Good parents not money

P matter. That's the message of Susan Mayer's new book. What Money Can't Buy.^ The University of Ghicago sociologist's sophisticated and often ingenious analyses lead her to conclude that parents' characteristics are more important than their income in determining how well they raise their children and, hence, how well their children will do in later life. Thus Mayer argues that giving low-income families more money would not help their children very much. Such conclusions are likely to infuriate liberals and receive an "I told you so" response from conservatives, but it's more complicated than that. The children of low-income parents, as Mayer notes, are much less successful than those whose parents have more money. They score lower on measures of cognitive ability. They are more likely to drop out of school, to become unwed parents in their teen years, to have behavioral problems, and to earn less in later life. But why? The best way to find out would be to conduct a grand social experiment like the negative-income-tax experiments of the 1970s and early 1980s. Those randomized experiments, although still subject to academic debate, suggested that simply giving poor families more money would not solve their problems. Mayer, of course, was unable to conduct such an experiment. Instead, she took advantage of the differences among families, as reflected in various national data sets to conduct a series of creative analyses that exploit natural variations in behavior. Here's what she found: The parental characteristics that lead to higher earnings are associated with better child outcomes. Mayer performs two analyses to come to this conclusion. First, she finds that higher earned income is more correlated with good child outcomes