Incentives and the Social Sciences–Summary

 

    The choice isn’t, "Rules or no rules?" The choice is, "Rules made and enforced by voluntary contractual arrangements, or rules made and enforced by coercive agencies that can’t go out of business?" Mises Daily:  Monday, December 28, 2009 by Robert P. Murphy.

    I review four areas of the social sciences in: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope. 

    In education, the favored programs, or set of programs is a combination of Direct Instruction, Precision Teaching, Programmed Instruction, Personalized System of Instruction and Behavior Modification. Direct Instruction, by itself, has been shown to be vastly superior to any of the programs used in public education.

    In psychotherapy, the exemplar program is by Azrin and Belasel, which so far as I can determine, has not even been replicated, much less used.

    In drug and alcohol rehabilitation, exemplar programs are again based on those pioneered by Azrin and his associates, these programs are rarely used, but have at least been replicated.

    In criminal rehabilitation, the program by Larson was chosen, although there are several others which are similar. Again, these programs are rarely used.

    The reason that exemplary programs are not used is simple. The overwhelming percentage of programs are run under the aegis of government agencies and success is irrelevant. Cherchez les Contingencies.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson

Advertisement

One Response to “Incentives and the Social Sciences–Summary”

  1. palisadesk Says:

    “Cherchez les contingencies” — I love it. Have you trademarked it;-)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.