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Ambrose: New hope for solving social woes

By Jay Ambrose
Published: October 11, 2014, 5:00pm

Hallelujah, fellow citizens. There’s a relatively new idea trotting about in the land. It offers great hope of addressing persistent, heartrending social problems effectively and without waste, it is backed by conservatives and liberals, and it could ultimately replace a system that has provided far too little for far too much.

You’ve seen this old way of doing things all your life. Congress figures it has the final answer to something it clearly knows little about, then combines political conniving with good intentions and delivers maybe just a portion of the intended consequences along with some harmful unintended ones. Though the cost is high, even the most obviously fruitless programs often stick around indefinitely because they develop powerful constituencies bolstering them while critics get dismissed as compassionless and mean-spirited.

And the new idea? It is sometimes boringly called social income bonds but is more interestingly identified as Pay for Success. It comes from Britain, has been tried some both there and in Australia, and works like this: A government agency identifies some social dread it wants fixed and then strikes a deal with a non-governmental organization to fix it. This outfit will then find investors to fund managers who put together ways to tackle the problem. The investors get no money back from the government until a trusted, impartial, independent entity verifies that the goals have been reached in accordance with previously determined criteria.

The mechanism can be used by federal, state and local governments to address a host of problems, ranging from homelessness to school dropouts to joblessness, and its benefits seem apparent. Those financing the projects will have clear incentives to identify top, creative leaders to make them work and, if they don’t work, the government will be out no money.

Promising evidence

While none of this has been around more than four years, there’s already some evidence it works, namely a report that an English program reduced the annual recidivism rate of prisoners released at one prison by 11 percent even as the national recidivism rate increased by 10 percent.

In this country, a couple of think tanks have grown especially excited, and the Harvard Kennedy School is developing ideas about ways to proceed. The Obama administration has shown intense interest and has been pushing ahead. A Republican and Democrat in the House of Representatives have introduced a bill providing more money for more programs. Scouting various articles, we learn that New York City has its own program to reduce recidivism rates, Massachusetts has a program to more successfully rehabilitate young prisoners, and Utah has one to better prepare children for what they will face in kindergarten.

Maybe some of this will work far less well than the English program. After all, there’s always room for much to go wrong as new ways of doing things march forward. Additionally, it is clearly true that no set of programs can refashion all the political, cultural and economic factors that contribute to the ways lives get dragged down. But there’s ample room for optimism. While the methodology did not originate here, it fits splendidly in with what we are as a people, our high-energy, imaginative, entrepreneurial, can-do spirit and charitable impulses that evince themselves in a multitude of ways. The possibilities for ultimately large achievement will surely tug on us.

The most exciting of these possibilities? It’s that we will help people out of desperate circumstances, that we will become a society with less disadvantage, less crime, less unemployment. For this to happen on a grand scale will obviously require more than Pay for Success, but this approach may contribute to still other ways in which adversarial ideologies find common ground and more new answers are located for some very old problems.


Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune. Readers may send him email at speaktojay@aol.com.

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