Larvatus Prodeo

Turns out it’s about human capital formation, I think.

On Friday Brendon Nelson accused Rudd of copying the idea of one-stop shop childcare centres from Tony Blair’s Sure Start program, which is actually a program targeting military children (four year olds) and their families living overseas and considered to be at risk.

Rudd brushed the comment off, saying that his deep interest in early childhood dates from his reading in the summer of 2006-7 of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman who has worked extensively on studying investment in early childhood programs. When Rudd got back to work in 2007 Labor’s preschool initiative was the first policy announced in the new dispensation of his leadership. (He gives a fuller explanation in this Breakfast interview.)

In fact neither had to look so far afield. Back in 2006 under Howard at COAG all states agreed on the importance of improving “early childhood development outcomes through a collaborative national approach” as part of COAG’s “human capital agenda”.

In that year too it seems South Australia was working on the establishment of Child Development and Parenting Centres with advice from the Canadian Fraser Mustard who was there as a thinker in residence.

But before Christmas 2006 Jenny Macklin was on the case:

“This is something I’m going to want to put my mark on and one option is to make sure that we do have early childhood educators in every setting, that people are qualified to provide not only a high standard of care but also to have early childhood programs for children and this is an area that needs urgent attention”

When Rudd’s policy was announced after Christmas, the target was all four year olds, who were to receive 15 hours per week of play-based education.

I’m very much in favour of play-based education, but I don’t know how that element got there. It doesn’t seem to be in Heckman’s thinking.

Heckman had been in Australia in 2006, and (via Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy) had attracted the attention of blogging economists Nicholas Gruen and Andrew Leigh. Nic Gruen later did a Counterpoint interview with Michael Duffy.

Nic Gruen has presumably read some of Heckman’s many academic journal articles that you can find on his CV from his home page. I found a
short article he did with Dinitriy Masterov (pdf) and a longish 2005 interview.

First up Heckman has nothing to say about child care. He says it is a separate question from education interventions and he has no opinion about it.

Secondly, his focus is on children from families that are just not up to doing the right thing by their kids:

If we don’t provide disadvantaged young children with the proper environments to foster cognitive and noncognitive skills, we’ll create a class of people without such skills, without motivation, without the ability to contribute to the larger society nearly as much as they could if they’d been properly nurtured from an early age. Neglecting the early years creates an underclass that is arguably growing in the United States. The family is the major source of human inequality in American society.

Yes, he’s a dad and is concerned about kids, passionately so, but he is also an economist and is not interested in spending public money on middle class kids who are being developed quite nicely as economic production units by their families and ordinary schools. But you can save money by not having to build jails and on other interventions which, he says, are much less likely to be successful if attempted later. You save eight dollars for every dollar you spend.

That is in the US, of course. We haven’t done the research here, so we don’t know.

Gruen says Heckman has worked out that adult success is roughly equally attributable to ‘coginitive’ and ‘non-cognitive’ skills. Gruen speaks of motivation, dependability and social skills as non-cognitive skills. In Heckman I find motivation, self-control, forward-lookingness and persistence. Elsewhere he talks about values and attitudes.

On the basis that he’s really on about the skills he actually measures, Andrew Leigh has identified the questions he used in surveys. He’s used the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. This is not my area of expertise, but I was underwhelmed. Yet as I think commenter Kevin Cox was implying, these measures may be proxy for the skills he’s talking about.

I get the impression that Heckman sees the individual child very much as an individual child rather than a social being, but I may be doing him an injustice.

Heckman sees the period before age eight as critical, but clearly he’d want to intervene before four. This appears to be supported by other researchers, at least for children at risk, as Mark mentioned in comments on the earlier thread.

Last year in a segment on Radio National Professor Jeannie Brooks-Gunn from Columbia University strongly supported the capacity of quality educational programs for 2 and 3 year olds to improve their life chances and Professor Tony Vinson has recommended that NSW spend more on education for this group.

We were also told that Australia’s spending on early education was the second lowest in the OECD.

Rudd talks about the whole thing as improving productive capacity in the economic sense and in a secondary sense as a benefit to people. The summit will have its say then Maxine will sort it all out.