Children & the Law Blog

On the Becker-Posner Blog, Judge Richard Posner, who sits on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and continues to teach at the University of Chicago Law School and Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who also teaches at the University of Chicago routinely take a dueling-banjos approach to the most interesting and often controversial ideas of the day in paired blog posts.

Becker’s recent post Paying the Poor to Improve their School Performance-Becker highlights anti-poverty programs that pay poor parents to keep their children in school, presumably alleviating the pressure to have those children quit school in order to work to contribute to the family income. Posner’s reply Paying Children to Go to School–Posner’s Comment considers the perverse incentives such plans might induce and concludes that they are a “band-aid approach at best,” advocating increased competition among public schools to increase the value of an education instead.

The success of such a program seems highly situational - Becker and Posner discuss similar plans in Mexico and in New York, and while no conclusion emerges, the analytical approaches of both prove to be worth the price of admission.