Five years ago, the government of Oregon looked far into the future and made a list of goals and commitments it called “Benchmarks.” By the year 2010, the state legislature declared, all two-year-olds will be immunized against contagious illness. All displaced workers will be guaranteed jobs at 90 percent of their previous pay. Spouse abuse will be cut in half, and teenage pregnancy by two-thirds. Ninety percent of the adults in the state will be doing aerobic exercises three times a week.
In January, Oregon issued a five-year progress report. It was mixed. In some fields, such as job and income growth, and clean air, Oregon was just about where it wanted to be. But when it came to crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and a whole host of social problems, the situation had gotten worse. On crime and drugs, in fact, the state gave itself an unambiguous “F.”
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. 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. 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.
There are problems of public management and funding, and there are problems of human behavior. It is in our interest to appreciate the difference. The benchmark movement doesn’t appreciate the difference, and that is its signal flaw.
Managerial solutions are relatively easy. Immunizing first-graders doesn’t require that they think or behave in any particular way. It requires only that the government provide the serum and the nurses, and that the kids show up at school. 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. That isn’t just a harder task — it’s a task from an entirely different conceptual universe.
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? If it does, it belongs in a separate pile. 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.
The intractability of perverse human behavior may seem an obvious point — too obvious to make much fuss over. At some level, I suppose most policy makers understand it. 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.
Government has always sought to manipulate human behavior, of course. Indeed, there have been long periods in modern history when it has seemed interested in little else. Five hundred years ago, the majority of laws on the books in any community in Western Europe were called “sumptuary laws.” 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.
Sumptuary laws were about behavior; their aim was to control it, not to reform it. The governments that passed them didn’t mind if people harbored secret desires to dress inappropriately. What mattered was that they not do so in public, on the street. The elevation of human moral standards was a task for the church, not the city council.
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. The ultimate expression of this fact was the Prohibition experiment. Prohibition has always been described as a moral crusade, and certainly it possessed an element of that. 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. But Prohibition was not fundamentally an attempt to educate or motivate; it was an effort to stop people from drinking by taking away the product. It was an attack on supply, not demand.
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. Its point was to give people money, not to teach them how to spend it. Unemployed workers were presumed willing to work at almost any job if the government could create one for them. 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. 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. The public- housing programs of the 1930s were designed as an attack on the physical environment of poverty. The authors of these programs believed that once the buildings were fixed up, behavior would take care of itself.
And they continued to believe that right up through the construction of the urban high-rise housing projects in the 1950s. 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. Cabrini-Green, the Chicago Daily News exulted, was “a new mighty city of concrete and steel pushing off the shell of decadence.”
The 1960s are the dividing line on this issue, as on so many others. 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. But at its root the Great Society was something more, something new. 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. It assumed that government, especially the federal government, possessed the tools to reverse this process. And it was not shy about saying so.
“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.” 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.
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. Charles Morris, who worked in the Model Cities program and then testified eloquently to its failure, expressed this point better than anyone. “The anti-poverty program,” Morris wrote, “was premised on the assumption that poverty existed primarily in the heads of the poor. It emphatically rejected the notion that the way to solve poverty was to give people money; it aimed instead to change people’s behavior. 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. They merely came to appreciate the monumental overconfidence with which the Great Society operated. It was assuming the existence of solutions that the society as a whole had not yet discovered.
This was an error of more than historical significance. Thirty years later it still distorts judgments and policies.
For more than a decade now, for example, the Ford Foundation has officially been seeking out new ideas at all levels of American government. 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 Kennedy School at Harvard helps make the selections, and each program selected gets $ 100,000. Some years there are 1,000 applicants; by the end of 1996, there had been 110 winners.
Taking a look back at those 110 choices is an enlightening exercise. For the most part, they fit into two rather easily defined categories. There are the technical and managerial innovations, most of which have spread quickly and successfully to places all over the country. Then there are the experiments in behavioral change, few of which have had any lasting impact.
In 1988, for example, the Ford Foundation bestowed its generosity on the St. Louis County Police Department, the Kentucky state court system, and the public libraries of Vermont. St. 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. Similarly, the Kentucky courts had been pioneers in making video records of trial proceedings, eliminating the traditional dependence on expensive and sometimes unreliable stenography. Vermont had made the catalogs of libraries all over the state available for computerized searching by librarians or ordinary citizens.
Those three governmental innovations have several things in common. In the great scheme of things, they are pretty minor. They do not deal with human conduct in any important way at all. And they have spread like wildfire. These are things that governments all over the country have now learned to do as a matter of routine, and to depend on.
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. Project Match prided itself on accepting the most difficult cases — long-term publicaid dependents who were difficult even to find, let alone place. It was an intensive personalized counseling service that matched up volunteer case- workers with 400 Cabrini-Green families.
There is no question that in its 10 years of existence, Project Match has helped dozens of people. It can provide impressive anecdotal accounts of individual success. 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.
Project Match is creative and well-meaning. 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. The problem it set out to deal with would be well on the way to solution. 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. 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. It has nothing whatever in common with video court reporting or computerized library catalogs.
To say all this is not to claim that legislating behavioral change is flatly impossible. 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. Even Prohibition, for all the abuse we heap on it, succeeded in its primary goal. Americans consumed less alcohol in the 1920s than they had consumed before. The incidence of liver disease went down. Of course, most of us would say now that it wasn’t worth it, for a whole variety of reasons. But it can’t be dismissed as ineffective.
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. 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. No doubt some of this was a matter of saying what they thought the researchers wanted to hear. But it would be obtuse not to give at least a little credit to the civil rights law.
The 1996 federal welfare law is the most recent effort to change fundamental aspects of human behavior by altering the incentive system. It assumes that those who have depended on welfare, confronted with the elimination of permanent subsidies for idleness, will find jobs. The likelihood of this project’s succeeding is an issue on which reasonable people may at this point still differ. But it might work. It’s not crazy to hold out some hope.
In any case, it’s beyond dispute that government does sometimes induce people to behave. 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.
A decade or so ago, when George Latimer was mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, he summed up his philosophy of government in two sentences that would be difficult to improve upon: Don’t look for problems. Look for opportunities. 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. The best target may be graffiti, or classroom vaccination, or even computers in the state library system. The best target is something the society knows how to deal with.
The most intractable problems of American society are entitled to some respect — more than we typically give them. Recognizing that fact is the beginning of public-policy wisdom.
Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine.
