Doonesbury on Congress

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

LaLonde on WIA book

Bob Lalonde reviews the recent Upjohn book, edited by Doug Besharov and Phoebe Cottingham, on the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) (journal access required). The book grew out of a mini-conference held to inform the Europeans of the lessons they could learn from the US experience with active labor market programs.

The review has wise words about the difficulties of non-experimental evaluation of active labor market programs like WIA, about the lack of policy response to evaluation results, and about performance management.  I particularly liked this bit on the latter topic:

A very closely related problem turns on the merits of using performance measures to proxy for rigorous impact estimates. Since these measures were first conceived during the CETA program, attempts to refine them so they actually “work” have amounted to the workforce development field's equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail. Like its predecessor quest, so far this effort has been futile. There is no convincing evidence that using performance measures as a proxy is a good idea and lots of evidence against it. As explained by Burt Barnow in his chapter here, “Lessons from the WIA Performance Measures,” workforce performance measures do not correlate well with program impacts. That really should not be a surprise, because coming up with reliable performance measures requires that we be able to confidently and consistently solve the evaluation problem.

Though nominally aimed at the Europeans, there is much that US policymakers could learn from the book as well. They could also learn from the Europeans (at least some of them) about how to increase the quality of non-experimental program evaluations via better administrative data.

You can order the book from Upjohn (or Amazon) and you can read the final draft of my chapter for free. They made me take out the bit about Farrell's from the book version, so I actually prefer the final draft.

Movie: ParaNorman

ParaNorman is a fine bit of fluff with some good humor - I quite enjoyed Courtney, the airhead older sister - and a nice message - be nice to people who are different - though not one that is subtly delivered. As the NYT reviewer notes, the animation is beautiful and fun as well.

Recommended if you have kids.

What Jim Tressel is up to

Former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressell is now the "Vice President for Strategic Engagement" at the University of Akron.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Move over Tina Fey

The Daily Mail reports that it is a big week for "Lisa Ann", the "adult entertainer" who looks like Sarah Palin.

Contra Lisa Ann, it is not clear to me that voting for someone because they are hot is worse than voting for them because they promise to take things from other people and give them to you.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

[Text updated to reflect the fact that the FT and the Daily Mail are not the same]

You might be a redneck if ...

... you think Jeff Foxworthy's new game show is a good idea on any of several different levels.

Via: an ad for the show on NFL network (sic)

FT on corporate mindfulness

The FT surveys the growth of corporate wellness programs that include aspects of "mindfulness", pop Buddhism, yoga and other spiritual tricks for daily living.

I am sympathetic to the idea that periods of quiet and reflection can improve one's life, but the supposed "scientific" evidence cited in the article is pretty miserable.

The first bit consists of participant evaluations:

The company has even begun research into its efficacy, and the early results are striking. After one of Marturano’s seven-week courses, 83 per cent of participants said they were “taking time each day to optimise my personal productivity” – up from 23 per cent before the course. Eighty-two per cent said they now make time to eliminate tasks with limited productivity value – up from 32 per cent before the course. And among senior executives who took the course, 80 per cent reported a positive change in their ability to make better decisions, while 89 per cent said they became better listeners.

Smith, Whalley and Wilcox mock these sorts of questions and provide evidence from an active labor market program that they do not correlate with impacts estimated in more compelling econometric ways.

And then there is this:

Other companies have found that such programmes can generate both health benefits and cost savings. Aetna, partnering with Duke University School of Medicine, found that one hour of yoga a week decreased stress levels in employees by a third, reducing healthcare costs by an average of $2,000 a year.

The main problem with this, of course, is that we do not learn the methods the companies used to find this amazing reductions in health care costs. Did they do random assignment? Did they compare participants to non-participants without controls? Did they compare participant health costs before and after the program? Two of those methods typically yield rubbish, one does not. The second problem with this is that the estimate does not really pass the smell test. Employees are large corporations do not have high average health care costs. If they did, in most cases they would not be working. For this group, a $2000 impact would be really large, so large, I suspect, as to be implausible.

I think the FT author needs to meditate a bit on methodology, as well as on his bodily sensations.