Views of a Policymaker and Public Administrator

This paper, which considers the income maintenance experiments from a welfare administrator’s point of view, explores two major questions. The first is one of process: What is the relationship between the way in which the experiments were conducted and their reception by welfare officials? The second question concerns substance: What lessons for administering today’s welfare system are suggested by the goals with which the experiments were undertaken and by the knowledge they generated? Before addressing these questions, however, it may be helpful to briefly set them in the context of the major papers before this conference. A review of the papers by Burtless, Cain and Hanushek highlights the diversity of environments studied in the negative income tax experiments -variations in the demographics of the sites, in their grant levels, their economic conditions and their tax structures -a diversity that mirrors the heterogeneous circumstances of the poor in this country. Such diversity heightens the difficulty of any effort to reform the nation’s income maintenance system. Moreover, the variation of environments studied was compounded by the wide variation of experimental designs, which encompassed so many different benefit and tax levels, research samples and services. Thus, in reflecting on how these experiments might have affected welfare administrators in the past and how their lessons might illuminate lessons for the future, it is useful at the outset to recognize that these experiments were ambitious, highly complicated and probably overly elaborate in design. While this paper does not focus directly on these characteristics, it will have occa-