Arnold Kling shares the sort of evidence that Robert Putnam should confront, from a working paper by David Cesarini and others:
We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players’ own health and their children’s health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors — such as the number of lottery tickets — conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs.
Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large the cross-sectional gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children’s outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth.
Another incident of the null hypothesis is the Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, a “natural experiment” which had nearly universal participation by white males, and in which the winners received a wealth shock equal to roughly the median wealth. The result:
Ah, yes, I’ve mentioned that before!
So children get more healthcare but don’t become healthier. You don’t say.