The Best Thing We Could Do About Inequality Is Universal Preschool

The latest research, from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by James Heckman and Lakshmi Raut, concludes that a policy of free preschool for all poor children would have a raft of cost-effective benefits for society and the economy: It would increase social mobility, reduce income inequality, raise college graduation rates, improve criminal behavior (saving some of the societal expenses associated with it), and yield higher tax revenue thanks to an increase in lifetime wages.

Keep such a policy in place for years, and its benefits accrue from one generation to the next. Put a child in preschool, in other words, and that improves her chances of graduating college. But it also improves the future education and earnings prospects of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, the quality of a school that a child attends later in life matters, too. And we'd be foolish to invest in preschool without continuing to invest in poor children as they age.

But this mounting evidence suggests that we should be front-loading our investment in the most disadvantaged children during the ages 2-4, when their brains develop at an extremely high rate, and while they're learning social, motivational, cognitive and analytical skills. Preschool is when kids first learn to work together in teams, to resolve problems, to listen and cooperate – all skills that directly come into play in the workforce.

Life cycle skill formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation. Motivation cross-fosters skill, and skill cross-fosters motivation. If a child is not motivated to learn and engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, he or she will fail in social and economic life. The longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle of a disadvantaged child, the more costly it is to remediate disadvantage.

Racial Profiling

http://www.upworthy.com/meet-the-17-year-old-who-blew-the-lid-off-racial-profiling-with-his-ipod?g=3

Promoting Equity through the Practice of Health Impact Assessment

Only 8 percent of African Americans live in a census tract with a supermarket, compared to 31 percent of whites.

In 30 years, people of color will constitute a majority of the U.S. population.


http://www.policylink.org/atf/cf/%7B97c6d565-bb43-406d-a6d5-eca3bbf35af0%7D/PROMOTINGEQUITYHIA_FINAL.PDF

Promoting Social Mobility

While we celebrate equality of opportunity, we live in a society in which birth is becoming fate.

First, life success depends on more than cognitive skills. Non-cognitive characteristics—including physical and mental health, as well as perseverance, attentiveness, motivation, self-confidence, and other socio-emotional qualities—are also essential. While public attention tends to focus on cognitive skills—as measured by IQ tests, achievement tests, and tests administered by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—non-cognitive characteristics also contribute to social success and in fact help to determine scores on the tests that we use to evaluate cognitive achievement.

Second, both cognitive and socio-emotional skills develop in early childhood, and their development depends on the family environment. But family environments in the United States have deteriorated over the past 40 years. A growing fraction of our children are being born into disadvantaged families, where disadvantage is most basically a matter of the quality of family life and only secondarily measured by the number of parents, their income, and their education levels. And that disadvantage tends to accumulate across generations.

Third, public policy focused on early interventions can improve these troubling results. Contrary to the views of genetic determinists, experimental evidence shows that intervening early can produce positive and lasting effects on children in disadvantaged families. This evidence is consistent with a large body of non-experimental evidence showing that the absence of supportive family environments harms childhood and adult outcomes. Early interventions can improve cognitive as well as socio-emotional skills. They promote schooling, reduce crime, foster workforce productivity, and reduce teenage pregnancy. And they have much greater economic and social impact than the later interventions that are the focus of conventional public policy debate: reducing pupil-teacher ratios; providing public job training, convict rehabilitation programs, adult literacy programs, and tuition subsidies; and spending on police. In fact, the benefits of later interventions are greatly enhanced by earlier interventions: skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation.

In short, to foster individual success, greater equality of opportunity, a more dynamic economy, and a healthier society, we need a major shift in social policy toward early intervention, with later interventions designed to reinforce those early efforts.

Early adverse experiences correlate with poor adult health, high medical care costs, increased depression and suicide rates, alcoholism, drug use, poor job performance and social function, disability, and impaired performance of subsequent generations.

Lack of a certain kind of input during early childhood results in abnormal development in brain systems that sense, perceive, process, interpret, and act on information related to that input. Studies of Romanian infants show the importance of the early years. A perverse natural experiment placed many Romanian children in state-run orphanages at birth. Conditions in the orphanages were atrocious. The children, who received minimal social and intellectual stimulation, demonstrated cognitive delays, serious impairments in social behavior, and abnormal sensitivity to stress. The later the orphans were adopted, the poorer their recovery on average, although there are important variations among the children, reflecting the quality of orphanages and adoptive home environments as well as the length of the stay in orphanages. The Romanian studies fit with what we understand from other settings: severely neglected young children often have persisting cognitive, socio-emotional, and health problems.

Absent these sensory experiences, abnormal development results. This is vividly illustrated in the smaller head size, enlarged ventricles, and cortical atrophy of neglected three-year-olds as compared to children who receive normal amounts of early attention.



There is much commentary on the benefits of two-parent families, but the presence of a father can be a net negative factor if he shows antisocial tendencies or if marital conflict is substantial.

A large body of evidence suggests that a major determinant of child disadvantage is the quality of the nurturing environment rather than just the financial resources available or the presence or absence of parents.

Social policy should, then, be directed toward the malleable early years. And it should be guided by the goal of promoting the quality of parenting and the early life environments of disadvantaged children, while also respecting the primacy of the family, showing cultural sensitivity, and recognizing America’s social diversity. And that means that effective strategies need to provide a menu of high quality programs from which parents can choose.


http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.5/ndf_james_heckman_social_mobility.php

Where the Poorest Americans Live

Many metropolitan areas never recovered from the decade’s first downturn, in 2000. Midwestern and Northeastern Rust Belt metro areas, and several in the South, experienced the steepest increases in concentrated poverty as they shed manufacturing jobs and income throughout the decade. Chicago and Detroit chalked up among the largest declines in the 1990s but yielded back much of that progress in the 2000s.





This research merely confirms what we've suspected for some time: extremely poor neighborhoods and their residents are last to benefit from growth when times are good, and first to feel it when tough times arrive. Progress against concentrated poverty is possible when growth is strong and sustained, and buttressed by housing, education and transportation policies that guard against segregating poor families. With projections of high unemployment for years to come, the outlook for this indicator is grim.

But that's no excuse to throw up our hands in the fight against concentrated poverty. If anything, we need to redouble our efforts at growing not just any old jobs, but better-paying jobs, and jobs that are accessible to workers living in these disadvantaged communities. Now that we’re finally paying attention to rising inequality in America, it's a good time to focus on helping the places that bear the most severe burdens of an increasingly unequal society.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/11/where-the-poorest-americans-live/419/

concentration of advantage and disadvatage

"Much homicide is black-on-black, much inner-city, much gang-on-gang, unlicensed illegal guns, whereas the mass shootings have all been individual, white-on-white, mostly non-urban, often licensed guns (although often licensed to others as in [Sandy Hook])."

distinguished criminologist, Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University


it's time to essentially flip the construct of concentration and clustering on its head. Instead of focusing just on "concentrated disadvantage" to describe crime, we should also focus on "concentrated prosperity." He adds that the main problem in making the connection between the concentration of urban prosperity and disadvantage is that our measures are far too broad. To do so would require more micro-level data at the neighborhood or Census tract level, something like a "micro place-based Gini coefficient."

John Roman, an urban crime expert at the Urban Institute, took a detailed look at the declining homicide rates in America's largest 24 urban centers

The concentrated nature of economic advantage is a central feature, if not the central feature, of the rapidly evolving urban knowledge economy. We are seeing the rise of an increasingly spiky world where prosperity and economic advantage are becoming increasingly uneven and concentrated at every single geographic scale — between as well as within cities and metros, globally and national, and across neighborhoods and communities.

We have tons of research that compares metros. What we need is better data and more research which looks inside our cities — at their increasing economic and geographic divides, tracing differences in income and wage levels, class and industry composition, density and other factors at a much more fine-grained scale.

Place, Not Race, May Better Explain America's Health Disparities

Place, Not Race, May Better Explain America's Health Disparities

Living in Some Parts of Chicago Can Take More Than a Decade Off Your Life!!!!!

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/08/living-some-parts-chicago-can-take-more-decade-your-life/2781/

Researchers with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, in conjunction with the Center on Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University, have found that people living in Chicago neighborhoods with a median income higher than $53,000 a year have a life expectancy almost 14 years longer than Chicagoans who live in communities with a median income below $25,000.

This research reinforces an idea we’ve written about previously: that where you live may be the most important determinant of your health.


"Place really is the fundamental [issue]," says Brian Smedley, director of the Health Policy Institute at the Center for Political and Economic Studies. "Residential segregation is really the fundamental driver of many of the health inequalities that we see."

"It is unacceptable in the world's wealthiest society that a person's life can be cut short by more than a decade simply because of where one lives and factors over which he or she has no control."


The researchers also frame this problem in another way: Chicagoans with the worst access to chain supermarkets and large independent grocery stores (in the bottom quintile) have an average life expectancy that's 11 years shorter than Chicagoans with the best access to food (in the top quintile).

This doesn’t mean that when grocery stores disappear, people die prematurely. Rather, the patterns on these maps reveal that numerous forces are all intersecting in the same parts of the city: Neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty are also the neighborhoods with the lowest educational attainment and the least access to pharmacies and food, and they’re also the neighborhoods where the city’s minorities tend to be segregated, and where the health outcomes tend to be the worst. The correlations are just too strong to ignore. As the report warns: "These place-based patterns are neither arbitrary nor benign."

These communities, Smedley says, have experienced long-running patterns of disinvestment (by grocery chains, by employers, by banks, by cities), and health inequalities appear to be one result of it.

-The Atlantic Cities