Afternoon Must-Read: Robert Waldmann: Poverty and the “Laboratories of Democracy”

Robert Waldmann: Poverty and the “Laboratories of Democracy”:

Marco Rubio proposes, among other things, the bold new idea of block grants. [Kevin] Drum condemns the proposal, but writes that there have been some advantages from Fedralism. I throw a cow. He wrote: ‘state experimentation, a la welfare reform in the early 90s, could be pretty valuable’. ‘if each of the various state policies were rigorously studied’…. What have we learned from a state level welfare reform experiment? Well, we now know that welfare reform kills people: http://angrybearblog.com/2013/06/welfare-reform-kills.html…. AFDC ‘participants in the experimental group had a 16 percent higher mortality rate than members of the control group (hazard ratio: 1.16; 95% confidence interval: 1.14, 1.19; p < 0.01). This amounts to nine months of life expectancy lost between the ages of thirty and seventy for people in FTP’. Odd that this statistically significant result from an actual experiment has had no influence on the debate at all. There is little point having laboratories of democracy if people ignore the experimental results and just go with their prejudices, as we do…