We Can Do Better Assigning Roles to Charities and Government for Fixing Social Ills

President Obama’s second inauguration- creates an opportunity for America to think anew about what the government’s role in society should be and about its appropriate relationship to its citizens.

This should also be a time for nonprofits to reassess their tendency to assume that government must solve nearly every social ill.

Focusing first on government obscures important considerations. Among them: the limits to of the efficacy of government’s efficacy, the constraints on human knowledge, the differences in how institutions carry out social enterprises, the malleable nature of social problems, the inevitability of unintended consequences, and the fact that we almost always find goods in our evils and evils in our goods.

I’m not in any way arguing that government doesn’t have a role in social policy. I have led organizations that managed Head Start and other government programs, and I am proud of what we and federal, state, and local governments, together, have done for the people we served.

But we can do better. In approaching problems like childhood obesity or homelessness, we need to be more rigorous in choosing what government does, what nonprofits do, what is left to business, and what can be done through partnerships among all kinds of organizations.

Leaping too fast to the idea that government should solve problems sets government up to fail and underestimates the vitality of business and nonprofits. But most important, it risks doing a disservice to the people we seek to serve.

For instance, conservatives have pointed out that welfare has contributed significantly to the breakdown of impoverished families in the United States, a view that many liberals have also embraced. Government, in this assessment, has just kept doing more for poor people until it wound up unintentionally harming them.

Perhaps we need to if we established a set of questions that must be answered before deciding whether government should assume responsibility. Here’s a one list of considerations:

What constitutes success and does the idea for dealing with the problem have a strong prospect of success?

Solving problems entirely is often not possible, but what level of improvement is essential to justify a program—and is the idea under consideration up to the challenge?

Depending on the severity of the problem, we might be willing to accept a lower likelihood of a solution, much as doctors are willing to adopt higher-risk strategies when death otherwise seems imminent. But we would almost always want to believe strongly in our solution before embracing a program on a large scale.

Does the “solution” require support from people and institutions beyond the affected people and their intimate acquaintances?

Most of us think that the world would be a better place if fewer people divorced, but most would also see that as a problem better left to families, friends, places of worship, and private counseling, at least for the middle class and wealthy.

We will may set different thresholds based on political values or assumptions, but each of us probably has some standards for believing that certain problems are better left to what might be called the “intimate sector.”

Can government play a role effectively?

Let’s say our goal is to produce more inquisitive and happier children. We need to be wary of the Summerhill effect. Summerhill was the magnificent, nearly rule-free experiment in education created in Britain in the 1920s by A.S. Neill that appeared to work wonderfully for its students. The problem was, no one could duplicate it. There was something, many concluded, about Mr. Neill himself that made the schoolwork.

Imagine, then, government trying to expand that particular experiment to a national scale. There are some things that well- trained bureaucracies can do relatively well, and some at which, by the very nature of their tools, they are destined to fail, and a large range in between.

Do we know how much it will cost for government to get involved?

To answer this question, we need to include the direct costs, such as the expense of establishing and running the program; the indirect costs, such as what government or the taxpayer must give up to play a role; and the peripheral costs, such as collateral damage to personal initiative or communities. If we can’t reasonably estimate these, then the risk in cash and in unintended consequences is probably too great.

Do those costs outweigh the benefits of the government solution?

This will sometimes be an easy calculus and sometimes very difficult, but we owe taxpayers and the intended beneficiaries an honest effort to tally costs against benefits.

Is the relationship between costs and benefits better if government provides the solution than if other parts of society do?

It could be that a government-administered program is the best way to solve the problem, or that it’s better for government to pay businesses or nonprofits to run a program. But it’s also fair to ask whether government money taints the enterprise—as some who acknowledge a need for religious schools believe—suggesting that government should stay out of that game altogether.

The answer to each of these questions is inherently contestable. Each involves judgment calls, and each of those judgment calls will be informed by moral values.

The general effect of applying this kind of reasoning, it seems, would be to narrow the role of government. However, we owe it to those we seek to serve, to taxpayers, and to the efficacy and credibility of government itself to establish a coherent argument that seems to meet each of those tests before we assign government the responsibility of carrying out a solution.

Even when we conclude that large-scale policy is not warranted, there may be a role for government. If we don’t know the prospects for success for various strategies, we might want government to pay for a variety of experiments, as it did with welfare-to-work programs in the Clinton years.

At a time when government money is so tight and our problems so serious, we ought to be rigorous about whether we can achieve solutions and whether government can or should put them into action.