The Magic Bureaucrat and His Riverside Miracle | Hacker News Reader

The Magic Bureaucrat and His Riverside Miracle

99percentinvisible.org

80 pointsjcbeard26 comments

The Iron Law of Program evaluation: "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero"; the stainless steel law: "the better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero."

http://www.gwern.net/docs/1987-rossi

> Neither the federal government nor the states that ran the welfare-to-work programs had the political will to rethink the programs, which they had worked already to reform.

This is an under-appreciated constraint on government-run welfare programs and other government-run charities.

The larger problem – providing welfare and other forms of charity – is, of course, huge, complex, and possibly impossible-to-solve (completely).

Most political leaders are focused on making their problems someone else's problem. We tend to overweigh the amount of "thought" going into these things.

In this case, you had an expensive benefit that was politically unpopular with just about everyone and very expensive to local government (who provides the workforce and shares costs). Welfare to work "fixed" that, and at the end of the day, most of the people who fall off the wagon end up on the Social Security Disability rolls.

All the stakeholders are happy:

* Recipients are happy - They get their money, and deal with less bullshit once their get the benefit.

* People who get off of government supports are happy. They have a job.

* Local politicians are happy - Social Security pays for everything, their share goes away.

* Local voters are happy - "We're not paying for those freeloaders. Derp."

If all the stakeholders are happy, the solution is good, right?

Or perhaps not all the stakeholders really are happy?

Well, it's partly a problem of shifting the problem to a much larger one that affects much more people, which allows the original stakeholders to shift responsibility. The new problem includes the entire State or US population as a stakeholder, and they are not happy that the burden has been shifted to them.

Put another way, local pain is spread throughout a much larger area, allowing a more average level of burden overall (which helps heavily affected areas), but more importantly allows hiding of the cost for the local area, so local stakeholders are "happier", if by happier you mean they are now upset about the same thing under a different guise, which they no longer see as their own responsibility.

The problem is that over time the miracle has proven to be largely a fluke of the labor market at the time (there was a large demand for low skill workers when the program was started) and people who went through the former style of retrain and reeducate do better over time. In that case I don't think the solution can be called good since it has poorer results than what it replaced.

Read the article: recipients (and people who formerly received assistance) are not happy. The opposite of what you write is true--they have to deal with more onerous requirements and aren't getting good jobs.

Twenty years later, sure. At the time, it was a huge deal. Lots has changed since then. People really want to work... Previously any type of income was forbidden for folks on most forms of assistance.

Unemployment and underemployment have nothing to do with welfare policy, it has to do with the wholesale shift of any low/moderate skill job that pays well to China and other places. There are only so many hospital aide and waitress jobs to go around.

What is not mentioned here is that many of the welfare recipients moved to SSDI (Social Security Disability Income). SSDI is paid for by the Federal government, so the states were incentivized to encourage this move. In fact, there are companies that specialize in applying for SSDI for welfare recipients, and charge per successful application.

There's the feel-good story, and then there's the harsh reality. The reality is, SSDI enrollment has gone up by a factor of 3X since this "welfare reform" thing passed.

I have a neighbor who is reasonably fit (he can move 100lb+ stones in his side gig as a landscaper), but he is on SSDI and collects a cool $3K/mo for doing nothing. Once you are on SSDI, it's very difficult to kick you off.

I am hoping the slow expansion of Social Security and Disability will eventually bring Universal Basic Income to the USA. This is the only likely route for the USA to get UBI, since the political forces opposing UBI are very strong. But if we can push to expand the definition of "disability" and if we can lower the age of Social Security, then eventually we can get close to something like UBI. And hopefully, once we've passed some critical threshold (which might be 30% of the population or 50% or 80% or some other number) then the public will see the need to reorganize the way these programs are run, and hopefully when that reform is enacted, we will get a real UBI, implemented in a clear and concise way.

> push to expand the definition of "disability"

I think this is very much the wrong way to do it - you're suggesting that we can leverage people's existing thinking that "disabled == deserving" to expand who is considered "deserving". Whereas it could well go the other way and leave the public thinking "disabled == skiving". Plus the fact that encouraging people to label themselves "disabled" is debilitating and demoralising.

The only way to get UBI is to break the negative associations of voluntarily not working.

Something similar happened in the UK over the past decades: statistical bubble-pushing people out of the "unemployed" category into the "disabled" category.

So there was a lot of pressure to tighten up the system. Unfortunately, this just rewards the people who are better able to negotiate it, while resulting in an increasing number of people getting e.g. letters informing them they have to return to work while in the terminal cancer ward, people found dead with no food in their stomach, and suicides by medication.

The magic of regression to the mean - "They compared these subjects to those participating in other California programs that had focused on education and training. What they found was that the effects of the 'Riverside Miracle' had all but disappeared."

The important point here is not that they compared to other programs, they did that from the start, but that the trajectory of the future benefit looked very different. It was much more beneficial in the short term, but less beneficial overall in the long term. The initial study period was just not far enough out from the beginning of the program to see this.

It's a catch-22 really, you either wait long enough to correctly identify what may be some long term detrimental effects, and if it's actually a better option many people are kept from these benefits during that period, or you move more quickly to help the people you currently have and risk a situation like this, where the eventual outcome is worse.

  > Before Townsend and Clinton, the prevailing philosophy
  > around welfare was that single mothers needed it so they 
  > could afford to stay out of the workforce and raise 
  > their children.

I wonder if it might not make sense to return to those older ways (for those parents that wish it): childcare is expensive and paying one parent not to work (or to give them the security to work part-time) may have a greater societal benefit / societal cost savings than aiming for full employment.

As someone who recently had to face this issue in my family (should one of us stay home with our daughter or should we do daycare?), I think I disagree.

Simply put, daycare is much more economically efficient than having one parent stay home with one child. In a daycare setting, one adult can care for up to 4 children. Most stay-at-home parents are NOT parenting 4 kids at once.

Like most things in the world, specialization has all sorts of advantages. Daycare is able to provide stimulation for our daughter that a parent at home would struggle to provide; when it is your full time job to take care of a number of kids, you can dedicate your time to creating stimulating and fun activities for them.

I also think there is benefit in the socialization aspects of daycare. Learning to be around other kids and be the social creatures we are is a good thing.

Now, I do believe that a dedicated stay-at-home parent can of course provide all of these things as well, it is just very difficult and inefficient... it is the same reason we all don't grow our own food and make our own clothes... division of labor and specialization are great things.

Economically efficency and childraising efficacy are not exactly the same thing... I think joeyo was alluding to the societal benefits of having one parent not work, in addition to more focused child-rearing.

Example: most teachers in this day and age pretend you (as a parent) have time to help your kids with some pretty rigorous homework, like 1-2h every evening (esp. if your kid is in the "gifted" track). Multiply by 2 or 3 and it becomes difficult to say the least. If you're a working parent, its literally impossible.

> we all don't grow our own food

I can make way better tomatoes in my backyard garden then anything you can buy at the most premium, organic farmer's market you can find. Part of the reason is that I can care for my tomatoes to an unreasonable level since I know that I am the one that's going to be eating them.

The other part of the reason is your natural tendency to believe your tomatoes are better, because you put in all that work. Bias is a funny thing

Agreed. There are plenty of studies that attest to the well-being of children who go to daycare.[1]

"Home grown tomatoes" may be best when grown by good gardeners (i.e. some people are just better with kids, including their own) and the ideal environment (parks, museums, grandparents nearby). But it's not a universal truth.

[1] http://www.cckm.ca/ChildCare/EvidenceQuestion1.htm

Exactly, the question is...how to pay for the daycare. My son went to daycare. When I went to grad school, it was half my salary. Literally half. Thankfully I had the US GI Bill, otherwise I'd have been hosed. Dealing with the churn in society, and lets not argue semantics, if you're on welfare it's likely the skills you have don't meet the market needs. We need an education system that enables people to learn to fish, while giving them fish to survive/take care of their families. Right now, that system is slightly borked. Online education is awesome at providing access to many people, the problem is getting employers to recognize the value of the degrees/certificates that result. Some do, many don't. I totally get it, the quality is all over the place. Then again, so is the quality of in-person institutions.

I agree, your bias is funny. Tomato taste is heavily influenced by a property called BRIX which can be objectively measured. The mass tomato farmer probably doesn't even own a BRIX meter while I can obsess over getting the perfect reading for my variety and picking the fruit at the exact right time.

A dedicated artisan can beat even an expert mass producer every time.

That's why I built my own car from bauxite and iron ore. And my own computer from sand, in my own silicon-refining furnace.

Yes, tomatoes.... But do you grow ALL you own food?

I certainly still do a lot of parenting for my daughter (I don't outsource all of it!), but I do use external daycare, just as I am sure you buy food from places besides your garden.

Can you grow your own food, raise your own children, educate them in all subjects, and build your own smartphones? All at the same time?

I am not a Sisyphean (someone aiming to create more work and 'full employment), but encouraging people to stay out of the labor force for 5 years has collateral impacts, such as depriving them of potentially valuable experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com