The issues of marital stability and family composition and the income maintenance experiments

Income distribution ; Public welfare ; Income

Methods Used to Evaluate Employment and Training Programs in the Past

The authors begin with a thorough assessment of the many nonexperimental employment and training program evaluation techniques based on non-random comparison groups. These techniques typically use econometric methods to estimate the effects of employment and training programs by using comparison groups from non-program external sources. Then, recognizing the inherent drawbacks in these methods, Bell, Orr, Blomquist and Cain respond by reintroducing an evaluation method first implemented in the 1960s, the use of internal comparison groups consisting of nonparticipating program applicants. These groups include withdrawals, screen-outs and no-shows of the programs being evaluated in order to solve the selection bias problem. By applying to the program, say the authors, nonparticipating applicants reveal themselves to have some of the same difficult-to-measure, personal characteristics that inspire participants to seek help in response to their current economic situation. The methodology of this technique is updated, then tested against the random experimental findings derived from a controlled job training experiment, the AFDC Homemaker-Home Health Aide Demonstrations. Encouraging results are presented along with useful suggestions for designers and implementers of all types of program evaluations.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1080/thumbnail.jp

Between Commerce and Empire: David Hume, Colonial Slavery, and Commercial Incivility

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as a robust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. This essay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflections on commerce, empire and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned the colonial system of monopoly, war and conquest, his strictures against empire did not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonial slavery represented a manifestly uncivil institution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also a decisively commercial institution pivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical ‘commercial incivility’ of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the link between slavery and commerce, and confined his criticism of slavery to its ancient, feudal and Asiatic incarnations. I contend that Hume’s disavowal of the commercial barbarism of the Atlantic economy is part of a broader ideological effort to separate the idea of commerce from its imperial origins and posit it as the liberal antithesis of empire. The implications of analysis, I conclude, go beyond the eighteenth-century debates over commerce and empire, and more generally pertain to the contradictory entwinement of liberalism and capitalism