Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets, Removing Bad Apples

Who should be first in line for kidney transplants--the relatively healthy or the severely ill? Should chronic troublemakers be allowed to remain in public housing? Should perpetually disruptive students stay in classes where they can prevent other children from learning? Prominent legal scholar Peter H. Schuck and leading economist Richard J. Zeckhauser take on such vexing policy dilemmas in Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets and Removing Bad Apples.

Schuck and Zeckhauser present a rigorous framework for analyzing many of the difficult choices facing policymakers. Most social programs seek to help "bad draws"--unfortunate, often low-income individuals. Poor targeting of scarce resources, however, often undermines both the effectiveness of those policies and their political support. Many policy failures occur when officials allocate these scarce resources to two groups of bad draws: "bad bets," who will derive substantially less benefit from the resources than would other bad draws, and "bad apples," whose behavior in the program imposes significant costs on other recipients. The authors show how to identify bad bets and bad apples, and how to treat them in ways that promote the greater public good.

This tough-minded book raises the right questions, those that society ignores at its peril, particularly to its less fortunate members. The answers it provides and reforms it suggests,though rarely easy and sometimes incomplete, will point social policy in the right direction.