A trenchant summing up of the uselessness of most jobs programs by Jim Bovard:

“Advocates claim that job programs give kids lessons that will change their lives, but the lessons are often of doubtful value. The Tulare County, Calif. summer-job program provides kids with “workshops on safety, ethics and life skills” — as well as “referrals to armed services.”

True, there are things more absurd than government agencies’ paying teens for a day to learn how to find and keep a job. But the highlight of a job-preparation “summit” in Orlando, Fla., was a motivational speaker named Marvellous Mark, whose slogan is “Opportunity Rocks.” According to Workforce Central Florida (a successor to state unemployment offices, which also dispense federal job-training funds in the area), Marvellous Mark’s presentation “is based on this simple premise: The qualities successful rock stars have are also found in every successful worker.”

The key thing kids should learn from their first jobs is to produce enough value that someone will voluntarily pay them a wage. But the goal for summer-job programs is often simply to make kids feel good about themselves. Many programs bend over backward to avoid firing kids, regardless of their behavior. The D.C. program last year continued paying almost 2,000 kids long after they had achieved a record of perfect absenteeism.

Politicians brag that government-funded summer jobs helps kids get a foot into the labor market. However, the federal hiring criteria for this year’s program could affix a scarlet letter on youths later seeking real private jobs. Most kids who receive a federally subsidized summer job must possess at least one “barrier” to employment, such as being a school dropout, pregnant, criminal offender, runaway, homeless or deficient in “basic skills.”

The precedents don’t bode well. In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences reported that the summer-job program failed to reduce the crime rate among participants. As for the economics, a Health and Human Services Department-funded study of summer-job programs in the 1980s by two Harvard University professors concluded that “roughly 40% of jobs simply displace private employment” for minority youth.

Discouraging History

Forty years ago, the General Accounting Office condemned federal summer-job programs because youth “regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.” In 1979, GAO reported that the vast majority of urban teens in the program “were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced, or realistic ideas on expectations in the real world of work were not fostered.” Persistent negative evaluations eventually convinced Congress to terminate federal funding in the late 1990s.

The federal government has run more than 100 different job-training programs since the 1960s — dozens of them targeted at youth — but has consistently betrayed people who trusted Uncle Sam to give them marketable skills. An Urban Institute study found that participation in the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1974-’83) produced “significant earnings losses for young men of all races.” And a 1992 U.S. Labor Department study concluded that federal training “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths.”

There is no reason to imagine that the revived summer-job programs will be less harmful than previous ones. “Make work” and “fake work” are a grave disservice to young people. American teenagers should not be sacrificed on an altar of political photo opportunities….”

Read the rest of this at Jim Bovard’s blog.

My Comment:

Bovard documents his point pretty well in this post. So my comment is going to be more general.

Massaging self-esteem is the logical result when society as a whole refuses to allow “value judgment” of actions and behavior. You might think that this refusal to judge is confined to those liberals who simply can’t bring themselves to notice the bad behavior that welfare programs often incentivize. You’d be wrong. A lot of libertarians subscribe to some form of it.

For them, making a judgment is confused with “being judgmental,” in the negative sense. We are told that this judgmentalism is what’s wrong with society.

Actually, and this is often the case, we have too much of what we think we lack, and what we think we have too much of turns out to be completely lacking.

We lack judgment ourselves and we discourage its cultivation in our young people. I won’t spend this post explaining where and how this peculiar attitude developed. Some of it can be blamed on the New Age with its strange cross-breeding of neo-Hindu/neo-Buddhist thinking with American pragmatism and home-spun prosperity gospels..

This school of thought refuses to believe in the existence of material facts, unpleasant limitations, or real physical bodies. Everything is mental. Variations of this mindset abound in New Age literature – a perfect illustration being the block-buster movie about the “Law of Attraction” – “The Secret.”

The New Age minus the discipline of systematic thought and rational ethics gives us the kind of mentality which produced credit derivatives – debt forever with never a creditor paid back. In fact, the whole credit bubble perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with “non-judgmentalism”. It was telling (to me) that many on the left, who until then had never had any use for Jesus or the Gospel, were quick to trot him out when it came to “forgive us our debts.”

Non-judgmentalism gives us value-free education, jobs without productive work, journalism as stenography, off-balance sheets and on-balance debt, contrition as public performance, and every other economic and non-economic sin that has brought the country to its knees.

The topic bears much more examination, but I’d rather wander out onto the rambla just now and watch the waves – looking rather brown and muddy today – beat against the city. Living next to the sea has its uses. The city, man’s puny hive, is put in its proper place against the infinite, rhythmic chaos of nature – a chaos of higher order and meaning than anything humans can create. The waves have no pretensions. They suck at the beach,  and grind down the sand and the rocks. There’s no escape from the tides – now in, now out.

Only man would try to create – or think it worth creating – a tide that always came in and never went out….