Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Good intentions are nice, but with so many resources poured into social programs, wouldn't it be even nicer to know what actually works?
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In our previous episode, we looked at a study that explored the links between jobs and family structure. The findings were surprising and, frankly, a little bit depressing. It turns out that the fracking boom, which has provided a lot of good jobs for less educated men, also led to a mini baby boom. As economics would predict, people tend to have more kids when their financial circumstances are solid. But economics would also predict that when people's financial circumstances improve, they're more likely to form families, not just have babies. But that did not happen. About 40% of the babies born in the US these days are born to unmarried mothers. That's a huge increase over the past few decades.
Coming into the fracking study, the researchers had suspected and hoped that good jobs would lead to more stable families. It didn't. And as you likely know, kids born into less stable families are at a much higher risk for bad outcomes in life: education, health, income, you name it. So the next question becomes, if more and more of these at-risk kids are being born, how can society best help them? That is what today's episode is about. We will begin briefly in Los Angeles. So let's start by, if you would, just say your name and what you do.
I'm Greg Boyle, and I'm a Jesuit priest, and I'm the founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries, which is the largest gang intervention rehab reentry program on the planet.
Father Boyle and Homeboy Industries are kind of legendary. They've been celebrated over the years.
G-Dog is Father Greg Boyle, a 37-year-old Jesuit priest.
He's trying to tell us that there's another person inside of us, that we're not all just gang-bangers, that we could become citizens, regular citizens.
There is no place on the planet Earth where more gang-bangers show up to redirect their lives, to get some help, to begin all over again.
Boyle started Homeboy in 1988.
When I was pastor of a very poor parish, and we had eight gangs at war with each other.
Things have gotten somewhat better since then.
I'm gonna bury-- A guy who was killed, but in a high-speed chase on Saturday. So that'll be my 218th gang member that I've had to bury. But it's nothing like the bad old days when I'd have eight funerals in a three-week period.
Homeboy caters to gang members who've gotten out of prison. Their motto is nothing stops a bullet like a job.
So we have a bakery, several restaurants, farmers' markets. But then we have programs alongside, like tattoo removal, anger management, and a jobs program, trying to find felony-friendly employers to employ enemies working side by side with each other.
Boyle preaches what he calls boundless compassion. And by that measure, Homeboy Industries would seem to be a raging success. How concerned is he with more traditional outcomes?
If you're driven by outcomes, you're gonna only work with a population that will give you good ones. You know, we're going to work with the most belligerent, difficult, hard-headed, as long as they walk through the door.
Okay, but, big question. How well does a program like this really work?
And somebody might say to me, "Well, how do you know that it works?" And I would say, again, no place on the planet Earth has more gang members who walk through the door trying to get help. And the reason I say that is no gang member would walk through the door if this place didn't help. If it didn't somehow work.
The story of Father Boyle and Homeboy Industries is inspiring, for sure. He tells it well in a book called Tattoos on the Heart. But his answer about how well Homeboy works...
No gang member would walk through the door if this place didn't help. If it didn't somehow work.
That doesn't really constitute proof, does it? For that, you'd need to measure outcomes more objectively, more scientifically, maybe even set up a control group that you could compare to the treatment group. I say this with no disrespect to Father Boyle and others like him. That's not the business they're in. But in a world where so many right-hearted people spend so much time and money on interventions meant to help other people... Wouldn't it be nice to understand which ones work and which ones don't? Maybe to even understand when helping hurts? Today on Freakonomics Radio, one of the earliest modern attempts to find out what really does help at-risk kids.
The program grafted scientific methods onto a social action program.
That study is one of the bedrock studies in the prevention of crime. It was just, it was very innovative at the time.
It's also the story of a tenacious researcher who chased down the data decades later.
It was a little bit like a mystery, and you're trying to track people down. And every time you found someone, it felt like a little treasure hunt.
And the conclusions.
People just assume that if you do something that sounds good, that it's going
to have positive effects. But it's actually, it's actually more complicated than that.
Without exaggeration, it is still shocking to this day.
From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
Long before Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries and all the others like them, there was a civic-minded Harvard physician named Richard Clark Cabot.
Richard Clark Cabot was just a fascinating character.
That's Brandon Welsh, a criminologist at Northeastern University.
And for Bostonians, you know, he was a member of the Cabot family. So the Cabots and the Lodges, a very distinguished family.
Richard Cabot was a philanthropist and a doctor and very much committed to helping people and committed to figuring out what methods really worked.
And that is Jeff Sayer McCord, a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
And he was quite revolutionary in thinking.
We ought to be taking the same care when we intervene with people's lives as we do when we intervene with their bodies.
During the Great Depression, Cabot commissioned what came to be known as the Cambridge-Summerville Youth Study.
One of the unique features of this study that was initiated back in the 30s was to be a longitudinal survey, a prospective longitudinal survey.
The purpose of which was what?
He wanted it to be tested over a very lengthy period of time, something that, by today's standards, is unheard of.
The study would last so long that technically, it's still going on today. And Brandon Welsh is now its director.
Yes, it's now been recognized as the first randomized experiment of a social program.
There had been a few earlier experiments in education, but nothing like this in social work or crime prevention. What drove Cabot?
He was appalled by the recidivism rate from the Boston Juvenile Court. And he really saw that there was a need to move outside of the treatment regime, outside of attending to after the fact. And so he really coined this view of prevention in the first instance.
And he was quite convinced, but didn't have the evidence to support his being convinced, that what we now call mentoring was effective.
Jeff Sarah McCord, as you will hear later on, also has an intimate connection to the Cambridge-Summerville Youth Study through his late mother, who was a criminologist. Anyway, Dr. Cabot's idea was that boys and young men headed for trouble could benefit from some mentoring.
Yes, so the treatment was largely referred to as directed friendship.
So hoping to get evidence that mentoring would be helpful, he went to Cambridge and Somerville at the time of very poor neighborhoods. And he identified roughly 250 at-risk kids. This is talking to-- Preachers, teachers, and parents. Which kids seemed to be having trouble? And then he also identified 250 kids who seemed to be doing well.
And the control groups received no special services. They were what we would call a no-treatment control group.
And basically, information about who they were was recorded, but there was no intervention with them.
So the boys were first matched. There were diagnostic pairs.
Maybe he would match you and I because we lived in the same neighborhood and we came from families that were the same size and had the same income. And then he flips a coin, basically, and randomly assigns one person from each of the matched pairs to a control group. And then in the treatment group are their matched partners.
Okay, okay. So the control group is either a kid doing well or a kid not doing well, matched with the opposite. One goes in control, one goes in treatment. Is that right so far?
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And then the treatment took a broad range. It was basically counselors who would visit the family.
The counselors would meet every couple of weeks with the boys, interact with them, help them with homework, take them to the YMCA. And during the summer months, some of the treatment group boys were able to go to summer camps and so were sent out of the city.
So it was big brother, big sister. It was the kind of mentoring that still is celebrated.
It lasted from 1939 to 1945.
So what you had at the end of the CABT study was this voluminous set of records. Here's this treasure trove of data with controls. That's almost nonexistent in social interventions, that you have data on a control.
Okay, so why is this important? Because whenever you're trying to establish cause and effect in anything, whether it's a chemical reaction or something like this, a mentorship program for at-risk young men, you need to be able to isolate the inputs and reliably measure the outputs. That's a lot easier to do in chemistry than it is with something as complicated as people's lives, which is why a lot of the ideas you hear about in a field like criminology tend to be more theoretical than empirical.
So when I started in this field, there were, I think, 13 different ideas about how to prevent delinquency and very little empirical research on any of them.
That's Denise Gottfriedson.
And I'm a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.
When Gottfriedson started out in the field, even something as basic as good measurement was elusive.
So it was, for example, quite difficult to study schools because we didn't have the instruments to measure things and we just didn't have the technology to measure a lot of different schools in the same way.
So it was heartening to learn about the Cambridge-Summerville youth study.
That study is one of the bedrock studies in the prevention of crime. All students learn about it. It was just, it was very innovative at the time. Joan McCord's work to follow up those 500 youth was just, I mean, a study like that was very rare in those days.
Okay, so Joan McCord was a young criminologist a couple generations before Gottfriedson. Here's McCord on tape from 1996.
During the period of the 1950s, when I was a graduate student, I had walked into a room that was filled with records. This was while I was Eleanor Mackey's research assistant.
Eleanor Mackey was a renowned psychologist at Harvard and then Stanford who worked on child development.
Eleanor Mackey's study was asking mothers to report on how they treated their children and how their children behaved.
The minute you hear that, you probably think, wait a minute. Asking someone about their behavior isn't the best way to measure behavior, is it? That's exactly what Joan McCord was thinking as she was coding the survey responses.
And I was coding those and thought that it was a shame to believe what mothers had to say about what they did when you can't be objective about your own behavior.
So when Joan McCord heard about the Cambridge-Summerville youth study, which was launched more than a decade earlier, she got excited because it had been set up to avoid a lot of the typical problems in social science research. First of all, it was a bona fide randomized controlled trial, which meant you could isolate the effects of the intervention. And it also afforded the opportunity to look at long-term effects using objective measurements. For instance, did the kids who got mentorship tend to stay out of trouble and get better jobs? Were they less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol? It would take a lot of work, but McCord knew those questions were answerable.
So I applied for a grant as a graduate student.
McCord got the grant. In fact, she would go on to become director of the Cambridge-Summerville youth study, as Brandon Welsh is today. Along the way, she taught at Drexel and Temple Universities, and in 1988, she became the first female president of the American Society of Criminology. But back in the 1950s, when she began to look into the Cambridge-Summerville data, she wasn't even the first scholar to do such an analysis.
So the first one took place in 1948.
That's Brandon Welsh again. By now, the boys from the study.
The boys were in their early 20s on average, and the findings were a resounding null effect, or they didn't detect any differences in delinquency offending between the treatment and control groups.
So that must have been a little bit surprising and disappointing, correct?
Indeed, it was quite surprising.
Now, in the late 1950s, Joan McCord comes along, working in partnership with her then-husband, who was a sociologist.
These boys were now young men, embarking on careers, some already engaged in careers. And so there was this opportunity to examine, one, was the program effective? Could there even be a sleeper effect? And then, two, as part of the longer follow-up phase of the research.
And so in the 50s, the McCords found what?
Similar findings. They found a null effect, that they found there were no differences between the treatment and control boys on offending.
So, that's not very encouraging, is it? A mentorship program for troubled boys seems to have no long-term upside. The story might have ended there, quite undramatically. Were it not for a dramatic technological innovation?
Computers came on the scene, and my mom was really keen to exploit that new resource and had the mathematical ability and the empirical commitment to learn the programming and run the data.
That's Jeff Sayer-McCord again.
She thought, once you had that resource, you'd be able to uncover the positive effects she was convinced would be there.
These boys were now men in their mid-40s.
So she saw a great opportunity to follow up on the inspired commitment to doing social science as a controlled study. And it was in the grip of that that, when I got to college, I volunteered as a mentor, as a big brother.
You're kidding. You, inspired by, essentially, this idea? Inspired by this program?
Oh, yeah, and I loved doing it. I loved hanging out with kids.
And I knew his mother, and who worked at the college I went to. He was 10 or 12. He was right in that age. And his father was, had been in jail. It was mostly tutoring and hanging out and, you know, playing soccer. And at the same time, I was involved in trying to track down people when my mom started doing a follow-up of this.
That's right. Joan McCord had enlisted her son to help track down the men who, nearly 30 years earlier, had been boys in the Cambridge-Somerville youth study. It was now the 1970s.
The world was very different back then. No internet, no cell phones, et cetera.
That's Richard Parente, McCord's research assistant at the time. He was also helping track down these men.
So we really had to rely on physical telephone books, searches of official government records that Dr. McCord had gained access to, such as the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Massachusetts.
We were, you know, figuring out where they had lived and then finding, doing searches in the library to find people with the same name in roughly the same communities. And you'd be dialing the numbers and, you know, introduce yourself and say, "I'm trying to reach so-and-so. Did you used to live in Cambridge at this address?" And having confirmed them and said, "Yo, I'm working for the Cambridge-Somerville youth study. We'd like to contact you."
So I went everywhere from Maine to Florida to California, at least twice. A lot of guys, when we asked them, when I asked them why it was they ended up in, you know, Arizona or California or whatever, and they said, "Have you been to Somerville? It's a horrible place. I couldn't wait to get out of there."
You know, it was a little bit like a mystery and you're trying to track people down and every time you found someone, it felt like a little treasure hunt. She found 98% of the people from the study.
It kind of boggles the mind to think either how hard she worked, or how lucky she got, or some combination of both. Can you explain how that number 98 is so high?
It is quite astonishing. A couple of factors were working in her favor. The first one was that about 80% of the participants still resided in Massachusetts at roughly age 45.
They were the easier ones to find.
And I guess probably low income is correlated with low mobility?
Very much so, very much so. Another important part was that Joan began or continued this meticulous record-keeping. So, the last known address, the last known phone number of these participants. So, she had started to build in what we would call today a database.
And she was a compulsive note-taker.
In other words, before Google, there was your mom.
That's exactly right. I love that way of thinking about it.
And so, for example, if we found from talking to a family member, for example, that one of the subjects from the program had died, Dr. McCord, she didn't consider that that case was closed until she actually had documentation, physical documentation. We had one guy in particular, who his whole family had told us that he had died in a car accident in Canada. And so, for more than a year, Dr. McCord encouraged me to track this guy down. And I was really at a loss. You know, come on, Dr. McCord, you're being a real pain in the neck here. Everybody in the family told me he's dead. You have me chasing him down to the ghost.
She was meticulous. She was dogged.
And then, I had a hunch that, well, maybe I'll try looking at the motor vehicle records for the state of Massachusetts. And I found a record of this guy in Massachusetts that was recent. And by luck, one of the numbers I had, I called, and somebody else I hadn't spoken to answered the phone this time. And this person told me that the guy wasn't dead. In fact, he was still in Cambridge. I actually think I interviewed him in a bar. And he's basically said that his family had disowned him from when he went into prison. They considered him dead.
So McCord and her research assistants tracked down nearly all the participants from the long ago study. They interviewed the men, asking them all sorts of questions about how their lives had turned out. Nearly every interview had one thing in common.
Their memories of the mentoring were overwhelmingly positive. You know, you'd get people saying, oh, it was one of the best things that happened in my life. Whatever happened to my mentor?
And a lot of them made unsolicited type comments like, if it hadn't been for those guys, I would have, you know, never been as good a person, or I would have gone to prison. All kinds of different positive things they attributed back to their counselors and their experience.
In addition to the interviews, McCord also went after lots of other data on the subjects.
She got access to all sorts of amazing records. And there were a bunch of measures, seven in particular, that are worth mentioning. Death records, criminal records, mental health records, and health records, alcoholism, and then job satisfaction and marital satisfaction.
Couldn't get that data today, presumably, unless you hack into an insurance database, maybe, yeah.
Exactly. It's available, just not legally, I'm sure.
What was her level of, you know, I guess enthusiasm like at this point when she realizes that she can actually make a comparison and make a measurement about how the treatment worked?
She was clearly animated by the thought that if you can find the causes, you're in a better position to find treatments. And the vindication of your work is to do that. That's what excited her.
Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, so what did McCord and her intrepid team finally find?
It was so surprising that I began from scratch a second time.
They took these results as an attack on the value of what they were doing.
That study did provide a big wake-up call to the field.
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Richard Clark Cabot, the Harvard doctor and philosopher who set up the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, died in 1939. So he never got to learn whether his program actually helped the boys it was designed to help.
But now, decades later, the criminologist Joan McCord had an opportunity to rigorously measure the outcomes.
So in the 70s, all of a sudden, universities had these buildings full of giant mainframe computers, and you had access to them. And you could run data in ways that you just could never have done before.
That's her son, Jeff Sayer McCord.
And I do remember vividly her running the data and coming home at the time with these huge stacks. And she'd go in with these boxes of punch cards and run them and always be excitedly waiting for the output.
And then she found what?
On all seven measures, we're talking how long did you live? Were you a criminal? Were you mentally healthy, physically healthy, alcoholic, satisfied with your job, satisfied with your marriage? On all seven measures, the treatment group did statistically significantly worse off than the control group.
Wow. In other words, I was in this program, I liked it. The data show, however, that I came out worse because of the program than someone who was in the program as a control and didn't get the treatment.
I should emphasize that there also seemed to be what's called a dose effect. The longer the intervention, the more likely the damage would be done.
Which is a yet a stronger argument in against the intervention, obviously.
That's exactly right. So, her reaction at first was disbelief. So, for a long time, she would look at the data and think she's not getting anything. This is really frustrating. She reran data and reran data and isolated elements to confirm. And I remember her thinking, in effect, oh no, I've screwed up. Something's wrong.
That is Joan McCord from a 1996 interview.
I reanalyzed from the beginning, having gone through pages of printouts. And it had sort of passed over my head until I suddenly said, everything is going the wrong direction.
And it's, that's one of the important things is people who are engaged in social interventions really don't spend much time thinking, I may be screwing this person over. They are self-conscious about, maybe this won't work, but I've gotta try.
Wow, that's, that's just such an amazing, an amazingly interesting and, you know, heartbreaking result. What was your response? I mean, your mom was your kind of intellectual hero. You were a mentor yourself in part because of her. First of all, let's start with that. What did you do as a mentor to that, to that kid?
I stopped being a mentor.
You're kidding me.
No. I, it was complicated. So she told me the results and she knew that I was serving as a mentor and that I was enjoying it and she basically gave me all the reason to think that to the extent I was doing this to help someone, I shouldn't think I am.
I see.
I became convinced that there was a moral objection to continuing to do what I was doing and then the challenge was to handle it as gracefully, considerately as possible.
Because I'm guessing the kid didn't know that you, I mean, you, you kind of put yourself in his life as a friend. Is that the way it works essentially?
Exactly. Yeah. I had to rely on my explanation to the kid of why I was not around anymore on an appeal to all the work that I was then facing.
I see. I, I just, I'm too busy with my work. I can't do this anymore.
Yeah. I've, I've loved it. You've been a real pleasure. I've had a great time with you and so I don't want to, you know, blithely act as if, oh, that was an easy decision. It was not easy. So it, it, that argument did weigh heavily and, you know, it's nothing like the poke in the eye of a social worker who'd spent 30 years in social work.
Certainly in the wider sphere of people running social programs and not necessarily just in the social work community, found this as a, a major affront and were seriously concerned about the ramifications, in particular for funding, you know, a front page of the Boston Globe, Science, and then, you know, smaller newspapers throughout Pennsylvania with her being at Drexel at the time.
And the other kind of response, which really took my mom up short, were people who thought that it was, um, that social interventions were a mistake because you couldn't change things. Or people who thought social interventions were a mistake because they weren't worth the money.
We can imagine today in 2017, imagine that, you know, a study like this comes out and nothing like it had ever come out before. And it basically says, hey, you know what? These nice thoughtful, and by the way, expensive, social programs that are meant to decrease juvenile delinquency backfire, and the people who get the treatment actually do worse. Can you just imagine in the political climate we're in now, how that would be received?
Oh, indeed. And it would provide a great deal of ammunition for, for those who were hell-bent on withdrawing funds or delimiting such social programs.
10 top examples of wasteful federal spending in 2012.
One of the biggest programs is Head Start. You know, it's 1960s, Great Society program that the left loves to say helps kids. The program has basically no effect on helping kids who are disadvantaged.
Obviously, you know, this validates the concerns of the founders, that the best government is the government closest to individuals. I guess it makes a great case that the government should get out of these businesses on a federal level.
In that exchange, the Head Start example was cited by David Mulhousen, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation. In 2007, Mulhousen cited the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, when he testified before Congress against the Youth Promise Act, which sought to increase the government's involvement in delinquency and gang prevention. "Congress should contemplate the fact that government's intervention in the lives of youth can cause more harm than good," he said. In the end, the Youth Promise Act did not make it through Congress. The problem, of course, is that doing nothing isn't always the best solution either. The
trick, as with all interventions, is to measure the benefits against the costs and decide if it's worth it. Jeff Sayer-McCordigan.
When I talk to people about this study, I remind them of thalidomide, which was a magnificent drug for curing morning sickness. And it was only when you stepped back and you got the data that you'd see that thalidomide puts fetuses tremendously at risk for very serious birth defects.
Although, on the other hand, to extend your thalidomide argument, there are now all kinds of legitimate beneficial uses of thalidomide.
Exactly. So you don't study thalidomide and say, okay, now we're going to give nobody drugs. You realize, oh, drugs are powerful things. Let's figure out which ones work. Same thing with social interventions. They make a huge difference. It's just, we haven't done the studies. We don't put money into the studies to run controls to figure out what the effects will be long term. So to sit back and say, we should be abandoning social interventions is the wrong reaction. The right reaction is, we should start to be careful in trying to figure out which ones work.
Let's talk about the really important thing. What the heck happened? Why did it backfire?
There are several hypotheses.
One hypothesis that she found support for was this idea of peer contagion or deviancy training that was associated with the summer camps. So there were upwards of 60, 70 or so of the boys who participated in multiple years of the summer camps.
Deviancy training is when deviant behaviors are encouraged by other high-risk youths present, kids that are probably already engaged in deviant lifestyles to some extent.
That's Denise Gottfriedson, the University of Maryland criminologist.
For example, in the context of a small group counseling session, one youth might be telling a story of how he or she used drugs and broke into a house or something like that. And other kids may respond to that by smiling, by laughing, by acting in an encouraging manner rather than disapproving of the activity. And so it's just kind of a normal process of conversation that occurs. But the research shows that it actually is related to an increase in those behaviors in the future.
So it sounds like the worst thing you could do for at-risk or in-trouble kids is put them in group therapy.
Well, I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that. The degree of structure or programming involved in the intervention is important. If high-risk kids are brought together in a relatively unstructured setting where basically they're just kind of given free rein to talk about whatever they want to talk about and react however they want to react, that's the kind of setting that encourages deviancy training. But on the other hand, if the adult is clearly in charge and keeps the focus on whatever they're doing rather than just letting it range, that kind of intervention seems to work.
So one of the elements of the Cambridge-Somerville youth study was summer camp.
Exactly. Summer camp would be a very good example of it. And after-school programs are another.
Joan demonstrated that those boys who participated in more than one summer camp, they had a heightened level of criminal offending even relative to those who participated in just one year. This is where we saw that dose-response relationship.
Do you buy that as the primary or a primary reason for why that seemingly beneficial intervention turned out to backfire?
I do buy it. I clearly think we need better research. But I think it is theoretically very consistent with what we know about the causes of delinquency. The very biggest correlate of delinquent behavior is peer delinquency.
Another theory, this, I think, has a lot of traction to it, is that the kids in the program developed a kind of dependence, or a sense of need, so that when the program ended, they felt like something they needed wasn't there, or something they valued wasn't there. What happened was, you people got a mentor, and then at a certain point, they lost the mentor.
Is the deeper part of that theory that these kids are kind of given expectations via osmosis of how their mentors live, their mentors have these solid jobs, maybe a solid family, et cetera, et cetera, and then, once they are cut off from the mentor, that they find that they can't get that stuff on their own? Is that kind of the connection to how it might have broken down?
Well, I would put that under a third hypothesis, theory, and this was really my mom's favorite theory, though she died before she could test it. But her suspicion was that part of what was happening was fairly privileged mentors, who had values and expectations that well-suited their opportunities, successfully transferred, not really intentionally, but by osmosis, or by modeling, or by conversation, transferred those values and expectations
to the kids. And part of why my mom thinks this is an important hypothesis, is she thinks psychology and sociology in general pays too little attention to what explains how people make the decisions they do, why they take certain considerations as reasons, and not others.
And she thinks that process of teaching people what to consider a reason, or a value, or a goal, is deeply important to explaining behavior.
Let me ask you just a little bit more about the potential explanations. Did the kids in the control group, did they know about the treatment group kids getting counseling and treatment?
That's a fascinating question.
And the reason I'm asking is, we're talking about the treatment group going in one direction, but it could be that it was really more like the control group went in the other direction. If you learn that some of the kids are getting all this stuff, they're getting this guy to come and teach them to drive, and they're getting sent to summer camp, and you don't get any of that, I'm just wondering if possibly that might have proved a kind of, you know, either through envy or hurt, might have proved a kick in the pants to propel oneself into the future that one wants and realizes, hey, the only way I'm going to get that future is me, I don't have that help, whereas the people who got the help maybe became too reliant
on the help and couldn't make it happen for themselves. That's my crazy theory.
I really don't know. It's a, you know, it's a, it's a nice complement to the dependency theory. I think that's, it's not something that I know of any evidence concerning. So I don't know how visible it was to the kids in the control that they were even in the control.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because they, they are just identified demographically. I'm not sure how visible the treatment was to other kids.
On the other hand, you know, Somerville and Cambridge are not so large-
It's not big, right.
You wouldn't hear about the other kids who are getting this, you know, what's the story, you know, Jimmy's got this guy coming over teaching him to drive, and so and so's getting this kind of thing.
I think that's absolutely right. I think it's a fascinating possibility.
There is, of course, a lot that remains unknown and unknowable, especially when it comes to something as complex as human behavior and what leads any of us to make a productive choice versus a destructive choice. The important thing, at least as I see it, is to keep assembling empirical evidence and to use that evidence rather than relying on gut hunches or ideology or simply good intentions to try to move the needle. In that regard, the criminologists we've been talking to today say they've learned a lot over the past few decades, especially about preventing delinquency.
Yeah, well, it's like night and day. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of very high-quality studies covering a wide range of different strategies, everything ranging from, you know, discipline strategies like placing police in schools all the way to trying to change the social climate in schools to make schools more likable and to increase the attachment that kids feel towards school.
We now know that far more programs of a punitive nature have backfired. You know, Scared Straight or boot camps have failed miserably, whereby those boys who received the program would have been better off getting nothing.
Some of the things that the evidence suggests do work are efforts to teach kids social competency skills and self-control skills. And a lot of kids learn these skills just as a matter of course in growing up. They learn how to control their impulses. They learn how to, you know, to regulate their emotions.
We talked about this, the use of cognitive behavioral therapy in an earlier Freakonomics Radio episode. It was called Preventing Crime for Pennies on the Dollar. You have 30 seconds to open up Letter A's fist.
So, over the years, we've developed different models for teaching those skills to kids. But they all have in common this focus on teaching kids to recognize their emotions, to slow down, to think more carefully about the potential consequences of different actions they might take.
I will say, the economic value that is demonstrated through the small number of benefit cost analyses also is beginning to show on a much larger front.
When you compare the cost to society of jails and prisons, even the most costly of these programs is a money saver. So now there's like a second layer of activity that's aimed at just summarizing what the research says to practitioners. So there are lots of different groups that just comb through all of the research and try to make judgments about the quality of the research underlying each of these strategies, and then puts it out there for laypeople to have access to.
Another major legacy of the Cambridge Summer View study pertains to the longitudinal prospective nature of it. We're able to talk in a much more precision because of the studies that have been undertaken and the long-term follow-ups as well.
Joan McCord was always a proponent of, you know, using evidence to make decisions. And the Cambridge Summer Bill study was the main basis. That study did provide a big wake-up call to the field that it was really necessary to study things. We can't just assume that they work.
The one takeaway might be that delinquency prevention...
For all its benefits is by no means a panacea. And that we need to be equally careful in how we med out prevention resources as we med out treatment resources or intervention resources. The best of intentions can sometimes backfire.
I have to say, hearing you speak now, I'm just struck by, I guess you'd have to call it the irony, or at least the paradox, that Cabot was driven by a very sensible revulsion to this high recidivism rate. And ultimately, instead of addressing the problem, actually contributed to it. I mean, can you talk for a minute about how you, as a researcher, dealt with that irony or paradox?
Yeah, I mean, you're right. This is the violation of his oath, first do no harm. And he could never have foreseen this and was acting on the best of intentions. So as a researcher, I, it's really quite difficult. And I know this was certainly part of, you know, Joan McCord's difficulty in talking about this.
I think her first response was to be crestfallen, finding that it had hurt people in measurable ways. I think she had had so much hope for this kind of intervention as paying off.
That, again, is Jeff Sayer McCord, Joan McCord's son.
But her main view on it was that what the study shows is we can have an impact on people's lives, and that we don't yet know how to have a good impact. And that that's a reason to put money into finding out.
Yeah, that's a great point.
What makes the difference.
Yeah, yeah. Right, right. We did something that we thought would work. It didn't work. It produced a backward result, but obviously, we can influence behavior. We can influence outcomes, right? We just need to find the right levers.
Exactly. So she saw this as very strong evidence for supportive research in the hope of making people's lives better, but in the recognition that we don't really yet know how to do that, despite excessive confidence.
Let me ask you this. This is kind of a personal question in a way that I hadn't intended on asking, but do you think that was your mom's takeaway in part to kind of soften the blow of the fact that the evidence was so disheartening?
That is a very interesting question. My mom was extraordinarily good at avoiding wishful thinking. So she didn't, for the sake of her values, ideals, or concerns, change her belief. She was perennially aware of the appropriateness of intellectual modesty. She thought the skeptics who emphasized how little we know were right to do it. What her dying words to me were,
she's on her deathbed, she had been for her life an agnostic, didn't believe in God. She said, "This could be interesting." She didn't think there was a God, but if there was, then there was more interesting things to come. And it's basically the way she led her life was she was always open to arguments and evidence, always. And she would change her view in light of them, even if she couldn't always change how she felt.
Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, how many times in the last month have you picked up marbles with your toes? That would be a zero. What kind of animals have you put in shoes? We put sheep in shoes, actually. Have you ever had people come to you who want their foot surgically altered so that they will fit the fashionable shoes they want to wear better? Once a week. You're kidding.
The foot is an amazing structure that is highly underappreciated.
These shoes are killing me. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam with help from Eliza Lambert. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez. We also had help this week from Sam Behr. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to our intern Kent McDonald, to Radiolab producer Latif Nassar, to the Center for Effective Altruism, and the American Society of Criminology. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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