There is a mob between the haves and the have nots.

instead of promoting social mobility, let's promote class leveling.

Excerpt from article: "Well educated women are working disproportionately more than less educated women. At the same time, college educated mothers...devote more time to child rearing than do less educated mothers, especially in child enrichment activities. They spend more time reading to children and less time watching television with them."
Developing programs to give children in families equal opportunity for social and cognitive development, where one parent is unsupportive (missing and/or not providing support) and the other parent is not working as hard as more educated mothers - that is a lot of missing labor that any new program would be attempting to provide. If we all have the same right to have children, and this right does not hinge on our ability and willingness to provide these children with a nurturing environment, we will have inequality. Making up for the missing labor - how expensive would that be? Has it ever been done in history? Finally, there is nothing special about a political boundary - what about equal opportunity for all children world-wide?

Dr. Heckman writes:

"The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today."

Perhaps we should strive for a society with fewer accidental births and more planned ones?

Seriously, doesn't all of this evidence suggest that the single most effective policy would be to discourage people who are likely to be poor parents from having so many children? Let them concentrate their scant parental resources on one child rather than three.

The government has had a policy of dissuading teen births, and, indeed, teen births have been declining. Why not try to similarly investigate ways to slow down the rate at which impoverished unwed mothers reproduce?

For example, why not invest in R&D for better, easier-to-use long-term contraceptives? The FDA's approval of a long-term injection contraceptive in 1992 appears to have helped bring about both fewer teen births and fewer abortions. Wouldn't continued improvement in contraceptives be a win-win strategy for all of us?

Why not learn from history and repeat what works: Returning the Bible to schools will do more to foster model citizenship in America once again than any social program could possibly hope to achieve. The moral ethics that built this nation to become the most prosperous ever, did not happen by a strategy to be imposed upon people, but rather by the inner transformation that occurs whenever one learns about the saving grace of Jesus. That is why our early Congress first printed Bibles to be distributed to classrooms. Laws condemn people because no one can live up to high standards on their own, but grace saves and gives hope to the downtrodden so they can achieve their best. Isn't that what America was all about?

If we as a state or a country want to fund early childhood programs as described in this article, the zero-sum aspect of state or federal budgeting must be considered. In simple terms, what do we want less of to implement this government program? Fewer state troopers? Less maintenance/repair of roads/bridges? Smaller medicare benefits? Fewer troops and aircraft carriers and bombers and tanks? Ideas for government programs are usually well intended, but funding often becomes problematic.

***Seriously, doesn't all of this evidence suggest that the single most effective policy would be to discourage people who are likely to be poor parents from having so many children?***

In that respect I've wondered whether much thought is given to making contraception a condition of welfare. There is a discussion of the ethics of this here by economist Eric Crampton.

http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/coercion-everywhere-welfare-edition.html

1) Since Perry and Abcedarian were not true experiments, the causal consequences of their interventions were likely overstated. The control as well as the treatment groups knew what was expected of them, so part of the difference in outcomes could have resulted from adverse effects on the control group -- something akin to "stereotype threat".
2) The extent (cost) of the treatment was probably more than officially stated since the classroom teachers also knew who was supposed to behave how -- something akin to "pygmalion in the classroom." The High Scope report acknowledged this as an "extension" of the treatment but made no estimate of its extent.
3) The reduced cost of nurturing borne by the biological parents may increase their fertility, providing a larger field of play for whatever genetic factors may also contribute to gross national adverse childhood experiences.

FROM THE EDITORS: "America is polarizing, increasingly a country of haves and have-nots. According to James Heckman’s lead article in this issue’s forum, the greatest source of this inequality is precisely ... the accident of birth."

Maybe "the accident of birth" is the greatest source of inequality, but another very big source is immigration. And in fact immigration to America by future "bad parents" followed by "the accident of birth" to those bad parents leads to millions of additional American children in need of Jim Heckman's expensive "interventions".

Don't we already have enough American children who need "intervention"? And don't we already have enough "have-nots"? Why don't we stop importing "have nots" and the likely parents of future "have-nots"?

I find it strange and distressing that anyone would engage with this grasping attempt at insight, or that a "thinker" like Heckman would be feted in a forum as august as This American Life.

Look at the example about Indian casinos. They get lots of money and outcomes improve, but it's not the money that matters—it's the parenting that's gotten better. But how did it happen? It must be the ghost of Protagoras emerged from the grave! You can put ten more Nobel prizes around Heckman's undeserving neck. It doesn't change the fact that his case is pure and simple sophistry.

All of the apparently successful early interventions are about giving deprived young people access to the resources that children of wealthy families are provided by their parents. That the problem is poverty, not parenting in the abstract, is so obvious that only an economist could miss it.

Steve Sailer: I found Heckman's lead statement rather profound, and your response rather obvious. It goes without saying that accidental, unplanned births ought to be discouraged through contraception. You ask how to reduce the rate of reproduction by poor, unwed mothers. As far as I can tell, early childhood development programs and parental coaching, as suggested by the research, aim to do exactly that, in the long(er) term.

The comment by “miffed” in response to James J. Heckman’s lead essay in the Boston Review (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.5/ndf_james_heckman_social_mobility.php), that poverty, “not parenting in the abstract,” is the ultimate source of educational disparity must not be overlooked. And yet poverty itself is not the source of the educational differences between students in the U.S.A. and those of more than a dozen nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Simply consult the educational rankings of the OECD (http://ourtimes.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/oecd-education-rankings/) and you will see that students in China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Estonia, Iceland, and Poland excel American students in the areas of science, reading, and math. If “disadvantaged” students are being deprived of educational success and social mobility due to impoverished environments, then why are white and other American youth of relative “privilege” stacking up poorly against their international peers?

There is a twin truth here: Rich, white kids are not doing so well compared with their peers in other OECD nations and poor children generally are not doing well in comparison to their “peers of privilege.” Why?

Returning to the primary point, however, the type of social policy and programming advocated by James Heckman, Geoffrey Canada, and others is not and should not be the domain of public school education. Is it not the domain and responsibility of Social Services? Is it not the domain of E Pluribus Unum (One Nation out of Many)? Is it not the domain of civic and personal virtues such as free inquiry and communication, co-operation, trustworthiness, faith in the intelligence of commoners, self-motivation, reciprocity, and industry? Is it not the domain of sufficient opportunity?

While Mr. Canada is right to insist that “our malign neglect will produce a generation of Americans who are less educated, less healthy, and less able than their predecessors to maintain this country’s standing in the world,” it is quixotic to believe that American “perspective and political will” (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.5/ndf_geoffrey_canada_social_mobility.php) is going to save the day by fortifying social infrastructures to reverse the self-fulfilling prophecy that birth equals fate in America. The lack of affordable housing, the shrinkage of decently-paying jobs, and the proliferation of haves vs. have-nots bode otherwise.

Even if the policy makers, the wonks, and the well-fed legislators desired to establish far-reaching, social interventions to promote the academic achievement of poor children (regardless of their ethnicity), the means of America to reward those with the requisite degrees, credentials, and even professional experience are today diminished. How else does one explain American companies that refuse to grant interviews to those who are currently unemployed? (See http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-57380914-10391709/discrimination-against-the-unemployed/?tag=contentMain;contentBody.)

The American pie has shrunk, but the pie is still big. The problem is that those in real power are not going to pick up democracy’s burden and share anything.

Corey Olds writes:

Rich, white kids are not doing so well compared with their peers in other OECD nations and poor children generally are not doing well in comparison to their “peers of privilege.”

I looked at the OECD link provided by Corey Olds, and his claim about "Rich, white kids are not doing so well compared with their peers in other OECD nations" was not supported by his link.

Look at the first graph here:

http://128.241.61.184/sailer/101219_pisa.htm

In reading, non-Hispanic American white students do quite well compared to students in other countries. Asian Americans do even better. Hispanic Americans don't do well at all, and black American students do much worse.

The American average is mediocre because it is dragged down so much by our underachieving minority groups.

If we want children in American schools to do well academically, then we're crazy to accept immigrants whose children tend not to do well in American schools.

Maybe America should "intervene", à la James Heckman, with the American children Heckman thinks need his "interventions", but it would be a lot cheaper and more effective to keep immigrant underachievers from swelling the ranks of our native underachievers.

Hey Corey, here's an article with data showing that there are countries doing much better than America at the high end of school math achievement. The article also has data about the place from which we're getting the lion's share of our immigrants.

Makes you proud to be an American
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/thats-pretty-pathetic.html

QUOTE:

At least we're not Mexico. PISA ranks students on a 7 stage scale from Below Level 1 up through Level 6. According to PISA, you need to be at least at Level 2 to actually start making use of all this book-learnin'. In the U.S. 10% of the kids are Below Level 1 in math, and 18% are at Level 1, for a total of 28% below the minimum level of any kind of math competence. In Mexico, however, twice that percentage, 56%, are at those two bottom levels, with 28% being Below Level 1. And that's after a sharp improvement since 2003. In other words, Mexico's 19 year olds are even less educated.

So, we can take pride that we aren't Mexico. Oh, except that lots of the worst students in Mexico are moving to America every day. Never mind ...

By the way, Mexico's high end in math isn't very good either -- just 1% are at Levels 5 and 6, versus a little under 8% in the U.S. But we're pretty bad compared to 32% at the top two levels in Taiwan and 24% in Finland.

END QUOTE

Maybe America could even raise its high-end achievement levels if our schools were not so focused (as with NCLB) on the underachievers and the associated "achievement gaps".

No serious scientist -- not even the bedeviled Dr. Watson -- would put forth "purely genetic arguments about outcomes". Every one of them, even Richard Lynn, whom Steven Pinker calls a fringe scientist and with whom 99.99% of his collegues are supposedly in disagreement, concedes that intelligence is only partially determined genetically, by most accounts by about 50% to 80%.

What Dr. Heckman is doing here is using Stratagem Nr. 1, described in Schopenahuer's "The Art of Controversy", called "The Extension": "This consists in carrying your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; in giving it as general a signification and as wide a sense as possible, so as to exaggerate it".

Surely, a man of Dr. Heckman's intellectual stature is well aware of this stratagem and thus there can be little doubt about what he is engaging in here: pure intellectual dishonesty.

The show and Mr. Tough suffer from conceptual confusion. What he is calling "non-congnitive" really should be called "non-academic" learning. Emotional learning takes place in the brain and involves cognitive information.

He is re-inventing the wheel. Young children need activities that engage the whole brain, not just the pre-frontal cortex, because the pre-frontal cortex needs to be connected and strongly supported by the rest of the brain. One such activity is music, another is movement (dance). The little child who learned to interact and talk with her mother experienced a strong emotional bond. Such feelings of intimacy made learning pleasurable for her and for her mother. What the so called "reformers" ignored was that both parents and young children feel strongly attached to those who teach their children. That is because they are economists and CEOs who never opened a book on child development, or works by authors such as John Dewey who inspired the very successful reforms in Finland (and the school where the odious Rahm Emanuel sends his children. Schools where there is not invidious emphasis on fill-in-the-bubble tests.

The findings here suggest early support for stay-home parents is indicated. Add to that mandatory programs to educate the parent and child together in the early years with emphasis on communication and interaction between parent and child. The contributions of working people, through productivity will pay for the program. The idea that the middle class of this nation has not and is not producing enough to pay for such programs for our fellow citizens, whom we do care about and whose welfare is linked to our own, is absurd. Our fiscal problem is that greedy corporations have exerted excessive influence on our government to control regulation so that they are able to siphon off the wealth the middle class creates. When a set of policies leaves such a large segment of the population suffering as in our nation now, it's clear we need different regulation to create a greater opportunity for more to participate. Enriching the environments of all children will serve us all!

Shouldn't we be spending much more time, effort and money in making sure (convincing) people who cannot really afford having children to avoid having children? Graduate high school, get a job and get married first, perhaps.

So why do the Republicans want to cut Head Start?

"We should not repeat the mistakes of the War on Poverty, although there are many recent calls to do so. Giving money to poor families does not, by itself, promote social mobility across generations. It was this insight that prompted the Clinton administration to reform the welfare system in 1996."

It's hard to imagine how forcing parents to enter the workforce at miserly wages and stripping them of resources improved the enrichment environment of their children. But hey, let's waste some ink condemning unenumerated mistakes and these unenumerated people demanding them, while ambulating around the fact that what is being called for is essentially a universalization and expansion of head start, a core War on Poverty program.

Much of this piece would serve as an adequate condemnation of the misplaced priorities of national school reform efforts of the past ten years with NCLB and Race to the Top, so I'm confused why it would end with a discursive, knee-jerk condemnation of the very program it advocates.

The science is getting better; every day we have new evidence that reinforces how bad it is to suffer in early life. For example, please see the recent (October 8) symposium in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the long-lasting impact of early adversity on physical and psychological development ; also the recent World Bank volume, Children and Youth in Crisis, which tries to summarize some of the evidence from around the world .

PNAS papers: (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/05/1121264109.full.pdf+html)

World Bank book: (http://elibrary.worldbank.org/content/book/9780821395479)

Acquiring traits and customs of more fortunate classmates may help to erase some of the mystery associated with what success and trust is ,helping children to overcome the isolation of class survival habits, to learn that there are ways common "toward a better life" than that within whitch the imobility of their parents could be understood.

Shame on public figures who are so obsessed with the fetus but refuse to invest public money in taking care of a child after it is born. I am waiting for the day when politicians on both sides can make caring for young children the number one priority of this country.

Mr Heckman! This is the main issue in a true "social", or in the sense of John Rawls, "egalitarian" society. From my praxis, working 19 years with seriously disturbed people in a small therapeutic community, and from my own research on identity development, I concluded, that all of our social problems, from mobbing, school dropout to the most serious brutal crimes are founded in the early family environment. Early interventions in families need, however making families "transparent", in order to save the children, and help the parents, who are ready to accept help. In my (unpublished) developmental psychology, the Survival Identity, the first developmental stage of identity, self and human consciousness (roughly from 1,5 to 3,5 years) is the crucial stage: virtually this is the stage of the birth of the human infant (M Mahler), and the stage of the birth of the will, and the extremely intense emotions of love and hate. When parents got stuck in their emotional development at this early stage, children get stuck WITH A HIGH PROBABILITY at this stage, and create unceasingly social conflicts and enormous financial costs thru their destructive behavior in families, schools, work places and so on. The key notion is fostering the development of IDENTITY, SELF or PERSONALITY, which are partly overlapping concepts for describing the same individual and in their complex interactions and transactions socioeconomical process of civilisation from stone-age to an empathic society (Rifkin).

I am cutting and pasting from a FB discussion we had below.
a lot of wishful thinking and faulty premises go into this. will try to address the main ones as time permits. It is interesting what he leaves out. for starters below
1. " First, life success depends on more than cognitive skills. " absolutely, but having said that, amongst many, Cognitive skills are still the most important determinant.
2. " Second, both cognitive and socio-emotional skills develop in early childhood, and their development depends on the family environment." Yes, but only if the environment is totally F***d up. once you are beyond total f-up, it is the genetic potential that is detrminative. http://www.amazon.com/The-Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised/dp/1439101655/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1356628619&sr=8-15&keywords=pinker
"lessons for social policy"....."A growing fraction of our children are being born into disadvantaged families" What part of this is due to unintended consequences of misguided social policy enacted to address these verisame problems ? and so... definition of insanity... doing same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

" Third, public policy focused on early interventions can improve these troubling results. Contrary to the views of genetic determinists, experimental evidence shows that intervening early can produce positive and lasting effects on children in disadvantaged families." anyone saying that in 2012 is stupid or a charlatan (or both) ( or uninformed.. which some guy spewing off on something and getting paid for has no excuse)......."DHHS 2011 study
A 2011 report by the Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start Impact, examined the cognitive development, social-emotional development, and physical health outcomes of Head Start students as compared to a control group that attended private preschool or stayed home with a caregiver. Head Start students were split into two distinct cohorts – 3-year-olds with two years of Head Start before kindergarten, and 4-year-olds with only one year of Head Start before kindergarten. The study found:
Though the program had a “positive impact” on children’s experiences through the preschool years, “advantages children gained during their Head Start and age 4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole. Impacts at the end of kindergarten were scattered…”
After first grade, there were no significant social-emotional impacts for the cohort of 4-year-olds, and mixed results on measures of shyness, social withdrawal and problematic student-teacher interactions. The cohort of 3-year-olds with two years of Head Start attendance, however, manifested less hyperactive behaviors and more positive relationships with parents.
By the end of first grade, only “a single cognitive impact was found for each cohort.” Compared to students in the control group, the 4-year-old Head Start cohort did “significantly better” on vocabulary and the 3-year-old cohort tested better in oral comprehension." and this is the " spin".
" But a substantial body of scholarship shows that GEDs’ earning power is similar to that of non-GED dropouts in the U.S. labor market. " So perhaps the important variable is dropping out- not the education recvd in school.
" Roughly 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics now leave school without a high school diploma, substantially higher than the dropout rate for non-Hispanic whites. Contrary to claims based on the official statistics, there is no convergence in minority-majority graduation rates for males over the past 35 years. Moreover, exclusion of incarcerated populations from the official statistics substantially biases upward the reported high school graduation rate for black males." racism? or is that telling us something ? Murray and Herenstein are routinely denounced for their politically incorrect spin on this and James Watson ( yes the watson and crick one) lost his job when he spoke heresy. Are they wrong or is there a thought police in action here.

" Roughly 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics now leave school without a high school diploma, substantially higher than the dropout rate for non-Hispanic whites. Contrary to claims based on the official statistics, there is no convergence in minority-majority graduation rates for males over the past 35 years. Moreover, exclusion of incarcerated populations from the official statistics substantially biases upward the reported high school graduation rate for black males." racism? or is that telling us something ? Murray and Herenstein are routinely denounced for their politically incorrect spin on this and James Watson ( yes the watson and crick one) lost his job when he spoke heresy. Are they wrong or is there a thought police in action here.
" GED test scores and the test scores of persons who graduate high school but do not go on to college are comparable." Given the riduculous % of people who elect to( spend 40,000/ yr and risk lifetime debt serfdom) go to college in the US, The ones left behind would be 1 sigma or more to the left the mean, so why is this so surprising ?
Fig 1 is a surprise ?

" For example, neuroscientist Avshalom Caspi and his colleagues have shown that the adverse impact of the absence of one gene—a particular variant of the Monoamine Oxidase-..." We have discussed this in another post to an extent. ... Judith Harris and Steve Pinker think that 1/3 of the variation is attributable to herdity, 1/3 to family ( but we dont know what in family) and 1/3 to - god knows what. The MOA gene stuff supplements does not contradict, either pinker of Murray.

Are you saying that the only important aspect of development is the genetic make up? is not the environment important?


no, but it is the single most important....You are an Ob so maybe this will give you some perspective... amongst NICU graduates... the single most important predictor of long term cognitive outcome is always some proxy for maternal intelligence ( ed level / se status etc) NOT grade IV cerebral bleeds, or periventricular lekomalacia, or severity of BPD or duration of mech vent, or for that matter any indesx of disease severity etc.

What happens with adopted kids?..can they be educated well by the new parents?
the environment is important - but frankly we are clueless about what in the environment... it probably is not what the various "goody two shoes - purveyors of pablum would have us believe


there is whole literature about identical twins raised apart which tries to address some questions

what harris and pinker etc found was that, as long as the home environment is not totally f'ed up.. as in cigarette burns on the kids, spiral fractures, etc etc, once you get to halfway OK, the environment , at least on larger samples is no longer operative.

fig 2.... ho hum

Practical Questions "quality of parenting" . Any viable suggestions re how you the state can improve the quality of parenting from the 17 yr old minority girl w 3 kids from three different fathers. NADA... you cant... those kids are screwed, no matter what. The traditional multigenerational family gave much needed parenting skills.. esp important for those that cognitively or psychologically are unable to figure it out for themselves... As we find out one of the glues that kept the traditional family structuere intact was that if you are borderline, there are advantages in numbers. Most social welfare programs take away the economic incentives for dealing with the S*** that comes w multigenerational families.. so the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater... literally and metaphorically.

Practical Questions 2. With what programs?.... asked and answered.

3. 4. blah blah 5. 6. similar.... if you havent seriously argued your a-priory premise... all prescriptions are just feel good pablum

the other elephant in the room if you are from India.... predistribution/ redistribution.... pshaw. In absolute terms, let us take pause to just compare.... I was schooled in XYZ School, delhi .. the elite of elite schools - my classmates were kids of CEO's and Prime ministers, at least then... My kids went to a public ( govt.) school in the US.. a suburban public school that they jokingly called a ghetto school as there was a substantial disadvantaged-minority influx (secondary to Mayor Daley tearing down the" projects" and making his erstwhile urban problem a suburban problem) .. upto 20 %. However, I can say with certitude that a. The quality of education offered my kids was better than what I got at good ole XYZ ( my peer group was more interesting tho). b. So are disadvantaged minorities benefiting from the excellent resources offered them in any substantive way from their inner city peers.... i think we all know what the answer to that is...c. The Chicago Tribune publishes annual school report cards for the various public school districts in the metro area. The second highest scoring school district has the lowest per pupil spending... consistently... difference.... that school district has a huge number of Asian/ South Asians.. moral: throwing feelgood money at a problem without understanding the real dynamic is simply misallocation of, what will be, increasingly scarce resources.

Look, I am not suggesting that I or anyone else has viable alternatives. But this paper is a rehash of the failed governing paradigm. more of the same... double down at the poker table mentality. Viable public policy alternatives in a free society come from open debate. Where we have gotten to is a situation where even a luminary public intellectual like Jim Watson lost his job for questioning some development paradigms for Subsaharan Africa, (which were, I think, misattributed to racism, ... if you bother to read the full content of his controversial remarks). To me the whole point of having prominent figures as public intellectuals is that occasionally they can broaden the scope of the debate. What happened to Watson was Orwellian at the very least.

so is this heckman fool a modern day Lysenko?

Egypt today is a good example of a young well educated population with no work to be had. The economic growth of the past century was one of a limited technologically advanced state able to export goods to markets around the world, but 21st century America is not early 20th century america. Even if we could produce a100 percent college educated generation there would be 0 percent guarantee that they can find decent paying jobs. I find dr. Heckman's proposal extremely naive.

I'm willing to give early intervention a try. But results have to be rigorously measured. I find reliance on two old studies to be thin. I have my doubts. Furthermore, I don't believe the fantasy that babies wait in heaven to be randomly assigned to parents on Earth: birth into your particular family is not an accident or random chance, it is how the world works. That's life.

It's not just about children, it's about mothers! It seems to me, after working with poor and homeless families for over 20 years, that we need to support mothers much better than we do. Workfare forced them into low-paid jobs, many of which are only part-time with no benefits, so that they are continually stressed by what would otherwise be normal events. An illness, a car breaking down, a sick child who must be brought home from school all cause income loss with no health care, paid sick days or savings to fall back on. These mothers are stressed, discouraged and often angry or depressed. Most have no husbands to help. Many were statutorially raped and dropped out of school when they became pregnant. They did not abort their pregnancies, but society allows them to sink or swim with no real support. We cannot expect these young mothers, themselves barely out of childhood, to adequately care alone for their little ones, let alone provide the hope, encouragement and education they need to avoid repeating the cycle of poverty. Other developed nations provide free, in-home post-natal care and parenting instruction, paid time off, and free health care for mothers; perhaps the better performance of their children is one result.