There’s an interesting post here at Brookings on a social science experiment to pay the poor to leave their crime-ridden neighborhoods. As it turns out the strategy might even work:
With their new study, Chetty and Hendren (along with Lawrence Katz, an author of many of the previous studies) provide very strong evidence for the positive impact of MTO. Specifically, moving to a less poor neighborhood in childhood (i.e., before the age of 13):
- Increased future annual income by the mid-twenties by roughly $3,500 (31%)
- Boosted marriage rates (by 2 percentage points)
- Raised both college attendance rates (by 2.5 percentage points) and quality of college attended
The age of the child moved was a critical factor: moving to a less poor neighborhood in the teenage years had no significant impact on later earnings or other adult outcomes.
There are quite a few interesting implications of those findings. They appear to be analogous to the frequently observed factors among those who’ve been released from jail or those returning from rehab. As long as you stay with the old surrounding and your old companions you’re likely to slide back into your old, bad ways. That last sentence seems to suggest that keeping the kids out of gangs is a critical success factor.
I’d also like to see those results broken down by race. That might take a much larger experiment. How about Baltimore?
The increase in income is impressive, but the rest looks to be close to the margin of error.