Many programs that give poor people stuff to put them on the same footing as the middle class don't have the desired effects. A recent example is
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19060Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren
Robert W. Fairlie, Jonathan Robinson
NBER Working Paper No. 19060
Issued in May 2013
NBER Program(s): DEV ED
Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership and use increased substantially, we find no effects on any educational outcomes, including grades, test scores, credits earned, attendance and disciplinary actions. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts. The estimated null effect is consistent with survey evidence showing no change in homework time or other "intermediate" inputs in education.
discussed at
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox...n_computers_and_education_no_change.htmlGiving Poor Kids Computers Does Nothing Whatsoever To Their Educational Outcomes
By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Thursday, May 23, 2013, at 2:10 PM
Studies of how rich and poor kids use the internet found that the latter do so less productively:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/new-digital-divide-seen-in-wasting-time-online.htmlWasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era
By MATT RICHTEL
New York Times
May 29, 2012
In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.
Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.
As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.
This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.
Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality
By RANDALL STROSS
New York Times
July 10, 2010
MIDDLE SCHOOL students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.
Still, wherever there is a low-income household unboxing the family’s very first personal computer, there is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealized form, as the Great Equalizer. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which was examined in this space in April. The same is true of computers that go to poor households in the United States.
Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.
Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.
“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”
