00:00:05 – Commercial 
Welcome to The Work-Life Equation, hosted by Priya Krishnan and Paul Sullivan. During this episode, you will hear from working parents just like you who understand the daily struggles and triumphs while finding our unique work life equation. Now, here are your hosts.
00:00:24 - Priya Krishnan
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Bright Horizons Work-Life Equation podcast. I am Priya Krishnan. I'm the Chief Digital and Transformative Officer at Bright Horizons.
00:00:33 - Paul Sullivan
And I'm Paul Sullivan, founder of The Company of Dads and co-host of the Bright Horizons Work-Life Equation podcast. Today, our guest is Professor James Heckman, a truly distinguished economist and scholar from the University of Chicago. Professor Heckman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2000 for his groundbreaking work on micro econometrics and the causal evaluation of public policy programs. But as pioneering research is what we really want to talk about today on early childhood education, it's ranged from inequality, social mobility, discrimination, and the importance of investing in early childhood development. With over 350 published articles and nine books, Professor Heckman's interdisciplinary approach, drawing from fields like psychology, genetics, and neuroscience, has shed invaluable light on major social and economic problems today. Welcome, Professor Heckman, to the Work Life Equation podcast.
00:01:28 - Professor James Heckman
Well, nice to be here.
00:01:30 - Priya Krishnan
Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Professor Heckman, a lifelong fan and such a great, you know, just a great admirer of your work. Your research has span, you know, such a wide range of disciplines, and not just economics. What has motivated you to take such an interdisciplinary approach and how is it enriched your understanding of complex social issues, specifically around early childhood development?
00:01:55 - Professor James Heckman
So I went to Princeton and I studied demography, but as an undergraduate, I ranged over a whole set of topics. So I was, you know, I tried a lot of different things, including philosophy of science, and I was interested in various things, but I ended up feeling that economics was something where you could make a difference and that my preparation of mathematics would entitled me. And I didn't want to just work on abstract problems. I'd always, always interested in history and interested in social science. So I was a very avid reader of all the local magazines of the time. The magazines like Time magazine and the New Republic and just a variety of different magazines thought places that were really out, at least in that time when I was an undergraduate. So there was a sense that there was a lot going on and economics could help me. So that's how I got interested. But you raised the question about why these different subjects, I still draw on them, and the reason is I'm not an expert. In fact, I really verge on the. I really verge on being a dilettante, and I try to avoid that. But I know just recently I was reading some great work on neuroscience and learning by Dahan, who's at College de France in Paris. And it was fantastic how he was able to use brain scans to essentially capture the learning process and how the brain readjusts when learning occurs, and the lessons that came from that for how you might teach people reading, how you might essentially promote activities very relevant. So to me it's very exciting that we're starting to go from this very broad aggregate level, which was more or less the way economics was in 1960s when I started in, to a very micro now the neuronal level, at some points, really understanding a lot how the brain works and how experience affects the way the brain works.
00:04:09 - Paul Sullivan
You know, Professor Heckman, I want to follow up on that question, and, you know, for you are for the purpose of this podcast, but really, in the world, your research is probably some of the best known to the layperson and some research you did on the Priya preschool, and it's so essential. I want you to talk about really the motivation for you doing the research. But for the listeners to sum it up, it essentially improved the value of early childhood education by looking at two different groups of students, wealthier students with more advantageous and poorer students with fewer advantages. And he really showed that how well early childhood education worked to sort of lift up those kids with fewer economic advantages going in. And as I remember with the research, it wasn't, you told me this years ago, you weren't teaching those kids baby Mozart or any of these other academic skills. You were teaching them those skills that help people show up in life. Could you tell the listeners how that project was initiated? And what surprised you about some of those initial findings as they came out?
00:05:23 - Professor James Heckman
Well, as a little bit of background for how I got into that in the late nineties or mid to late nineties, I was actively engaged in looking at what I call manpower training programs. That was the name given back in the 1960s. And these are training programs targeted primarily to disadvantaged youth, but also young adults. So we're talking about people in their twenties, early twenties, who were disadvantaged for one reason or another, typically poverty people who dropped out of high school, some students who had actually been in prison. But that wasn't a focus. It was more on people looking at the structure of poverty in various ways. And what I was finding in study after study, that except for a group of young women who were forced to drop out of school because of pregnancy, and then who were able to re enter school and so forth. Most of these job training programs were having very little effect. And there were studies that were done. I was actively engaged and in evaluating those studies, including a very long term head start study that was still. It's still being much discussed, but it was undertaken, and I was a recipient and looked at the data in the early years, but then followed it faithfully. And the main finding was, is that they were just not having any effects except for the young women. And these programs were actually able to help fund that and provide daycare in so many cases. And they did go ahead. They got some cases, a GED, but then they went on to college, many of them or associates degrees anyway, and did pretty well. They took them a while. They were delayed, but by the time they were 30 or 35, they were pretty much on even keel with others like them in terms of ability and motivations. And this was also at a time when there was a very influential book being published by Charles Murray called the Bell Curve. He did show the importance of these social. Of cognitive skills, and in a way that was very productive in a way that social scientists hadn't done. I mean, he used new data, and whatever you may think of the conclusions, he did do something new, and it was really powerfully new. It was very interesting in following children from early childhood, or at least their childhood, into adult life, and he showed the power of these cognitive skills. So I got very, very attracted by this, and I thought that was interesting. And I got then also interested in the question by. In the middle of all this, there was a symposium that was advertised, but this group sponsored a lecture by somebody who was, I think, a surgeon, or somehow he was a neuroscientist. He knew neuroscience, but what he did is he talked about the importance of the developing brain, and he gave some extremely influential, for me, a very powerful lecture about how child's brains were forming. This is early days, but it was done very well. This guy was at Wayne State. I think he's still there, or maybe emeritus, I'm not sure. But he gave a very articulate statement about how we can actually develop. And early brain development was really important. So I was intrigued. But the thing that comes out is we still are actively searching for the essential ingredients that encourage learning and that encourage motivation and so forth. So we're in the beginning of this, and I find it very exciting, the whole host of measurement issues which I'm actively engaged in, and I'm doing it not just old studies in Priya, but actively engaged in China. Doing studies of very disadvantaged environments. We have a project we're working with team in Thailand. We have another team working in Ireland. And we are trying to pull together some common forces and understanding of what the factors are that promote child development. Very young children, because you can see how they acquire knowledge and how various kinds of relationships emerge between the kind of learning they will learn in language and the kind of learning they will find in mathematical skill and the kind of learning they will have in fine arts and for that matter, even fine, gross motor skills. So, but to me, it's fascinating, as I was saying a minute ago, that it, you can't. The reason why I find it so interesting is that it really is understanding how we as human beings emerge.
00:10:17 - Paul Sullivan
Professor Heckman, this is great. We have many more questions. We're going to take a quick break and be right back. You're listening to The Work-Life Equation with Paul and Priya.
00:10:35 - Commercial
What's more magical than a childhood filled with days of play, learning, exploration and discovery? At Bright Horizons, we think of childcare as a chance to help a child experience it all. Our teachers go beyond the usual ensuring your child has an enriching, satisfying day. They take the time to listen, engage, encourage, and celebrate the wins big and small. At Bright Horizons, we put the care in childcare. Visit brighthorizons.com to find a center near you. Welcome back to The Work-Life Equation with Priya Krishnan and Paul Sullivan. We hope you're enjoying this episode and are finding the stories empowering and inspirational. Now back to the show.
00:11:27 - Paul Sullivan
Welcome back to The Work-Life Equation podcast with Paul and Priya. Our guests today is Professor James Heckman, Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago.
00:11:40 - Priya Krishnan
Well, Professor Heckman, can you tell us a little bit more about the Heckman equation and, you know, overall understanding the benefits of early childhood education? How did you arrive at it? What are the tenets of the equation? And, you know, what's changed over time, if at all?
00:11:58 - Professor James Heckman
Well, I think our understanding of the equation has changed, but the equation itself graphs the relationship between what I would call the productivity of investment with age. And there's a concept that is really intrinsic, and I think some of the early child development psychologists and even living ones. So some of the people who are alive at Cornell in Michigan had a version of this in their thinking. But there are two notions of what we call complementarity. The first is a fact that Murray was worried about and that I'm worried about as well. And so, starting with Murray, although he didn't start it he found that generally, learning is most active for the people who already know a lot. So high ability people are the ones who seem to be learning at a more rapid rate. So very, not just high iq, but with high command of language and mathematical skill. Those people are easy to teach, and therefore they acquire even further knowledge. So we're thinking of knowledge now as a hierarchy, and they can advance on that hierarchy very quickly. And we see that, by the way, with the infants in China talking about or working on recently. But there's another aspect which became to me very important when I understood it, and that is something called dynamic complementarity. And that is the following. That very disadvantaged children, if gotten skills early enough, we can build up to take advantage of what I just called complementarity. Static complementary static versus dynamic. The dynamic complementarity says the highest returns to college are for those people who are bright and motivated. And it's true, you look at that, you get the highest economic rate of return however we can. And this is the hopeful part of it where I escaped the bell curve and I got into something that was extremely valuable, I think, analytically. And we actually find evidence for it everywhere. And many people have worked on it. Some people misunderstand it, and they claim to find evidence for it, and it really isn't evidence for it, but there's a lot of evidence for it. And that is the, you build the skill base early, and it makes it much easier to acquire the skills later. And so what it means is that there's a dynamism here, that you start with a very disadvantaged kid, you build a skill base and that kid can start catching up. And in fact, the advances can be even more rapid. If you give the very disadvantaged child, who has a very low skill base in early stage, these skills, then down the road, when the child is in a higher grade, say a third or fourth grade, rather than an early childhood program, those skills will build and accumulate at a more rapid rate. So it's just the notion that skills beget skills, but they do it because they accelerate the rate of learning. And we found that, and there are a lot of other determinants of that curve, but that's the main curve. So what we found is you get there early enough, then you're going to find that the children are going to learn much more rapidly. Now, I was mentioning Dahan's book about the neuroscientific basis of learning, his book reading on the brain. He has a series of books, very, very intelligent man, and very insightful work. But what does he do well. He, like many others, documents that when the child is developing, I mean, this is now common knowledge. Many, many neurons are produced. So the child is very, very young, and there are more neurons than the child can do anything with. So there's a pruning process that sets in, but it really is a case of use it or lose it. And if people use neurons, they specialize in various ways. They excite their neurons. They take challenges. They learn new things. You can physically see a transformation in the brain that's now documented with brain scans. But you can also, in terms of early childhood literature, the preschool literature, and so forth, understand that these kids come out highly motivated, able to function in a way that kids who don't get those early childhood stimulations are not able to function as well.
00:16:34 - Paul Sullivan
Professor, one of the findings that you have that we're really fascinated by is how you've calculated the return on investment for early childhood education. You talked about that the greatest percent for human capital formation development is, is years zero to five. And you have this number at the institute that there's a 13% return on investment. When you talk about getting into those early years, how did you come about? How did you calculate, as you said, you're an empirical economist. How did you calculate that 13% return on investment? And what does it constitute, when you think of the resources put into those years, from zero to five for children?
00:17:13 - Professor James Heckman
Okay, well, the program in particular, that has the part of these rates of return are contingent on being able to get rich data. So that 13% return that you mentioned is connected with a program done in North Carolina in the 1970s, later than the Priya program, but still very intensive, something done at the Franklin Porter Graham center at the University of North Carolina. And there were several different child development experts. Craig Ramey and his group were really, Francis Campbell, very influential in putting this program together. And that was a program that was more intensive than Priya. It lasted for a longer period, was like three to five. This is like zero to five, essentially six, eight weeks to five, actually going on further. But zero to five is basically a good way to describe it because the follow up was less intensive. And this would involve children attending a preschool, but also playing and getting these kinds of interactions that I mentioned before for a good five years. And this was truly amazing. And how do we get the returns? And we look at all the economic and social benefits. So what do we mean by the economic and social benefits? Well, the social benefits include things like health. See, one of the interesting findings of this program. Not only did it boost IQ as conventionally measured. So it lasted until the mid twenties. And it's now, we follow them now to age 45. We haven't tabulated the results, but it looks like IQ persists, those gains in IQ, but also other dimensions like criminal activity, so we can measure the value of a life. The health economists and the people working in epidemiology have a whole literature called quals, where they're trying to evaluate the quality of life. And so they're asking about how much you spend on disease, how much you spend on various kinds of ways to fight off disease. And we can see substantial reduction in disease in the ABC program for the treatment group compared to the control group. We worked with a group at the University of Southern California, the Schaeffer center, and that group was able with us to look at lifetime health profiles and what the ingredients were, and how these cognitive and social and emotional skills plug in to those health related outcomes. So we had a range of outcomes. Health, heart disease. We look at blood pressure, one of the benefits of the ABC program, which we measured. We had an article in science now almost eleven years ago. It is eleven years ago, and that paper showed that reduced blood pressure, much less participation in things like the lungs, diseases, COPD, and in a variety of other diabetes and prediabetes. In all of these conditions, we found substantial improvement in the treatment group versus the control group. We can also look at some measures of stress that can be measured through taking hair samples. We didn't get to do blood samples, but we do have hair samples. And you can see that those samples show reduced stress and much better lives in the sense of having a quality of life. So you can monetize all those things. And of course, earnings. We had earnings, job growth, earnings growth, the benefits of education and so forth and so on. You put all those together and that's how you get that rate of return. Then you subtract off the cost. And the cost in this case consists of several things. One is education. We use some numbers that were generated, some estimates generated by the late Martin Feldstein, who was director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a major contributor to work on cost benefit analysis. And so we put all these ingredients together and we get a very healthy return. And that's true for both men and women. For women, one return that I didn't mention yet was in the ABC program, which is full day. They actually had childcare, and so that gave them opportunity to make money. They were going to work while their kids were in daycare, and they could also go back to school if they had dropped out, and some did, and then they went and became more productive in terms of earnings. So we put all these earnings together. Then we could also capture the social and emotional skills well as the skills associated with cognition. So we actually were able to come up with a very much bigger inventory of what the skills are for those children.
00:22:23 - Priya Krishnan
The fact is that the ROI is clear and the business case is clear. But there are three stakeholders in this. There is the parent who is going through this process of saying, do I work? Do I not work? There's an employer who gets the benefit of productivity of either the, you know, the father or the mother coming back to work, and the government who gets taxes when these parents work. There are these three stakeholders. But how do you action this? So we forgot the economics work.
00:22:58 - Professor James Heckman
The fourth, the child. The child is the ultimate stakeholder, right?
00:23:02 - Priya Krishnan
The child is the most important stakeholder in all of this. And we're all focused on saying, how do we ensure that the early childhood intervention is right? The point is that these three adult stakeholders actually need to engage and make sure that that intervention is correct. How do you mobilize this? Because that's really the work of the work that we do. And given all the years you spent on it, it'd be great to hear your point of view. And how do you get the government, the parent and the employer educate?
00:23:31 - Professor James Heckman
Well, I think the important thing, the great fear. I mean, I remember, I don't remember, but I do recall from written records that in 1969, Walter Mondale was a senator from Minnesota then, and he was later vice president under Jimmy Carter. Mondale had a program for something like a universal head start program, an early childhood program. And it passed the Senate, as I recall, passed the house. In fact, it was on Nixon's desk, and Nixon vetoed it. And the reason he gave is one of the reasons why there's so much resistance now today. And that is he said, well, look, we're going to get the government involved in the early life of the child, and that's the province of the family. We should not intervene with a family really should be active. So that was Nixon's view, and I think it's still a very widely accepted view. Many people don't want the government or anybody in their household other than themselves. And so there's an aspect that the early years are years where parents are shaping their children's perspectives, their values. So what I, my view about this is very, very, is emerging in the sense that I think we have to understand that providing parents, activating parents in these environments is a huge issue. Providing resources to the parents, giving them advice. We've worked in Jamaica where we found children who are getting 1 hour, 1 hour a week. Their parents are getting 1 hour a week instructing them how they, the parents, can play with the children. What we see is we see very strong effects, and that's where the parents get engaged. So anywhere, we can improve the family to it. But I don't think it's just a matter of money. There was a very famous child development expert. He really wasn't a child development expert to start with, but he became that a guy named Fraser Mustard, who was in Toronto, and he was a surgeon, really, a doctor, famous for many, many medical breakthroughs and so forth. But he also conducted this study and had financed these studies from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. And what they found was that even in Vancouver, which is, you know, in the neighborhoods of Vancouver from the most affluent to the least affluent, you found that a lot of children were not school ready. So by the time there were four or five, even kids from more affluent neighborhoods were not school ready. It wasn't money. It was really the way that the environment at the home encouraged or discouraged learning. Now, how do you get the employers? Well, the employers will recognize that childcare is a very essential feature. You can make a case for the employers, and there's a real case that you're going to get better quality employees. That's a way to pay employees. That's a part that people must understand when they're talking about child stakeholders and so forth. We have to pay the childcare workers a liveable wage, maybe. I'm not saying we shouldn't, but I also realize that if you pay a mother in high quality childcare that's valued a lot of, and the mother will understand that. If you could really communicate those results, and many mothers do so, you'll see that there can be some real benefits.
00:27:20 - Paul Sullivan
Professor Heckman, this is a robust conversation. We are very grateful for you. We end each podcast with a series of three very quick questions. The first question we ask every guest is, in your own words, how do you define the work life balance that so many people are trying to achieve?
00:27:42 - Professor James Heckman
Well, I think you find work that's worthwhile, and the balance will find itself if there's something you engage in that you do enjoy and you do like. I think that the way to achieve work life balance in that case is to kind of ask yourself what values you really hold. What is the most important thing in your own life. And people don't ask themselves that much. I think you can achieve the balance by recognizing what you really value and then following your nose to what you really value.
00:28:15 - Paul Sullivan
That's great.
00:28:16 - Priya Krishnan
And then when you're not thinking about all these interdisciplinary actions and thinking about economics in general, what is your go to? Way to relax, professor.
00:28:27 - Professor James Heckman
Oh, if you ask the single thing I like to do the most, take long walks in the woods. Especially in a time like this in Illinois, when the flowers, wildflowers are growing, the whole community is blooming. The Midwest is very beautiful this time of the year. The grasses are growing. So I find it very, very soothing and relaxing to take very long walks out in the woods and just absorb it.
00:29:00 - Paul Sullivan
Our last and final question from Professor Heckman is, in addition to being a renowned professor at Nova laureate, you're also a father. What advice would you give to other dads out there who are trying to achieve in their own careers, but also be great fathers?
00:29:17 - Professor James Heckman
Well, it's a hard task, and I'm not even sure I was a great father. You probably should ask my kids, not me. So I'm gonna give you a biased account, but I do think that the best advice I found was to stand by them and to provide firm, consistent advice. I mean, consistency is the key to everything. I mean, you've gotta be. If you're gonna say, lay down a law, you've gotta be – I don't mean dogmatic – I mean just consistent. And encourage the child and never kind of discourage the child and be there for the child and recognize the child. When the child does something good or does something that it's proud of or should be proud of, you recognize it. And when the child is erred in various ways, you point out the error. You might suggest how to improve, but I think the crucial thing is being there. But being consistent, that's something that has been really misunderstood. Being there is so important for a child, and being there to understand and listen and also to provide advice and frankly, also to provide value. So you don't just say, oh, you know, do anything you want. I mean, that's the job of a parent, I think, is to give the child basic values, basic values about their own lives, about how to treat other people, how to engage in society and engage at school, engage with peers, engage everywhere.
00:30:51 - Paul Sullivan
Thank you, Professor Heckman. This has been fantastic. You've been listening to The Work-Life Equation with Paul and Priya, and our guest today has been Professor James Heckman, Nobel economist and renowned thinker at the University of Chicago. Thank you again for your time today.
00:31:08 - Priya Krishnan
Thank you.
00:31:08 - Professor James Heckman
Good luck.
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