Alex Tabarrok on some interesting-if-unsurprising research:
[The study] looks at the effects of a program that gave poor households a voucher to purchase a computer. ... Households with incomes directly below a cutoff level were given a voucher while households with incomes directly above the cutoff were not. Thus, households which were very similar were treated differently and this lets the authors use a regression discontinuity design that makes their results credible as representing a causal effect.
... we see that households with incomes just below the cutoff were much more likely to have a computer than households with incomes just above the cutoff - thus the voucher program has a big effect on computer ownership. ... [It] shows similarly that the voucher program increased computer usage since computers were used much more often in households with incomes just below the cutoff than in the non-eligible-for-voucher households with incomes just above the cutoff.
What's interesting about it is that the study also showed that an increase in computer usage to play games was apparent, while an increase in usage to do homework was not. And as a result:
Not surprisingly, with all that game playing going on, the authors find that the voucher program actually resulted in a decline in grades
A classic case of unintended consequences. It's worth appreciating that anyone who a priori would have claimed that giving computers to poor people would've actually reduced their grades would have likely been dismissed. It's especially important when thinking about the new health care bill, which is claiming great improvements in both coverage and cost, and those who claim the seemingly counterintuitive opposite are being dismissed. But then that's why the consequences are unintended...
Comments