STARTING FROM RESPECT

A different model is possible. We once drove to the mission locale office in the city of Senart near Paris to observe a meeting of “young creators.” The mission locale is a one-stop shop to serve all the needs (medical, social, employment) of disadvantaged youth.

The approach of the young creators program is very different from the typical approach in unemployment agencies. In the traditional approach, the goal of the counselor is to quickly identify something the youths, mostly high school dropouts or vocational school graduates, could do, usually some sort of training program, and direct them there. The presumption is that the counselor knows what is good for each person (the fashion these days is to do it with the help of some machine-learning algorithm). The youths then have to conform or lose their benefits.

Didier Dugast, who conceived the creators program, told us that more often than not, the traditional approach fails entirely. The young people who arrive have been told, all their lives, what to do. They have also been told, in school and perhaps at home, that they are not good enough. They arrive bruised and wounded, with extremely low self-esteem (we verified this in our quantitative survey⁹¹), which often translates into an instinctive suspicion of everything offered to them, and a tendency to resist suggestions.

The idea behind the young creators program is to start with the project the young man or woman proposes, and to take it very seriously.

We were involved in the RCT of this project. Nine hundred young people who had applied for the program were assigned either to this program or to the regular services. We found that those in the program were more likely to be employed and earned more. The effects were much larger for those who were the most disadvantaged to start with. What was extremely surprising at first glance was that the program actually reduces the probability of being self-employed, even though it begins with the applicant’s idea for starting a business. The main value of the program (and its explicit philosophy) is that the self-employment project is a starting point, but not necessarily the end. The program is essentially a form of therapy aimed at restoring confidence. What matters is finding stable, rewarding occupations within six months to a year. In contrast, a competing program we also evaluated that simply cherry-picked the most promising candidates for a self-employment program and then focused on bringing their initial project idea to fruition had no effect whatsoever, mostly because it selected the type of people likely to succeed regardless of the help they got.⁹²

In our view, the deep respect for the dignity of the young people is what made the Senart young creators initiative work. Many of these young people had never experienced being taken seriously by anyone in an official position (teachers, bureaucrats, law enforcement officials).

The same shift in attitude, from patronizing to respectful, was built into the program Becoming a Man, in inner-city Chicago. The program seeks to temper violence among young people. But instead of telling them it is wrong to be violent, it starts with recognizing that for teens in disadvantaged neighborhoods violence may be the norm, so being aggressive or even fighting may be necessary to avoid developing a reputation as a victim. Someone in this sort of neighborhood environment could develop a tendency to reflexively push back with violence whenever challenged. So instead of telling participants it was not the right thing to do, or punishing them when they did so, Becoming a Man asked kids from poor neighborhoods to participate in a series of activities, inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy, to help them identify when fighting was the appropriate reaction and when it might not be.

What is common among a drought-affected farmer in India, a youth in Chicago’s South Side, and a fifty-something white man who was just laid off? While they may have problems, they are not the problem. They are entitled to be seen for who they are and to not be defined by the difficulties besieging them. Time and again, we have seen in our travels in developing countries that hope is the fuel that makes people go. Defining people by their problems is turning circumstance into essence. It denies hope. A natural response is then to wrap oneself into this identity, with treacherous consequences for society at large.

The goal of social policy, in these times of change and anxiety, is to help people absorb the shocks that affect them without allowing those shocks to affect their sense of themselves. Unfortunately, this is not the system we have inherited. Our social protection still has its Victorian overlay, and all too many politicians do not try to hide their contempt for the poor and disadvantaged. Even with a shift in attitude, social protection will require a profound rethinking and an injection of lots of imagination. We have given some clues in this chapter on how to get there, but we clearly don’t have all the solutions, and suspect nobody else does either. We have much more to learn. But as long as we understand what the goal is, we can win.