Bureaucrats as "Social Engineers": Federal Welfare Programs in Herbert Hoover's America

A bstract . Historians interested in 20th century American reform often seek to analyze the ideologies of political leaders separately from the institutions that these same leaders created. Such emphases on ideas, as opposed to actions, has, for example, led "revisionist" American historians to argue that the presidencies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt were "conceptually continuous." Our examination of the major social welfare programs undertaken by the federal government in the 1920s disputes this claim. Examination of the operations of the federal bureaucracy instead of the rhetoric of politicians demonstrates the existence of decided policy differences between the Hoover and Roosevelt eras. "Efficiency" analogues dominant during the Hoover era were replaced with "direct service-provider" approaches which created a clear distinction between private and public welfare programs. Elements of "continuity" between the two eras have been overdrawn. Background is provided for increased understanding of some of the policy implications of America's contemporary welfare debate—particularly about "rehabilitation" strategies and/or rationales for action in the social welfare field.     

Sub additive measures of relative information and inaccuracy

Summary In the study of information theoretic measures, additivity has been the basic requirement. However it is quite interesting to investigate the sub-additive measures. Starting from subadditivity for measures associated with a pair of distributions of a discrete random variable, it has been changed into an equality relation using another function of a pair of distributions., Under the sum property of the function and the measures, the relation is expressed in terms of a functional equation of which the most general complex solutions have been obtained. In terms of the real continuous solutions of the functional equation, the sub-additive measures of Relative information and Inaccuracy have been defined and characterized. Particular cases and simple properties particularly the convexities of some of these new measures have also been studied.     

Irrelevance of the soft budget constraint for the shortage phenomenon

Kornai's thesis that shortage results from demand expansions bred by the soft budget constraint, derives from his implicit assumption that price regimes of input and output firms are different. Since any firm is both an input and an output firm, which discards the assumption as logically untenable, excess demand can only turn up because of lower than contracted inputs of labor and management that are not offset by an adequate downward adjustment of earnings. Expansions of demand that appear to be autonomous, are incited by uncertain deliveries of inputs, that is, by inefficiency (of output firms) as well. A by far the largest part of excess demand can be explained by state preferences for fast growth. As planners are more successful in generating investment, and the ensuing consumer, demand than in expanding production, shortage is inevitable regardless of the character of the firms' budget constraints.     

A new approach to optimal selection of services in health care organizations.

A new reimbursement policy adopted by Medicare in 1983 caused financial difficulties for many hospitals and health care organizations. Several organizations responded to these difficulties by developing systems to carefully measure their costs of providing services. The purpose of such systems was to provide relevant information about the profitability of hospital services. This paper presents a new method of making hospital service selection decisions: it is based on an optimization model that avoids arbitrary cost allocations as a basis for computing the costs of offering a given service. The new method provides more reliable information about which services are profitable or unprofitable, and it provides an accurate measure of the degree to which a service is profitable or unprofitable. The new method also provides useful information about the sensitivity of the optimal decision to changes in costs and revenues. Specialized algorithms for the optimization model lead to very efficient implementation of the method, even for the largest health care organizations.     

Costs, commitment, and rewards: factors influencing the design and implementation of internal labor markets.

Much research on internal labor markets has been hampered by the failure to differentiate the wide variety of ILMs, by accounts of their determinants that too heavily emphasize isolated causal factors, by the lack of detailed material describing the economic and organizational dimensions of their design and implementation, and by the neglect of managerial perceptions of and motivations for constructing ILMs. This paper presents detailed case studies of three organizations that have constructed very different ILMs. Based on this material, a model of the determinants of ILMs is developed that centers around the concepts of costs, commitment, and rewards and that attempts to assess the interactions of effects of markets and hierarchies on ILMs. The model is built on the premise that the underlying imperatives typically held to affect ILMs are inevitably filtered through managerial beliefs and the constraints on managerial decision making. The implications of these findings for theory and research on ILMs are discussed.     

On recalls, layoffs, variable hours, and labor adjustment costs

The paper analyzes the employment policy of a firm that can vary both hours and the level of employment. The analysis differs from previous work in the adjustment cost literature in that the firm is able to change its employment not only through hires, layoffs, and quits, but also by recalls of employees who were previously laid off. Thus, we introduce the possibility of the firm inventorying the labor input. It is shown that this labor inventory potential is necessary if the firm is to ever lay off workers. Further, it is demonstrated that linear rather than strictly convex adjustment costs are then required if the firm is to always recall employees who were previously laid off prior to hiring new workers.     

Spillover effects of human service facilities in a racially segmented housing market

Previous studies of human service facility spillovers on residential property values have been inconclusive, and have failed to take into account the effects of racial segmentation of housing markets. Likewise, studies of racial discrimination in urban housing markets and price differentials between white and nonwhite areas of the city have failed to consider the impacts of service facilities on prices. This study develops an hedonic price model of housing services in a racially segmented housing market, which considers a variety of human service facilities and their spillover effects. Model results for Oakland, California in 1976 indicate that facilities significantly affect housing prices both positively and negatively, and that these effects vary by racial submarket. Implications of these findings for the interpretation of past discrimination studies, facility impact studies, and social policy are considered.     

Air pollution-mortality models: A demonstration of the effects of random measurement error

Errors of measurement have long been recognized as a chronic problem in statistical analysis. Although there is a vast statistical literature of multiple regression models estimating the air pollution-mortality relationship, this problem has been largely ignored. It is well known that pollution measures contain error, but the consequences of this error for regression estimates is not known. We use Lave and Seskin's air pollution model to demonstrate the consequences of random measurement error. We assume a range of 0% to 50% of the variance of the pollution measures is due to error. We find large differences in the estimated effects on mortality of the pollution variables as well as the other explanatory variables once this measurement error is taken into account. These results cast doubt on the usual regression estimates of the mortality effects of air pollution. More generally our results demonstrate the consequences of random measurement error in the explanatory variable of a multiple regression analysis and the misleading conclusions that may result in policy research if this error is ignored.     

Structural instability of the core

Let σ be a q-rule, where any coalition of size q, from the society of size n, is decisive. Let w(n,q)= 2q-n+1 and let W be a smooth ‘policy space’ of dimension w. Let U(W)^N be the space of all smooth profiles on W, endowed with the Whitney topology. It is shown that there exists an ‘instability dimension’ w^*(σ) with 2w^*(σ)w(n,q) such that:

1. (i) if ww^*(σ), and W has no boundary, then the core of σ is empty for a dense set of profiles in U(W)^N (i.e., almost always),

2. (ii) if ww^*(σ)+1, and W has a boundary, then the core of σ is empty, almost always,

3. (iii) if ww^*(σ)+1 then the cycle set is dense in W, almost always,

4. (iv) if ww^*(σ)+2 then the cycle set is also path connected, almost always.

The method of proof is first of all to show that if a point belongs to the core, then certain generalized symmetry conditions in terms of ‘pivotal’ coalitions of size 2q−n must be satisfied. Secondly, it is shown that these symmetry conditions can almost never be satisfied when either W has empty boundary and is of dimension w(n,q) or when W has non-empty boundary and is of dimension w(n,q)+1.