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Print Post- We need to give the various Healthy Marriage Initiative programs a few more years to demonstrate their potential efficacy, much like we do with the vast majority of federal programs. Tweet This
- If the U.S. had adapted Philip Cohen’s standard a half-century ago, this would have resulted in the elimination of scores of federally funded programs. Tweet This
Editor's Note: The following essay is part of a Cato Unbound symposium on the "success sequence" and has been reprinted here with the permission of the Cato Institute.
Federal efforts to directly strengthen relationships and marriages among lower-income Americans have failed and should be shut down. This is one of Philip Cohen’s arguments in this symposium on the success sequence. He’s making this claim, I suppose, on the force of two evaluations of the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI), which have found that, in the aggregate, the programs studied were not successful in improving the quality or stability of low-income couples’ relationships, especially the unmarried couples served by the initiative.
I share some of Cohen’s concerns about the effectiveness and legitimacy of these initiatives; elsewhere, I’ve expressed reservations about the federal government intervening directly in men’s and women’s relationships. But Cohen did not do justice to the existing literature on the HMI or of interventions like those used within it. For instance, he ignores evidence of modest success for the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative in fostering family stability (the longest-running local effort working on this issue) and research that found that spending on the HMI was “positively associated with small changes in the percentage of married adults in the population.”
Nevertheless, the implicit standard that Cohen is articulating here is that federally funded programs should be discontinued if (a) they do not show clear and consistent positive results of effectiveness two to three years after implementation (b) in the first round of program evaluation. If the United States had adapted Cohen’s standard a half-century ago, this would have resulted in the elimination of scores of federally funded programs that now garner hundreds of billions of dollars every year in public spending—from job training to Head Start. As Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution noted in his presidential address to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in 2016, “rigorous evaluations of social programs show that most of them do not work.”
I am sure Michael Tanner and the Cato Institute would be happy with the Cohen standard for program elimination. But as for me, I would like to give the various programs associated with the Healthy Marriage Initiative a few more years to demonstrate their potential efficacy, much like we do with the vast majority of federal programs. If there is more consistent evidence of program success in five years, the United States can keep funding them. If not, I would join Cohen and Tanner in urging the Congress to pull the plug on federally funded marriage and relationship education.
Finally, in thinking about public policies and programs designed to strengthen marriage and relationships for lower-income Americans, I think an “analogy to health policy is useful here,” to quote from family scholar Alan Hawkins. In his words,
We know that impoverished circumstances make it much more likely the poor will become overweight. As a society, we must constantly struggle to overcome the inequalities that poverty present. While doing so, however, we should not withhold knowledge and skills about healthy eating and lifestyles. We should treat the poor as resourceful people rather than passive pawns. Similarly, I trust the science of relationships can help many people and even be most helpful to those who struggle daily with the external stresses of poverty. I don’t think it is a stretch here to invoke the language of civil rights—that all people deserve an education about matters that are so crucial to human flourishing.
If it is indeed possible to provide publicly-funded relationship education that strengthens the quality and stability of lower-income family life, I would be willing to entertain this kind of case for continuing with the Healthy Marriage Initiative. Only time will tell if sufficient empirical warrant emerges for such a case.
W. Bradford Wilcox is a senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
