Thomas J. Main's "Reforming Social Services in New York City"

Thomas J. Main is Professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Rise of Illiberalism, The Rise of the Alt-Right, and Homelessness in New York City.

Main applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Reforming Social Services in New York City: How Major Change Happens in Urban Welfare Policies, with the following results:

In my case The Page 99 Test comes very close to working but not quite. On page 98--close enough, I think--there is an important exchange I had with J. Philip Thompson, who was Mayor de Blasio's deputy mayor for Strategic Initiatives. I interviewed Thompson and many players in New York City's welfare policy community. My big question was how to get the myriad set of agencies, bureaucracies, governments, and other players to coordinate their efforts to help the city's poor find work. Here's what was said:

Main: "You're saying, well, yes...the system is fragmented. But you're working to make it less fragmented....What other initiatives are you undertaking to try to reduce fragmentation?

Thompson: Well, vision...workforce [policy] is tremendously underdeveloped.... In terms of vision, I think there's general unclarity over what the future of work will look like.

Very interestingly, Thompson did not say what is needed to make government systems for employing people work better is more money, or more political will. No doubt he would like to see work development programs get more money and political support, but those were not his immediate answer to my question. His answer was "vision," that is convincing ideas, backed up with good field testing, about what actually works in helping people find jobs.

One of the main themes of my book is that the power of public ideas in policymaking is much underrated by many observers. By a public idea, or vision, I mean a pithy concept, backed up with a lot of rigorous research, about what government should do. In the 1990s, welfare policy was dominated by the public ideas of "end welfare as we know it," and "work first." They sound pretty vague, but they were backed up with high-quality research that showed welfare agencies put too much emphasis on making sure only eligible people received benefits and not nearly enough on helping people find jobs and succeed at them.

My point is that, whatever one might think of 1990s welfare reform, the combination of a simple formulation with plenty of good research to support it, is a powerful way to reform dysfunctional bureaucracies and to coordinate a fragmented system. When policy entrepreneurs can come up with such a vision, major change in government is possible.

Learn more about Reforming Social Services in New York City at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue