It would be good to get your read on whether this is absence of evidence, or evidence of absence. To me (I work in stats) it sounds like the former, but the general reader could get the impression of the latter, especially given the title. What's your take?
Thank you for including such a thorough and approachable conclusion. As someone with no background in statistics, it helped me understand the content.
Genetic mutations seem to have similar properties (by analogy). Most don't 'work', but evolution still uses random mutation to build better organisms. Progress is sensitive to the degree of selection pressure: too small, and unfit organisms will reproduce; too great, and even fit organisms will frequently die.
I wonder if there's an empirical way to determine the optimal degree of selection pressure (where "optimal" means the degree which most rapidly improves the organisms) and whether the same logic could be applied to determine what fraction of underperforming social programs to cut and replace with new programs.
Criticism: (buttering up first, as all good criticisms do: I give to the Give Directly UBI test through Effective Altruism Australia, basically because I read Doing good Better, and am very pro what you are all doing with 80,000 hours specifically).
I think the mistake of the article is that you assume people have a context for your asking these sorts of questions. I know it is tedious to start with the context every. time. but without some context, the articles end up preaching a little to the converted, or risk putting people offside. They are also impossible to share, which is a shame because I think the basic premise (do good better) is really easy to sell, and the methodology really helpful.
I think the title is phrased badly. You wouldn't say "most businesses don't work", because business is obviously doing just fine. Yet it's true, since most businesses fail in the first few years - 80% by some calculations. And you'd be laughed out of the room if you used this statistic to argue that businesses aren't working.
"So is it fair to say 'most social programmes don’t work?'
I think this is a little ambiguous and potentially misleading. Individual projects mostly don’t work, but whole areas often do have a positive impact. So, if you pick an intervention at random, then on average your impact will be positive, because there’s a small but important chance of you picking one of the good ones."
Can we fix this to the proper, non clickbait title of "What fraction of social programmes don’t work?"
"4 Reasons Why The Answer To This Complicated Social Science Question is More Subtle Than You Think - The Conceptual Clarification in 3 Will Shock You"
The big secret is social programs are largely to promote stability and prevent civil unrest. The effectiveness at the stated intention is a secondary concern.
We probably are better off with a basic income style system where people can opt-into public (or private) education, public (or private) medical services, and the balance is paid out to them in cash every month. The cost being recouped via cutting existing programs and raising tax revenues to recapture 100% of the value once you have a 6 figure household income.
"Is it fair to say that it's hard to create good social programs? And we should all remember that some social programs work far better than most people realize."
Something like that might not give the wrong impression...?
The way of telling if it works is: statistical significance.
This "approach" to research was debunked as pseudoscience long ago (eg here is one from 1967[1], and that wasn't the first)... So the answer is: no one knows what works or doesn't, (edit: at least not based on the usual claimed method of drawing conclusions from the data).
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.
>"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:
"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.
"Evidence based medicine" is your best example of science? No, that does not meet the definition I gave. RCT's are not the gold standard of research (how did solar system astronomy get so good with only a couple dozen objects?).
We discuss this somewhat in the post - the line at which you say something "works" is arbitrary. We explore how the choice of definition changes the stat.
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.
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.
Very good point. The assumptions I was implying were that a UBI would replace the broad, disjointed social welfare programs with a centralized, singular service that's relatively equal but weighted by need.
It would help some people but for most of the people I worked with money was more a symptom of their issues than a root cause.
Lets say we have a child who is in 5th grade who reads at a 1st grade level. Most programs will say oh well he/she just needs more education so they create after school tutoring. That's great but there are so many things that can be hindering that child's ability to read. The real root may be a medical issue, family issue, cultural issue, structural or a combination of one or more.
People aren't equations, you can't just input x and expect y.
>People aren't equations, you can't just input x and expect y.
People react in mostly predictable ways to certain environments and situations. We're largely deterministic state machines. This kind of mystical thinking devalues the importance of a scientific, objective, data based approach to solving human problems. We aren't an exception to science.
I'd like objective data that sustains your argument then. I think approaching problems, including social problems, as rationally as possible is important. I, similarly, believe that leveraging all available data is important. However, as far as social issues are concerned, American psychology and western psychology in general have shown themselves to be inadequate when addressing the universal set of humans and not the western set. We've seen evidence of this not only in western vs. east-asian psychologies but also in the psychological treatment of refugees from areas like Sudan. I appreciate that there might come a day when human psychology is a solved problem, but unless that problem is currently solved then it seems like leaving room for mysticism is more pragmatic because it permits us to identify, and adapt around, areas of uncertainty while still providing some amount of care.
Admitting uncertainty or having probabilities isn't unscientific, but saying something is outside the realm of normal physics with no evidence is. Sure, psychology as we know it may be flawed, but retail, advertisers, etc. have a pretty good track record of systematically achieving results based on predictable human behaviors.
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.
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 currently have a job but no place to stay when they leave form work.
Many of the successful homeless programs are "housing first" programs. Search for "colorado homes first program" to read more about it. In many cases it's also the cheapest way to do it as well. If you want to organize a group of currently homeless people to do some task, you have to coordinate travel, pick them up, have a van or a truck, hire a coordinator to plan the events and oversee them, and then at then on top of it pay for housing. It's actually cheaper just to provide housing.
Anyway, just wanted to say the issue goes deeper than "why won't these lazybones work".
And attracted every homeless person from 3 states around.
The situation is so bad(both in terms of crime, and total population) that our state legislators are non-ironically talking about calling the national guard. To clear out camps where violence is becoming a problem.
They already totally cut to the ground the shrubbery near one major camp because there were multiple assaults and a rape using those bushes as cover.
If the biggest problem with the program is a prisoner's dilemma issue like this it seems we need to figure out how to get everyone to cooperate instead of defect. We've done it for other issues.
It would require taking the evidence gleaned from a local trial and applying it at a federal (nation wide) level (since that's where the immigration bounds are).
Sadly that would be "socialism" so it's not politically popular... damned legacy of the red scare.
So basically the solution works - the local solution was fixed.
The extra local issue - national homelessness - ended up suffocating the resources made to solve a much smaller program.
So the solution seems to be to scale up this system in other cities and distribute the load.
Again, assuming that people make a genuine effort to do this, as opposed to deciding "lets put a homeless housing center in the middle of nowhere. We can then say that homeless don't work while discrediting the idea and earning political points with my base"
There are a few other complications, but you're right in general. And the rat park experiments tend to suggest that improving quality of life will reduce the temptation to use, so when I share this anecdote I'm not saying it's hopeless, I'm trying to find a route out of a local bad state.
What does one do about people who want to abuse drugs, and will not move into housing with a no-drug use clause attached? I recently helped a guy move out of his free housing because dope was more important to him than a roof over his head. Cleaned out his whole appt, and moved dropped him off a block from the camps I mentioned above.
I help feed this guy most weeks, and when he's sober he's really cool, but he's consciously choosing dope over a better life. I can't really force him into treatment, nor do I really think it would help unless he wanted them.
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 multiple social programs and people should be able to choose ones.
Programs that are performing best should get more funds, the ones that are the worst should be removed.
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.
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.
I'm interested in seeing something as you've described too. All the little tasks that would make a community look really attractive, but that are ignored by councils. The sort of things you see industrious, elderly (often migrant) men do around their own gardens when they have endless spare time. Not back-breaking labour or anything especially unenjoyable, but tasks for people who have pride in having things look presentable.
There is though a workforce of gardeners employed by local governments and individuals that you would be displacing. Perhaps from a good job onto the work programme.
I do not see it would happen on a large scale. Those work-to-benefit could work on things, that local government cannot afford or are not planning to do. Even cleaning wild areas which are a serious problem in some parts of woods for example. Or cleaning beaches, or planting trees in remote areas. There are those things that simply are hard to achieve when you are tight on a budget already.
No, this would be in addition to that. Often the employed gardeners have maintenance schedules meaning they have limited time in each area. I know there are countless areas near me, my commute and my office that would benefit from a bit of extra attention.
I think this is a great idea, and we should apply it to insurance benefits in other areas. Go to the doctor? You have to clean the gutters in a street for a few hours. Claim for stolen property? You have to help paint fences. House burns down? Get on those overalls. Car accident? Time to dig a hole.
You wouldn't have to do it, you just wouldn't get full payment unless you did.
> 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:
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 people with the things they actually need (i.e. treating the causes) instead of the symptoms.
Here's an example. Guy is low income. Cannot afford food & insulin for diabetes. So he chooses to not buy insulin and the food he does buy is high in sugar (think cheap whitebread). Goes into diabetic shock and gets sent to the emergency room. Instead it's much cheaper for everyone involved if a social worker finds out the problem, helps him research some foodbanks to cover his nutritional needs or gets him on a discount insulin program. It's not free, but it's much cheaper than trying to clean up a mess after the fact.
Am I "op" here? I live in America so it's all I've ever known.
Another example involving insulin: The client got free insulin but did not pick it up. It was only after a social worker dug into the issue found out the client did not have a fridge and so when picking up the insulin the pharmacist said "do you have a fridge", they said "no" and walked away. The social worker found a program with home depot to get a free mini fridge.
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. Since we are talking long term drugs, its by definition something that would be applicable to preexisting conditions. I worry that it will not take the steps necessary to control fraud or run out of money like IHS.
I mean for everyone in the US not just those on Medicaid. Replacing insurance but still able to use Medical Savings Accounts to purchase my share of the drugs.
This is a large problem in Canada as well. A relative is an ER nurse and she has endless amounts to say about the number of people who come in for these kinds of reasons, or less. The hospital she works at is in a town that was economically decimated in the late 80's and only just started to recover. The number of people who go into emergency because of alcoholism, self-neglect, loneliness, and of course (probably encompassing the rest) mental illness is staggering. She says it's one thing to know their names, but it's bad when you know how their [grand-/]children are doing in school, and who visited or did not visit last week. She is not shy about how much she thinks that social programs need to be expanded in accessibility. I agree.
From what I understand, much of the medical world feels the same way. That's one thing I would certainly add to Canadian health care -- some kind of minimum of public mental health and social work. There are a lot of programs already that don't attach a fee for the patient/subject, but they're not necessarily common knowledge or accessible to people as a "walk in and book" sort of service.
edit: To wit, I think the reasons social programs don't work is inaccessibility to those who really need them, lack of familiarity with them, and taboo (but this last one is probably another discussion). I think right now we need more of them, and they need to have access to proper resources and that their end benefit to society would be substantial. I'd be interested in seeing some projections surrounding that to be sure.
I participated in a social program funded by the gov in the 90's as the data person. It was a combined early childhood education / social service program. I won't discuss what I thought of the outcomes or the cost / benefits, but I think there is a piece a lot of people miss.
There are consultants in DC that take all the data from a program and summarize it. They have a contract and aren't always the folks who have the assistance contract on the grant. People are sadly, people, and sometimes the summarizing folks have some pretty powerful incentives to put a spin on the numbers, drop certain grants, and well, other things. Life is incentive based after all.
When I look at the outcomes, I often wish there was a way to get some anonymized raw take because I am a bit mistrustful of third-party analysis particularly when they aren't up on simple things like geographical and economic differences. Plus the tendency to roll all the results in one set of numbers ignores how big the USA is and that San Francisco is a bit different than Salt Lake City or Rosebud.
PS: one thing, it is amazing how many children start life with hearing problems - fix that early and save the rest of us a lot of money. Plus, fatalogic has it right in my book, life is complicated, one axis of action doesn't really cut it.
I'm glad that you mentioned hearing problems (ear infections specifically). They have been shown to affect child development in ways that aren't immediately intuitive, like hyperactivity and their ability to pick up phonics [1]. That obviously has an impact on their early learning, and consequently the rest of their lives.
Yeah, new parent really need to make sure they get the screenings and be very aware of their child's hearing. This can slow your child's development in the critical 0-3 years. This is not a grow out of it thing, quite the opposite in fact.
I appreciate the last section's perspective: that giving to the causes best supported by evidence, though very helpful, does not guarantee 10x (social) returns since measurement is imperfect and some big returns are likely from things that aren't fully studied yet. Besides how that makes sense in its own right, it sort of pushes folks to recognize that that the many useful strategies the effective altruism community has come up with still aren't a silver bullet for aid effectiveness.
Recognizing there's no silver bullet seems especially relevant to me because there's a folk interpretation of "most social programs don't work" that's more like "we spend tens of billions of dollars trying to alleviate poverty; why isn't it gone now?". And _that_ question only seems to make sense because people misjudge the size of the challenge relative to the amount spent on it and the returns you can expect from that money.
The U.S.'s yearly global health budget, if spent entirely on sub-Saharan Africa, would be under $20/person, and you don't, say, raise average income $10k with $20, no matter how wisely or creatively you invest it. Demanding that kind of return from charity is like expecting every investment to perform like early money in Google, except, perhaps, that the impact of your demand is less on the investor and more on the global poor.
Separately, it seems like a shame to me that in fields where we do have strong signs of a high multiplier, like bednets or deworming, the opportunities haven't already been fully exploited by governments and billionaires. Some of it is that large spenders are making their choices through a process much different from someone like GiveWell's, but some is also that governments, for example, spend a lot less of their budgets on non-strategic global-health aid than most think (<1% for the US). More about aid spending here: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/02/10/38387558...
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).
I've long had this thought about charity itself, it seems that a lot of charity is propping up bits and pieces of capitalism so we don't look at the root causes of why we "need" charity in the first place.
On one hand it's great that children around the US can have life saving surgery because so many donated to their cause, on the other hand would we all be better off donating to a lobbying cause for single-payer healthcare?
If we could get that passed, every child in the US could have life saving surgery if needed and it wouldn't be a matter of whether or not their community is charitable enough.
This is silly. The biggest social programs in America are Social Security (basically a UBI for old folks), Medicare (health care), and the #1 economic development success of all time, public education. The kind of social programs they're talking about in this article are so unambitious it's hardly surprising their results aren't measurable.
You are 100% correct if you have zero context. Let me provide some context.
If you look at https://80000hours.org/about/ their goal is to help people make the world better, by a combination of career and charitable donations.
> Our aim is to help as many people as possible lead high-impact careers.
> We do this by providing career advice for talented young people who want to have a social impact.
Given this context, several questions arise:
1. What to give to?
2. Which areas to give to? Health? Social? Education?
3. Which countries?
4. Which programs that you can give to have positive outcome? How do you decide which to give to?
That's the context of question being asked.
The specific article is about an issue that, in this community, is a big question, and 80,000 hours (a YC non-profit BTW) tries to quantify the truth of this common - in their sphere - belief.
It is not an attack, or a denial of any of the things you stated, just a different context for inquiry.
People are failing to recognize that it doesnt matter what percentage of programs fail/succeed. The metric that matters is the ROI on programs. If 25% of programs succeed, giving a 100x ROI, then they more than make up for the failed programs.
Unless we know a better way (UBI seems promising) to help people, then programs seem to be the best bet.
The problem is that people hear "75% of programs fail" and think "Dont start programs". This is like saying "75% of businesses fail therefore do not start a business" .
I would imagine most of them can't, it amounts to trying to bail out the ocean, one bucket at a time.
In less hyperbolic terms, many of these programs are attempting to tackle intractable societal problems when - even for ones that are relatively well-funded - the cost of organizational overhead, limited ability to cause lasting impact outside of their specific area of influence, etc., reduce what they do to a lot of good intentions and few meaningful results.
Depending on the "clientele," it amounts to attempting to provide assistance to people who really can't or don't want to be helped (hard drugs and the chronic homeless, for example).
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadGenetic mutations seem to have similar properties (by analogy). Most don't 'work', but evolution still uses random mutation to build better organisms. Progress is sensitive to the degree of selection pressure: too small, and unfit organisms will reproduce; too great, and even fit organisms will frequently die.
I wonder if there's an empirical way to determine the optimal degree of selection pressure (where "optimal" means the degree which most rapidly improves the organisms) and whether the same logic could be applied to determine what fraction of underperforming social programs to cut and replace with new programs.
I think the mistake of the article is that you assume people have a context for your asking these sorts of questions. I know it is tedious to start with the context every. time. but without some context, the articles end up preaching a little to the converted, or risk putting people offside. They are also impossible to share, which is a shame because I think the basic premise (do good better) is really easy to sell, and the methodology really helpful.
Maybe a prominent push of https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/#how-to-w... front and centre, 1st paragraph would help? Or perhaps a sentence or two aimed at someone for whom this article is their first exposure to your site/concepts?
"So is it fair to say 'most social programmes don’t work?'
I think this is a little ambiguous and potentially misleading. Individual projects mostly don’t work, but whole areas often do have a positive impact. So, if you pick an intervention at random, then on average your impact will be positive, because there’s a small but important chance of you picking one of the good ones."
Can we fix this to the proper, non clickbait title of "What fraction of social programmes don’t work?"
We probably are better off with a basic income style system where people can opt-into public (or private) education, public (or private) medical services, and the balance is paid out to them in cash every month. The cost being recouped via cutting existing programs and raising tax revenues to recapture 100% of the value once you have a 6 figure household income.
Something like that might not give the wrong impression...?
This "approach" to research was debunked as pseudoscience long ago (eg here is one from 1967[1], and that wasn't the first)... So the answer is: no one knows what works or doesn't, (edit: at least not based on the usual claimed method of drawing conclusions from the data).
[1] http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
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.
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
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.
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.
Lets say we have a child who is in 5th grade who reads at a 1st grade level. Most programs will say oh well he/she just needs more education so they create after school tutoring. That's great but there are so many things that can be hindering that child's ability to read. The real root may be a medical issue, family issue, cultural issue, structural or a combination of one or more.
People aren't equations, you can't just input x and expect y.
People react in mostly predictable ways to certain environments and situations. We're largely deterministic state machines. This kind of mystical thinking devalues the importance of a scientific, objective, data based approach to solving human problems. We aren't an exception to science.
Many of the successful homeless programs are "housing first" programs. Search for "colorado homes first program" to read more about it. In many cases it's also the cheapest way to do it as well. If you want to organize a group of currently homeless people to do some task, you have to coordinate travel, pick them up, have a van or a truck, hire a coordinator to plan the events and oversee them, and then at then on top of it pay for housing. It's actually cheaper just to provide housing.
Anyway, just wanted to say the issue goes deeper than "why won't these lazybones work".
The situation is so bad(both in terms of crime, and total population) that our state legislators are non-ironically talking about calling the national guard. To clear out camps where violence is becoming a problem.
They already totally cut to the ground the shrubbery near one major camp because there were multiple assaults and a rape using those bushes as cover.
Sadly that would be "socialism" so it's not politically popular... damned legacy of the red scare.
The extra local issue - national homelessness - ended up suffocating the resources made to solve a much smaller program.
So the solution seems to be to scale up this system in other cities and distribute the load.
Again, assuming that people make a genuine effort to do this, as opposed to deciding "lets put a homeless housing center in the middle of nowhere. We can then say that homeless don't work while discrediting the idea and earning political points with my base"
What does one do about people who want to abuse drugs, and will not move into housing with a no-drug use clause attached? I recently helped a guy move out of his free housing because dope was more important to him than a roof over his head. Cleaned out his whole appt, and moved dropped him off a block from the camps I mentioned above.
I help feed this guy most weeks, and when he's sober he's really cool, but he's consciously choosing dope over a better life. I can't really force him into treatment, nor do I really think it would help unless he wanted them.
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 multiple social programs and people should be able to choose ones.
Programs that are performing best should get more funds, the ones that are the worst should be removed.
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.
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.
You wouldn't have to do it, you just wouldn't get full payment unless you did.
What does that solve, what purpose does it serve?
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...
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 people with the things they actually need (i.e. treating the causes) instead of the symptoms.
Here's an example. Guy is low income. Cannot afford food & insulin for diabetes. So he chooses to not buy insulin and the food he does buy is high in sugar (think cheap whitebread). Goes into diabetic shock and gets sent to the emergency room. Instead it's much cheaper for everyone involved if a social worker finds out the problem, helps him research some foodbanks to cover his nutritional needs or gets him on a discount insulin program. It's not free, but it's much cheaper than trying to clean up a mess after the fact.
http://insulinnation.com/treatment/why-walmart-insulins-aren...
In the US of all places, there isn't a good argument for the very, very slightly modified newer insulins to cost so much more.
(these points are alluded to in the article, just want to mention them here, as well)
Another example involving insulin: The client got free insulin but did not pick it up. It was only after a social worker dug into the issue found out the client did not have a fridge and so when picking up the insulin the pharmacist said "do you have a fridge", they said "no" and walked away. The social worker found a program with home depot to get a free mini fridge.
Welcome to America. Land of the free.
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. Since we are talking long term drugs, its by definition something that would be applicable to preexisting conditions. I worry that it will not take the steps necessary to control fraud or run out of money like IHS.
1) http://familiesusa.org/product/federal-poverty-guidelines
2) obviously some upper limits apply https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/prescription-drugs/pharmac...
Already exists.
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/prescription-drugs/index.h...
From what I understand, much of the medical world feels the same way. That's one thing I would certainly add to Canadian health care -- some kind of minimum of public mental health and social work. There are a lot of programs already that don't attach a fee for the patient/subject, but they're not necessarily common knowledge or accessible to people as a "walk in and book" sort of service.
edit: To wit, I think the reasons social programs don't work is inaccessibility to those who really need them, lack of familiarity with them, and taboo (but this last one is probably another discussion). I think right now we need more of them, and they need to have access to proper resources and that their end benefit to society would be substantial. I'd be interested in seeing some projections surrounding that to be sure.
There are consultants in DC that take all the data from a program and summarize it. They have a contract and aren't always the folks who have the assistance contract on the grant. People are sadly, people, and sometimes the summarizing folks have some pretty powerful incentives to put a spin on the numbers, drop certain grants, and well, other things. Life is incentive based after all.
When I look at the outcomes, I often wish there was a way to get some anonymized raw take because I am a bit mistrustful of third-party analysis particularly when they aren't up on simple things like geographical and economic differences. Plus the tendency to roll all the results in one set of numbers ignores how big the USA is and that San Francisco is a bit different than Salt Lake City or Rosebud.
PS: one thing, it is amazing how many children start life with hearing problems - fix that early and save the rest of us a lot of money. Plus, fatalogic has it right in my book, life is complicated, one axis of action doesn't really cut it.
[1] https://www.hslda.org/strugglinglearner/CraftDocs/EarInfect....
Recognizing there's no silver bullet seems especially relevant to me because there's a folk interpretation of "most social programs don't work" that's more like "we spend tens of billions of dollars trying to alleviate poverty; why isn't it gone now?". And _that_ question only seems to make sense because people misjudge the size of the challenge relative to the amount spent on it and the returns you can expect from that money.
The U.S.'s yearly global health budget, if spent entirely on sub-Saharan Africa, would be under $20/person, and you don't, say, raise average income $10k with $20, no matter how wisely or creatively you invest it. Demanding that kind of return from charity is like expecting every investment to perform like early money in Google, except, perhaps, that the impact of your demand is less on the investor and more on the global poor.
Separately, it seems like a shame to me that in fields where we do have strong signs of a high multiplier, like bednets or deworming, the opportunities haven't already been fully exploited by governments and billionaires. Some of it is that large spenders are making their choices through a process much different from someone like GiveWell's, but some is also that governments, for example, spend a lot less of their budgets on non-strategic global-health aid than most think (<1% for the US). More about aid spending here: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/02/10/38387558...
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).
On one hand it's great that children around the US can have life saving surgery because so many donated to their cause, on the other hand would we all be better off donating to a lobbying cause for single-payer healthcare?
If we could get that passed, every child in the US could have life saving surgery if needed and it wouldn't be a matter of whether or not their community is charitable enough.
If you look at https://80000hours.org/about/ their goal is to help people make the world better, by a combination of career and charitable donations.
> Our aim is to help as many people as possible lead high-impact careers.
> We do this by providing career advice for talented young people who want to have a social impact.
Given this context, several questions arise:
1. What to give to?
2. Which areas to give to? Health? Social? Education?
3. Which countries?
4. Which programs that you can give to have positive outcome? How do you decide which to give to?
That's the context of question being asked.
The specific article is about an issue that, in this community, is a big question, and 80,000 hours (a YC non-profit BTW) tries to quantify the truth of this common - in their sphere - belief.
It is not an attack, or a denial of any of the things you stated, just a different context for inquiry.
The problem is that people hear "75% of programs fail" and think "Dont start programs". This is like saying "75% of businesses fail therefore do not start a business" .
In less hyperbolic terms, many of these programs are attempting to tackle intractable societal problems when - even for ones that are relatively well-funded - the cost of organizational overhead, limited ability to cause lasting impact outside of their specific area of influence, etc., reduce what they do to a lot of good intentions and few meaningful results.
Depending on the "clientele," it amounts to attempting to provide assistance to people who really can't or don't want to be helped (hard drugs and the chronic homeless, for example).