"It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without.
Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness. Half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless."
Thanks for pointing this out.
The NY Times article's framing (about homeless "being denied assistance") is potentially distortionary: are the people who do not receive assistance people who otherwise would have received assistance? If so, what is the money that would have been used to assist them being used for?
People often object to randomized controlled trials on humans on the grounds that it seems inhumane to deny people potentially useful assistance. But even ignoring potentially positive long term consequences, such a framing ignores the fact that there's a short term opportunity cost to granting assistance to everyone; the money saved by giving it to only half of the people can be used for other social programs.
According to the city, 5,500 households receive full Homebase help each year, and an additional 1,500 are denied case management and rental assistance because money runs out.
If it's going to happen anyway:
Ms. Almodovar said she was told when she sought help from Homebase that in order to apply, she had to enter a lottery that could result in her being denied assistance.
However:
The department is paying $577,000 for the study
which is the only point at which one can object.
This seems like an interesting article, but I'm having a little trouble parsing the post. Was there supposed to be another sentence/paragraph before the one starting "Now, NYC City . . ." that talks about where else this methodology is used? Maybe the first sentence of the article?
This seems like an interesting article, but I'm having a little trouble parsing the post. Was there supposed to be another sentence/paragraph before the one starting "Now, NYC City . . ." that talks about where else this methodology is used? Maybe the first sentence of the article?
Previous sentence from the article added for clarity.