Hidden Brain - What's Not On The Test

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

Smarts matter. But other factors may play an even bigger role in whether someone succeeds. This week, we speak with Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman about the skills that predict how you'll fare in life. We'll also look at programs that build these skills in the neediest of children – and new research that suggests the benefits of investing in kids and families can last for generations.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthan. In the early 1990s, Jim Heckman traveled to Corpus Christi, Texas. He was there to see something that had been described to him as a miracle. It was a program for students who had dropped out of high school. And they said, you know, we have a program which will take high school dropouts, people who had dropped out at 9th grade or before actually, and converted them into high school graduates within 2-3 months in our program, and then we send them out to the workplace.

So I said, well, this is amazing. The program that gave young people a second chance is now known widely across the country. It's called the GED. Which was a program which students studied for our test, and at the end of the test, they were certified as legitimate high school graduates. There were plenty of individual success stories, but Jim is an economist, and he wanted to know whether on average people with a GED were as successful as those with a high school diploma. He started by looking at their test scores. What really surprised me was their test scores

were virtually the same. Within a few months the GED program was allowing students to catch up with peers who had spent years in high school. But then Jim looked further, were GED grads holding on to jobs and long-term relationships, staying out of trouble? If you looked at the GEDs, you realized they weren't doing so well. They were likely, it turned out, if they got a job, to quit the job or be fired. If they went into marriage or some partnership, how stable were those compared to the ordinary high school graduates? Much less stable. What about their crime? Much more likely to commit crime. What was going on? Why would GED recipients struggling if they had the same test scores as high school graduates?

It was kind of a revealing insight that these people were as smart as high school graduates measured by the kind of test that so much public policy focuses on, but in real life they were really not succeeding in any real way. This week on Hidden Brain untangling the mystery Jim Heckman discovered in Corpus Christi and the astounding implications his findings have for public policy. James Heckman is a professor at the University of Chicago. In 2000, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Some of his early work focused on programs like the GED that are designed to give young people a second chance. Jim found that these programs were succeeding

and getting young people to do well in tests, but failing when it came to improving their outcomes in life. It prompted him to ask broader questions about the American educational system. I realized that the whole educational establishment, at least the establishment that looked at test scores and that valued schools and valued people by these test scores really was just missing important dimensions of human behavior.

And so that brought me onto a subject which has fascinated me and what I think is really important for success and understanding success and failure. And that is the notion of what I call non-cognitive skills. By non-cognitive skills, I met skills that weren't measured by these tests. And what I found, and that surprised me, was that those non-cognitive skills were extremely important. And then when you think about it, you say, well, what an idiot. Of course, these are important.

And then you go back to everything you ever heard from the time you were a child, the Esaubs Fable, the tortoise in the hair, and Teddy Roosevelt saying, you know, it's the man of grit, and the person who would go down, who gets back up again and tries, and you know, all of the motto as we quote to our children and that many presidents and leaders have told us for centuries, I mean, it's in many religious teachings. So I said, you know, this is obviously true, but it turned out that in psychology at that time, there was a sense that somehow personality

and the subject of personality was kind of, you know, a dark and unrigorous corner. Whereas the IQ test, there we actually had machinery to measure it. We had to waste a score test and so forth and so on. So what I did then is that started a lifetime investigation on the social and emotional skills. And there's evidence, by the way, that staying in school, that working through will build those skills. In 2014, the makers of the GED overhaul the exam partly in response to the work of Jim

Heckman and other researchers. A spokesman for the GED program says the new test more effectively measures problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and writing. It also demands more from test takers by way of preparation and grit. To put it another way, the GED now does more to tap into non-cognitive skills. Jim says these kinds of skills can be summed up with a single word. Character.

One time in American education. I mean, I'm talking a long time ago when Horace Mann was devising the first common schools for all Americans, character training was literally part of the curriculum. I think Horace Mann has a quote in the 1840s when he was setting up this movement. And basically he said something that says it all really, you know, that reading, writing, and arithmetic

is about a small portion of what we teach in school. And then he goes on to say that what we're really teaching is character. We're teaching children how to just stay on task, to control their emotions, to work with others, to persist, and so this whole bundle of attributes, we know, are important in life, and the common school was designed basically to foster all of those. A clear example of character education was the hugely popular textbook series called McGuffee Readers. You'd find them in many classrooms between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century.

The textbooks were filled with stories about how to live a virtuous life. This one is about a hen who works hard to take care of her 12 chicks. She asks them to follow her as she jumps across a brook to a stone, but they don't obey. Oh mother, we can't, we can't, we can't! Said all the little chickens. Yes, you can, if you try," said the old hen, just flap your wings as I did and you can jump over. Only one of the chickens, Chippy, even tries.

When they got home, the old hen began to look about for something to eat. She soon found near the back door a piece of bread. So she called the chickens and they all ran up to her. Each one trying to get a bite at the piece of bread. No, no, said the old hen. This bread is for Chippy. He is the only one of my children that really tried to jump to the stone. One of the most interesting is the story about a couple of boys who ran away from school, played hooky, stole a boat, and then the ocean came up and they were nearly drowned, and finally,

by the grace of God, they were thrown onto the beach and saved, and they learned their lesson, and they never ran away from school again, and they did their lessons. So there were a lot of stories like that. Unfortunately, from the standpoint of some elements of society, and I really mean it was unfortunate, those early lessons were more or less using the Bible, the Protestant Bible, as the touchstone to teach morality and character. And then, of course, other groups, as they came to the United States, more Catholics, for example, Jews, and other groups.

As they came, they found this very offensive. They didn't want to get their children indoctrinated. And so that aspect of character gradually got edited out of the common school. And then psychology, meanwhile, had this quote, development, this great breakthrough that was really cognitive psychology, that really said IQ and cognition and pure problem solving ability, that was really the be all and end all of an education. And we shouldn't worry about this. Touchy, feely, stuff, building Americans, learning to work with others, understanding democracy.

All of that was viewed as junk. And it really hit the trash can in the late 50s when Sputnik surprised Americans. And literally, if you read the education journals of the time, what really was needed was get your math right, get your science right, and the rest of it was kind of taken for granted. So this is fascinating, because what you're pointing out is that for a long time, the

link between character and what was taught in school had a religious component to it. And as the country became perhaps more secular or more diverse, people had some resistance to bringing those religious ideas along. But of course, you don't need religion to teach questions related to character. Modern psychology has done a lot of thinking about some of these traits. What traits are we talking about when we use the term character? What kind of traits are these? Well, there's a range of traits.

What I mean is the ability to plan. How well can I actually plan my life forward? Make good use of time. How well can I persist on a task? And how resilient am I? If I experience failure, how far can I go and bounce back and try, try again? How open am I to experience? So, in other words, am I closed off? Do I just have to shun contact with new ideas and with new people? How agreeable am I in a sense of, you know, I may find somebody disagrees with me, but that doesn't mean I have to fight them. It means I listen, they listen to me,

and we can agree, and we can also agree to disagree. But there's a sense of having a sense of propriety about the relationship. So this term character is a quite broad term, really. It'll be very elastic in some ways. One of the most important qualities that Jim identified is conscientiousness, or what the psychologist Angela Duckworth calls grit. Jim also found that the ability to delay gratification matters a lot. In other words, I can see again if I wait today, like go to school, it's unpleasant, I don't like

the teacher, I don't like studying, but I know that if I finish these two years, I will have much better opportunity in life. So I control myself and stay in school. You know, I grin and bear it, I guess, is the way to describe it. So I think it's this ability to manage yourself and to work with others. It's both. Do you think this is true for even Nobel Prize winners?

I mean, when you look at your own life in career, do you see sort of the role of character of perseverance and conscientiousness and grit as in some ways being just as important or perhaps more important than cognitive and intellectual abilities? Oh, for sure. And the reason why I say for sure is take some truly important scientists like Marie Curry, her work for example, in isolating radium, taking

pitch blend or distilling it in the back of some sheds in Paris back more than a hundred years ago. That was just brutal. Gruntworks, she had an idea for sure, but it required that she stay with it and stay with it for years. Take all of the rocket scientists, many failures to say, get a satellite into orbit or to get a rocket to fly. I think in every case, especially in science, but especially in learning, literally, you have to stay with it. And it's one of the loneliest things in the world, the original research.

Bertrand Russell in his autobiography has a great line. It was a very young man, a brilliant guy, a acknowledged genius. And he described how every morning he would go to his desk, and there was a sheet of paper. And he was trying to prove something. It turned out what he was really trying to prove was impossible.

So the story is even better in that regard. But he went there and he said he would look at this paper all day and then he would go home or go back to his bed and sleep without having written a line on it. And he did this for weeks, sometimes months, because he was waiting for a breakthrough. His mind was working, but he couldn't write anything down.

So I really is a question of staying with it. And that's why Einstein said it, Edison said it. Genius is like 1% inspiration, a 99% perspiration. I mean, there are some people who strike it rich. I mean, you fall down and you see, oh my God, I stubbed my toe on a piece of gold and it goes down one mile and you're rich or something. But that's pretty unusual. Pretty unusual. You know, we had Angela Duckworth on Hidden Brain maybe a year or two ago and she told me something really interesting during that conversation. She brought up something the German philosopher Nietzsche had said about how we all in some

ways want to believe that genius and talent essentially spring out of nowhere, spring out of the soil. And he apparently said the performer has an incentive to want to suggest that his or her genius was natural, that it just required no effort, because that makes the performer look good. But he had an important insight about the audience, that the audience also, in some ways, wants to believe that grit and hard work and perseverance were not necessary,

because what the audience wants to say is that the person who's playing this piano so beautifully before me, this person just has a gift. And I can't play the piano that well, because I just don't have the same gift. And so seeing things as natural in some ways relieves us of the obligation or the hope or the possibility that we might be able to match that performance. And so there's almost a conspiracy in society

to believe that good outcomes come naturally as opposed to, you know, through conscientiousness, persistence and hard work. I'll add to that story, a true story. At Los Alamos during the Second World War, when these brilliant physicists were all trying to develop the atom bomb and develop atomic energy and make it usable for military purposes. Many brilliant people, they were in these laboratories working. But apparently, and I know this, I had a high school teacher who was part of that group

for a while, and he told me that everybody in the course of the day, they would sit around and play volleyball, and they would appear to be just naturally very bright, and papers would show up up and calculations would get done. And then you said, if you went there at night, you'd realize in every office, people were staying up all night doing the work, but they didn't want to admit how hard they were working to anybody else. Is there a time in your life where you feel like you recall this happening to you? Where in some ways you could actually tell that it was persistence and grit, you know,

conscientiousness that actually mattered more than intelligence and cognitive ability? Well, you know, it's always a mix, like Einstein and Edison were saying. I think, you know, I wrote a PhD thesis at Princeton the years ago now, and I was working on a range of different topics at the time. I would write these papers, you know, I would work for a while, and then I put it aside because I felt it wasn't going anywhere. You know, there were some cases where I wasn't that interested

or didn't feel I had that much to say, or felt that what was gonna be learned was too small to continue work on it. But yes, one of the best things about academic life, you have these ideas, they're very stimulating and then writing them up and rewriting them and getting them into a form that the rest of the human race can understand that that is a very tedious task is no joy in that really. You're just polishing and polishing and polishing.

But it's like a composer, you know, working on music or for that matter, think about a marathon runner who's running like five marathons a week in order to train for the really big one. So it's nice to just be playing brilliant and we have stories of such people. And I believe that on this earth, there live such people who are absolutely brilliant without much effort.

But I also think there are quite a few very bright people who earned it through their work. They had the vision to kind of have an idea and then make it real. And that's hard work. That's creativity. So when you started to see these outcomes with the GED and the outcomes with the GED, diverging from the outcomes of the students who had completed high school diplomas, and you drew these conclusions about non-cognitive skills and character,

in some ways it led you to a larger indictment, if you will, about the role of standardized tests. I mean, standardized tests are so widespread, and I think many people believe that these tests really are markers of your ability in ways that are deeply profound. And part of what I think you're saying, Jim, is that perhaps we've put too much store in what these tests have to tell us and too little store in some ways in what those ancient fables, you know from from children's from children's books have had to tell us Yes, but you know To sort of advertise

What's coming I think in this whole notion of psychological measurement educational testing service which is in some sense the measurement. Educational testing service, which is in some sense the heart and one of the creators of the modern testing revolution. They do the SAT, they do the graduate record exam. Well, I've had a series of conferences with some very first-rate scholars from that organization. And the whole direction of the organization now is really moving away from the paper and pencil test and focusing only on cognition. They are now focusing on some of these personality tests, and they're now focusing on a larger

array of skills. But they're going even one step further, and actually I think this is where it will actually end up. They had some project a few years ago where they were trying to determine who would be a good mechanic, a good repairman for some advanced Air Force fighter plane. And of course, the fighter plane has maybe

thousands of moving parts, very subtle. So they said, well, you know, to fix a good airplane, it's not a question of how smart you are at math, but really the idea was the ability to kind of see the project as a whole, assess a situation. And part of that situation would also be a human situation, understanding in that case how the pilot would respond, understanding this in a broader way, in a more, I guess, inclusive way. And so they really developing kind of computer games to measure those characteristics and understand the ability to solve problems.

Testing companies are starting to see what Jim says is clear from the data. Consciousness and other character skills play a huge role in success whether we're talking about a scientist at Los Alamos or a recent high school graduate. When we come back, how to develop these skills in the most disadvantaged kids and the extraordinary effect this can have on their lives. This can have on their lives. I'm Shankar Vedantam, you're listening to Hidden Brain. This is NPR. In 1963, Louis Durman Sparks got her first job as a teacher at the Perry Preschool Project.

It served disadvantaged African-American kids in Ipsilanti, Michigan. I was what? 23? I'm 24, it's hard to imagine now. I'm 79 now, so it was a while ago. Her lessons with the preschoolers appeared simple, but they usually had a hidden curriculum. Louise encouraged the kids to develop

what we'd now call non-cognitive skills. She gives an example of something called dramatic play. The kids would dress up and perform. I would take a role and help the kids expand their play, not by telling them what to do, letting the kids create the script, but I would make certain demands where they would have to respond. If I was a storekeeper, they would bring me something and I might say, well, did you see how much this cost? And then I would think, well, who's in your family and what kinds of foods might

they need to eat? By adding up the cost of items in the pretend store, the kids learned arithmetic, but they also learned other things. Planning skills, expanding the awareness of the world, we felt that communication and developing and expanding language was really important for the kids because it's important in society and it's very important in order to be successful in school. She often moved learning experiences outside of the classroom. Thankfully we should just put them in our cars.

The teachers took the students around the community to a bakery and orchard, the airport. That was always a favorite trip. They were fascinated of course by the tech, you know, watching the planes take off and come down, and those were days where you could actually go and write into the take-off areas, departure areas. We wanted to expand their world experience, because the families were very poor and most of them didn't even have their own cars, so the kids were really restricted to a pretty small physical area. What we wanted

to do was for them to be able to have the concrete experiences in the world that children from middle class homes had, and to learn to become comfortable in these larger arenas of the world, of their world. Jim Heckman says the program was a creation of a group of educators connected with the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University. They were trying to think of how they could improve the lives of those children starting from a very early age. So they operated on the belief that early investments, early environments played a tremendous role. And the initial program was designed to boost the IQ of disadvantaged children.

One thing that made the program unusual was that families were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first got the intervention. The second was a control group. When the results started rolling in after a few years, they were initially disappointing. By the time children were 10, there wasn't much of a difference in how children in the two groups performed on tests of cognitive ability. And a lot of people at the time to conclude that the program was a failure. And it was a failure because it had not boosted IQ. And that program was launched in the 1960s at a time when IQ was considered the be all and end all of life success. Partly because the study was conducted so long ago,

researchers have been able to follow the kids who went through the Perry Preschool Program for a very, very long period of time. What have you and others found when you look at the kids who went through the Perry Preschool Program in terms of their life outcomes? Well, that's the interesting part. They were much more likely to kind of be cooperative, much more likely to engage in school, and then going forward much more likely to graduate high school, much more likely to make earnings, much more likely to go on to college, much less likely to commit crime.

And so when you started following people into the 20s and into the 30s, you saw substantial benefits that came from this program. And that, by the way, has an important lesson. I mean, it lesson is that if you start doing interventions and then evaluate them within a few years and not recognize that these programs have multiple effects. And you don't allow those effects to kind of generate and express themselves, we can reach very premature, negative conclusions.

In some ways, this sounds like you're going back to the soft-skilled story we talked about in the first part of our conversation, that those were the factors of adriving these outcomes. Exactly. See, in some sense, it was a total confirmation of what we'd also seen in the GED work, that it's the social and emotional skills that A are malleable, much more malleable than we used to think.

B can be measured and C are very powerful in producing life outcomes. So in that sense, I think the two lines of research come together beautifully. One of the things that has excited a lot of people about the Perry Preschool Program and programs like it is what you mentioned a second ago, that the skills that are important in driving life outcomes are not just, you know, it's not just enough to say that they're character skills or they involve these different traits, but that these traits actually might be malleable, that actually we can do something to change them, that in some way, instead

of thinking of them just as traits, it might actually be useful to think of them as skills, skills that can be taught, skills that can be learned. And that's a remarkably hopeful message in terms of thinking about ways we can improve the life outcomes of lots of people. I agree. In fact, even in this conversation we're talking about traits. I increasingly use the word skills because skills can be changed. That would be true both for IQ and for personality traits. We understand much more now. IQ gets to be fairly stable by around age 10. If you start early enough, like at birth, you can actually boost IQ

even. But IQ tends to be fixed at least in terms of your rank and the IQ distribution by somewhere 10 to 12, you know, varies among people, but then it becomes much harder to change it. However, personality traits are actually emerging. And so if you look at the work on neuroscience, you look at the work on behavior science. Many, many excellent behavioral people, they're showing that many more what we can think of as personality

and character traits emerge as people get older. Personality's thickened, they're rich in. The kind of strategies we use to deal with people become much more complex and adapted, and it's partly related to the slowly developing prefrontal cortex. There is a sense that that is a target of opportunity. And we miss that. That adolescence is a huge stage. Children, especially in the adolescent years, are developing very rapidly in the social

and emotional environments. What exactly did the Perry-Preet School program do to boost these character traits, these character skills? Well, it's interesting. What exactly did the Perry Preschool Program do to boost these character traits, these character skills? Well, it's interesting. If you study it, two things, I think, were really important. The program lasted two years during the regular school year. These kids are three and four, and they came in for two and a half hours a day.

The curriculum was very easy to describe. They basically, they planned tasks, they executed tasks, and then they reviewed the task collectively. So it had many aspects where kids were picking a project, staying with it and finishing a project. A project would be building a small wooden boat, maybe painting a picture, and then evaluating each other's work, working together. So it had this social interaction on top of the activities. And so the kid each week, each day, for five days a week, for about 39 weeks a year, two years in a row, they would start doing these projects. They would stay on those tasks and they would review the tasks and

then they would go back home and maybe even bring the art back home. So that was part of it. But another component sometimes gets lost. It wasn't just that the program operated with the kids. It also visited the parents. It tried to build the parents, the engagement with the parent with a child. And that was really important because a lot of parents, then and even now, don't understand how important they are in stimulating, motivating, cultivating the child and getting the child to stay on task and learn.

And so the parents themselves got galvanized and worked with the child. So the child and a visitor, a person from the childcare center would go home and work with the parent. So you had two things going on. The child stimulation, the stimulated children came home and they activated parental curiosity.

That's one thing, and second, parents themselves were directly encouraged to work with a child. And there was this very, very active engagement on the part of the parents that was hadn't been there before. So you can literally see that the parents provide a warmer environment. They encourage the child. They spend a lot more time with the child reading, playing and encouraging. And you can think about it now. Yes, the program is over in two years, but the kid doesn't grow up until 1718. So you have basically a cocoon, a nourishing cocoon, surrounding the child, encouraging the child,

staying with the child, and fostering that child. Sometimes the teacher's explicitly taught parents how to use educational materials. In other cases, the meetings were more informal. They focused on building a partnership with the parents. Louise Domen's box described how a home visit played out with one family. I had one child was the son of a mother who was still in high school and they were living with the grandparent who worked all day. So I agreed to come in the evening. And the first night I knocked on the door and the the mother of the child opens the door and it was kind of what we used to call a railroad

apartment. You know you had the rooms one behind each other, small little rooms and the kitchen was the third room. And I could see the grandmother standing over the stove in the kitchen. And I knew that she had spent her day standing over a steam iron all day long. And now she was having to stand over the stove. And so the door opens the door. And the mother, the grandmother says, who is it? And she says, oh, it's the teacher.

And she says, oh, f*** is she here? So I realized at that moment that I was intruding into a family's life that this woman had been on her feet the whole day. So I just decided then and there that I was going to adopt this much more informal way of doing it. And I asked her if I could sit in the kitchen so that she could keep cooking and bring the child into the kitchen and we could play some games and occasionally I would just start chatting with the grandmother and that built into a relationship where we really could talk with the grandmother of the mother every time I came. How can a teacher who chats with a student's grandmother or acts out a scene with preschoolers make a lasting impact on children's lives?

Jim Heckman has followed the kids who went through the Perry Preschool Project, they're now middle-aged, and he's followed what happened to their children. What he finds is that an early investment in disadvantaged kids and their parents can pay dividends across generations. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and you're listening to Hidden Brain. This is NPR. is NPR.

A half century ago, the children in the Perry Preschool Project dressed up as pretend shopkeepers and learned how to count. They did science experiments without realizing they were doing science experiments. They went to the airport and watched as planes lifted off. They played with their teachers in their own homes as their parents watched. Those children are now middle-aged adults. James Heckman has tracked them to understand how they've done in life and how their children have failed. We have a very rich server, went back and interviewed the original participants. And what we did is we gave people not only active tests about IQ,

intelligence, things like that, but also we have measures of personality and then we found out about their lifetime earnings. We looked at criminal justice system records to find out whether they had been incarcerated, what their criminal histories were. So we had measures with their blood pressure, we had measures of their stress, and we had measures of physical health. And whether or not they had good diet, hip waist ratio, various kinds of dimensions. So we were able to measure. What we find is very encouraging.

The original participants are doing much better than the non-treated group. So the treated group, the ones who stayed in the program, who got the treatment, and 55 were doing much better. And all these dimensions, including health. You see, that's the part. Think about it for a second. This originally, the program was designed to raise IQ. Well, still doesn't really raise IQ,

but it does produce a lot of benefits in self-management, including the ability to manage your own health, to follow a healthy diet, to follow doctor's orders, to actually then go and get educated about disease and disease prevention. So these people are healthier. They also have multiple benefits, less crime, more earnings, and so they're in a better position

as they're now looking towards retirement. What do you find when you look at their children? Yeah, now what that's an amazing thing. We looked at their children. We find some very strong effects. The children of the participants are healthier. The children of the participants are also earning more. They have better social and emotional skills.

Are more likely to graduate high school and go on to college less likely to engage in the criminal justice system so they're less likely to be incarcerated or even have ever been arrested. So what you see is beneficial effects that go on to the next generation. And you ask, well, how could that be? And I'll tell you how it could be, because the original group it turns out, not only do they benefit, they're more likely to have stable families and earnings during the time of stability. So they provide their own children

with a nurturing environment, far richer than that is for the non-treated children. They're more likely to be in stable marriages, more likely to have earnings. And as I mentioned earlier, they're less likely to go to prison, which is a major minus for earnings. So what happens is more to parent families, more earnings, their children have environments, which are much richer. And so, following a lot of research, the children benefit from being raised in those richer environments.

There is something quite incredible about a program that, you know, ran in the 1960s for a few years and is intervening in the lives of kids for maybe one or two years. And you're seeing the effects of that program 50 years down the road, both in the lives of the people who went through the program and their children. I mean, that is incredible. Well, remember, I said something. Yes, the program itself lasted two years, but we did change the parents. So we changed the parents themselves, came out of that program with a greater appreciation for what their own children could do,

and a greater understanding of their importance in nourishing the child. So those original kids grew up in more welcoming, supportive environments than the other children. That's state one. So, it wasn't just that we had two years and then dropped them in the oceans somewhere. They really had parents that were supportive. But yes, it is remarkable. It is remarkable because what it leads to then is the hope that this is a social program that not only benefits the recipient, it goes on.

And it's, you know, the gift that keeps on giving, if you will. We also looked at another program, a later program, more intensive program called the ABC program. That was launched about 10 years later. That started at birth. So that started when the kids were eight weeks old. And it followed the kids to lay or age five, essentially. Much richer, eight hours a day, five days a week.

And if you look at what happened in that program, we just computed recently the rate of return, which is the kind of rate that a dollar would earn, put in a bank or a bond. So we found that the rate of return on the ABC program, we found that was 14% per annum. And why? We're finding that there was a permanent increase in IQ that didn't fade away. Because remember, this started at birth. And so starting early on, we can boost IQ, but all the other social dimensions were there,

parenting skills were improved, and then there was another dimension, which frequently gets lost in the current discussion. This program also gave childcare. And so as a result of the child care, the mothers of these children were able to work, they were able to go back to school, and they themselves had their lives transformed. So the parents were transformed, the children of the parents were transformed, and again, you have these intergenerational benefits.

If you want to encourage children and raise them to be successful in the sense of controlling their own destiny or at least having more control over their own destiny and feeling exercising being the best they can be, we have to enrich family life, one way or the other. And these programs do that. I'm wondering if you can, in some ways, make the economic case for spending money. So a lot of people, as you point out, make sort of an argument of fiscal conservatism and say,

there's a waste of money, it's a black hole, you're going to throw money down the tube, you're not going to see it. As someone who has studied this work for a while, what is the economic case to be made for investing in early interventions, especially for families of disadvantage. Well, the economic case is summarized simply. I mean, very few public investments have a rate of return above 14%. And that's what always stuns me when some people say, oh, this is costly. It is costly. You know, the Transcontinental Railroad was costly. Building airfields and building airports and highways,

all of these were costly, but it's the rate of return. It's what do you get out of the cost? And so it's the ROI, in other words, and we know that it's a very high ROI. Unfortunately, and this is where our political system really fails us, that a lot of cases the return is harvested downstream. Well after the governor or the mayor, whoever is initiating the program is out of office. A lot of these benefits are lifetime benefits. But we think about this and we built the Hoover Dam, in the 1930s and the Grand Cooley Dam, and we

built all of these public infrastructure projects. Really nobody said, oh, Hoover Dam had a pay for itself in six years, but I would argue that long-term investment and looking at what's good for the country for the next generation, even for this generation, of adults when they get older and are asking their children to support them, they're going to have a bigger base, a better country, with fewer problems, less crime, more health, and more earnings and greater civic participation. So I think that's a social argument, but it's also a really sound economic argument. I mean, people compare, for example,

these sports investment, many cities, build a stadium to try to attract a team or keep a team in a city. And they spend millions and millions. And when you compute the rate of return on it, it turns out to be low or even negative. This is 14% per annum. That's beyond anything that most programs offer.

When you think about some other programs that have been conducted more recently, I'm thinking about a pre-K program in Tennessee, for example, that was evaluated. Researchers find that these programs don't have, you know, strong effects on cognitive outcomes, but also don't have strong effects on some of the social and emotional skills that we've been discussing. And they argue that in some ways, unlike the small intensive programs like the Perry program or the ABC program, the Tennessee program was actually what, you know, if you scale up, if you were to scale up programs

with early childhood intervention, what you see in Tennessee is what you would actually get, and that actually argues against spending that kind of money. What would you make of that kind of argument, which is that when you look at these narrow programs and you talk about scaling up, it misses the point that when you scale up, you're going to get something that probably isn't high quality. Well, I mean, you get what you pay for. I have no doubt about it. This Tennessee program was cheaper.

They're the ones who announced that this is the way a program has to look. I don't accept that. I mean, I think there can be higher quality programs that we can and should afford. You know, one of the things we ask, we brought the original Perry people to Chicago, to our center. These are the teachers, the first teachers, going back to the 60s. They're quite old now, but there, many of them are still alive and active and very engaged. So we ask them a basic question, what was the curriculum you used? What, what is it you did? And so they said, oh, we did for these children, we would do for our own. So think about it for a second. These are middle-class mothers. They basically did for these kids what a middle-class mother does.

So now you're asking a slightly different question. We say, okay, that's the ingredient. We're not talking about, you know, having supermen or super women come into the program. We're doing the kind of encouragement, warmth, engagement that a successful middle-class family would do for its own children. Now you ask the question, how expensive is that? Well, that's very expensive. Think about it. I mean, what is it cost for a woman, say, who stays at home?

Let's take the stay-at-home mother, or even the woman who's working, and has very expensive childcare, to actually work and develop the child. You'll see a lot of middle-class women are doing that, going to work, but they're also rearing their children. And fathers. Yeah, and fathers. Primarily primarily mothers though. I mean, I agree, fathers are doing it, but that's a trend that's increasing, but it's still at a pretty low level. So yes, but what I would argue, look, the real problem is the family life.

And how do we reproduce the kind of family life we know to be productive? We know it's not cheap. So take an educated college woman who's working say let's take 35 hours a week, 40, 40 is easier to multiply. And let's suppose she's making something like, I don't know, $30 an hour. So you multiply. So it's like $30 an hour times 40, okay? So you're talking $, 60,000 dollars and probably a lot of these mothers are worth much more, 50 dollars an hour. They're making that investment

and that's the kind of cost of quality. So when somebody says, oh you know we hired a bunch of people at low wages and Tennessee and they didn't produce miracles, they kind of take you to the cleaners with their mindset that's very limited. You know, they're making a whole set of premises that that's the way a program has to be constructed and the rest is just not feasible. I think it is feasible. And we know it's feasible because

millions of kids today are getting that precisely in their own homes. They're affluent children and they're middle class children. So we know that it's possible. The question is, is it possible to do that for the kids who are severely disadvantaged? And I think it is, but it's going to cost money. James Heckman is a professor at the University of Chicago. In 2000, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

He is co-editor and co-author of the book, The Myth of Achievement Tests, The GED, and the role of character in American life. Jim, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, and I enjoyed the conversation very much. This week's episode was produced by Raina Cohen. It was edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Parth Shah, Thomas Liu and Laura Quarelle. Special thanks to Brook Valley Air.

If you liked this episode, please tell one friend about it. We're always looking for new people to discover hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week. you