Invest in children

Abstract

This article cites research supporting claims that (a) the US would be safer, healthier, and wealthier with 100% public funding for quality childcare from pregnancy through age 17, and (b) we can afford it. We claim that these research results are not widely known, because the major media have conflcits of intereste in honestly reporting on research that might offend people who control major portions of the money for the media.

Introduction

• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. attributed to Margaret Meade
• Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Daniel Burnham (1910).

There's a substantial body of research that says that 100% public funding for quality child care from pregnancy through age 17 would likely produce a substantial return on investment, including the following:

• The rates of school drop-out, teen pregnancies, and crime would drop dramatically.
• Public health would improve, because those children and their care givers would be less likely to catch and communicate infectious diseases.
• After 30 years or so, the entire education and child rearing system would become essentially free, paid from money we would not have without it, because those better educated children would as adults increase the rate of economic growth, generating money we would not otherwise have, as suggested by Figure 1.
• However, the incarceration rate may not fall, because incarcerations are a function of people's perceptions of crime, and that's a function of the media, not of crime itself, within the range of experience of most people in the US; see Figure 2.
• Also, the highest rates of economic growth in US history coincided roughly with the highest tax rates on the ultra-wealthy -- exactly the opposite of what the major media seem to want us to believe, as documented in "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future". This strongly suggest that we can afford it in the short term, and we would be vastly better off in the long term by investing in children as suggested herein.
• A primary obstacle is that virtually everyone thinks they know more than they do, and this overconfidence is exploited to please those who control most of the money for the media, as documented in "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future".

Figure 1. Conditional growth rate (increase in GDP per capita adjusted for inflation 1960-2009) vs. condition test scores, both adjusted for GDP per capita in 1960.

Figure 2. Percent of the US population in state and federal prisons 1925-2023: The increase since 1975 has been attributed to changes in the editorial policies of the major commercial broadcasters to fire nearly all the investigative journalists and replace them with the police blotter. The public thought that crime was out of control, when there had been no substantive increase in crime. They voted in a generation of politicians committed to getting tough on crime, and this is the result. Michelle Alexander (2010) The New Jim Crow (New Press) missed the role of the media, documented in other work, e.g., by Sacco (1995, 2005) and Potter and Capeller (1998).

Summary of research

In the following, we review relevant literature, starting with the benefits of improving support from pregnancy through age 2. This is followed by discussions of other early childhood interventions and then of breaking the school-to-prison pipeline.

However, before discussing this research, we describe why it is so easy to polarize a body politic.

The role of the media in politics

Acemoglu and Johnson (2023, ch. 4) said that 'Medieval society is often described as a “society of orders,” consisting of those who'

• fought,
• prayed, and
• worked.

Those who prayed persuaded those who worked to accept this hierarchy. This "society of orders" also seems to describe the other major civilizations that built major monuments like the major cathedrals in Europe and the pyramids in ancient Egypt.

Roughly a century after the Reformation came to England, pamphlets and newspapers began suggesting that commoners should be allowed to innovate. After the English chopped the head off of their King Charles I in 1649 during the EnglishCivil War (1642-1651), the rate of growth in average annual income began to increase, presumably because enough commoners were allowed to become entrepreneurs.

However, the wealth created by this new class of entrepreneurs was not broadly shared until enough commoners got sufficiently well organized in the late nineteenth century to convince elites to share the wealth more broadly. Then inequality of income and wealth generally trended downward until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979 and Ronald Reagan became president of the US in 1981. These thrends for the US are as documented in the Wikiversity article on "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future".

Acemoglu and Johnson (2013, ch. 11) say that to reverse the current trend toward increased inequality, we must

1. alter the narrative,
2. build countervailing powers, as was done with organized labor in the past, and
3. develop technical and policy solutions that benefit all, not just elites.

How can we do this?

Overconfidence, the media, and how to talk politics

To alter the narrative, it helps to recognize that virtually everyone thinks they know more than they do. This is a central tenet of a relatively new field called behavioral economics at the intersection of human psychology and economics. Daniel Kahneman shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, even though he was not an economist: He was a research psychologist. He won the prize in economics for his leadership in developing this relatively new field. Progress on many and perhaps all substantive issues facing humanity today can be traced to how the major media everywhere exploit this to please those who control most of the money for the media.

People say, "We don't talk politics." That seems upside down: We have to talk politics -- but with humility and respect -- because the alternative is killing people over misunderstanding.

Science and improvements in human living standards

Much of the progress in standards of living have rested on science, which involves a few basic principles.

1. Measure something that is as close as possible to what is desired, but recognize that there will always be a gap between what is measured and what is desired.
2. Replicate to confirm the results of any study.
3. Randomized controlled trials increase the confidence that any effects that are statistically significant will work in a new environment.

The need to quantify the value of innovations in education and other government services has rarely been given more than lip service. Rare exceptions were recognized in the award of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

Bipartisan legislation passed in the first Trump administration mandated evidence-based public policy. However, the record is clear that Congress is not likely to seriously consider evidence that might not support the desires of major political campaign donors unless the major media make the evidence so widely available that Congress is forced to consider it.

Learning and economic growth

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and co-workers have documented a high correlation between scores on standardized tests of educational achievement and subsequent rates of economic growth. This suggests that any intervention that actually increased what children learned in schools would likely translate into increases in the rate of economic growth during the working lives of those children as adults; see Figure 1.

The following summarizes past research on innovations in child care that have documented (a) dramatic reductions in poverty and crime and (b) improvements in health and wealth.

Pregnancy through age 2

The main message of Stephen Bezruchka (2023) Inequality Kills Us All: COVID-19's Health Lessons for the World can be summarized by comparing the evolution of public health in Japan since 1946 and China since the end of their Communist Revolution in 1949 with the US: Inequality in 1946 was very high in both Japan and China and relatively low in the US. Public health in most countries worldwide has improved since then, but the improvements have been most dramatic in Japan and China and slower in the US than in other advanced industrialized countries. Figures 3 and 4 plot life expectancy and infant mortality in selected countries including the US and Japan but not China between 1950 and 2020. Both show that in the early 1950s, the US was a leaders and Japan trailed the rest of the advanced industrialized world, and by 2020, Japan led the rest of the selected countries while the US trailed. Bezruchka claims that's because of dramatic reductions in inequality in Japan and China and increases in inequality in the US during this period.

Figure 3. Life expectancy at birth in selected countries and regions in 5-year periods between 1950 and 2020. w = World. la = Latin America and the Caribbean. jp = Japan. cu = Cuba. ee = Eastern Europe. ne = Northern Europe. se = Southern Europe. we = Western Europe. ca = Canada. us = United States of America.

Figure 4. Infant mortality in selected countries and regions in 5-year periods between 1950 and 2020. w = World. la = Latin America and the Caribbean. jp = Japan. cu = Cuba. ee = Eastern Europe. ne = Northern Europe. se = Southern Europe. we = Western Europe. ca = Canada. us = United States of America.

However, Bezruchka also documents the importance of good nutrition and low stress during pregnancy, including the following:

A natural experiment, the Dutch Hunger Winter, allowed us to gauge how nutritional stress during pregnancy later impacted adult health of the infants who were in utero ... when a famine gripped the region ... . Fetuses who were exposed to the famine during ... gestation, in contrast to those born before the famine, were more likely to have ... many... chronic diseases in adulthood. ... What’s more, the damage isn’t restricted to a single generation—it perpetuates into successive generations. ... Recent studies suggest that epigenetic factors, meaning the variation in gene expression ... influence the health of subsequent generations.

Beyond that, he mentioned the following:

A 1958 British Birth Cohort study found that around half of adult health is determined in the first seven years. The first thousand days after conception [to age 2] is now seen as the most critical period.

In 1996, college-educated Black women had a higher proportion of babies born of low birthweight than any other racialized group of any educational status in the United States, higher than Whites not graduating from high school, or Latinx or American Indians. An African American woman cannot erase the color of her skin even by attaining the highest level of schooling. Her baby will still have compromised health. ... Consider women immigrating to the United States from Africa. Their babies have birthweights comparable to White women and considerably higher than American-born Blacks. Why? The socially mediated stress of racism has a profound effect on health outcomes. African women living in the United States have not experienced racism to the degree of American-born Blacks. This advantage deteriorates for subsequent generations that are descendants of African-born Blacks. ... The United States is one of only a handful of countries that have seen increases in maternal mortality over the last few years. African American mothers suffer about three times the chance of dying from childbirth-related causes than other racialized group.

Bezruchka documents how good nutrition and low stress during the 1,000 days from pregnancy to age two contributes to generally better health for a person's life beyond that age. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit called, "1,000 days", is "fighting to give all families a healthy first 1,000 days. This organization was born in 2010 in response to ground-breaking scientific evidence that identified a powerful window of opportunity from a woman’s pregnancy to a child’s 2nd birthday when nutrition has a long-term impact on the future health and development of both children and societies."

Infancy through age 5

The Carolina Abecedarian Project enrolled 111 "high risk" infants (98% African American) in a project through age 5. Of those, 57 selected at random received 6-8 hours per day, five days per week of child care consisting in part of educational games based on the latest in educational theory. The control group received nutritional supplements, social services, and health care to ensure that these factors did not affect the outcomes, which have been measured at ages 3, 4, 5, 6.5, 8, 12, 15, 21, 30, and 35. The results documented statistically significant improvements in educational achievement in the experimental group over the controls with reductions in teenage pregnancies, crime, and unemployment. Nobel prize winning economist James Heckman estimated a 13% return on investment from that program.

Class-size experiments

The Wikipedia article on "Class-size reduction" mentions two studies involving random assignment of students and teachers to classes with different pupil-teacher ratios:

• The 1980s Tennessee STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio) project.
• The Wisconsin SAGE (Student Achievement Guarantee in Education) project begun in 2002.

Both found statistically significant benefits from smaller class sizes, especially for children in the early grades (K-3). Moreover, the benefits were sustained when the children were assigned to regular classes after the end of the random assignment period. The SAGE experiment also found that teaching methods should be modified to take advantage of the smaller class sizes.

"The Heckman Equation" is

+ Invest (in educational and developmental resources for disadvantaged families to provide equal access to successful early human development)

+ Develop (i.e., nurture early development of cognitive and social skills in children from birth to age five)

+ Sustain (early development with effective education through to adulthood)

= Gain (a more capable, productive and valuable workforce that pays dividends to America for generations to come).

The latter point has been documented in research by Eric Hanushek and co-workers, mentioned above with Figure 1.

School-to-prison pipeline

Vitale (2021) claims that "zero-tolerance policies in schools" have contributed to "school-to-prison pipeline". It might be wise evaluate these policies using victimization surveys using the methodology of the "National Crime Victimization Survey". The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which administers the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), says that UCR data should not be used to compare different jurisdictions, because they are subject to differences in many factors including "Crime reporting practices of the [local] citizenry", "stability of the population" practices, and now different components of the criminal justice system are managed. Trust in the police also varies between communities based on differences in how local residents are treated, and some of these factors vary over time in response to events. Victimization surveys tend to be less subject to these kinds of problems.

We CAN afford this

Piketty noted that the highest rates of economic growth in US history coincided with the highest effective tax rates on the ultra wealthy. These occurred especially during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Eisenhower presidency, as discussed in the Wikiversity article on, "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future". Figure 2 in that article plots US average annual income (GDP per capita adjusted for inflation) 1800-2024. The administrations of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) are outliers with the GDP per capita falling at roughly 8 percent per year under Hoover and increasing at roughly 8 percent per year under FDR. Figure 3 in that article shows the structure of the income tax over that period: The top marginal rate peaked at 94 percent during 1944 and 1945 while GDP per capita grew at 10 percent per year; the effective tax rates on the ultra-wealthy and major corporations have generally been declining since. Before the Hoover administration, GDP per capita grew at roughly 1.5 percent per year. Since 1947 it has grown at roughly 2 percent per year, though that growth rate appears to have slowed in recent years. Piketty claims that it is slowing because of the increase in inequality. However, it's not clear of the growth rate is actually slowing down, and if it is, it is not clear if that change is due to the increase in inequality or something else, like the changes in the ownership and editorial policies of the major media.

Conservatives claim that we cannot do what FDR did, because FDR's actions responded to the "special circumstances" of the Great Depression and World War II. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) insists we can do this again; all we need is the political support that FDR had to tax the major corporations and ultra-wealthy and to prevent price gouging, which had generated inflation and stifled economic growth during the earlier wars, as discussed in the Wikiversity article on "The Media, the Great Depression, and our future".

For more on the role of the media in this and other issues, including the increase in inequality in the US over the past half century, see the Wikiversity article on, "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government".

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