Child Protective Services Investigated Her 4 Times Because She Let Her Kids Play Outside
by Lenore Skenazy, Reason, August 9, 2025.
Excerpt:
During this visit, the social services worker acknowledged that our home was clean, that the children were happy, well-fed, polite, and well-spoken, but said the children had to be supervised 100 percent of the time when outdoors. When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.
A Guaranteed Annual Income Flop
by Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2025.
Excerpts:
Progressives and a growing faction of Republicans support cash handouts as an important answer to America’s social ills. So readers might want to know about a study published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research that finds $1,000 monthly payments have few long-term benefits.
Researchers with the nonprofit OpenResearch and several universities ran a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of a cash transfer on lower-income, working-age Americans. One group received $1,000 every month for three years—$36,000 total—no strings attached. The other were paid $50 a month to participate as a control group.
And:
Recipients also worked less, equivalent to roughly eight fewer days in the previous year. Yet OpenResearch touts that “average household income was roughly $6,100 higher for recipients than control participants, including the transfer amount” and payments “increased agency to work fewer hours or reduce the number of jobs held.” In other words, the payments led people to work less.
DRH comment: 8 days a year is substantial. It’s about 3% of a 2000-hour work year. But it’s not as substantial as I would have expected.
The Fictions Holding Down the Economy
by Dominic Pino, Civitas Institute, August 7, 2025.
Excerpts:
Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux have written a book called The Triumph of Economic Freedom in which they debunk seven economic myths that undergird much of American government policy today. The book is a valuable resource to anyone who needs a refresher on the defenses of free markets based on historical research. Both men are teachers at heart — Gramm taught economics before serving in Congress, and Boudreaux is a professor — and they communicate with clarity and precision.
The problem is that people believe that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, free markets caused the Great Recession, the Industrial Revolution led to increased poverty, and free trade hollowed out America. They really, sincerely, believe these things to be true. And that really does matter.
And:
Between 1980 and 2000, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty declined from 34 percent to 25 percent. The death rate from malnutritiondeclined by 43 percent. Rice yields increased by 41 percent, and wheat yields increased by 47 percent. Global average life expectancy increased by six years. And all of that happened while the world’s population increased from about 4.5 billion to over 6 billion.
DRH Note: Although I haven’t yet read their book, I suspect that they cover some of the same ground that I covered in this talk that I gave to students at Stanford University. BTW, I got Malthus a little wrong in my exposition I gave, as David Friedman pointed out to me. Although Malthus was dismal, he wasn’t that dismal. He thought people would adjust their behavior before they got to anything like mass starvation. Lauren F. Landsburg, in her biography of Malthus in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, notes in the first paragraph the correct understanding of Malthus’s claims.
Why Tariffs On More Countries Can Be Better
by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, August 9, 2025.
Excerpt:
Suppose the U.S. can import Hyundai Sonatas from Korea and Toyota Camrys from Japan, and consumers view the two cars as perfect substitutes. We compare three scenarios:
- A)Free trade
B)10% tariff on both countries (uniform tariff)
C) 10% tariff on Korea only (selective tariff)The surprising result: B can be better than C, even though C is, in one sense, closer to free trade (the “best” policy) than B as it tariffs fewer countries. To focus on the key points I will assume 50 car buyers and no change in the number of buyers when tariffs change (so I will ignore the standard deadweight loss from reduced quantities).
DRH note: Although Alex doesn’t mention it in the title, notice that a crucial assumption in his proof is that the tariffs are uniform across imports from both Korea and Japan.
Note: The featured image was generated by ChatGPT.
READER COMMENTS
TMC
Aug 10 2025 at 3:54pm
“8 days a year is substantial. It’s about 3% of a 2000-hour work year. But it’s not as substantial as I would have expected.” $5900 (12k- the 6100) is substantial. At $12/hr that’s about 60 missed work days, not 8.
David Henderson
Aug 10 2025 at 5:29pm
Weird, huh? On the one hand, they worked 8 days less. On the other hand, they earned $5,900 less. It’s this latter number that I find more plausible and so I don’t know how they got the 8-day number.
Craig
Aug 10 2025 at 6:48pm
My suspicion is people are wary of triggering program eligibility limits.
Warren Platts
Aug 11 2025 at 12:47pm
One could quit working that second job and still pretty much work the same number of days. That perhaps could account for the income loss. 8 days is nothing, really. The vacation days the average European has is still way higher than the average American’s vacation days plus 8.
Craig
Aug 10 2025 at 6:46pm
“DRH comment: 8 days a year is substantial. It’s about 3% of a 2000-hour work year. But it’s not as substantial as I would have expected.”
Because ultimately in a trial the recipients understand that there is an end to the largesse. So if they have a full time job they might max out any PTO/sick time and then take a bit of unpaid leave but if they push it too much and are absent too frequently, they might risk termination.
Mactoul
Aug 11 2025 at 4:53am
Crop yields have been growing because of increased CO2 concentration. There is a recent NBER paper by Taylor and Schlenker: for every 1 ppm rise in CO₂ corn yields go up 0.5%, soybeans 0.6%, wheat 0.8%. Over the last decade, thanks in part to 20 ppm worth of bonus CO₂, global farmers collected an extra $71.7 billion worth of food, including $4 billion a year for U.S. corn alone.
Even more, the slight warming in recent years has accelerated the hydrological cycle so that Indian monsoon has not failed even once in last 20 years. This is historically unusual and a big factor in food security and economic growth.
David Seltzer
Aug 11 2025 at 9:54am
David, I read the reason article. One of the issues was the kids wandering on to private property. But…that the Stasi demanded “the children had to be supervised 100 percent of the time when outdoors” is in part, a result of HRC’s smug command, It takes a village. Maybe she meant, It takes a police state. Growing up in NW Indiana, our home was about two miles from Lake Michigan. In the morning my mother us packed lunch and said be home by dinner time. Me Droogs and I rode our bikes, no helmets, to the beach where we swam unattended. No lifeguard. Occasionally a local cop would drive by and admonish us to be careful.
Craig
Aug 11 2025 at 10:03am
I grew up in a similar fashion. I think Patz murder and now the internet have changed things. More recently, years ago now, the two Indiana girls murdered in the woods on a hike. Let me ask you a brief question, DS? Do you go swimming in fresh water in FL? I don’t. Irrespective of your answer the fact alligators exist is common knowledge. How do you assess the danger? More often than not, you’re fine, but on the day you’re not, you’re dead. Stranger danger is different, but its still under a broader umbrella of low probability/high impact events. Humans just have a difficult time grappling it. Trust me, I know, I just drove my kids to school uphill both ways, on a fair weather day in August. They’re 14, they SHOULD walk, I still drive them.
steve
Aug 11 2025 at 1:03pm
My mother kicked me out of the house in the morning and we often rode our bikes miles away and no one thought twice about it. I think we way over-manage our kids now. I make it a point to let the grandkids do stuff that might be a bit risky. That said, I dont think Hillary’s village thing had anything or much to do with it. I think it had much more to do with 24 hour news and the intense media coverage of the young girls who disappeared and were killed. The Catholic priest scandal was a big blow as we learned that those who were to be trusted the most were abusive. That also lead to making it OK to report on other abuse stories on teachers, coaches. That kind of stuff largely got ignored or swept under the rug in the past.
The other big factor is that women went to work. In the kind of past I think we were reminiscing about the mom was almost always at home. We were outside running around but nearly every home had a mom inside. The men were at work. A man running around the neighborhood would have been, we all thought, more notable but really, the idea of sexual predators just wasn’t common. The bigger fear was a kid getting hurt and if that happened the screaming would have been heard by the mom in the closest house.
Steve
David Seltzer
Aug 11 2025 at 1:14pm
Steve, good points.
nobody.really
Aug 12 2025 at 2:35pm
The idea that Americans have ever lower risk tolerances, especially regarding kids, was the thesis of a 2015 essay by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt–an essay they then expanded into the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind. They trace this dynamic back at least as far as the disappearance of child Etan Patz (1979) and the kidnapping and murder of child Adam Walsh (1981), whose story was told in the 1983 television movie, Adam. These reports developed into the “stranger danger” moral panic. In short, this dynamic long predated the Hillary Clinton quote.
For what it’s worth, Ngram identifies the phrase “takes a village to raise a child” around 1850, and notes that it grows in popularity beginning around 1986.
David Seltzer
Aug 11 2025 at 9:56am
Meant packed us lunch. Apologies.
David Seltzer
Aug 11 2025 at 1:09pm
Craig asked, “Do you go swimming in fresh water in FL? I don’t. Irrespective of your answer the fact alligators exist is common knowledge. How do you assess the danger? More often than not, you’re fine, but on the day you’re not, you’re dead.” Craig it goes to an individual’s aversion to risk. I’ve Scuba dived in water with shark, barracuda and other dangerous aquatic life. When I was 60, I climbed Mt Rainier assuming the attendant risks of hypothermia and hypoxia. I backpacked in Glacier National Park where bear attacks occurred. In each case I knowingly and voluntarily assumed the risks of those primitive environs. I suspect each individual’s subjective aversion to risk explains their behavior. Some are so risk averse, they are fearful of leaving their beds. That’s no guarantee either. Speaking of Fl, Jeffrey Bush disappeared in his own home. No trace of him has been found. He was asleep in bed when the ground caved in, swallowing him into a massive sinkhole. I suspect his prior probability of his demise happening that way was zero. In the end the statists impose their RAC, after Arrow- Pratt, on many of us in an attempt to achieve dominion, authority and jurisdiction over our lives and our risk/reward decisions. As an example, Senator John McCain likened MMA to “cockfighting. This smug statist sent letters to various state governor asking them to ban the “barbaric” enterprise of cage fighting. I’ve trained with those fighters. Everyone of them assume the risks of injury voluntarily. They resent any bureaucrats regulating their choices. Especially when many are fat and have never been the ring or octagon. Apologies for the long wind.
nobody.really
Aug 12 2025 at 1:54pm
I don’t have have a WSJ subscription, so I couldn’t see the whole editorial. But I don’t know what constitutes a flop.
First, recall that we’re discussing a working paper. I don’t know what review it has received, or whether any journal would require pre-publication revisions.
Second, I would like to know the period over which consequences have been measured. As I understand it, the study was conducted on poor families with kids. I could imagine it would prove difficult to measure the long-term consequendes for those kids if we’re looking at only three years of data.
–Typically, these studies show what you would expect: People with more wealth take more time away from paid work. What do they do with that time? Often they invest more time going to doctors appointments for themselves, their kids, or other dependents. They go to PTA meetings a school events, etc.
–I think the study revealed that parents invested more in food and health care.
–I think the study revealed that, relative to the control group, the recipients were more likely to change address, and to report that their kids had developmental and stress-related problems. Maybe added income caused homes to become unacceptable, and cause kids to develop problems. Or maybe added income freed up some bandwidth to address problems that would otherwise have gone unaddressed.
–And I think the study did not reveal any increased propensity to have kids, so Malthus can chill out.
Again, the consequences of these changes might be hard to evaluate over, say, a three-year period, but might become larger over a lifetime. Thus, I don’t have sufficient information to evaluate whether the intervention was a “flop.”
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