Matt Anderson, a guru on burning out from the child welfare system, talks about “values fatigue” in social work and being an effective change agent. He emphasizes the importance of knowing “what hill to get fired on.” Many jobs have this feature, where you know from Day 1 that your employment will probably end dramatically. Like joining a presidential administration or becoming a stunt double. To do anything dangerous, including social systems change work, it helps to have a fallback.

How do you tear down an oppressive system? Creatively. Another name for innovation is creative destruction. By pioneering a better way, innovators can undermine what existed before. Peeling apart the concepts of policy innovation (trying something new) and program evaluation (rigorous tests of what works) helps us see how they operate differently and serve different purposes. Policy innovators try something new, while program evaluators legitimize existing practices. For anybody with extreme views of a public service – e.

The design and operation of Child Protective Services (CPS) is a topic often shrouded in pain and emotion, with big risks at play. This essay aims to take a dispassionate step back and survey the incentives that shape CPS, as part of the justice system, and how that system interacts with child and parent wellbeing. Overview As a starting point, I assert that society chooses some minimum standard of care for children.

Sometimes practicality demands answers to ugly questions from academia. Regulators make decisions about risk based on a dollar value of death. Military planners contemplate apocalyptic destruction as a strategy to keep peace. When we shirk answering these ugly but necessary questions, people suffer. Government policies that separate children from negligent or abusive parents raise these types of ugly questions. Probing the limits of children’s innocence and love for their parents feels profane.

In Rosen’s paper, the theory is that companies simultaneously pay a price for labor, and workers pay a shadow price for a job. The shadow price that workers pay for a job is their maximum earnings potential minus their actual earnings. Workers can be excluded from certain types of jobs if the job’s shadow price exceeds their earnings potential. This idea seems relevant to people’s decision to parent and provide foster care.