John Arnold: belief

Transcript context

…You can make it 15, whatever. I think on society, it’s very hard to get people off of their baseline for the long term. There’re a lot of interventions that can happen that’ll change somebody’s short-term prospects, whether that’s a job training program or an addiction treatment program or an education program. You can bump them off that baseline for a little bit, and over time, there’s reversion to the mean. It’s made it very difficult to find social interventions that pass the benefit-cost test over the long term. I think that’s why we were talking earlier about evaluations. We’re very focused on the evaluations that we fund, of trying to do long-term effects of programs and policies. Oftentimes, if you’re just looking at what the six-month effect is, you find an effect and a cost-benefit ratio that’s not relevant to what actual policymaking should be. Last question — what will you learn about next?…

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