Socialism: study the precedents and test whether the help matters

Add precedents.md: Mondragon's Caja Laboral, the US National Consumer
Cooperative Bank, Italy's Coopfond and Marcora Law, each with what went
wrong. Add a support lottery to the pilot (intensive help for a random
half, advisers walled off from lending, all help counted against the
bank), count distressed mergers as closures, and replace unsourced
precedent claims on the bank and argument pages.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QWPs69B8nQZjtPEUXMKzZx

JoshHeaps.Net/Content/Socialism/pilot-spec.md

@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ Private co-op lenders exist and do good work, but they're small. Shared Capital
 It breaks down like this:
 
 - **About $300 million for loans.** Around 400 co-ops with a typical first loan of about $500,000 is roughly $200 million. The rest is for follow-on loans to co-ops that grow. For comparison, Shared Capital's average loan is about $230,000. The pilot's loans are larger because it's meant to fund real businesses with real payrolls, not only very small ones.
-- **$20 million, capped, for business help:** bookkeeping, governance training, legal setup. Venezuela's census blamed many of its failures on the lack of exactly this. This money is a public cost, stated openly and capped, and it's counted in the pilot's total cost to taxpayers. It isn't allowed to hide inside loan pricing.
+- **$20 million, capped, for business help:** bookkeeping, governance training, legal setup, and more intensive help for half the co-ops, chosen by lottery (see [the support lottery](#the-support-lottery)). Venezuela's census blamed many of its failures on the lack of exactly this. This money is a public cost, stated openly and capped, and it's counted in the pilot's total cost to taxpayers. It isn't allowed to hide inside loan pricing.
 - **The remainder** is a cash cushion and running costs.
 
 ## Why about 400 co-ops
@@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ All of this is written down and filed in a public study registry before the firs
    - it stops being a real co-op: fewer than three-quarters of its work hours are done by members, or its workers are kept on probation past the limit.
 
    The pay rule matters. Co-ops can survive a bad stretch by cutting their own pay instead of cutting jobs, and the best existing study couldn't rule that out. A co-op that survives by paying its people far less than the business down the street hasn't passed.
-2. **The bank's money.** At the end, after every loss, write-off and running cost, has the loan book earned at least what the same money would have earned in Treasury bonds over the same years? Anything less means taxpayers lost money compared with just holding bonds. Loans still outstanding are valued at what a buyer would pay for them. Loans that were restructured to avoid default are marked down, so going easy on struggling borrowers can't hide losses.
+2. **The bank's money.** At the end, after every loss, write-off and running cost, and every dollar spent on business help, has the loan book earned at least what the same money would have earned in Treasury bonds over the same years? Anything less means taxpayers lost money compared with just holding bonds. Loans still outstanding are valued at what a buyer would pay for them. Loans that were restructured to avoid default are marked down, so going easy on struggling borrowers can't hide losses.
 
 A useful yardstick: among the SBA's mature loan groups from 1992 to 2004, loans making up about 6% to 10% of the money lent eventually defaulted, and about 37% of the defaulted amount was later recovered ([GAO-20-618](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-618)). A lender charging market rates with losses in that range covers them from interest.
 
@@ -139,6 +139,38 @@ This is the hardest part of any test like this. Co-ops that got a loan aren't li
 
 **What existing evidence predicts.** The strongest study so far followed every firm in Uruguay from 1997 to 2009: about 29,000 firms, 223 of them worker-run. After leaving out very small businesses and adjusting for tax differences, worker-run firms were about 29% *less* likely to close in any given period than conventional ones ([Burdín, *ILR Review*, 2014](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001979391406700108)). The advantage was clearest in services. In manufacturing and transport there was no clear difference. That's encouraging, but it's one country, and it's why pay is built into the survival measure above.
 
+## The support lottery
+
+Mondragon's bank gave its co-ops far more than loans. It gave them a salaried manager while they planned, specialist departments for marketing and production, a staff member who sat in on board meetings for the first year, and monthly check-ins on the numbers ([Has This Been Tried?](precedents.md#mondragons-bank-caja-laboral)). Nobody knows whether the loans or the help did the work. The pilot can test part of that cheaply, so it does.
+
+**How it works:**
+
+- **Every co-op gets standard help:** setting up the books, legal setup, and training in how to run a co-op meeting and a co-op budget. That's about $15,000 per co-op, around $6 million in all.
+- **Half also get intensive help for two years, chosen by lottery.** That means an experienced adviser who attends board meetings without a vote, a monthly review of the numbers, and access to specialists in marketing, operations and pricing. It costs about $70,000 more per co-op, around $14 million in all.
+- **The draw is made by the reviewers, not the bank**, after each co-op's first loan payment, using a random method filed in advance. It's balanced by industry and by the founders' wealth. Every co-op is analyzed in the group it was drawn into, whether or not it uses the help, so a co-op can't improve the numbers by opting in or out.
+- **Each co-op's help budget is set aside when it's drawn.** If money runs short, the intensive group gets smaller, but no co-op's help gets thinner.
+- **Co-ops agree to the lottery when they apply**, and the design is approved by an independent research ethics board. Co-ops in the standard group can ask for intensive help after year four, once the main comparison has been measured.
+
+**Advisers are walled off from the bank's interests.**
+
+- **They're hired through outside nonprofit providers on fixed fees.** They aren't bank staff, and nothing they're paid depends on whether their co-ops survive.
+- **They advise; they don't run anything.** All advice is written and non-binding. They can't vote, sign anything, or take part in hiring or firing, and the members can replace their adviser at any time.
+- **They can't arrange rescues.** Advisers can't arrange or suggest mergers, loan changes or sales of the business. A co-op's merger counts as a closure if it was behind on payments or below the minimum sales level in the year before (see [Keeping zombies alive](pilot-safeguards.md#keeping-zombies-alive)). Merger and restructuring counts are published for each group.
+- **They're treated as insiders.** An adviser and their firm can't sell paid services to a co-op they advised for three years afterward. Someone who referred a co-op for a loan can't be its adviser.
+- **Their one reporting duty is fraud.** They report suspected fraud to the reviewers, and nothing about business performance goes to the lending side.
+
+**The help is a subsidy, and it's counted as one.** Intensive help is worth something like a sixth of a typical first loan. So:
+
+- **Every dollar of business help counts against the bank** in the [money test](#the-decision-rule), just like a bad loan.
+- **The survival result for the standard-help group alone is published next to the main result.** If co-ops only hold their own with intensive help, readers will see that.
+- **Comparison firms' use of free government business counseling**, such as the SBA's Small Business Development Centers, is recorded where the data allows.
+
+**What it can and can't show.** Assume about 200 co-ops in each group and closures in line with new businesses generally. Then the pilot can reliably detect only a large effect, something like 30 to 40% fewer closures in the intensive group. So its main outcome is survival and fair pay at year four, when the help's effect should be clearest, with year twelve reported as well. The result is reported as a range, with a cost per closure avoided, and it counts as exploratory. **A result that isn't statistically significant doesn't prove the help is useless.** It means only that a large effect has been ruled out.
+
+**What it doesn't test.** Mondragon's help started *before* a co-op existed: studying the idea, paying the manager, covering early losses. This lottery starts after the loan, so it can't say whether help before launch creates more good co-ops. That's logged as an open question.
+
+**If intensive help works,** that's an argument for building it into [the federation](federation.md), paid for by the co-ops out of their shared fund the way Italy's Coopfond is, not for a permanent federal advisory office.
+
 ## The timeline
 
 - **Year 0.** Charter the bank. File the full analysis plan, code, benchmarks and thresholds. Name the reviewers.
@@ -155,7 +187,7 @@ At year 12, both measures must pass:
 1. **Fair survival.** We can be 95% confident that co-ops' chance of failing in a given year, as defined above, is no more than 25% higher than the comparison group's. If co-ops are exactly as durable or more, this should pass. If they're clearly worse, it fails.
 
    Why allow up to 25% rather than demanding exact equality? No test can prove two things are *exactly* equal. You can only rule out differences bigger than some margin, and a tighter margin takes more co-ops. Ruling out a 10% gap would take somewhere around 1,500 to 2,000 co-ops, more than twice the entire US co-op sector. The 25% margin is also a value judgment, stated openly: a society might reasonably accept firms that are a little less durable in exchange for workplaces people govern themselves. Readers who think that price is too high should say so. Burdín's result suggests the margin won't matter, because co-ops may well come out ahead.
-2. **The bank's money** earned at least the Treasury rate.
+2. **The bank's money** earned at least the Treasury rate, counting every loss, every running cost, and every dollar of business help.
 
 **If both pass:** the charter triggers a fast-track, up-or-down vote in Congress on a second capitalization, with no amendments and no committee bottleneck. It can't be automatic, because no Congress can bind a later one's spending. A fast-track vote is the most that can honestly be promised. If the bank is later allowed to borrow, its debts carry **no federal guarantee**, written into the charter. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed a taxpayer rescue in 2008 partly because markets had always assumed the government stood behind them. This bank shouldn't be able to create that assumption.
 
@@ -173,5 +205,5 @@ At year 12, both measures must pass:
 
 - **Whether the labor market changes.** 400 co-ops won't move anyone's wages. See [The Test](the-test.md).
 - **Whether the best founders come.** The test measures the co-ops that *did* apply. If strong founders stay away ([The Founder Problem](founder-problem.md)), a pass means "the co-ops that exist can compete," not "co-ops would win with everyone's best people."
-- **Whether co-ops do better with a full support network.** The pilot funds individual co-ops. It doesn't build [the federation](federation.md) that Mondragon relied on, so co-ops that join a federation are reported separately.
+- **Whether co-ops do better with a full support network.** The pilot funds individual co-ops. It doesn't build [the federation](federation.md) that Mondragon relied on, so co-ops that join a federation are reported separately. The [support lottery](#the-support-lottery) tests one piece of that network, hands-on help, but not the rest: shared funds, moving workers between co-ops, joint buying and selling.
 - **Whether it survives politics.** Congress can refuse the second capitalization, or repeal the whole thing. See [The Constitution](constitution.md).