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Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

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Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#41

Post by shubb »

BartSaM wrote: post #28
schneems wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people who are currently homeless are not the bums you see on the side of the road. Many have assets (computers, clothes, maybe even cars) but have been temporarily displaced from a home. Usually due to unforeseen financial hardship like an unexpected medical bill, or an auto accident etc. These people don't have a safety net of family or friends they could borrow money from so they get evicted. These people may…

You are going extreme on me now. I did not say "lazy guys won't work". I said a lot of people would love to work for their benefits. I have been in this situation and hated. And I know a lot of pride people, that would not take free money. I have not said this is a solution to everything. I said, this would be a good thing and additionally should be put in the Constitution ("right to work"). I think there should be m…

Such a programme was recently tried here in the UK.

I don't know the details but friends effected mentioned:

* Being required to attend an office full time where they were monitored job searching and required to do soft skills courses, which they perceived as not useful.

* After an extended period of joblessness, being required to work for free (while recieving normal out of work benefit), for instance at a supermarket

This was critisised because:

* 'Jobless' people working for 1/4 the minimum wage displaced normal workers

* The programme encouraged people to make a high volume of inappropriate job applications. These make it harder for employers to sift candidates who actually want a job (I notice - do you want 100 angry highschool dropouts applying for your developer roles?), and reduce time and energy available to chase real leads.

* People who landed interviews for real jobs risked catastrophic penalties if they attended the interview, because the bureaucracy often failed to accept that this is what they were doing.

You could argue that this was a badly executed programme. Or that it was more focused on reducing public spending by discouraging people using their social insurance than on rehabilitating anyone. Or you could argue that aspects were good and got a bad rap.

For me, I think the nanny state can be terrifying, and that that no workplace needs people who'd rather be at home.

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#42

Post by sedachv »

BartSaM wrote: post #19

I would love to see more work-for-benefits programs. Where you are required to do some labour work for the community (cleaning wild areas, swiping side walks, planting trees etc.) in exchange for some better than average benefits. IMO everyone should be entitled to such a work. This way we would eliminate involuntary extreme poverty.

> Where you are required to do some labour work for the community (cleaning wild areas, swiping side walks, planting trees etc.) in exchange for some better than average benefits.

All of the things you listed are geared towards improving the looks and desirability of communities, which will not work to benefit the people receiving the benefits in the current US housing system because of gentrification. Forcing poor people to work to receive the equivalent of less-than-minimum-wage in benefits to drive gentrification and real estate speculation will price those people out of housing in their own neighborhoods and make their plight worse.

This is not hyperbole or hypothetical, it actually happens today in many places in the United States. There was an article in the Guardian yesterday about homeless people in Portland being jailed and then forced to work for $1 a day to destroy the homeless camps that they had lived in:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/09/portland-hom...

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#43

Post by BartSaM »

shubb wrote: post #41
BartSaM wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are going extreme on me now. I did not say "lazy guys won't work". I said a lot of people would love to work for their benefits. I have been in this situation and hated. And I know a lot of pride people, that would not take free money. I have not said this is a solution to everything. I said, this would be a good thing and additionally should be put in the Constitution ("right to work"). I think there should be m…

Such a programme was recently tried here in the UK. I don't know the details but friends effected mentioned: * Being required to attend an office full time where they were monitored job searching and required to do soft skills courses, which they perceived as not useful. * After an extended period of joblessness, being required to work for free (while recieving normal out of work benefit), for instance at a supermark…

This is another contradictory to what I said.

I said working for public good - not supermarkets etc. Working in public spaces for community benefit. That is a huge difference. Why should someone on benefits work for a private business or even public offices? That is ridiculous! They are receiving public help, they should help the public.

There is absolutely no place for the nanny state. Try not to look at things black/white.

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#45

Post by thephyber »

forgotmysn wrote: post #39
fatalogic wrote: post #12

As a former social worker I think most social programs don't work because they try to deal with multifaceted problems from a single point of action. It's like trying to fix a suspension bridge by replacing one cable while all the other cables are broken.

do you think a UBI would be a more effective way of helping people in more complex situations?

You can't talk about a hypothetical world with a UBI without making assumptions about what programs we currently have that are lost to fund the UBI.

In the most "free market" version of a UBI vision, there are no government-subsidized social workers. If you are blind, deaf, learning impaired, addicted, etc you are at the mercy of whatever help you can find by paying for it.

But there are also visions of UBI that combine it with current social services, as opposed to replacing them.

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#46

Post by pillowkusis »

An anecdotal but interesting illustration of the suprising finding that "social programs don't work": http://freakonomics.com/podcast/when-helping-hurts/

The tl;dr being in the mid 1900s when somebody actually DID try to measure the results of a mentor program for at-risk youth, they found the impact was slightly negative.

Actually fixing societal problems is a really hard problem and what actually works is often very counterintuitive. I think the whole field could do to let the data guide them better (also difficult because so many outcomes are "make people feel better", and most people are pretty bad at actually knowing how they are or will be feeling).

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#47

Post by BeetleB »

nonbel wrote: post #18
cuchoi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might not be perfect, but it is the best way we have come across.

What about actual science? Where you figure out how to get reproducible results, come up with theories to explain why those results are the way they are, then make predictions with the theories to test on new data?

>come up with theories to explain why those results are the way they are, then make predictions with the theories to test on new data?

Probably never will happen in social science, and in much of medicine. Too many confounding variables.

I'm willing to bet that if we threw away all the "knowledge" we obtained from p-tests, and stuck only to the methodology you espouse, we would know far less true stuff than we do currently (albeit we would not know a lot of false stuff).

Simply put: Even though there is a lot of noise, we do know more using these methods. And the nice thing about bad results due to misuse of statistics: Much of it is not reproducible.

Ultimately, the problem isn't the use of these statistical methods. The problem is the lack of emphasis on reproducibility.

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#48

Post by nonbel »

BeetleB wrote: post #47
nonbel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about actual science? Where you figure out how to get reproducible results, come up with theories to explain why those results are the way they are, then make predictions with the theories to test on new data?

>come up with theories to explain why those results are the way they are, then make predictions with the theories to test on new data? Probably never will happen in social science, and in much of medicine. Too many confounding variables. I'm willing to bet that if we threw away all the "knowledge" we obtained from p-tests, and stuck only to the methodology you espouse, we would know far less true stuff than we do cur…

>"Probably never will happen in social science, and in much of medicine. Too many confounding variables."

This is some kind of talking point. I'm not sure who is behind it, but it is totally false. There are tons of examples of this, especially from the pre-NHST era:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_mass_action

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17845298

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_effect

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00221309.1934.991...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2916857/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2007940/pdf/brjc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_output

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#49

Post by mobilefriendly »

protomyth wrote: post #37
schneems wrote: post #20

My S/O used to work at a company AuntBertha. They're a "search engine for social services" but they are a for-profit company (a B-Corp). Their biggest clients are hospitals and insurers. There are people called "frequent flyers" who come to the emergency room frequently and while they might only be 2% of clients they account for a huge share of costs. It's actually cheaper to hire social workers to provide these peop…

I often wish we in the US would separate out long-term medicine from insurance. It really violates any rational for insurance to have a continuous, known cost be part of that. Also, it ups the insurance cost for everyone else. I wish we had a separate drug assistance program. Something like if you are making less than 200 or 300% poverty[1] the government will pay the full cost[2] and then just pro-rate it from there…

> wish we had a separate drug assistance program.

Already exists.

https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/prescription-drugs/index.h...

Re: Investigating a ten-year-old estimate that “most social programmes don’t work”

#50

Post by matt4077 »

nonbel wrote: post #18
cuchoi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might not be perfect, but it is the best way we have come across.

What about actual science? Where you figure out how to get reproducible results, come up with theories to explain why those results are the way they are, then make predictions with the theories to test on new data?

"Actual science" tends to move towards empiricism, not theory-building. See for example the evidence-based medicine movement, or effective altruism.

Besides that–how is what you're proposing different from the status quo? Every social program ever was born from a theory, i. e. "education creates agency, and is therefore a better investment than direct money grants".

It just happens to be a lot more difficult to run randomised experiments in sociology, because it is (by definition) the study of very large, interconnected systems. Societies just don't lend themselves to the sort of reductionism that gave us all the advances in physics and mathematics.

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