Modifying Bolsa Familia for the US

This week's reading was not the first time I'd heard about the Bolsa Familiar program in Brazil--I've

come across it numerous times before, in classes and through jobs/internship assignments. But every time I come back to it, I'm still astonished by the levels of success it has attained. It appears to be, far and away, the most successful program to combat poverty established to date. Reading again about its effectiveness, and how governments have been able to scale it up thus far, got me to thinking about its structure and whether or not its underlying principle--using individualized economic incentives to modify behavior in order to address social problems--can be applied to other societal issues.

The concept that most quickly jumped to my mind as a potential application was unemployment benefits. There are plenty of economic analyses of why unemployment as it works now often provides a disincentive to work. Furthermore, while unemployment benefits can sustain an individual financially while they are out of work, as the system stands now it provides little support to regaining and furthering employment options. Once an individual has been out of work 6, 7, 8 months, their skills have stagnated and the hole on their resume has grown too large to ignore.

But what if we applied the principle behind Bolsa Familia to unemployment benefits and paid the unemployed to change their behavior in order to become more employable--namely, by taking online classes and finding volunteer opportunities to sharpen skills. Just as Bolsa familia encourages families to send their children to school and ward off malnutrition and disease by conditioning cash transfers to school attendance and doctors visits, we could encourage individuals to take more productive steps to becoming employed by tying unemployment benefits to completion of online courses and fulfilling a certain number of volunteer hours at local nonprofits.

There are a plethora of open-enrollment online courses available today--starting with the massive collection offered via iTunes U--and plenty can offer new skills and knowledge for individuals to become more competitive in the job market. We could require the completion of a certain number of credits, or the documentation of a required number of hours put towards coursework, in order for an individual to receive unemployment benefits. A senior analyst at the Heritage Foundation proposed this exact idea in February, in writing that "the rapid growth of online education offers a better alternative to traditional government job training programs, which are expensive and of dubious effectiveness." 

Similarly, we could require the unemployed to find a volunteer position that allows the to exercise and perfect skills necessary in the workplace--such as working as an office assistant, or managing the inventory at a food bank. These positions, albeit unpaid, could help fill the gap that unemployment leaves on an individuals resume. Combining these voluntary work experiences with required online coursework would be an efficient way to retrain the workforce and guide the unemployed back into productive careers.

Such a model follows closely to the framework established by Bolsa Familia and Opportunitades--two tremendously successful program. Obviously, the cultural and economic atmosphere of the United States differs greatly from that of Brazil or Mexico, but the concept still seems to be of merit, particularly when the alternative is a system that tends to provide disincentives to rejoin the work place.


Source:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/returning-the-unemployed-to-work-adding-online-education-to-unemployment-insurance