Thursday, March 29, 2007

Bloomberg's Experiment

A while back, I started trying to formulate a description of what I called wonk-free politics. The idea was that government should become less prescriptive and more adaptive. As long as data assessment remained centralized, the actual policy approaches could be experimented on at a local level, taking into account the fact that what works in one setting may not work in another.

New York City's new experimental anti-poverty program is exactly what I had in mind. It offers poor families financial incentives (up to $5,000 a year) for meeting various behavioral goals such as school attendance, academic performance, and steady employment. The program has been privately funded, including a contribution from Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and will be assessed by comparing a randomly selected participant group to a randomly selected control group. If it produces measurable results, it will become a city-funded program next year.

Will it work? Who knows. But it's a streamlined policy proposal that can be experimentally tested. And I'll take that over a telephone book-sized white paper any day.

Posted by Judah in:  Domestic Policy   

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