CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION

A Nobel Prize-winning economist and newcomer to Chautauqua Institution will kick off the season and this week on “Kids!” with the morning lecture at 10:45 a.m. today.

Dr. James J. Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, will deliver his lecture, “Schools, Skills and Synapses: An Economist’s Perspective on Early Childhood Education and Development” to “frame the questions that frame American life.” His lecture will fuel smaller discussions for the remainder of the week, he said.

“People will be discussing the nature of early intervention: programs that enrich the lives of children, especially in the early years,” Heckman said. “So, the structure of the whole lecture will be towards that theme of the early years.”

Since graduating in 1971 with a doctorate in economics from Princeton University, Heckman’s recent work has focused on human development and life cycle skill formation. He places emphasis on the economics of early childhood, and his research gives policymakers new insights into education, job-training programs, civil rights and anti-discrimination laws.

“Current policy discussion is misguided in the sense that it focuses a lot on solving problems that could be prevented, and I think that that’s the thing we want to talk about,” Heckman said. “There’s a very strong economic case that can be made for early childhood development.”

Heckman’s work began almost 15 years ago, when his work on adolescent remediation efforts led to disappointment. Heckman found there was a substantial gap between whites and African Americans when it came to life skills and intelligence — and that people were attributing it to genetics, making the deficit impossible to correct.

Heckman also found that many job-training programs directed at adolescents and young adults simply were not working well.

“I was led to the fact that these abilities that were predicting life outcomes very well ... the gaps were opening up at very early ages and American society was focusing its attention more on solving serious problems like crime, teenage pregnancy and the like, and not really looking at the structure of the underlying causes which are things like skills: cognitive and non-cognitive skills,” Heckman said. “I learned that this is really an avenue for understanding what our social problems are, and how we might solve them.”

The creator of the Heckman Equation Project, a program investing in early childhood development, Heckman boils down his findings into five points: One, that intelligence and social skills are set at an early age, and that both are essential for success; two, that early investment produces the greatest returns in human capital; three, that America’s advantage will come from helping the disadvantaged; four, that quality economic returns come from quality investments in early childhood development; and five, that the Heckman Equation Project already has successful programs that can be implemented in local communities. Programs like Early Head Start and EduCare Inc. are built on Heckman’s principles.

The outreach that occurs through these programs, Heckman said, is what makes his work more than statistics and research. The human face of his work can be seen in the interventions made in young children’s lives.

“It’s not just statistics; it’s looking at children and seeing how their lives are improved and the opportunities available to them,” he said. “I think that’s the thing that’s most exciting: to see the individual transformations that occur.”

Heckman is the recipient of several awards, not just his 2000 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He was the 1983 winner of the John Bates Clark Award of the American Economic Association, and he received a glut of awards in 2005 including the Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labor Economics, the University College Dublin Ulysses Medal and the Aigner award from the Journal of Econometrics.

At the end of the day, Heckman said, he and his colleagues are ultimately aiming to understand the creation of human potential.

“We’re understanding how people become people, and we’re understanding how poor people, people who start out in bad conditions and seriously humble conditions, can be bettered,” he said. “We can actually guarantee improvement in people. That’s pretty stimulating. It’s hard not to be excited.”

by Sara Toth, Staff writer