Grantcoulson's Blog

     Ontario, in spite of record deficits has recently put out money for all-day kindergarten and announced the subsidization of wind farms and electricity-generating solar technologies. The farther north one goes, the less sense solar generation makes and it makes no sense in the best of latitudes. Ontario and California, apparently, never met a trendy idea they didn’t cotton to and find worth of spending money on.

    “Those who support the Ontario government’s new all-day kindergarten plan may be sobered by the US government’s recent evaluation of its Head Start program. Conceived in the mid-sixties as part of the war against poverty, the Head Start program aims to boost the school readiness of low-income children – just as all-day kindergarten is promised to do for Ontario.

    Comparing students who had been randomly assigned to Head Start with students who had not, the researchers found virtually no differences – cognitive, behavioural, or emotional – at the end of grade 1. This despite an enormously expensive program that includes medical, dental, and mental health care; nutrition services; and efforts to work with parents to foster their children’s development.

    Do we really want to spend an extra couple of billion dollars a year on a program that is unlikely to affect student success while simultaneously pushing the province further into the red and enhancing the power of its teachers’ unions?” Malkin Dare.

    All-day kindergarten is very expensive, but at least it doesn’t work.

    Himalayan glaciers are safe. In another IPCC debacle, they will not melt by 2035.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

Effective programs

    This book has established four facts, 1) There are very powerful and well researched programs which work quite well to solve real human problems. These programs represent genuine progress in the social sciences, 2) The most useful programs are those used the least frequently, 3) The most frequently used programs are of little value, 4) The programs of little value almost always take place in situations where government finances the operation, directly or otherwise. This chapter will summarize the reasons for this state of affairs, using effective psychology to explain why polgrams are ineffective. This inevitable impotence lives within all government systems, but this final chapter will formally place ineffectiveness in the context of rewards or, as the economists call them, incentive structures. If the hypothesis is correct, as millennia of observation suggest it is, no progress will be made until the consumer can hire and fire the producer and the producer receives no subsidies or preferential treatment, but only what he earns from unforced interchange with the customer.

    From these four essential  facts come  two main themes. The first is that there is an inventory of extremely successful programs. The second is that successful programs aren’t used because of the wrong incentive structure for those who provide the service. The unavoidable infirmity of government operations is not confined to social sciences programs, but social sciences programs are what this book is about. Most government social services are so ineffective that they are no better than nothing. Only those which “park” people safely, such as education or criminal rehabilitation, can be said to be successful to the minor extent of babysitting.

    Every effective program will have many elements. If any of these components is missing, the program will be less effective. The lack of a few of these factors will render the program useless so that it is easy to run an unsuccessful program which looks like a successful one by failing to implement a few essential parts. This produces the pseudo-program or the Something Like It impostor program. The most important element that the present analysis requires is that payoff be linked to success providing the engine for all effectiveness. Any program without this link will have a low probability of usefulness.

    Any operation can go wrong at many points. The first is in the assumptions of the program itself, reflected in its design, and the second is in the program’s implementation which can fail for many reasons, among which are lack of training, lack of oversight, or lack of a manual to ensure proper implementation.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

This entry was posted on January 20, 2010 at 2:23 am and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.