A Benchmark for Trouble

...No doubt some of this was a matter of saying what they thought the researchers wanted to hear...

...But it can't be dismissed as ineffective...

...Indeed, there have been long periods in modern history when it has seemed interested in little else...

...Welfare was a widows-and-orphans program, an emergency expedient to bail out families that, through no fault of their own, were temporarily missing a breadwinner...

...Teenage pregnancy and terrible test scores may be the most frightening conditions in an urban community, but that in itself doesn't make them the most appropriate targets for benchmark commitments or innovative experiment...

...Of course, most of us would say now that it wasn't worth it, for a whole variety of reasons...

...For more than a decade now, for example, the Ford Foundation has officially been seeking out new ideas at all levels of American government...

...I have been fascinated by the Oregon Benchmarks project from the beginning, in part because it has spawned admirers and imitators all over the country...

...Thirty years later it still distorts judgments and policies...

...It emphatically rejected the notion that the way to solve poverty was to give people money...

...In fact, I would argue that we would all be better off if every discussion of public policy solutions started with one simple question: Does this solution require the transformation of human conduct in any significant way...

...Some years there are 1,000 applicants...

...There are the technical and managerial innovations, most of which have spread quickly and successfully to places all over the country...

...The best target may be graffiti, or classroom vaccination, or even computers in the state library system...

...The 1960s are the dividing line on this issue, as on so many others...

...The ideas embodied in that report, and in countless others at the time, were the first step toward the indiscriminate conceptual confusion of reforming human souls with the much simpler tasks of improving technology, administration, and management...

...In some ways, the Great Society programs of those years were merely expansions of New Deal thinking, efforts to broaden the scope of economic redistribution beyond the aggrieved working class and into the precincts of the truly destitute...

...It can provide impressive anecdotal accounts of individual success...

...Sumptuary laws were about behavior...

...Ninety percent of the adults in the state will be doing aerobic exercises three times a week...

...It's not crazy to hold out some hope...

...But it would be obtuse not to give at least a little credit to the civil rights law...

...On crime and drugs, in fact, the state gave itself an unambiguous "F...

...All displaced workers will be guaranteed jobs at 90 percent of their previous pay...

...The Kennedy School at Harvard helps make the selections, and each program selected gets $100,000...

...Five hundred years ago, the majority of laws on the books in any community in Western Europe were called "sumptuary laws...

...In 1957, when the city of Chicago leveled a big chunk of its Near North Side to build Cabrini-Green, not only the planners and the politicians but the media shared a single assumption: The people who moved in would now commence living conventional middle-class lives...

...The public-housing programs of the 1930s were designed as an attack on the physical environment of poverty...

...Its point was to give people money, not to teach them how to spend it...

...These are things that governments all over the country have now learned to do as a matter of routine, and to depend on...

...Immunizing first-graders doesn't require that they think or behave in any particular way...

...it was an effort to stop people from drinking by taking away the product...

...Cabrini-Green, the Chicago Daily News exulted, was "a new mighty city of concrete and steel pushing off the shell of decadence...

...Its advocates would have been delighted if, in the absence of legal alcohol, Americans had lost their thirst and had come to appreciate the evils of intoxication...

...The problem it set out to deal with would be well on the way to solution...

...It was assuming the existence of solutions that the society as a whole had not yet discovered...

...It assumed that government, especially the federal government, possessed the tools to reverse this process...

...It assumes that those who have depended on welfare, confronted with the elimination of permanent subsidies for idleness, will find jobs...

...But when its object is to improve them on the inside, to motivate them to be good, to teach them to think about the long run, to stay away from drugs and crime and promiscuity, and sit quietly in school and listen to the teacher, then it is playing against very tough competition...

...Vermont had made the catalogs of libraries all over the state available for computerized searching by librarians or ordinary citizens...

...But at its root the Great Society was something more, something new...

...There are problems of public management and funding, and there are problems of human behavior...

...And it should go there with the clear understanding that, based on what we know of history and human nature, it is a long shot...

...it aimed instead to change people's behavior...

...Paul, Minnesota, he summed up his philosophy of government in two sentences that would be difficult to improve upon: Don't look for problems...

...Even the New Deal, which was the harbinger of every revolutionary change in American governance this century, was almost exclusively an experiment in economic change...

...And it was not shy about saying so...

...But Prohibition was not fundamentally an attempt to educate or motivate...

...The 1996 federal welfare law is the most recent effort to change fundamental aspects of human behavior by altering the incentive system...

...Similarly, the Kentucky courts had been pioneers in making video records of trial proceedings, eliminating the traditional dependence on expensive and sometimes unreliable stenography...

...By the year 2010, the state legislature declared, all two-year-olds will be immunized against contagious illness...

...It has nothing whatever in common with video court reporting or computerized library catalogs...

...by the end of 1996, there had been 110 winners...

...Louis County had figured out a way for patrolmen to dictate their arrest reports into a telephone network, rather than having to enter them laboriously in longhand...

...For the most part, they fit into two rather easily defined categories...

...They merely came to appreciate the monumental overconfidence with which the Great Society operated...

...It accepted the "culture of poverty" thesis— the idea that being poor gradually stripped people of their ability to function with competence in the wider world...

...A decade or so ago, when George Latimer was mayor of St...

...It requires only that the government provide the serum and the nurses, and that the kids show up at school...

...But it has made no dent in welfare dependency or joblessness at Cabrini-Green, not to speak of Chicago or inner cities in the rest of the United States...

...In the years since it started, dozens of states and cities have drawn up similar lists of long-range goals and begun keeping track of their progress...

...Louis County Police Department, the Kentucky state court system, and the public libraries of Vermont...

...Since 1986 it has written more than $10 million worth of checks in support of programs it deems successful, innovative, and easily replicated by other jurisdictions...

...The best target is something the society knows how to deal with...

...Taking a look back at those 110 choices is an enlightening exercise...

...But often they don't act as if they understand it, and that has been an endless source of confusion, frustration, and ultimate public disillusionment when programs that promise to cure intractable social ills fail, as they inevitably do...

...But problems involving human behavior are far more difficult: Immunizing those same children against having babies at the age of 14 involves transforming their ideas, beliefs, and daily conduct...

...But there is something more fundamentally interesting and important about this whole phenomenon: It symbolizes the naivete of American government at all levels in the 1990s...

...But it might work...

...It was an intensive personalized counseling service that matched up volunteer case-workers with 400 Cabrini-Green families...

...The most intractable problems of American society are entitled to some respect—more than we typically give them...

...What mattered was that they not do so in public, on the street...

...They do not deal with human conduct in any important way at all...

...That same year, 1988, the Ford Foundation also awarded $100,000 to Project Match, an ambitious program that took hard-core welfare recipients in Cabrini-Green and aimed at motivating them to find stable employment...

...In January, Oregon issued a five-year progress report...

...Even Prohibition, for all the abuse we heap on it, succeeded in its primary goal...

...The history of this century offers a whole series of instances in which government influenced personal conduct by manipulating the incentives and disincentives under which that conduct took place...

...At some level, I suppose most policy makers understand it...

...In some fields, such as job and income growth, and clean air, Oregon was just about where it wanted to be...

...Charles Morris, who worked in the Model Cities program and then testified eloquently to its failure, expressed this point better than anyone...

...But when it came to crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and a whole host of social problems, the situation had gotten worse...

...Spouse abuse will be cut in half, and teenage pregnancy by two-thirds...

...Project Match prided itself on accepting the most difficult cases—long-term public-aid dependents who were difficult even to find, let alone place...

...It was an attack on supply, not demand...

...Government has always sought to manipulate human behavior, of course...

...It was mixed...

...The authors of these programs believed that once the buildings were fixed up, behavior would take care of itself...

...The benchmark movement doesn't appreciate the differAlan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine...

...But if it were a true innovation, it would now be in use in hundreds of places, as is the computerized library catalog pioneered by Vermont...

...This was an error of more than historical significance...

...their aim was to control it, not to reform it...

...That isn't just a harder task—it's a task from an entirely different conceptual universe...

...The likelihood of this project's succeeding is an issue on which reasonable people may at this point still differ...

...Look for opportunities...

...In any case, it's beyond dispute that government does sometimes induce people to behave...

...Project Match is creative and well-meaning...

...Recognizing that fact is the beginning of public-policy wisdom...

...In 1988, for example, the Ford Foundation bestowed its generosity on the St...

...In a more positive way, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is widely assumed to have changed the way people of different races treated each other and felt about each other in the South...

...The incidence of liver disease went down...

...And they have spread like wildfire...

...The intractability of perverse human behavior may seem an obvious point—too obvious to make much fuss over...

...To say all this is not to claim that legislating behavioral change is flatly impossible...

...If it does, it belongs in a separate pile...

...Unemployed workers were presumed willing to work at almost any job if the government could create one for them...

...Prohibition has always been described as a moral crusade, and certainly it possessed an element of that...

...There is no question that in its 10 years of existence, Project Match has helped dozens of people...

...Those three governmental innovations have several things in common...

...A Benchmark for Trouble What Happens When Reformers Try to Reform People By Alan Ehrenhalt Five years ago, the government of Oregon looked far into the future and made a list of goals and commitments it called "Benchmarks...

...It is in our interest to appreciate the difference...

...After a couple of decades of being required by federal law to sit next to black people on buses and in restaurants and in public schools, white southerners began saying more tolerant things about them in polls and surveys...

...Americans consumed less alcohol in the 1920s than they had consumed before...

...The welfare and housing subsidies we now link to the conduct of the recipient were presented in their initial New Deal phase as economic initiatives...

...Poverty was not so much a lack of money, but a 'condition of helplessness, hopelessness and despair.'" Morris and other chastened veterans of the 1960s didn't necessarily disagree with the "culture of poverty" idea...

...The governments that passed them didn't mind if people harbored secret desires to dress inappropriately...

...The fact that the problem is worse than ever is no comment on Project Match or the decent people who have been trying these things in cities all over the country in the past generation...

...In the great scheme of things, they are pretty minor...

...Well into this century in America, the relationship of government and personal behavior was fundamentally what it had been in medieval Europe— a matter of commands and controls...

...And they continued to believe that right up through the construction of the urban high-rise housing projects in the 1950s...

...It is a comment on the fact that motivating hard-core welfare recipients is a problem of behavioral reform beyond the current capacity of society as a whole...

...The ultimate expression of this fact was the Prohibition experiment...

...Most of the Great Society planners who grew disillusioned with the effort did so for a common reason: They felt it made unwarranted assumptions about society's ability to improve human conduct...

...Managerial solutions are relatively easy...

...ence, and that is its signal flaw...

...The elevation of human moral standards was a task for the church, not the city council...

...The anti-poverty program," Morris wrote, "was premised on the assumption that poverty existed primarily in the heads of the poor...

...They were aimed at telling citizens what they could wear, what they could eat, and how to conduct the routine of daily life in ways that did not constitute a violation of public decency, as defined by the local elite...

...Then there are the experiments in behavioral change, few of which have had any lasting impact...

...The knowledge and methods of the behavioral sciences," a report of the National Academy of Sciences proclaimed unequivocally in 1968, "devoted as they are to an understanding of human behavior and social institutions, should be applied as effectively as possible to the programs and policy processes of the federal government...