James Heckman GS'71 talks inequality, early childhood education

At the Alumni Day lecture on Saturday, James Madison Medal winner James Heckman GS '71 highlighted the importance of non-cognitive skills in human achievement, early childhood education and family influence on inequality in society.

The James Madison Medal is the highest honor bestowed upon an alumnus or an alumna of the Graduate School who has had a distinguished career, achieved a record of outstanding public service or advanced the cause of graduate education.

Heckman’s medal inscription read that he is “renowned for theoretical advances in economics and for applying them to enhance human development."

Heckman, who earned a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1971, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Education. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1983 and the Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Labor Economists in 2005.

Heckman was also awarded 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples in the field of econometrics.He currently serves as the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and the College at the University of Chicago.

According to Sanjeev Kulkarni, Dean of the Graduate School, Heckman’s work has been devoted to developing a sound scientific basis for understanding and predicting outcomes and evaluating policies to promote human development in areas such as health, education and employment.

“My professional life was shaped by Princeton, and it’s a privilege for me to receive an honor today from this place, which has already given me so much,” Heckman said.

Heckman came to Princeton as a graduate student 50 years ago and looks back on the past fondly.

“Coming back here evokes many memories; memories of my teachers and the lessons they taught, and some of the larger questions that were in the air when I was a graduate student and I think are still in the air today,” he said.

Heckman said his professors taught him how to address big empirical questions and instilled in him the importance of working on first order social questions, from labor economics to the effects of civil rights laws.

He added that he has drawn from what he has learned at the University to understand the key aspects of inequality and social mobility and their consequences in public policy.

The revolutions and important landmarks in social policy through the Great Society and the War on Poverty in the 1960s have impacted the understanding and evaluation of these ideas today, Heckman said. He noted that the lessons from that era are still relevant. Since the 1960s, there has been a tremendous increase in inequality, even though poverty has decreased, he added.

Instead of thinking about inequality in terms of college education or income gaps, people have to recognize that inequality extends more broadly to skills, he explained.

Heckman indicated that family influences were major determinants in children’s schooling. Due to the changing structure of the American family and the increasing number of less traditional families, there is a greater inequality in society at large, he said. Even if poverty has been reduced over the years, there persistsa very high level of immobility across generations, Heckman explained.

Heckman said that there are two interpretations: either income inequality is leading to immobility, or immobility is perpetuating inequality across generations. Different family structures are also associated with different environments for the children, he added.

“What we know now, which was not known by the Great Society architects in 1964, was that not only can we improve skills…with the appropriate natures of interventions supplementing family life…but we also learned that interventions at a somewhat later age were probably less effective than the interventions at early ages,” he said.

According to Heckman, what makes children succeed has changed extraordinarily, and cognitive skills that can be measured through standardized tests or IQ do not paint a full picture anymore.

He pointed to the Head Start Program, launched in 1965 and reauthorized in 2007, that yielded larger long-term economic and social rates of return because of the other dimensions of human performance introduced in children at an early age, such as important social and emotional skills.

Early intervention plays an essential role in building the skill base early, which can lead to increased social mobility, allow individuals to integrate into society and foster the production of later skills, he noted.

Social skills, emotional skills, health and cognitive skills interact in a dynamic way, he said.

“These programs, and these kinds of interventions, and this kind of understanding of a deeper skill base promotes self-control, the ability to regulate one’s life and to engage in the larger society,” Heckman explained.

The lecture, titled “Inequality, Social Mobility and Public Policy,” took place on Saturday at 9 a.m. in Richardson Auditorium.