My reading of the North Carolina experiment is that it provides little support for either side.

The question of whether to provide those benefits is an important one. But perhaps the answers should depend more on social values than on macroeconomic implications. After all, the point of unemployment insurance isn’t to boost the economy as a whole, but rather to ensure that an unlucky few don’t shoulder an unbearable burden. Whether we’re doing that is a question more of values than of economic statistics.

Let’s dig into the details on North Carolina. The policy shift was particularly striking because most of the cost of providing benefits to the long-term unemployed had been paid for by the federal government. Effectively North Carolina refused to allow the federal government to put money into the pockets of those who had been without work for a long time. The stated goal was giving the unemployed more incentive to find new work.

Proponents of the policy say it succeeded. They point to the fact that the state’s economy has done quite well since the change. Employment grew by 1.5 percent over the six months since the change took effect. While this growth rate is healthy, what matters here is whether it is better or worse than it would have been without such a policy shift.

To shed light on that issue, we need a comparison group: an otherwise similar state that made no such change. The most obvious possibility is South Carolina, a neighbor that has a broadly similar industry mix. Over the same period, nonfarm payrolls in South Carolina grew by 1.6 percent. These numbers are based on a survey of employers, which has some statistical noise to it. But an alternative and more reliable data set — known to aficionados as the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which includes a head count from nearly every employer — shows a similar pattern. Employment grew by 1.3 percent in North Carolina and 1.5 percent in South Carolina, according to this census.