The Role of Families in Human Flourishing: My Long-Read Q&A with James Heckman
By James Heckman | Katharine B. Stevens
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April 14, 2021
Nobel Prize–winning University of Chicago economist James J. Heckman is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking research on early childhood and frequently highlighted in support of expanding early care and education programs to improve children’s outcomes. His well-known “Heckman Curve” is widely cited as showing a high return on public investment in those programs. Yet, few people understand the fundamental ideas that underpin and drive his work.
I recently hosted Dr. Heckman at an AEI webinar event to learn more about those ideas. We discussed his interdisciplinary research on human capital development and skill formation over the life cycle, the origins of inequality and social mobility, and the crucial role of families in children’s development.
What follows is a lightly edited, abridged transcript of our conversation. You can view the event here and read a transcript of our full discussion here.
Stevens: You’ve said that the source of a nation’s wealth is the skill of its people. Can you explain what you mean by that and how it fits into your theory of human capital development?
Heckman: Well, that’s an old idea. I think you’ll find the seeds of that idea in Adam Smith and virtually every economist who’s ever thought about the larger aspect of the economy, until at least the beginning of the 20th century when human skills were put to the side as emphasis on physical capital investment increased. Focus on human capital has been an important tradition at the University of Chicago: recognizing that the skills created in a person play as big a role as any physical capital in creating the flourishing of an economy. Over the last 60-70 years, though, there’s been increasing understanding that both physical and human capital play a central role in creating the wealth of a country and in the development of the country and its people.
More than just an aggregate of economic productivity, human capital development creates opportunity for the individual. For generations, people have talked about education. Formal education is important, but it’s only one form of human capital. And we now understand education as part of a general skill-formation process. So the idea is to use economic theory to integrate aspects of human capabilities and how they’re formed and, of course, how they work with physical capital as well. It’s a very rich area, which allows us to examine how the economy is evolving, the characteristics of people that cause them to be successful, and the characteristics of groups of people that cause economies to develop and take advantage of opportunities as they come along.
Can you explain what you call the “technology of skill formation?”
Well, it’s a very basic idea. One thing I worry about is economists — for that matter, academics generally — may take a very simple idea and obscure it into something that becomes almost incomprehensible. So I want to go back to the very basic idea. The dynamics of the growth of a tree, a plant, a person — any kind of organic mechanism — is really the question of how one forms the base. In the case of the tree, you plant a seed, the seed grows, and then as the seed and the tree are nourished, the tree grows.
The same is true of a human being: Conditions we’re born into — even before birth — play a fundamental role. And I don’t just mean genetics, although genetics does play a big role. I think anybody denying the role of genetics is just denying reality. But there is a powerful role, too, for experience, for family, and for environment.
We’ve learned a lot from the neuroscientists. I have a late colleague here at the University of Chicago, Huttenlocher, who talked about neuroplasticity some 30-40 years ago. Neuroscientists explained how the brain was forming and how all the synapses — the connective tissue of the brain, the gray matter, the white matter — were forming. And that development was conditioned on the experience that children had. So you build the synaptic link. Then if you use that link, you can keep that link. And then you can expand on that link. So it’s biology that’s at the core of this. But the interaction with society is crucial because families can nourish those links or suppress them. And we have a lot of evidence on both.
You’ve described skill formation as a life cycle process, and you talk about characteristics of skills, like “self-productivity” and “dynamic complementarity.” Can you describe what these mean?
Well, “dynamic complementarity” has a counterpart in some other aspects of sociology and psychology: something called the Matthew Effect. The Matthew Effect generally says: To those who have, more is given. Dynamic complementarity is like a Matthew Effect in how we think about human productivity. Economists think about what are called “production functions.” You make inputs. The inputs interact with the available stock of skills, and then those inputs lead to the next stage of skill. So skill formation is a dynamic process.
And what happens with dynamic complementarity is that if you have a good skill base, then further investments down the road — like schooling, work experience, interaction with your colleagues at the workplace or out in the society at large — generally become more productive. If you get an early skill base, you can go forward in life, basically gaining more skill and being more productive in every activity you undertake. So dynamic complementarity is a statement about how you form skills. Once you have them, it’s easier to get more of them. There really is a sense in which it’s just a very simple and intuitive process. But it’s a process that involves dynamic actions — its agents are parents, society, schools, teachers, and coworkers who are interacting with the person we’re considering and helping to create skills and opportunities for that person. For that to happen, a good skill base is important.
I’ll give you an example that’s very important for public policy. A lot of people are concerned about the Black-White gap in college. We see big gaps in who goes to college — no question about it. It’s narrowed, but it’s still there. And many people say, “Oh, what we should do is give tuition scholarships for kids at age 18 or 19 and try to encourage those kids to go to college with a cheaper tuition.” Or maybe even lower the standards or whatever is necessary to get more kids to go to school. But I think what happens in many of those programs is that even people offered scholarships often won’t take them because they often perceive that they don’t have the skills that are required in college. So, before you start promoting people from high school to go to college, you need to build the skills so the person can get to high school and can graduate. You say: “Okay, from high school, we go to the eighth grade, where the kids really have to learn the skills,” and then it just goes back in time from there. Because learning is a cumulative process.
If we don’t have a core of skills — if we don’t have basic skills of reasoning, of self-control, of various aspects of what are called executive functioning — then we have very great difficulty proceeding all the way down through the rest of life. So it’s just basically saying you need a good start, and then that start . . . I wouldn’t say it’s self-propelling, but it makes it easier to take advantages all the way down the line. So that’s the idea, really. Very basic idea.
It’s probably not much different from asking, “How does a redwood grow?” I know a lot less about redwoods than I do about people. But it’s still the case that if a redwood starts in a situation of starvation, of inadequate water — you know, a desert-like environment — you’d think it’s not going to grow very well. That is going to be very difficult to remediate. The same is true for dynamic complementarity, which also says that the later we wait to remediate, the harder it is to remediate. And that’s got both biological principles and economic and psychological principles underlying it. So it’s this dual notion: It gives you the sense of why it’s good to invest early and to act early, but it also tells you that if you decide, “No, I want to put things off until later,” then you’re going to have a serious limitation.
The ugly fact is that it’s harder and harder to learn the older you are. It’s not impossible. There’s a lot of neuroplasticity: You can get cell growth in brains until in the late 80s, 90s, and so forth. But the fact is, it’s harder. Young people are more flexible. And a baby is the most flexible of all because the baby’s just soaking it up, building the architecture that’s going to create flourishing for the rest of life. And that is I think the logic of everything I’m talking about.
But it’s amazing how people are so wedded to particular aspects of skill formation that they don’t want to really understand it in a life cycle perspective. One of my thesis advisers at Princeton was Bill Bowen who was president of Princeton, a very important figure in education and in labor economics. He was very well intended in trying to promote the attendance of minorities at Princeton and in the Ivy Leagues generally. I’d say, “Well, Bill, you’re starting way too late. I mean, these kids are 18. Why don’t you start at 3? Why don’t start at 1? Why don’t you start early?” By the time he died, he was down to about the eighth grade. If he had lived a little longer, I think he probably would have made it all the way to the origin.
So you’re explaining that skills attained at one stage of the life cycle boosts skill attainment at later stages.
It facilitates it. And one kind of skill also helps you acquire other kinds of skills. Here’s an example. There’s something that psychologists call “executive function,” which has to do with the capacity for self-control or self-regulation, the ability to stay on task. Some economists and sociologists and psychologists call it “grit.” It’s the notion of being able to be perseverant and also to guide yourself, to have some sense of judgment. Now, this evolves over the lifetime: We still see a lot of development of executive functioning among teenagers and people even in their early 20s.
But early on, having some modicum of executive functioning — skills for striving and persistence — is extraordinarily helpful for young kids in school. So, when they’re learning something very hard and unpleasant — the alphabet, punctuation, whatever it is — the tenacity a child has acquired, those skills that allow you to stay on course and to try and try even if you fail, is essential to that learning. Those are skills we typically don’t appreciate. They’re not measured by the SATs, but they’re extraordinarily important for producing knowledge in schools and producing people who are productive in society.
You’ve said that skill formation is a life cycle process that starts at birth. And, as you’re now talking about, you’ve also emphasized the importance of cognitive and noncognitive skills.
Yes. Some people hate the word “noncognitive.” So, we’ll call it “social.” I mean, every skill has some basis in cognition, I guess. So, let’s put it this way: The way that [Angela] Duckworth and I thought about this when we started coining the term “noncognitive” was that it’s those skills that aren’t commonly tested — things that aren’t on the NAEP reports, or in the GREs, or the SATs. There are a lot of skills that aren’t typically tested.
What you’re suggesting, then, is that this set of multiple skills — I think you’ve called them “abilities,” too? — these skills and abilities begin forming at birth and build on each other. Can you say a little more about that?
Well, first, prenatal conditions play a huge role. It’s been very well-documented now that there are real effects that are created in the womb. The whole process of transmission of experience through the mother’s womb to the child has been very well researched in biology and in human biology as well.
And various skills matter. One of the big fallacies in the 20th century was thinking that IQ was the be-all and end-all of success. But it turns out that IQ explains only about 5 percent or 6 percent of the total present value of lifetime earnings. There are a lot of other human differences, and we see that a lot of other attributes matter a great deal. That’s the part that’s really becoming understood — that humans have these multiple dimensions. And they’re not just fixed.
You made a distinction that’s really important, because the literature generally talks about ability versus skills. When I first started working in personality psychology, I started calling them skills, and psychologists told me, “No, they’re not skills. They’re abilities.” And by that they — like the early pioneers of IQ — meant that these were genetically determined. But they’re not. What we’ve learned is that both IQ and these social and emotional skills can be created by experience. These skills are malleable, and that’s a good thing. Because it’s not just a question of how you’re born. This is not a eugenics fantasy, circa 1920. This is really a 2021 vision how human potential can be realized: by the understanding that there are multiple traits that are malleable and reinforce each other in their development.
It’s this multiplicity of abilities that matter, but the whole public policy discussion is so limiting. Even today, people are talking about NAEP scores: “Oh, the NAEP scores for blacks and whites, and for people from Georgia versus people from Colorado.” And that’s one dimension. But there are so many dimensions to human flourishing. And we’re now understanding that. Public policy isn’t, though. Not yet.
I’d like to put what you’ve been explaining in the context of the very well-known Heckman Curve, which is widely cited as describing returns on investment specifically defined as public spending on government programs — say, early childhood programs like pre-K or childcare. It’s usually cited as though “investment” means public spending. But you’ve also written about family environments and parenting as an essential investment in early skill-building. Can you talk about if and how families fit into what we know as the Heckman Curve?
Well, I mentioned human capital, but there was another tradition at Chicago that in some sense is probably more important. And that’s the study of the economics of the family, which my late colleague, [Gary] Becker, pioneered. But the economics of the family, of family life, is not studied now, and I think this is strictly an artifice of the way that academia and government programs are structured. For example, you have an early childhood program like Head Start, say, which we think of as kind of external — something that’s outside the family and offered or given to parents. Yet we have a lot of very exciting new work showing how the family and these programs interact. That’s beginning to be understood, but it’s not understood yet. The fact is that what these programs often do is what many parents are doing already. We have a lot of evaluations now of government programs targeted towards younger children. But what we don’t have — and to me, it’s an amazing deficiency — are any good economic and social studies of the impact of a mother on the child’s outcomes.
My guess is that if you added the role of the mother to the curve you showed — I’m using the word “mother” because frequently it is a mother, but it may not be — you would find that returns are even higher. In fact, that the idea that the program and the mother are separate is crazy. These programs only become productive when the structure is such that there’s a synergism between the program and the family. And there is a substitution, too, in some sense: Programs, in some cases, are playing the role of what a mother does.
We see very high rates of return on early childhood programs — as much as 13 percent per annum, as I’ve written about — but I’m willing to bet that if we really evaluated what the benefits were of a mother working with the child, we’d find rates of return more like 30 percent or 40 percent. It’s amazing to me that nobody’s ever studied it. It’s a pathology of the way research is funded and the way we think about the family as a separate entity from a lot of aspects of public policy. Yet, these childcare programs I’ve studied are only successful when they kind of “turn on” the parents. They get the mother informed, and they get the mother engaged. That’s the secret for them. It’s engaging the family, and frequently, the mother is the family. So the separation is there, I realize, academically, and even in public policy. But the reality is they’re not separate. And good public policy would join them and would nourish both the family and these programs, forming a bond between these programs and the mother, the father, the family.
One of my favorite things you’ve ever written is, “The best documented market failure in the life cycle of skill formation in contemporary American society is the inability of children to buy their parents.” What do you mean by that, and how does it relate to inequality?
Well, many public policy economists — not all — would like to formulate the reason for public policy as being some kind of market failure. The argument would be, “Why can’t the market take care of this, that, or the other thing?” One thing that’s very apparent, though, is that there isn’t a very good market on the part of the fetus, bargaining, “Which family am I going to be born into and get those advantages?” That is truly an accident of birth. And it’s not marketable. And it’s really not very easily insurable. But it is decisive: There is a market failure, in the sense that there could easily be a situation where we have a young Mozart, a young Wittgenstein, a young Einstein born into a family, say, in central Africa without any capacity to go to school or to learn music — and what families provided would limit the opportunities.
I think there’s a lot of human potential that is wasted for that reason. And I think this kind of market failure is within the scope of public policy. There are two ways to address it. One is to essentially say, “Well, we can somehow try to remediate later down the road.” And a second is that you can nourish the family, so the accident of birth becomes less of a decisive factor in outcomes. Those are two different ways, and I think they’re complementary ways.
So you’re assessing the root of inequality and barriers to social mobility as deriving from the family?
This is one thing that’s not understood: If you look at the statistics about income and equality, they’re usually about what’s called “family income,” right? Now, there’s a lot of bad work being done there, where families are equated to tax units. Tax units and families are not the same. But put that to the side. I think what we really have come to understand is that some of the major growth of inequality doesn’t only have to do with hourly wage rates at the factory. It also has to do with the change in family structure in the larger society. More single-parent families. And what does that mean? It often means that the mother faces the burden of supporting that child alone — she is really under stress — financial stress. And the single-parent family has fewer resources, so as single-parent families grow, inequality itself grows.
Then there’s the other aspect of the family: Increasingly among couples — which do form into two-parent families — there’s more sorting. Educated males and educated females meet at school, marry, and have children. And that leads to another group which is not marrying or is less educated, which leads to a lot of inequality.
So the family is a major driver. That’s the part that’s the third rail of American policy — nobody wants to talk about the family, and the family is the whole story. The family is the whole story. And it’s a whole story about a lot of social and economic issues. The policies I’m talking about are supplements to the family.
You’ve been doing some really interesting research in Denmark that I think bears on this. Can you tell us about that work and how it’s contributing to your thinking on the role of families, the effects of programs, and so forth?
To me, the Danish study is fascinating, for many reasons. First, many in the US see the Scandinavian welfare state as an ideal model. You know, it has universal health care and access is pretty equal. Quality is pretty equal. You have free college education. No tuition. You have universal pre-K, childcare, generous paid family leave — you have many of the features that are truly considered to be solutions for the American problem of social mobility and inequality.
But I’ve been working with a very brilliant, young Danish economist, Rasmus Landersø, at the Rockwool Foundation in Copenhagen, whom I met when he came to Chicago and took a class with me about five years ago. What we’ve found has staggered me. I’d been talking about inequality in America, but he had access to the whole Danish registered system — data on the lifetimes of all these Danish citizens, from birth to death. What schools they went to, whom they went to school with, what their wages were, their employment history, their health, their employment and other occupations, where they live, who lives next to them, their house value. Tremendous data.
I wondered, “Well, how much does US inequality compare with Danish inequality?” and we started working together to trace out the life outcomes of children by their parents’ socioeconomic status, measured initially by the education of the mother, but other dimensions as well. We wrote a paper together showing that the gaps that are present in American society — in terms of skills, in terms of mortality — are of the same order of magnitude as they are in Denmark.
This has been a huge controversy in Denmark because the Danish like to think, “Oh, the welfare state’s really doing well.” But what this shows, which I think is extremely important, is that all these public [programs] aren’t that effective in eliminating this fundamental source of inequality. And of course, the fundamental source of inequality is the family. It’s the family. And then you get to some really basic issues: Do we want to get to a situation like Plato envisioned — putting all children in orphanages to equalize them? I don’t think anybody wants that. In fact, we know when you do that, you create enormous social waste.
So family influence is not easily displaced. I think this should be highly relevant in the discussions we’re about to have about new policies in America. Everybody’s pointing to Denmark, saying, “Oh, look, universal childcare!” Well, okay. I’m not opposed to any of those things. But I’m still saying: Despite all those programs in Denmark, there are substantial inequalities. And it’s not just that they’re unequal — people are always going to be different from each other in some ways. But the differences are of the same order of magnitude as in America. The Danes find that totally unacceptable because they see themselves as having created a society with full equality.
The one way they do have more equality is in income distribution. But how is that achieved? Through taxes and transfers: a very high tax rate, very progressive, a lot of redistribution. So the so-called Gini coefficient in Scandinavia is generally much lower — it’s a much more equal society in terms of income after tax and transfers. Income before tax and transfers, not so much. So what you see is essentially a redistributive state which is causing income equality.
But the part that I think is most interesting, for me and for the current discussion, is looking at how much this affects social mobility. There’s this notion of the “Gatsby Curve,” which received a lot of attention some six or seven years ago. The idea was basically that more inequality at one point in time led to more social immobility — you were more or less stuck in the same position as your parents were. And that’s been the theme of a lot of media reports recently, a lot of different groups pushing this. But what we found was that social mobility in terms of education and skill is the same in Denmark as the US. When we look at the education of the parents and the education of the children, it’s at the same level. So, wait a minute: They’re not producing skills at any greater rate in Denmark. What they are doing is redistributing income. And part of the reason why skills aren’t being produced — although it’s not the whole story — is that very high tax and transfer system is actually leading to disincentives to acquire skills.
I’m not saying this is the whole story, but I think this is extremely important work. It’s clarifying what’s going on — showing that sorting is very pervasive, both in the US and in Denmark. With the Danish data, we’re able to study those processes in a much more flexible way. We’re not saying that Denmark is the same as the US: Denmark has a very substantial Arabic population, which is very disadvantaged, but it’s more recent and nothing comparable to the African American in the US. What we find, though, is something that is amazingly important about the role of family — that family is playing a central role in many ways.
Max Weber was a sociological theorist, an economist, a very broad thinker, and an important and influential thinker. He wrote a book on bureaucracy and did a lot of work thinking about how a welfare state (although he didn’t call it a welfare state) should operate — how a government redistributing or dealing with people in what we now call a welfare state would function. And a crucial feature was equal access. So fine. That sounds perfect. Equal access sounds like the American ideal. It was his ideal. Well, guess what? Equal access doesn’t do it. The reason is that more affluent parents — i.e. more engaged parents — always find opportunities that less engaged parents won’t. So their children will benefit, even when the same benefits are available to all families.
There’s an economist at Berkeley, Chris Walters, who did some very interesting work on charter schools. He looked at what the impact of charter schools was on a population of kids who were relatively disadvantaged. He found a positive impact of charter schools on the kids’ performance and he found that disadvantaged kids benefited the most from charter schools. But the parents who got their kids into charter schools were the most advantaged among that pool. So this is a real public policy question. It’s a real fact about what a free society is doing — we should admit it, and we should build that into policy.
I don’t mean by forbidding parents’ involvement, though. In California in the late ’70s, there was this reform which helped destroy the public schools, which basically forbade parents to come in and give extra to supplement the schools. The idea was to equalize, but as a result, some of the impact of the parent was neutralized. I think we do want to harvest the powerful force of love and attachment for the child. That is such a powerful force. And I just think we have to cope with it and then understand that for certain aspects of society — the people who drew a blank in the lottery of life — there might be some compensation for that down the road. My thinking about the form of that social insurance might be for it to help supplement the home life and to make the home life more effective for the child.
I dearly wish I could talk to Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton and many others. It’s not that I have any great hatred of the Danish. The Danes are very happy — if you go down the street, you see all these families. It’s truly heartwarming. They really love their children, and they engage — and it’s great. It’s great. But I think the idea is that there still is this sense that some families are better at doing that than others. And we can do something about it, you know?
Here’s another aspect of that. Some of the US programs that have been put forward are very formulaic. They come out of cooker-cutter models that are frequently put for a program. “We must have this curriculum, we must have these requirements,” and so forth. And what I think is really relevant and really, really important, is that we understand that we need some real flexibility built into the system; that it’s encouragement, building attachment and linkage between programs and parents; and that some parents literally don’t know how to be a good parent.
For example, Flávio Cunha at Rice University has done a number of studies — and others before him, less systematically — showing that if you ask a lot of disadvantaged mothers, “What’s the normal growth trajectory for a 2-year-old for reading?” they don’t know. So there’s a sense in which we can empower parents. But the whole activity has to be to engage the family. So, I think it’s the family, the family, the family. And I don’t know if public policy has gotten there yet.
Along these lines, advocates for universal preschool — essentially beginning the public school system at birth — are saying that this is the way to address problems of disadvantage and social mobility, and that these programs are highly cost-effective and will pay for themselves many times over. So, I have two questions: What is your assessment of the cost-effectiveness piece? And if we did have universal preschool starting at birth, what effect do you think that would have on problems of poverty and the lack of social mobility?
Well, first of all, why not have it universal? If you go to advantaged environments, they’re not going to use those programs anyway when they can go to an enriched childcare center — a Waldorf-type school, some kind of school that the parents carefully encourage and cultivate. So, in some sense, universality is a political ploy. And you can always have universality with a graduated schedule — you could say, “Okay, we’ll open a program in Winnetka, but you have to pay the full freight. If we open it in Inglewood, it will be free, or very heavily subsidized.” So that’s one approach.
But what I have systematically found — and I think is known by any serious scholar of these programs — is that the greatest benefits are to the disadvantaged. Programs benefit exactly those kids growing up in disadvantaged homes, where the parents maybe don’t have enough knowledge, or maybe enough skill, or may themselves not be all that fluent in language, or capable of helping the child. Or the parents might need a boost, you know, learning parenting. But studies of targeted programs is where the evidence is, all the iconic studies — everything I have ever done has studied programs targeted to disadvantaged children.
The main benefits always accrue to disadvantaged children. And that’s because their parenting environments are not as strong with fewer advantages, as we were talking about. Having a good family — “good” is too value-laden — but a rich family life, offering lots of stimulation. Let’s call it that. Those advantages aren’t shared by everybody, and these programs can help. But it’s the disadvantaged who benefit the most. I know that people want to say it’s universal for political purposes and I know the argument is you don’t want to stigmatize: “Well, everybody will like universal pre-K because we’re not just giving it to the poor, so we’re not stigmatizing the poor.” But the fact of the matter is if we want not to waste money, we would target disadvantaged kids.
There are two things that have been worrying me about the universal thing, which I’d love to get your thoughts on. First, we already have universal public K–12 education, now starting in kindergarten in most places. But I worked with very disadvantaged, low-income schools in New York City for a decade, and I observed a universal system which often serves disadvantaged kids very poorly, while working great for more advantaged families. One of the things that worries me about implementing universal preschool is that we’d start out with a clean slate and a lot of excitement, but more disadvantaged children will eventually end up in lower quality programs. What do you think about that?
In the case of the public schools, there’s no question that there’s a lot of sorting going on. Here’s an interesting finding from Denmark. In Chicago, teachers on the North Side earn a lot more than teachers in a very poor suburb on the South Side. But none of that goes on in Denmark, because teachers’ wages are the same everywhere. It’s full equalization. If you look at the quality of teachers in various Danish neighborhoods, though, they’re very strongly sorted by the education and affluence of the parents. Why? It’s not that parents are slipping a $50 under the table. It’s that — and this is exactly how economics would predict it — teachers can’t get paid in money, but what they can get paid in is good students and motivated students. And that makes a teacher’s life a joy, as opposed to the chore of working with unmotivated and not very bright students. So there’s an awful lot of sorting that goes on, even when you mandate equality like it’s mandated in Denmark.
By the way, one of the big fallacies in this area is that family advantage is primarily a question of money, which I think is an artifact of using certain kinds of statistics. Right now, there’s a whole group of child development psychologists, and economists working with them, who argue that poverty is the big problem for child outcomes. They argue, “Oh, what we should do is give families more money and we will solve their problems.” But the fact of the matter is that it’s not just money, it really is not just money. Some motivated parents — even very uneducated but motivated parents — can produce very effective, successful lives for their children. And they do all the time.
This was studied here in the housing projects in Chicago. You had women who were close to illiterate — low levels of education, not very skilled — whose children came out in a very healthy, functioning way. And they talk about the home life that was created for them by their parents, usually the mother. So it’s not always a question of money. But it is a question of parenting — engagement with the child, attachment, interaction, and the like. I think that’s what’s missing from the discussion.
And throwing money at a problem — well, 60 years after we did that at a wide scale and got very limited results, now there’s another whole revival of the idea. The problem is statistics. Right now, we have very crude measures of poverty. The measure of child poverty we use is income, which sounds reasonable: Poor kids have families with less income. But I don’t think that’s the right definition of child poverty. I think the right definition of child poverty is living in environments which don’t stimulate them and which don’t encourage them, rich or poor. So, they can be very, very poor, or relatively poor, and have a stimulating, engaged relationship with their parents. But that’s not understood, so instead we look at these statistics like free lunch criteria. I understand the political discussion lives on that and so-called evidence-based analysis uses these crude measures of poverty. But it doesn’t really get to the core of what poverty is or what family influence is.
So, again, it’s like people don’t want to talk about the family. They want to talk about something that’s “more objective.” And don’t you think that’s a central question in American society now? Nobody wants to talk about the family. To me, it’s amazing — we have this problem staring us in the face, and everybody wants to look the other way and say, “Oh no, that’s not it. We’re going to do everything but the family.”
On the flip side, another thing that worries me — and I think there’s some evidence it may have happened in Quebec, when they implemented universal childcare — is that if there’s childcare that’s free, or close to free, along with a norm established of mothers working and putting their kids in childcare, that good mothering could be displaced by mediocre childcare. That it would reduce the quality of children’s environments by displacing their home environment with a childcare environment. What do you think of that?
The study you’re talking about is done by several people, I think including Gruber. It’s a good study. And I agree: If you take somebody from a quality environment and put them in an inferior environment, you can make them worse off, there’s no question. The childcare centers in Quebec were fairly impersonal, there wasn’t any real quality. So quality has to be the “sine qua non” of the whole enterprise. You’ve got to really make sure that children are getting quality. If they don’t, you can hurt them. And that makes perfect sense. Think about a grade school: If you take a kid out of third grade in a good school and put them in third grade in a lousy school, they’ll do worse. And they could even do worse than not going to school at all. So that’s what happened in Quebec, and it’s happened elsewhere. Quality is important. Really important. And the absence of the quality that is offered at home is also a real issue.
So this is a question we’ve gotten in the chat box — it’s kind of not a serious question, but I’m interested in what you’d say about it: “Should we randomize the distribution of newborns to families to correct the market failure?”
That’s one thing you could do. That’s a version of Plato’s idea. You could do it. The trouble is that you would lose the incentive — there’s a very powerful incentive [of a parent’s love for their own child]. So you could put the kid into a better environment or make the environment better. I’d favor the latter.
A colleague of mine runs a group of charter schools in New York City, and he’s been teaching something called the “Success Sequence” in middle school, which is trying to teach kids that doing things in a particular order leads to more success in life: First graduate, then get a job, then get married, and then have a kid, in that order. And he’s finding that there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of teaching young people that doing things in this particular order usually yields better results. What are your thoughts on that?
To me, if you didn’t teach that, you’d really be remiss. In some fundamental sense, we know that for a fact. When children, or young adults, let’s call them, have a child out of wedlock and if they take responsibility for that child — even if they don’t — that’s going to generally impair their progress.
I did a study of GED women about 10 years ago and wrote a book on the subject. What we found was that a lot of women who took the GED had dropped out of high school because they had a kid. After the kid got older, they frequently got a GED, then enrolled in a community college, and so forth. If you looked at age 30 and 35, they were getting back to a normal trajectory for somebody who hadn’t had a kid. But they’d delayed the onset of a trajectory, which just reduced their mobility. It had real impact on their earnings and on their marriage rates. Women who bring a kid into marriage frequently will have less good sorting in the sense of finding a partner who’s willing to support them, somebody comparable to what they would like to have had in the absence of having a child in advance.
So I think you should teach children that. To me, why not? I don’t think it’s telling them what they have to do. I think it’s just giving them information about what happens if they don’t do it. I’m sure there are a lot of very creative people who broke the “Success Sequence” mold. But I think a lot of people have found that mold successful — and a lot of children born to such people have also found it very successful. For example, we’ve done an intergenerational study of the Perry Preschool program: following the participants, who are almost 60 years old now, and following their children. We found that the children of the former Perry Preschool participants were doing very well, and then we looked at the sources of their success. It turns out that the successful second-generation Perry people were the ones born into two-parent families — the parents stayed together, they had higher earnings. They’re more stable families, and those kids prospered.
So the benefit of the Perry program was partly the benefits of increasing second-generation, stable marriages, which I think is amazingly interesting. It just propagates this idea that yes, you can build successful lives. There were successful second-generation lives, and the main mediator was the family formation that created that.
I’m getting a similar question from people all over, saying, for example: “Heckman’s data has been used in New Mexico to push for universal, all-day pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds” and, “Where I live, Professor Heckman is most often cited as supporting universal, national, daycare programs. His views on family influence are never mentioned.” The question is, “Does it bother Professor Heckman that his views and thinking are distorted?”
Does it bother me? Well, I guess it’s kind of like the humility prayer — I shouldn’t worry about things that I can’t do something about. A few years ago, I saw a colleague at a meeting in Korea who complimented me for providing support for de Blasio’s universal pre-K program in New York. It was a short conversation, but I was horrified because I never said that. And I certainly wasn’t supporting it — I’ve said “universal” but with the qualification that you might have a sliding schedule. But I think that’s the least of all the misrepresentations going out there in the larger world. So I don’t go to bed at night, gnashing my teeth and feeling like I should jump out a window.
I do feel that the whole issue of the family does not get discussed. I mean, in the Black-White issue — that’s very sensitive these days, but to me it’s extraordinarily troublesome that there isn’t a more honest discussion. In the African American scholarly community, there is an honest discussion. But when I talk about it, forget it — I’m an intruder and so forth, so I’ll keep my mouth shut. I’ve written on it, and I think the data are there. But I wish there were more discussion of the family. And what bothers me, too, is that when you look at support for public policy analysis — this is something I’ve experienced a lot — there’s a lot of resistance to going places where you’re really getting to the core and possibly then touching some sensibilities that people don’t want to touch. If it’s a public review, some national review board, peer review, where people have certain political or social views, it gets very hard to probe and go more deeply. So, I think it’s hard to actually study things like the family to the extent it needs to be studied.
And, like I’ve been saying, I think it would be better tonot just give money to a bunch of kids who are relatively poor. It can’t hurt — I don’t think it’s the least effective approach. We have studies showing that targeted versions of that kind of program were much better than just open cash grants to families in general. But I think we need to get to the essence of what the social problems are, what the family is doing, and the power of the family. And we even should evaluate, “What is a mother really worth?” — just putting that on the same level [playing field] as a childcare program. Some of those programs are very, very generous. But I still can’t help thinking that the mother, the mother’s value, is going to be so much bigger because she has these bonds and she’s there 24 hours a day with her children.
I honestly think that, as things stand now, we are kind of preventing ourselves from seeing real problems. And I think we do that all over society. I sometimes wonder whether social science isn’t doing more harm than good. Because we get frozen on these categories, like test scores. Or, like IQ. Okay, it was an interesting idea a hundred years ago, but it’s a peanuts part of the whole story. If you focus the success of a life on IQ, you’re a fool. But it’s very hard because these things are entrenched, and academia has this wonderful feature of kind of ossifying every good idea. No idea should just become entrenched and die on the vine, and that worries me. I worry that academia is doing a lot of that.
Well, we’re just at 5:15pm now. This has been one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had in a long time.
I’ve enjoyed it! We should continue it. These are issues that I feel deeply about. And it’s not that I have a political ax to grind. I really don’t. I really think we should do something about disadvantaged children, and I think we should do something about groups of people who are suffering from having adverse family lives.
And not only do I think these ideas are important, but they’re really interesting. From a point of view of an academic working on these questions, they pose enormous challenges — they keep you up. My graduate students will ask me, “What should I work on?” And I will give them the answer, “Work on whatever you can’t help but work on.” And that’s my case. This is such a deep, important problem, so I’m glad we had a chance to discuss it. I’m happy to discuss it further with you or other people.
I just wish the family would get back into more of the center of our life. Everybody knows it’s important, although it’s changing, too. And I think that’s part of society that people have not quite put their hands around. The role of women is not the same as it was 60 years ago, and a lot of people have trouble with that, as well. So, we might want to think about arrangements that are more flexible, that accommodate the kind of changes that many women want now. Family life is so fascinating, and it’s not just an academic issue. I think a core of the problem in American society is misunderstanding of the family.
I very much look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.
It was good being with you. I enjoyed it very much.
See Also
Event ~ October 19, 2018
Op-Ed ~ August 3, 2020
Op-Ed ~ April 9, 2021