Community Heroes by Edward Patrick Akinyemi

Author:Edward Patrick Akinyemi [Edward Patrick Akinyemi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edward Patrick Akinyemi
Published: 2020-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

University of Pennsylvania criminologist Sara Heller conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test the effectiveness of the One Summer Plus (OSP) summer jobs program in Chicago. The program is a part-time, eight-week summer jobs program that pays its participants the minimum wage of the state of Illinois. Heller randomly assigned 1,634 youth between grades eight and twelve that were attending thirteen high-violence Chicago schools to treatment or control groups. In the treatment group, half of them were offered 25 hours per week of paid employment, while the other half were offered 15 hours per week of paid work plus 10 hours per week of social-emotional learning. The youth in the control group did not receive any sort of counseling or employment opportunities.

Heller used data from the Chicago Police Department to track the rates at which the participants were arrested during and after the study and found that while there were no significant differences between the groups in rates of arrest for property, drug, and other crimes, there was a 43 percent decrease in violent-crime arrests for participants in the treatment group compared to those in the control group.96 In a different study, Alicia Sasser Modestino of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program also used an RCT to evaluate the impact of a Boston summer youth employment program. Of the 4,235 youth that applied for summer jobs, 1,186 were offered jobs via random assignment (a lottery) and were placed in the treatment group. The remaining 3,049 that applied but weren’t chosen were assigned to the control group. Modestino found that compared to the control group, violent crime decreased by 35 percent and property crimes by 57 percent for participants in the treatment group.97

Looking at this through the lens of the three types of entrepreneurship and the rules of the game discussed earlier, these studies make a strong case for the argument that people generally engage in activities that reward them the most. When these kids were given options to do productive activities that rewarded their efforts more than destructive ones like crime, a significant portion of them gladly accepted the more positive offer. Without realistic options for such productive activities, however, one could argue that destructive activities become the only available, and hence most profitable actions for them to do. Given this scenario, maybe it’s not so strange to see them do these things; perhaps there is some method to the madness. Or as an economist might say, maybe destructive activities are sometimes rational and profit-maximizing actions for the people that do it, similar to how buying a cheaper product instead of its more expensive (but identical) version is also rational.

In other words, I am suggesting that maybe people that engage in destructive activities do so not because they are horrible, immoral people or are worse or less competent than you and me, but because they don’t have access to positive options in their lives that reward them for their efforts. What we perceive to be madness on their

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.