July 07, 2005
Nature vs Nurture: IQ vs Will
Check out this interview with U Chicago Economist James Henkman:
Enriched early intervention programs targeted to disadvantaged children have had their biggest effect on noncognitive skills: motivation, self-control and time preference. We know that there's a scientific basis for this finding. The prefrontal cortex, which is a center of these noncognitive skills, matures late. The executive function, the very definition of ourselves as people, the way we motivate ourselves, these things are malleable until quite late stages—into the 20s, according to research by neuroscientists. This means that in principle we can modify these behaviors. Noncognitive skills are powerfully predictive of a number of socioeconomic measures (crime, teenage pregnancy, education and the like) as I show in a recent paper with Jora Stixrud and Sergio Urzua.Kids in the Perry Preschool Program, an early childhood intervention, are much more successful than similar kids without intervention even though their IQs are no higher. And the same is true of many such interventions. There is a lot of research on such programs. I'm trying to integrate studies of early childhood into a common economic framework for policy analysis. This is the goal of my recent Handbook of the Economics of Education chapter coauthored with Flavio Cunha, Lance Lochner and Dimitriy Masterov.
So know lots of smart people. There is a decent amount of data showing that IQ is substantially hereditary. But now we have this other data showing that environment affects other aspects of behavior that are just as important to success. We can breed for high IQ but we need culture for general success.
Does this mean that some people's and countries cannot be as competitive? After all it has to be the case that culture substantially affects motivation, self-control and time preference.
Liberals and libertarians tend to think the big issue is institutions. Conservatives believe the big issue is culture. It looks like the paleos have a point. How depressing.
Posted by Alex at 02:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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