This also suggests the problem with liberaltarianism. Libertarianism is a genuine political doctrine, and freedom is a political concept. Liberaltarianism, I submit, is an engineer’s conception of politics, with no guiding political concept. Is poverty a problem? The liberaltarian will engineer a solution, so much the worse for freedom or justice or whatever political concept happens to get in the way.

do you personally prefer a reduction in relative or absolute poverty?

Setting benchmarks for the level of, say, reading comprehension and math proficiency for all of the nation’s children seems rather No Child Left Behind-ish to me, and totally at odds with a citizenry in control of its own life.

Brink Lindsey has discussed the way that upper middle class childrens’ lives are meticulously planned for them from their earliest years on through to young adulthood. For poor parents, it’s more “do your own thing”. I fear that liberaltarianism might be another Jane Addams like scheme to reign in the relatively freewheeling lower classes and set them on the track to respectability.

One way to try to avoid being too paternalist about interventions would be to ask poor people what they want out of life. My guess is, most crappy parents are inept, but not malevolent. They have some vision for the good life, they just don’t know how to get there. If you take care to make interventions that align with and support their broad vision, you can alleviate poverty without undercutting or denigrating the judgement of the parents.

These approaches mirror recent thinking in international development. See, e.g. William Easterly’s “White Man’s Burden.” In a sense he addresses just the same problem: how do you help people without presuming what’s best for them?

The answer in both cases is to see that the goals of efficacy (bringing people out of poverty) and self-determination (don’t do everything for the person) are really the same goal. Self-determination has to be woven into the DNA of whatever intervention is being proposed.

I think the early childhood interventions mentioned in the post probably pass this test. A simple question is: if you asked parents whether they would accept this “boost” for their child, would they say yes? My guess is most parents would say yes.

But Harris said that it was peer groups that influenced children more than parents. Peer groups are a manifestation of policy too, thus leading to yet another conservative libertarian oriented criticism.

There were two problems:

1. Children failed to benefit from a supposedly enriched environment.

2. The state provided a dreadful environment.

On the one hand, this long and horrifying past provides ample evidence that the swiftly reproducing poor really are genetically inferior, on the other hand, it also provides ample evidence that government bureaucrats are even worse for children than incompetent and neglectful parents.