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28 United States
The Economist
May 5th 2018
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a black teenager, as he was walking away.
The officer, Jason Van Dyke, who is about
to be tried for first-degree murder, had
been the subject of numerous complaints.
Changing such a culture will take time. In
Englewood, Mr Johnson tells his 350 offi-
cers to attend community meetings, to
build relationships and to avoid behaving
like an occupying force.
The riskwith policing software is that it
amplifies existing racial bias. “Technology
is far fromneutral,” says Kade Crockford of
the American Civil Liberties Union. when
police officers feed predictive policing al-
gorithms with their data on past stops and
arrests, so they can reinforce the bias that
police across the country stand accused of,
says Ms Crockford. For example, whites
and blacks consume and sell drugs at
pretty much the same rates, but far more
blacks are arrested for drugs thanwhites.
Used carefully, though, more data are
better than fewer, says Andrew Papachris-
tos of Northwestern University, and any-
wayHunchLab does not use arrest records.
It is too early to say whether the new tools
caused the decline in crime in Englewood
and other districts, though the evidence
suggests a correlation. This is good news
forMr Emanuel who is running for re-elec-
tion next year and is already facing a
crowded field of opponents. One of the
contenders for the city’s top job is Garry
McCarthy, whom Mr Emanuel sacked as
boss of the
CPD
in the wake of the Laquan
McDonald scandal. Mr McCarthy is likely
to run mainly on crime—until now, one of
Mr Emanuel’s biggest weak spots.
7
F
EDERAL Hill House is a squat building
in central Providence, within earshot of
the city’s main highway. On a recent rainy
Monday, a school holiday, the building
was full. Older children lounged in front of
a film, while toddlers roamed around the
soft play area. Some regularly spend more
than ten hours a day here, on top of school
hours, while their parents work. The chari-
ty provides essential support for low-in-
come families: it picks up children from
home before school starts, and looks after
them long after it ends. It accomplishes a
lot on a tight budget. In several places, the
ceiling lets through water from the grey
Rhode Island sky.
The youngest group of children at Fed-
eral Hill House are between18months and
five years old. There are 12 of them, with a
waiting list to join. The executive director,
Kimberly Fernandez, says some cannot
name any colours when they first arrive.
Some come to the centre hungry (it pro-
vides meals) or speaking no English. Oth-
ers arrive with behaviour problems. Par-
ents’ workschedules are often so inflexible
that Federal Hill must cover basic logistics
beyond school pick-up and drop-off. Ms
Fernandez says she had to use her own car
after some children took the wrong bus
home from school and wound up strand-
ed at the depot. Their mother was unable
to leavework to fetch them.
Plenty of evidence suggests that grow-
ing up poor, living through these kinds of
scrapes, has a detrimental impact on child
development. Children from rich families
tend to have better language and memory
skills than those from poor families. More
affluent children usually perform better in
school, and are less likely to end up in jail.
Growing up poor risks the development of
a smaller cerebral cortex. But these are as-
sociations between poverty and develop-
ment, not evidence that poverty causes
these bad outcomes, says Kimberly Noble,
a neuroscientist at Columbia University in
NewYork. She is part of a teamof research-
ers running a three-year experimentwhich
will, for the first time, search for causal
links between parental income level and a
child’s early development.
The teamwill start recruiting the first of
1,000 low-income mothers next week.
They will be invited to join the study,
which is called Baby’s First Years, shortly
after giving birth at one of ten hospitals in
four cities across theUnitedStates (to avoid
influencing the experiment, the research-
ers asked
The Economist
not to publish de-
tails about the cities). Of that 1,000,
roughly half will be randomly selected to
receive an unconditional $333 a month,
while the others will form a control group
that will receive $20. The money, which is
completely unconditional, will be loaded
onto a pre-paid debit card everymonth for
40months, on the date of the child’s birth-
day. The hypothesis is that this steady
stream of payments will make a positive
difference in the cognitive and emotional
development of the childrenwhose moth-
ers receive it.
The first data gathered will be baseline
interviews with the mothers just after re-
cruitment. This will reveal the various
backgrounds from which the mothers
come (all will have incomes below the
poverty line, roughly $23,000 for a family
of three). The researchers will conduct
phone interviews with all 1,000 mothers
around their child’s first birthday, thenvisit
them in their homes when their children
turn two. When they turn three, they will
be invited with their mothers to a research
lab in their city, where their child’s cogni-
tive skills will be tested and the electrical
activity of their brains studied.
Living experiment
The interviewswill alsomeasuremothers’
stress, mental health and employment pat-
terns. They will ask how the amount of
time mothers spend with their child is
changing, and gather data on the quality
and cost of child care and other child-relat-
ed expenses. The researchers will also
have a record of transactions made with
the debit card. The unconditional nature of
the cash transfer is inviolable: even if
mothers choose not to take part in the fol-
low-up studies, for which they are paid ex-
tra, they will still get the income for 40
months. The 1,000 mothers, minus poten-
tial dropouts, will provide enough statisti-
cal power to detect effects equivalent to
twomonths’ worth ofdevelopment in ear-
ly childhood, says GregDuncan, an econo-
mist on the team from the University of
California, Irvine.
A real-world experiment of this magni-
tude comeswith challenges. It has been six
years in the making, and the team has
spent years raising some $15m for it. About
$5.8m will be given away over the next
fouryears, towhichmust be added the cost
of recruiting and monitoring 1,000 people
over that time. The researchers worked to
get new legislation passed in two states in
which the experiment will be carried out,
in order tomake sure that those taking part
remain eligible for public benefits while
Child development
Mother’s money
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
Researchers lookfor causal links between income and child development
Are we in the control group?
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