Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Heckman is an economist who looks at the first few years of life. It turns out that already at age four, you can predict with about 77 per cent accuracy who is going to graduate from high school. He focuses on non-cognitive skills like personality which, unlike cognitive skills such as IQ, are hard to measure. For example, people who get high school equivalency degrees: they get test results that are just as high as people with actual high school degrees, but they do much worse in life. His main point is that having things like persistence and self-control are really important. But where do these things come from?
So how does a political commentator end up at neuroscience?
It grew out of my normal day work, which obviously involves politics, but also human capital development. Why, for example, 30 per cent of high school students in the United States drop out, why we got Iraq so wrong. A whole series of policy failures which, in my view, grew out of getting human nature wrong. So I began studying the issue of why so many people drop out of high school, when all the economic incentives are in favour of going to high school. And that took me into the work of an economist called Jim Heckman, at the University of Chicago, who focuses on the first few years of life. And it turns out that already, at age four, you can predict with about 77 per cent accuracy who is going to graduate from high school – based on childhood patterns and things like that. So that got me involved in how these childhood patterns form, which got me involved in brain science, which got me involved in cognitive science…
So, as it’s the one that got you into all this, do you want to tell me a bit about Heckman’s book?
It’s called Inequality in America and it’s by James Heckman and Alan Krueger. Krueger is an economist at Princeton, and presents an opposing point of view. But Heckman’s focus is on what he calls non-cognitive skills. And, basically, cognitive skills are things like IQ, things we’re used to counting. What he calls non-cognitive skills are what the rest of us would call character or personality. And the name non-cognitive is very misleading, because they are cognitive, they are just not conscious, and also not easily quantifiable. So one of the things he looks at is people who, instead of going to high school get GED degrees, which are high school equivalency degrees, degrees that people take if they haven’t been able to go to high school. And often they get test results that are just as high as people who do get high school degrees. But they do much worse in life. In fact, they do no better than high school dropouts. And that’s because they don’t have persistence, they don’t show up at jobs, they don’t have self-control – this is on average, of course. And so his main point, which is obvious to everybody – but not so much to economists – is that having things like persistence and self-control are really important. So where do those things come from? They’re sort of a black box.
And does he answer that question?
No. He is an economist, not a neuroscientist, but he leads us in that direction.
So Krueger is offering another point of view, but you find that section of the book less convincing?
Right. He is more in the ‘inequality is a matter of economic structure’ camp, less to do with human capital.
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David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times who writes about politics and American culture. He joined the Weekly Standard at its inception in 1995, and prior to that was op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal. His books include Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense. He argues that it will soon be hard to understand anything about the world around us without a knowledge of the unconscious workings of the brain. So we may as well make a start now, by reading the five books he recommends on neuroscience. The working title of his own book on the subject, due out in January 2011, is How Success Happens.
