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Bribery Strikes Out - 4/9/2010 6:56:39 PM

TheHeretic

Posts: 19100
Joined: 3/25/2007
From: California, USA
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This is a long-ish read, but fascinating. It seems New York City has a pilot program going that simply bribes welfare recipients to behave in a responsible way, and it still isn't working.

Opportunity NYC - Family Rewards

A few choice snips:

Randomly selected low-income parents of elementary- and middle-school students in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan are paid $25 each month that their child has a 95 percent school attendance record; high school students with a low-income parent in the program receive $50 a month for a similar attendance rate. Elementary- and middle-school students who make progress on annual academic tests net their parents $300 and $350, respectively. High school students get $600 each year that they accumulate 11 course credits (the bare minimum to stay on track to graduate) and another $600 for each New York State Regents exam that they pass. Parents are paid $25 for attending a parent-teacher conference or discussing their child’s test results with a teacher; they receive $50 for getting their child a library card. Taking advantage of taxpayer-subsidized Medicaid services, such as free medical checkups, brings a $200 annual windfall; simply maintaining free Medicaid insurance earns the recipient $20 a month. Working full-time earns an additional $150 a month beyond the existing salary. Seeking education and training while working at least ten hours a week could net a parent $3,000 over three years.

Contrary to the expectations of both its supporters and critics, the Bloomberg experiment had almost no effect on its participants’ behavior. Last month, MDRC (a welfare-research organization that operates the Family Rewards demonstration) published an interim report on the program’s first two years; the findings were stunning. The program had no effect on students’ attendance rates compared with those of students in the control group; it had no effect on average test scores or academic proficiency rates; it had no effect on high school students’ overall accumulation of course credits or successfully passed Regents exams; it had only a negligible effect on the rate at which parents sought a free annual checkup for themselves or their children compared with parents in the control group; and it had a negative effect on the rate at which parents sought education or training for themselves.

Two possible policy conclusions follow from the hypothesis that social and cognitive disorganization prevented participants from exploiting the reward structure. The first is: Do nothing. If paying a mother to take her nine-year-old to school every day induces no behavior change in her, it may be time to give up the notion that government programs can erase social and economic stratification. There is a substratum at the bottom of society that will never be raised up by outside intervention. “The premise of conditional cash transfers is that the stresses of poverty cause people to make choices that are not in their long-term interest,” MDRC president Gordon Berlin said at the press conference announcing the interim results. He may have it backward. It is the inability of some people to make choices in their long-term interest that causes poverty, as sociologist Edward Banfield argued four decades ago in The Unheavenly City. The poor have short time horizons, Banfield wrote, the rich, very long ones. No external force can change those psychological dispositions.

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