
of years, creating a sort of “natural experiment” beginning half a
century in the past.
“Hoynes’ work has been timely, innovative and
revealing,” said Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, which has highlighted Hoynes’ work this
year as food stamps and the SNAP program have become a major subject of
controversy. “Hoynes and her collaborators have really broadened our
understanding of how programs like food stamps not only relieve hardship
in the moment but can trigger long-lasting gains in participating
children’s later health and education. The implications of the research
are considerable. In this long view, such assistance is not only
helping struggling families to scrape by, it’s a good investment in the
next generation of citizens and workers.”
Hoynes herself said,
“This work indicates that there are important benefits of the safety net
that to date have been ignored. They predict that a more generous
safety net can reduce health disparities. More generally, the emerging
evidence points to an important role for investments in early life — and
those investments generate important returns in terms of better health
and economic outcomes in adulthood.”
It’s
a startling result in light of the onslaught of conservative claims to
the contrary, but it’s somewhat less startling — though still quite
illuminating — in light of what’s actually known about the impacts of
hunger on childhood development back in the “reality based community,”
where population-based studies of hunger impacts date back to the 1970s,
when researchers first began reporting on the long-term, adult impacts
on children born during and shortly after the so-called Dutch “Hunger
Winter,” a period from November 1944 through May 1945, when a large part
of the Netherlands was subjected to drastically reduced rations under
Nazi occupation.
But to really appreciate the significance of this
research, one must also appreciate two other aspects of Hoynes’ recent
research, which combine to provide a three-pronged counterattack on the
right’s “culture of dependency” narrative. First, she has done previous
research establishing short-term benefits — not just for
food stamps, but also the for the
earned income tax credit
— specifically, a reduction in low-birthweight babies, a significant
indicator of well-being. This research alone is sufficient to show that
safety net programs are achieving the goals of bettering people’s lives,
adding more weight to the already well-established
statistics on poverty reduction. Second, she has done research into safety net program utilization
over the course of economic recession and recovery,
research that shows that the current levels of food stamp and other
program use are in line with past history, and not a sign of any alleged
“explosion” in a “culture of dependency” under Obama, as the right-wing
noise machine would have it.
Thus, Hoynes’ work provides powerful
evidence for a three-pronged counterattack against this conservative
narrative, which has come to play a dominant role in Republican politics
in the post-Bush/Obama/Tea Party era: 1) The safety net works in the
short term, producing measurable improvements in newborn health; 2) it
works in the long term, improving health for both men and women, and
reducing dependency among women in the next generation; and 3) it works
currently in much the same manner as it has worked in the past. The
long-term effects findings are clearly the most remarkable, which is why
they’re worth looking into more closely. But it’s the overall
combination of evidence — along with the work of others working on other
aspects of the safety net — that provides a robust picture of what the
real-world safety net actually does to build better lives, pushing back
against the onslaught of right-wing lies.
In July, for example, when House Republicans were first threatening massive food stamp cuts, the CBPP released a report, “
SNAP Enrollment Remains High Because the Job Market Remains Weak.”
It’s common sense, of course. As the report stated in its very first
sentence, “The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly
known as the food stamp program) historically has been the most
responsive federal program after unemployment insurance in assisting
families and communities during economic downturns,” so it stands to
reason that our notoriously bad job market would keep tens of millions
of people on food stamps. CBPP began its analysis by citing
Congressional Budget Office projections that “as the labor market
recovers, SNAP costs will decline markedly. CBO projects that by 2019,
SNAP costs will fall all of the way back to their mid-1990s level,
measured as a share of gross domestic product (GDP).”
But as CBPP
continued, they supplemented CBO data with the more detailed research
that Hoynes took part in: “In a new piece of research, economists Hilary
Hoynes and Marianne Bitler examine the relationship between poverty and
fluctuations in economic activity since 1980 and the historical
responsiveness of SNAP, UI [unemployment insurance], and other safety
net programs over the business cycle. If SNAP had increased more in
proportion to the unemployment rate over the past few years than it has
historically, that would provide support to critics who claim that SNAP
should have come down as the unemployment rate has declined. But that is
not what the research shows. Hoynes and Bitler found that
‘[T]he safety net programs receiving the most attention through the
Great Recession (Food Stamps and UI) exhibit adjustments very consistent
with their behavior during previous historical cycles.’”
That
research is vital for deflating claims of an expanding culture of
dependency — and thus for holding the line against deeper cuts to SNAP.
But it’s the long-term impacts research that holds the promise of
informing a proactive, pro-safety net economic populism that can do more
than just respond reactively to the Tea Party. And, indeed, CBPP’s
president, Robert Greenstein, cited that research in his
testimony
to the Senate Budget Committee in February this year. Her research has
gotten more attention in the last six months or so than it ever has
before, Hoynes said — but if it’s to have the kind of impact that it
deserves, this should only be the beginning.
What Hoynes and
progressives interested in building on her work are up against is almost
20 years in which empirical data has been relentlessly marginalized. In
1995, in his first year as speaker, Newt Gingrich
dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment
(which had repeatedly dissed Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense), and
imposed other internal changes — such as defunding House committee
staff — which radically undermined the role of sound information in
shaping the nation’s laws. As conservative iconoclast
Bruce Bartlett put it,
“Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional
institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and
experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it.” Although
Gingrich quickly burned out as speaker, the fact-free culture he
promoted has only grown more virulent since then.
While all this
was going on in Washington, Hoynes was producing a body of work about
the safety net that no longer seemed to matter to those calling the
shots in Congress. “My work, coming from the background and typical
approaches of economics, had mostly focused on how … different kinds of
programs [welfare versus the earned income tax credit, food stamps vs.
cash welfare] lead to differences in employment decisions, poverty
outcomes, family structure decisions, how it influences the propensity
for kids to be living with 2-parent vs. 1-parent families, you know,
these kinds of questions.” In short, Hoynes was empirically studying
the very sorts of outcomes that self-absorbed politicians were busily
pontificating about.
About five years ago, Hoynes said, her
interests began to shift toward “calculating the benefits of programs,
rather than spending a lot of time talking about the costs of programs.”
“I
got interested in thinking about how we could measure how these
programs affect well-being of children in the households, or the
households more broadly,” Hoynes said. “It came from a broader interest
in evaluating potential benefits of the safety net, which … had sort of
never been thought about before — the sort of cream on the top, if you
will.” It wasn’t just a new direction for her, she noted, “There really
wasn’t a whole lot of work on this.”
There was one exception,
however: the child health impacts of Medicaid expansion, covering
families higher up the income distribution. Of course it makes sense
that expanding health insurance would impact children’s health; that’s
the whole point. But Hoynes took things beyond the obvious. “I sort of
thought, ‘Well, here are these measures of health and well-being, can we
demonstrate that a more cash-based safety net, general redistribution
[program] can be quantified in terms of effects on health outcomes?’ So
that’s sort of where I was coming from.”
Her research agenda has
focused on “the two programs that are the most important programs for
low-income families and that is food stamps/SNAP and the earned income
tax credit,” she explained. Her first projects looked at impacts on “a
very common robust important measure of child health, which is their
weight at birth.”
This is where she first used the
county-by-county rollout approach. “When food stamps come into your
county, we can use the full census of births in America,” she said,
“comparing women across counties from one year to the next, using the
full census of births from the birth certificate data; we can then look
at the weigh of children at birth, their propensity to be a low-birth
weight birth and how this varies when food stamps is available versus
not.” This is the short-term food stamp research referred to above. She
and her co-authors found a statistically significant reduction in the
risk of low birth weight, which tended to concentrate in high poverty
counties.
Her paper on the earned income tax credit used a
conceptually similar approach, but instead of using a county-by-county
rollout structure for the “natural experiment” design, she used changes
in the tax law, which changed the incentives involved during the 1990s
“as we reformed welfare and moved away from AFDC/TANF and toward the
EITC, as a main way to provide cash assistance to low-income families.”
This
is not how Washington understands welfare reform, of course. The
decline of AFDC/TANF funding and the expansion of the EITC somehow live
in completely separate boxes, and the “
success”
of welfare reform — primarily defined as the reduced number of
recipients — has nothing to do with expansion of the EITC, which has
helped keep so many millions afloat. But what about the real world? How
did expanding EITC compare to the rollout of food stamps more than a
generation earlier? “Amazingly, we found very similar results,” Hoynes
said. “If you provide more assistance through the tax system, using this
good variation across a different kind of natural experiment, as it
were, we found reductions in low birth rates, more so for families that
you would expect to be affected by the EITC, you know, lower education
levels, single woman versus married.
“I would say it’s a very
fertile area right now, that people are interested in trying to quantify
these longer-term effects. And now, decades have passed, since that
time period and the populations that are affected by them are
sufficiently mature that we can really dive in and ask some questions
that we hadn’t be able to do before.”
With all that data out
there, and researchers like Hoynes starting to make sense of it, one has
to ask if it isn’t time for a reality-based political movement to start
using what they’re learned to shape a better future.
It might
seem like a pipe dream now. But it was actually more or less like that
before Gingrich “reformed” the House. As late as 1992, authors Fay Lomax
Cook and Edith J. Barrett found strong support for the welfare state
and its programs, despite negative views of welfare in their highly
detailed survey,
Support for the American Welfare State: The Views of Congress and the Public. One
key factor in Congress was that Republicans in committee leadership
positions, who were much more familiar with how programs worked, showed
significantly more support than Republicans as a whole. That was how
things were
before Gingrich went to work. It’s a good
indication of what Speaker Pelosi should have undone when she held power
from 2007 to 2011. The next time Democrats do gain control of the
House, they will need to prioritize making it friendly to the likes of
Hilary Hoynes and her reality-based colleagues. It’s the only way,
ultimately, to make it friendly to all the rest of us as well.
