The Social Investment Model, ExplainedBy Lyndon Hood
Hello everyone, please be seated.
As Chairman-at-large of the National Committee for Ideas that Sounded Good at the Time, I get asked a lot about this
social investment strategy lark. It looks to be a big feature of the upcoming budget and they reckon it’s a
revolutionary approach to managing the fiscal ramifications of population-based wellbeing enhancement, so let’s give it
squizz. Listen carefully and all should become clear.
Except for you in seat 7F there – our algorithms have predicted this will all go completely over your head, so how about
you just grab that colouring-in book and try not to distract the others.
Now first you have to understand this government has been making great strides in the field of evidence-based policy
making. For example one line of research is to discover how much evidence a minister of the crown can ignore when making
policy. So far we know it’s “a lot”. There’s a hypothesis that your typical minister can ignore more information than is
presently contained in the universe. It’s a tricky one to prove, but we’re working on it and I can’t say it’s wrong as
of press time.
Second, some of you might not know the term ‘big data’. Well I’ve looked into this for you and it turns out big data is
a way of making computers a bit racist. It’s also the reason Facebook seems to think I live in a different city than I
in fact do. But big data has proved useful in many commercial fields. For example, analytics companies can now determine
with terrifying accuracy which governments they can make the most money selling ‘big data’ engines to.
For too long social welfare has muddled along with bipartisan policies like shouting at the jobless or not helping
people with mental health issues, without scientifically confirming if those methods work. So now we have ‘social
investment’, which is a way of explaining that your welfare policy is good, actually, because of numbers. The idea, you
see, is you’re making welfare interventions based on their actual measured outcomes. It turns out people have looked
into this and often the best way to get good outcomes is to just give everyone more money. So this social investment
idea is something the government’s come up with to avoid doing that.
Now, if you want to compare the outcomes of things, you have to turn them into something you can count. Let’s suppose
you want to know how your programme of hitting beneficiaries with sticks affects their personal wellbeing, helps them
fulfil their potential, and benefits wider society. In that case, personal wellbeing would be measured in terms of how
much the individual costs the government. Fulfilled potential, on the other hand, might be measured in how much the
individual costs the government. The benefits to wider society is obviously trickier to work out, but one popular metric
is how much the individual costs the government. (If you’re wondering how all this might affect you, I recommend getting
a regular medical checkup from your accountant.)
A simplified version of the process might pan out as follows: Take your beneficiary or your patient or your newborn
child or whatnot, enter its vital statistics, perform a regression based on anomalies observed in the original sample,
subtract the difference between the cradle and the grave and multiply by the sum of human dignity. Wait a moment, that's
wrong. Dignity hasn't been a factor for years. Anyway, once you're done maximizing your divisions, sweep the remainder
up into a small pile, and then offer them some bootstraps to pull themselves up by or whatever else the system
recommends.
Another issue is, if you’re working from data you have to be quite careful to use it properly. Making sure to take all
the information into account for your conclusions, not picking and choosing, and so on. Otherwise you might get perverse
consequences (and not the good kind). As it happens this government’s been practising this for a while. For example,
they worked out people who were on the benefit were at greater risk than people who weren’t, so they kicked everyone off
the benefit. Which makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it too hard. And in Corrections, where they can clearly
trace the statistical effectiveness of every intervention they apply, reoffending rates are going back up again for some
reason they apparently can’t put their finger on. So, third time being the charm, if they have another go at this data
stuff now, I reckon they’ll finally get the hang of it.
Any questions? Well, there is a risk of stigmatising people for life based on a statistical guess, but I think you can trust us to avoid that. Any other
questions? Not you, 7F, stop wasting everyone’s time pretending you’ve got a contribution to make.
Good. There will now be a short test. I’ve written the answers on the whiteboard here so I don’t miss out on my
performance bonus.
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