Laurie Penny is keeping up her attack on James Purnell’s Welfare Reform Bill, and in particular the plan to get single mothers back into work.
She has a point. If we look at the DWP’s own figures (big pdf), the returns to work for low-skilled lone parents are small. Table 1.2f suggests that a mother of one child who works 30 hours a week on the minimum wage is £56.87 better off in work than out.
This is an effective wage of just £1.90 an hour. And this ignores the cost of travelling to work and childcare costs - though 80% of the latter are subsidized through tax credits.
For a woman with two children (table 1.3f), the effective wage is just £1.65 an hour - before costs.
Purnell’s claim that work is the route out of poverty is true in the sense that work raises a lone parent’s income. But it doesn’t raise it much.
Herein, though, lies a quirk. Getting mothers into work might not be good for the mothers - I doubt if £1.90 an hour is much recompense for the disutility of working - but it could be good for children. This paper estimates that the children of lone mothers score better on some cognitive tests if their mothers go out to work early - though the results are not statistically significant. This could be because the extra income, small as it is, helps child development (say, if it’s spent on books or educational toys), or because paid childcare is better than the mothers’ care.
Whether these results are robust enough to justify Purnell’s harassment of lone mothers is, however, doubtful. I suspect instead that they are just a small, unintended by-product of a campaign motivated - as Laurie says - by much baser motives.
She has a point. If we look at the DWP’s own figures (big pdf), the returns to work for low-skilled lone parents are small. Table 1.2f suggests that a mother of one child who works 30 hours a week on the minimum wage is £56.87 better off in work than out.
This is an effective wage of just £1.90 an hour. And this ignores the cost of travelling to work and childcare costs - though 80% of the latter are subsidized through tax credits.
For a woman with two children (table 1.3f), the effective wage is just £1.65 an hour - before costs.
Purnell’s claim that work is the route out of poverty is true in the sense that work raises a lone parent’s income. But it doesn’t raise it much.
Herein, though, lies a quirk. Getting mothers into work might not be good for the mothers - I doubt if £1.90 an hour is much recompense for the disutility of working - but it could be good for children. This paper estimates that the children of lone mothers score better on some cognitive tests if their mothers go out to work early - though the results are not statistically significant. This could be because the extra income, small as it is, helps child development (say, if it’s spent on books or educational toys), or because paid childcare is better than the mothers’ care.
Whether these results are robust enough to justify Purnell’s harassment of lone mothers is, however, doubtful. I suspect instead that they are just a small, unintended by-product of a campaign motivated - as Laurie says - by much baser motives.
"though the results are not statistically significant": in other words, they cannot be confidently distinguished from mere chance. So why do you report them?
Posted by: dearieme | February 23, 2009 at 03:43 PM
dearieme,
have a read of this:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cf1d659a-f25f-11dd-9678-0000779fd2ac.html
Posted by: Luis Enrique | February 23, 2009 at 04:32 PM
"I doubt if £1.90 an hour is much recompense for the disutility of working".
Yes, but the disutility of working for marginal income may incentivise better birth control. Interested to know of any research on this.
Posted by: Mark | February 23, 2009 at 04:50 PM
Better birth control? I'm sorry? Actually, we already have pretty decent birth control - what we don't have is decent abortion provision. What you seem to be saying, however, is that women who are poor and don't have partners shouldn't have kids at all, is that what you're saying?
Or are you saying the working classes - because that's who people tend to be talking about when they advocate better birth control - should breed less?
I totally agree that abortion needs to be a viable and easy option for every woman who might fall pregnant, so that all classes can excercise their reproductive freedoms with autonomy. But you're just going to have to accept that some people actually want to have kids, and then find themselves in difficult straits. That's their choice.
Posted by: Laurie Penny | February 23, 2009 at 06:15 PM
Thanks, Luis. It's not the first criticism of sig tests that I've seen. Still, I'd need to know just how low the sig was. It's one thing to fail at 95/5, another to fail at 70/30.
Posted by: dearieme | February 23, 2009 at 09:00 PM
A good argument for wage subsidies -- financed by a graduated consumption tax!
The latter requires international cooperation and an end to tax havens -- but those are features, not bugs.
See BornAgainDemocrats.com for a little more detail
Posted by: Luke Lea | February 24, 2009 at 12:31 AM
Thanks for this reminder of the bind mothers are in. You don't mention the impact of a long time out of work on career progression, lifetime earnings and poverty in old age. Your example talks about a woman on minimum wage and you might think these irrelevant. Sadly, your shop checkout may be being operated by a woman engineer. Some professions are better than others at providing realistic part-time working opportunities. Better support for working mothers would unleash lots of trained brain power to the benefit of us all.
Posted by: TB | February 24, 2009 at 08:20 AM
Laurie Penny - "But you're just going to have to accept that some people actually want to have kids, and then find themselves in difficult straits. That's their choice".
No chance. I haven't got kids because I was never in a financial position to support them properly. Why should I now pay for someone else's desire to have a live dolly all of their own to play with?
This isn't about about the working class...that kind of distinction is now totally obsolete.
Posted by: Tommo | February 24, 2009 at 10:34 AM
I don't often line up with the libertoonians, but I'd have to disagree with Laurie here - of course 'can I afford to support them?' should be a consideration when someone considers having kids.
That doesn't mean that a woman for whom contraception fails and who doesn't want an abortion should be forced to raise her child in penury. Nor does it even mean that for a woman who chooses (or a couple who choose) to conceive a child they know they can't afford to support, as the consequences of doing so would be deeply unfair on the child...
But I can't understand how you can *possibly* say that someone who chooses to conceive a child in the full knowledge that they will be unable to support it *isn't* being irresponsible, or that we shouldn't try and deter people from making that decision *at least to the extent that such deterrence doesn't punish the child as well*.
Posted by: john b | February 24, 2009 at 11:39 AM
This could be because the extra income, small as it is, helps child development (say, if it’s spent on books or educational toys), or because paid childcare is better than the mothers’ care.
Or it could be a selection bias. The set of poor single mothers who choose to stay at home with their infants undoubtedly contains some excellent mothers, but probably contains more lard-arsed layabouts than the set of poor single mothers who choose to work.
Posted by: Sam | February 24, 2009 at 09:00 PM
In that Harford piece can you really state, as he does, that whe:
researchers estimated that every dollar spent on the programme saved $4.30 and were 87 per cent confident that the result was real.
it is the same as:
if I offered you the chance to spend a dollar and get back $4.30 87 per cent of the time, you would be right to see this as a good bet. Gosset would have agreed with you.
??
Posted by: Matthew | February 25, 2009 at 01:18 AM
In that Harford piece can you really state, as he does, that whe:
researchers estimated that every dollar spent on the programme saved $4.30 and were 87 per cent confident that the result was real.
it is the same as:
if I offered you the chance to spend a dollar and get back $4.30 87 per cent of the time, you would be right to see this as a good bet. Gosset would have agreed with you.
??
Posted by: Matthew | February 25, 2009 at 01:18 AM
This is just one idea, and perhaps displays no more than my limited imagination. If there are better ideas out there, that amount to more than "implement something called "market socialism" and then - alacazam! - full employment!" then I'd love to hear them. http://www.watchgy.com/ mostly bank deposits, fell by £143.2bn in Q1. And of course there’s no guarantee such buying will continue.
http://www.watchgy.com/tag-heuer-c-24.html
http://www.watchgy.com/rolex-submariner-c-8.html
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