I've listened to every Freakonomics episode, it's not the best thing in the world but it's nice when I'm working around the house. Bryan Caplan is on the show fairly frequently. They sprinkled in a rebroadcast of The Harvard President Will See You Now to take the sting off and they are quick to say that we shouldn't defund social problems but the average NPR listener can't be too pleased with the core of the last 4 new episodes.

I'll try to pull some important parts of each episode but if you want to check them out here they are:

When Helping Hurts

The Fracking Boom, a Baby Boom, and the Retreat From Marriage

Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (Part 1)

Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (Part 2)

When Helping Hurts

SAYRE-McCORD: That’s exactly right. And then the treatment took a broad range. It was basically counselors, who would visit the family … WELSH: The counselors would meet every couple of weeks with the boys, interact with them, help them with homework, take them to the YMCA. During the summer months, some of the treatment-group boys were able to go to summer camps and so were sent out of the city.

SAYRE-McCORD: It was Big Brother Big Sister. It was the mentoring that’s still celebrated.

WELSH: It lasted from 1939 to 1945.

SAYRE-McCORD: What you had at the end of the Cabot study was this voluminous set of records. Here’s this treasure trove of data — with controls! That’s almost non-existent in social interventions, that you have data on a control.

The results, even with what I would consider to be very biased researchers? Didn't work.

SAYRE-McCORD: On all seven measures — we’re talking, how long did you live? Were you a criminal? Were you mentally healthy, physically healthy, alcoholic, satisfied with your job; satisfied with your marriage? On all seven measures, the treatment group did statistically, significantly worse off than the control group.

DUBNER: Wow. Wow. In other words, “I was in this program. I liked it. The data show, however, that I came out worse because of the program than someone who was in the program as a control and didn’t get the treatment.”

SAYRE-McCORD: I should emphasize that there also seemed to be what’s called a dose effect — the longer the intervention, the more likely the damage would be done.

Now their pretty clear in the episode to say this doesn't mean we should start yanking funding.

The Fracking Boom, a Baby Boom, and the Retreat From Marriage

KEARNEY: It’s really hard for researchers to establish the causal effect of family structure or marriage on kids’ outcomes, of course, because we don’t randomly assign kids to married or unmarried parents. But there’s a lot of research that works really hard to isolate factors. That research consistently shows that kids who live with two married parents have lower rates of poverty, have higher cognitive test scores in childhood, have fewer behavioral problems. They seem to have better health outcomes. They’re less likely to live in poverty when they’re 25. They’re more likely to complete college and they’re less likely to become young, unmarried parents themselves.

KEARNEY: In 1960, 5 percent of births in the U.S. were to unmarried mothers. In 2014, over 40 percent of births in the U.S. were unmarried mothers. This is really a dramatic increase.

Still, what accounts for so many more unmarried births among mothers with less education? Social conservatives tend to point to the breakdown of old-school social norms. Social liberals cite less access to contraception — although that has improved a lot; and, especially, the lack of economic opportunity — that is, men without good jobs aren’t eager to marry or, from the other end of the equation, they aren’t considered good husband material.

DUBNER: Wow. So a coal boom produced more marriage, more kids and fewer kids born to unmarried moms; whereas a fracking boom produced more kids, but no more marriage and a lot more kids born to unmarried moms?

KEARNEY: Yeah. Equal proportion increase in married and nonmarried births in the fracking boom. We speculate that this suggests that social context is really important to determining the response to economic changes.

MANNING: That’s true when you look at physical health, psychosocial outcomes or cognitive indicators. If your parents get married, then you are going to fare better than if you’re a child who’s raised by cohabiting parents who don’t get married. But it doesn’t seem as if cohabiting parents who eventually marry really achieve the same level of health as children with stably married parents. It doesn’t seem as if they’re able to catch up in the same way.

The challenge is exacerbated, in Kearney’s view, because the unmarried birth trend is moving up the income ladder. It was always an issue among low-income mothers; but now it’s hitting the middle class.

And now these are rather self explanatory. I won't pull out specifics, but it goes a long way of showing that the Koch brothers may not be the bogey men that the left makes them out to be. Charles Koch largely just gets to talk and has a lot of positive things to say.

Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (Part 1)

Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (Part 2)