Evaluation, statistics and OR

Financial Market Regulation

The current number 1 topic of news and conversation today is quite rightly the meltdown of the global financial markets.  The effects that this is having on anyone's day to day life and future prospects are awesome.  From employment prospects to housing to holidays to pensions, everyone is affected and it is nearly impossible currently to gauge whether it will be a passing pain or a fundamental restructuring of modern finances.

But should we be surprised?  Not really, as even this millennium there have been enough examples of corporate sharp practice and lack of serious regulation to warn us that not all is necessarily as wonderful as we would like to believe.  In May 2006 I reviewed for the Journal of the Operational Research Society an excellent book by Roy C Smith and Ingo Walter called "Governing the Modern Corporation" which went a long way to describing quite how the dot com bubble and the Enron fiasco could happen.

Contrasting with that, if one reads the Skills Assessments of various London based organisations such as the Financial Services Sector Skills Council or the London Development Agency, or even Boris Johnson (although as Mayor of London he isn't totally unbiased), one would think that financial institutions are philanthropic organisations purely out for the public good.  Yet how can the lure of seven figure bonuses or higher ensure that activity is scrupulous?

It seems to me, and I hope I am wrong, as it won't be pretty, that there could be a major and serious market correction and it will hurt.  It seems the public are no longer prepared to laugh off the City bonuses, the over-heated housing market is finally calming down, and we have got to a crunch point in market regulation.  As long as the financial institutions could ensure that normal people's wealth increased as well as their own, and that no one got embarrassed, they were free to find ever more "creative" ways to operate, and no one dared to say no to them as they might go elsewhere.

The potential blackmail is now loosing its force, failures such as Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley and Lehman Brothers have embarrassed Governments and politicians will need to be seen to be acting.  [Quote from the 19th September 2008 edition of Private Eye "Number Crunching: $6.6 billion - losses by Lehman Brothers in 2008 up to point it went bankrupt; $8.7 billion - staff bonuses paid out by Lehman Brothers in 2006".]

And what of the little people like you and me?  Forget about a comfortable retirement, your pension pot value could well fall by a quarter this year!  But for those of us in our forties and younger, did we ever think we would be able to retire?  Make sure you enjoy what you do - you will be doing it a long time!

Measuring the benefits of Mentoring

The Centre for Policy Studies has published a report concluding that the benefits of mentoring are exaggerated and unproven.  It seems that the Prince's Trust and I disagree!

It seems that the Centre for Policy Studies does not think that there is enough evidence to prove the case for mentors, particularly children and young adults.  Well, au contraire say I and the Prince's Trust and from totally different bases too.

I have recently been involved in a number of evaluations of projects funded by the European Social Fund - the 2000 to 2006 monies have been spent and now need to be accounted for.  Those evaluations have been in the West Midlands and in the South West regions - quite different areas with quite different problems, yet both demonstrated benefits of having mentoring support, particularly for vulnerable people.

The projects ranged from support for ex-offenders and really hard to reach young people and encouraging them into learning or employment, encouraging the work-less back into employment, to helping people with mental health issues into learning and employment.  In all cases, the one to one mentoring gave the beneficiary (technical term for the person having the project done to them) the extra support they needed to face up to and overcome barriers, real or perceived, to learning or employment.

The mentor support included all sorts of things from the relatively mundane provision of bus travel tokens and assistance in completing application forms, through exploring an individual's career history to identify transferable skills, through helping young gang members to cross postcode boundaries, to providing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and helping young people in particular identify what is unacceptable as well.

Those mentors that I met were special people as well.  They could fearlessly work with those that I would run away from.  They could encourage, empathise with and support people with very different backgrounds to their own.  They could inspire some of the most lost people in society to reconnect with the world around them.  They could inspire friendship and companionship with and among people with no real knowledge of how to relate to those around them appropriately.  And at the end of the day, the mentors could go home and lead a normal family life, and not be hounded with the sorts of self-doubt and worries that I for one would have after an intense day.

If, for example, just one or five of the several hundred young people in one of the West Midlands projects went on to get a job, and didn't commit any more crime, the substantial funds put into that project would have had a positive payback.  The cost of supporting someone on benefits or in prison for a substantial amount of time, plus the insurance costs, the social costs, the human cost to the victims of crime would outweigh the cost of that project.  In fact nearly 50 people gained jobs, and many more were living crime free existences at the end of the project.

To me, that payback is priceless, and I am a fervent supporter of mentoring programmes.  I suspect that my ESF funded projects evaluations would not cross the Centre for Policy Studies radar however, so they will never see the value.