Pie Fight

Patience capital and non-cognitive development

Download patience_capital_and_the_demise_of_the_aristocracy.pdf

I'm not sure I buy the premise of the above paper on 'Patience capital and the demise of the aristocracy', but it's an interesting one, and some of the arguments are interesting. For instance, there's a good point about the fact that urban artisans had a life characterised by a steep income slope (making nothing as an apprentice, pretty little as a journeyman, and hopefully a good deal more as a master) that encouraged long-term planning and financial discipline; this in contrast to those (both poor and rich) in rural areas, for whom the land was worth basically the same when they were 20 as when they were 60. For the latter, lifetime income had more of a tendency to be flat from year to year; thus notions of investment in the future and the accumulation of capital would have been less salient - or so goes the theory. (See bottom of page for data on the landed aristocracy's attitude to business.)

Most interesting for my studies, though, is the notion of patience capital (think the Marshmallow Test, and the ways in which parents strive to teach their children patience and other key non-cognitive skills) is an interesting one.

It may be particularly related to positive outcomes for low-income children who attend decent daycare programmes, argue some. Remember, these kids - eg in the Abecedarian or Perry High Scope project - tend not to show greater cognitive development than their peers over time, but they do show better outcomes. Here's a snippet:

Heckman (2000)
and Heckman and Krueger (2003) review the evidence from a large number of
programs targeting disadvantaged children through family development sup-
port. They show that most programs were successful in permanently raising the
treated children’s non-cognitive skills, turning them more motivated to learn,
less likely to engage in crime, and altogether more future-oriented than children
of non-treated families. On the other hand, the programs were less successful in
raising cognitive skills as measured by IQ test scores.3 The most effective pro-
grams where those targeted to children at a young age, although positive effects
are also documented for programs targeting adolescents. These studies show
how important family transmission is in this particular form of human capital
accumulation, of which the notion of patience discussed in this paper is a com-
ponent. Similar conclusions are reached by a number of studies in child develop-
ment psychology (see e.g., Goleman 1995, Shonkoff and Philips 2000 and Taylor,
McGue, and Iacono 2000). Coleman and Hoffer (1983) argue that the emphasis
on patience and self-discipline is the key of the effectiveness of Catholic schools
in the US. [p 8]

There's also an argument in there that would be useful for understanding cultural transmission, eg through engaging in Lareau-ish analysis of parenting styles:

In our model, in contrast, parents invest in their children’s patience. In this re-
spect, our paper is related to the growing literature on cultural transmission (e.g.,
Bisin and Verdier 2000 and 2001, Hauk and Saez-Marti 2002, Saez-Marti and
Zenou 2004).5 In this literature, parents evaluate their children’s life prospects
from the standpoint of their own preferences, and actively try to manipulate chil-
dren’s preference to induce choices that parents regard as desirable. As these
papers, we argue that economic incentives are crucial in determining the effort
parents exert in affecting their children’s preferences. [p 10]

OK, up above  I promised data on the landed aristocracy's attitudes to business.  (it's really worth having a look at the table in the pdf; for some reason I can't seem to paste it into this post.)

Table 2 reports the professional choice of Cambridge graduates during
the period 1750–1899. The vast majority of students at Cambridge during this pe-
riod were sons of members of the landowning class, so their professional choices
(other than landowning) give us a good idea of which professions younger sons
entered. Strikingly, until 1850, not a single graduate got involved in banking or
business (widely defined as any “profit-oriented activity”), and even after 1850
the percentage remains surprisingly low.

How do politicians respond to the needs of the poor?

It's a trick question: they don't.

Larry Bartels of Princeton has recently studied the voting record of the Senate between 1989 and 1994--a time, note, when Democrats controlled Congress. He found that senators were very responsive to the preferences of the upper third of the income spectrum, somewhat less attentive to the middle third, and completely dismissive of the policy preferences of the poorest third. In one striking example, Bartels discovered that senators were likely to vote for a minimum wage increase only when their wealthier constituents favored it--the views of those directly affected by the hike had "no discernible impact."

Nor is this pattern limited to domestic policy. Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Benjamin Page of Northwestern have found that the foreign policy views of the executive and legislative branches are primarily influenced by business leaders, policy experts--whose think tanks are often funded by businesses--and, to a lesser extent, organized labor. Jacobs and Page found that the views of the broader public have essentially zero impact on the government when it comes to tariffs, treaties, diplomacy, or military action.

Toynbee blasts the Tories

They took her to their bosom a few weeks ago (well a few of the newer ones did), but now the old Tories rear their Thatcher-ite heads. The way to solve the problem of poverty, they say, is to increase the marriage rate. Why do conservatives so often forget that  a solution to some people's problems isn't necessarily the solution to the problem as a whole, or even much of it?

Marriage is the Tories' happy hunting ground, their comfort zone. It may hearten their heartland, but its wider political value is doubtful. Most ordinary families have divorce in their midst and they know life is complicated. It is a genuine social problem that a quarter of children live in single-parent families, yet society still fails to let mothers support a family. But as for cause and effect, one fact is conveniently missing from these reports: Denmark has exactly the same proportion of one-parent families and the least child poverty in the EU. Good social policy trumps moralising.

Middle class teen mums

You know what would make a good research project? Looking at what types of parents middle class teen mums turn out to be. I suspect they'd be much more similar to middle class older mums (eg in terms of smoking, verbal interaction with the children, etc) than they'd be to low-income teen mums.

On that note, an interesting discussion of the issue at unfogged.

Making work pay?

Low wages are undermining the government's focus on getting people out of poverty by getting them into work. (The quote below is from the Guardian article just linked to, but here's a link to the New Policy  Institute's Poverty page.)

Though the government has achieved "limited success" in cutting poverty, it has done so through the use of targeted benefits rather than resolving underlying issues such as workplace inequality and high numbers of jobless and unqualified young adults, the authors say.

The central premise of the government's anti-poverty strategy, that work is the best route out of poverty, is questionable given that half of the 3.4 million children living in poverty have a parent already in paid work, the same proportion as in the late 1990s, the study concludes. A low-paid couple, it says, can only avoid poverty if both are working.

[...]

The big fall in poverty among pensioners, especially single pensioners, has been a major success of the anti-poverty policy, the researchers say. The poverty rate for pensioners overall has fallen from 27% in the late 1990s to 17% in 2004-05, and among single pensioners the rate has halved from 33% to 17%. But for working adults, the poverty rate remains unchanged since Labour took office at 19%, reflecting Britain's low wages.

The government's failure to bring down this figure is "a major weakness", the report concludes.

The report highlights other persistent problems, including the continuing unemployment rate of at least 10% among adults under 25, and the lack of progress since the late 1990s in the numbers of school leavers failing to achieve basic qualifications.

What we know how to do, and what we don't

Following up on the NYT article I posted on a day or two ago, Yglesias quotes Jal Mehta, who says:

"We still know more about creating more good schools than we do about creating good school systems."

I would add that what we also don't know much about is creating good parents. We know what good parents do, but we don't know how to inculcate good parenting. That's true in terms of parenting that improves a child's educational outcomes, and is probably true for a whole load of other metrics as well - eg parenting that reduces a child's tendency to engage in criminal activity.

Parenting styles and education

Elizabeth looks at a NYT Magazine cover article on parenting styles on low-income eduational outcomes.

(Tough doesn't entirely dismiss the role of poverty, but concludes that parenting matters more: "True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey.")

She also links to a discussion of this at TPM, where there is a link to an earlier NYT article making a somewhat different argument.

No time for discussion now, but it looks straight up my alley.

And here's what Ezra says. Nothing special, really, but I'll link to it anyway.

Yglesias's discussions is more interesting. And here, Jon Chait makes the obvious (but still well made) point that while KIPP might work, and the right might cite this as evidence that ending the rich-poor education gap is just a matter of will, the reality is that it takes a whole helluva a lot of money. The education system used to depend on bright women being excluded from most other employment sectors. Now that they're not, the only way to make up the employment quality gap is with that most magic of all elixirs, money. As Chait wryly notes, we're not going to recitfy such a dire imbalance by depending on the kindness of strangers.

Fighting a puma with a rubber band

More interesting results in teh annals of addressing the symptoms of poverty rather than poverty itself: a new sex ed programme has failed to reduce teen pregnancy rates. The kids preferred the programme to the old way of teaching sex ed, and that's good, but the conception rate did not drop. The administrators blame this on the fact that teen pregnancy is the product of a complex set of poverty-driven factors. Kids may learn more about sex and how to prevent pregnancies, but if getting pregnant is still seen as at least as good an option as not, then nothing's going to change.

Technocratic parenting

Govt will be sending "supernannies" into 77 areas suffering from high levels of youth antisocial behaviour.

What we're seeing here, I think, is the re-rise of the technocrats and the culture of the expert, but in the home rather than in the public sphere. There's the idea of children as projects and parenting as a technological, industrial process. Perhaps this is something to explore in my diss.

Harker report on child poverty

Here. Press release here. And some clever follow-up here.