Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

Conservative criminologist John DiIulio called the fearsome horde "super-predators." He estimated that they'd number nearly 200,000 by now. Even unflappable Attorney General Janet Reno foresaw violent crime doubling among kids. . . . William Bennett, the former drug czar . . . wrote a 1996 book with DiIulio on the topic, titled "Body Count," which attributed the problem to moral decay. . . . It never happened. . . . Instead, Americans are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. . . .

[Why?]

Probably more important than tighter school security . . . were these factors:

In the decade of economic expansion that ended in 2000, the number of older teens who were neither in school nor at full-time jobs dropped by nearly a third. . . . Prosperity . . . gave teens more and better options to crime. . . .

The Latino population in central cities swelled as teen crime declined. . . . Their influx . . . brought more intact families, stronger values, higher religious participation - and lower crime rates. At the same time, many of the black families they replaced moved to suburbs where poverty was less concentrated. "Kids once confined to the inner city started seeing lifestyles other than the street." . . .

Criminologists decided in the `90s to track what worked and what didn't in dealing with teen crime. Boot camps didn't work. . . . Nor did trying juveniles in adult courts. Big Brother and Big Sister mentoring worked. Foster care for delinquents worked better than lock-ups if foster parents were well trained and the goal was to return the delinquents to well-coached biological parents. Suspending delinquent kids from school or leaving them back didn't work. . . . They found that if one parent is strong and consistent, the second isn't missed when it comes to preventing delinquency.

The incarceration rate rose from 1 per 1,000 adults to 4 from the `80s to today, and it has many foes. But . . . jailing more adults sharply reduced the number of teens who commit crimes with adult accomplices.

Economist Levitt attributes teen crime's sharp drop to a reduction in unwanted children, which began with the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Criminologist Zimring, among others, thinks it contributed but isn't as big a factor
as Levitt argues.

From here.

These gems come from a blog associated with The Atlantic magazine, linked to at Enik Rising.

It ties into a Denver Post rehash of a local think tank report on population growth in Denver neighborhoods that I saw today. Three of the top five: Green Valley Ranch, Stapleton, and Lowry, are unsurprising. They are neighborhoods that were previously uninhabited that have seen major residential development in recent years.

The other two, Five Points and Montbello, are cases that fit the dynamic described above in which neighborhoods that used to be predominantly black ghettos with dire poverty that have seen major influxes of Hispanics, as well as others, in a combination of ethnic shifts and gentrification as many black residents of these neighborhoods have moved to suburbs or to central city suburban style neighborhoods like multi-ethnic Green Valley Ranch.

Another place in the metro area that has seen a similar and rapid demographic shift is Old Town Aurora, once a center of blacks and lower income Korean immigrants, that is now increasingly Hispanic.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Denver Post also announced the inauguration of a major overhaul of eleven Northeast Denver schools, a move that has been heralded as positive by some, while arousing extreme controversy, skepticism and complaints about insufficient community consultation from others. FWIW, I haven't followed the overhaul efforts closely and don't have a strong opinion on their merits as a result.

Aurora, also perhaps not coincidentally, has also recently announced a major urban effort directed at the area between Stapleton and Old Town Aurora, although it has been overshadowed by a bid by Aurora to develop a complex that would compete heavily with the convention center complex in downtown Denver.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but, in each case, major governmental initiatives to improve city services in metro Denver neighborhoods have coincided with declining African American populations in those neighborhoods.

Certainly, nothing as crude as Jim Crow racism as it work in Denver, that just elected a second African-American mayor despite having a fairly modest African-American population percentage for a major American central city (Hancock this time around, Webb the last time around), or in Colorado, which recently had an African-American state house speaker (Terrance Carroll). Nor does metro Denver as a whole want for predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods that have been sorely neglected in the government services department. The cause and effect relationships here are more subtle and are not simple examples of racial or ethnic favoritism.

Northeast Denver, for example, has changed due to efforts like the Ballpark Neighborhood gentrification, the transformation of "North Capital Hill" into "Uptown" and the impact of the Stapleton and Lowry developments which sent middle class traffic through these formerly low income predominantly black neighborhoods and called attention to their potential to provide short commutes to downtown.

The housing bubble opened up a lot of affordable, quality suburban homes to people from Denver including families in Northeast Denver that have not been tainted by generations of covert and overt racial discrimination in the housing market that reached a critical mass that became self-sustaining where it has established itself.

Rising real estate values in Denver from a bubble collapsed low point in 1983 until an earlier than the rest of the nation slump, particularly in central Denver, transferred considerable wealth to inner city home owners.

As post from The Atlantic article that led me to the teen crime story that I quoted observed, underclass predominantly black dysfunctional ghettos are nothing to be nostalgic for, even if one is firmly committed to improving the well being of the people who lived in those communities a few decades ago and their children. The transformation of these dysfunctional neighborhoods wasn't a punishment inflicted on its residents; it was a reflection of the fact that the people who lived there have mostly found better alternatives and moved on when barriers to their exit from those neighborhoods became less steep. The neighborhoods weren't bad because they were non-white, they were bad because they had high crime, high truancy, governmental underinvestment, high teen pregnancy, few viable businesses, and high unemployment that had deep and obvious causes in American history.

Improving neighborhood well being makes neighborhoods tolerable to people who have any choice at all about where they live and has led to rapid population growth in these neighborhoods. Creating demand for housing in these neighborhoods boosts property values and makes life more tolerable for those who continue to live there. Even renters who are forced to leave due to rising rents in these neighborhoods spur the construction of newer and better rental housing in the metro area that if often better than what they left behind. The line between someone who is a slum lord who has received a windfall from the changes in these neighborhoods and someone who is a civic minded booster of a neighborhood is often a thin one.

Capitalism may not always seek out hard case situations to invest in for the long run, but it doesn't follow that it profits from large scale systemic socio-economic misery either. It encourages profitable mutual growth, it just sometimes has a hard time getting the ball rolling because not enough people have enough vision to bring the needed investment and suspicion abounds because it is hard to tell who gains and loses from the changes in advance. But, when your current neighborhood is one of the least desirable in the metro area, as was the case for a significant share of Northeast Denver in the 1980s and into the 1990s, it is hard for change, either to the neighborhood or for those who end up leaving the neighborhood as a result, to be a terrible thing or a case of downward mobility.

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How Stable Is Childhood IQ?

[T]he correlation between [an IQ] score obtained at 5 and the eventual adult score is probably no more than .5 or so. However, the main limitation seems to be unreliability of any single administration of the test to a child that young. Scores averaged over several administrations are a very good predictor already at a fairly young age. The average of three scores obtained at age 5, 6 and 7 correlates about .85 with adult score. This suggests that while it is difficult to measure a child's IQ in any single sitting, the IQ itself is relatively fixed already by age 7 or so . . .

This is using data in which the IQ was tested *three times* over the interval listed and the results averaged. A single measurement at age 5 would probably do worse than what is listed below. [N=61] . . .

age range correlation with adult score

42,48,54 months .55
5,6,7 .85
8,9,10 .87
11,12,13 .95
14,15,16 .95

. . . . another study of 80 kids [based on a single test at age 7] that appears in Bias In Mental Testing. . . found a .7 correlation between scores at 7 and 17.

From here.

Another study looked at pre-formal instruction number sense in two hundred children who were four years old and found that "the precision of children's estimations correlated with their math skill. That is, the children who could make the finest-grained estimations in the dot comparison task (for example, judging that eight yellow dots were more than seven blue dots) also knew the most about Arabic numerals and arithmetic.  According to the researchers, this means that inborn numerical estimation abilities are linked to achievement (or lack thereof) in school mathematics."
This is also supported by earlier research, with a sample size of sixty four, which use the same test involving estimating a number of dots in a time period too small to count them and comparing it to past academic performance.

Good "number sense" at age 14 correlates with higher scores on standardized math tests throughout a child's life up to that point and weaker "number sense" at 14 predicts lower scores on those standardized tests. . . . They then examined the teenagers' record of performance in school math all the way back through kindergarten, and found that students who exhibited more acute number sense had performed at a higher level in mathematics than those who showed weaker number sense, even controlling for general intelligence and other factors.

Thus, it both showed mathematical ability to be somewhat distinct from general IQ and showed that this measurement is strongly tied to academic performance in mathematics despite not having any formally overlapping content base.

It also suggests that tracking in educational instruction based on multiple middle school performances is as accurate as tracking at later points in an educational career in sorting students by IQ which is closely related to academic ability (although it lacks a component akin to conscientiousness).

The study does not test if it is possible to train children to develop number sense, something that is not generally done in modern math curricula, and if such training would bear fruit in generalized mathematical ability.  It also offers little guidance regarding the most sensible educational strategy to take knowing the some students have a greater aptitude for learning math than others.

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Legal Waivers Incomprehensible

You will be shocked to find that:

[C]onsent forms provided to volunteers for HIV/AIDS research in the United States and abroad about study procedures, risks and benefits has found that the forms were extremely long and used wording that may have been complex enough to hinder full understanding. . . . lead investigator, Nancy Kass, Sc.D., deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics [said], "While we were familiar with many fairly long consent forms for several different types of studies. . . we were honestly surprised to see that the median length was 22 pages, and the median length for adult forms was a full 27 pages. . . . commonly misunderstood research concepts -- namely, randomization and placebos -- seemed to be explained with far less attention. For instance, whereas confidentiality sections had a median length of about two pages, randomization was treated to just 53 words. . . . institutional review boards recommend that consent documents be written at or below the eighth-grade level. But the majority of the forms that Kass reviewed required readers with at least a ninth-grader's comprehension. . . . Almost half of Americans read at or below the eighth-grade level[.]

Yet, John Hopkins scientists say this is true (underlying source: Nancy E. Kass, Lelia Chaisson, Holly A. Taylor, Jennifer Lohse. Length and Complexity of US and International HIV Consent Forms from Federal HIV Network Trials. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2011; DOI: 10.1007/s11606-011-1778-6).

We wait with baited breath for the stunning revelation that legal documents other than informed consent forms which ordinary people are expected to sign have been "extremely long and used wording that may have been complex enough to hinder full understanding."

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The New American Work Force

[I]n 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do.…There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical.

From Tyler Cohen at the Marginal Revolution citing David Brooks at the New York Times.

In parallel with the shift Cohen notes, the percentage of adult women in the work force has almost doubled from about 32% to about 65%.  About one in five American women will never have children, and the vast majority of those who do have children will also work for many years while they have children, sometimes even when the children are infants.  Also, both men and women are entering the work force later because they are more likely to finish high school and attend college, and a much larger number of working age adults are incarcerated now than were in 1954.

Finally, of course, unemployment rates are just under the double digits as we creep out of the recession caused by the financial crisis, and men have taken more of a hit in the current recession than women.  In contrast, 1954 was a point of relatively low unemployment, driven by a manufacturing economy that was serving a world market whose own capacity had not yet recovered from the capital destruction of World War II and the millions of men permanently removed from the work force by that war.

I'm not ready to jump to the "loser men" interpretation  that Cohen, citing David Brooks, does.  An increased number of permanent disability claims is to be expected as a generation of blue collar baby boomers ages.  Total labor force participation relative to the working aged population as a whole is at all time highs, unrivaled anywhere else in the world, and Americans work longer hours that workers in any other country.

The working aged men who are withdrawing from the labor force, in addition to growing ranks of graduate students and inmates and disabled blue collar workers, are mostly early retirees who have played by the rules, worked hard, saved money, raised children, sent them to college and are retiring early because they are prosperous, not because they are lazy.  Many young retirees use their years of early retirement to give back to the community and their families, contributions that were often slighted during the hectic years when they built up their nest eggs.  Early retirement is the American answer to the fact that we have so much less work-life balance, longer work weeks, and less vacation time than our developed world counterparts.  For my druthers, I'd prefer an economy where the average American works fewer hours per year, unemployment is lower, early retirement is rare because most people love their jobs, and men and women balance work and family in more similar ways to each other than we do today.  But, until we reach that day, I am not going to grudge the time that working age men who toiled intensely for a few decades and accrued a nest eggs take to retire early and smell the roses.

My father was anything but an early retiree, but what he spends his time doing in retirement is typical of retirees in reasonably good health of all ages.  He visits grandchildren and stepgrandchildren.  He helps an urban Cincinnati church reimagine itself and develop a plan for raising funds and turning itself around.  He directs a youth choir, commissioned the composition of one hymn and wrote another hymn himself.  He is civically active, writing letters to the editor and op-ed columns relevant to his professional experience.  He participates in a gourmet group and a community choir.  He keeps his home in good repair.  He keeps a watchful eye on the good health and well being of his neighbors and the neighborhood's esprit de corps.  He takes steps to move forward efforts to convert smelly feedlot manure into a renewable energy source.  He set up a volunteer training program for people in his small town and established a lecture series in his old department.  He stays connected to the people he has spent a lifetime building ties to across the nation and the world.  Of necessity, he spends a lot more time than he once did tending to his own good health, and as a consequence of his age, spends more time reading obituaries and attending funerals than he once did.  He spends more time on vacation travel than he once did, but no more than a typical French or German bureaucrat in the prime of his career does.  Just as we strive to find meaningful work in our lives working for pay, and some of us achieve that, we strive to find meaningful leisure in our lives when we are not working for pay and some of us achieve that as well.

What my father does in his retirement is not the same as work, admittedly.  He no longer has to fight pitched bureaucratic battles with the university facilities department over furniture acquisitions for his department.  He longer spends hours grading papers from students in his classes.  He no longer bears primary responsibility for finding internship opportunities for three dozen graduate students a year.  He doesn't have to deal with office politics or admissions decisions.  His days of pouring over long technical reports and attending endless meetings while serving as an advisor to a federal nuclear waste disposal project have come to an end.  But, like most retirees, early and late, he is not an "idle man."  The kind of person who works hard enough to retire early, even more so than the usual retiree, usually is constitutionally incapable of being idle even if they tried.  Early retirement may leave our nation with more really good golfers than we really need, but if one takes it as a given that economic production is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself, something economists sometimes forget, this shouldn't be terribly troubling.

One can argue that an economic system that compensates some of our most skilled physicians, executives, lawyers and engineers so well that a large fraction of them withdraw their valuable skills from the monetary economy early is out of kilter.  Surely, my inlaws, who are both medical doctors and both retired early, would have probably done so a little bit later if medical doctors were paid less than they are in our economy and they needs to work longer to be economically self-sufficient.  In that world, they would have spend a few more years treating patients and a little less time playing golf in their golden years.

But, I can hardly fault them. They were cogs in the machine and did what made sense at the time.  The way that the profession was designed when they were actively participating in it, medical doctors had to work exceedingly long hours and carry pagers whereever they went missing children's birthday parties and family time after school, foregoing extended vacations, and generally giving extremely intensely of themselves to serve large numbers of people in medical need with cutting edge skills and technology that provided great benefit to those patients.  They didn't have the option of living more balanced lives while they were working, and that system had built into it the incentive of an early retirement as a reward for that very intense work using skills so scarce that the United States established an immigration visa to secure people with these skills that it was unable to produce in sufficient numbers at home.  If the hope of early retirement hadn't been available in the long run, lots of doctors in their generation would probably have decided that their toil simply wasn't worth it and would have deprived the health care system of their skills far sooner.

The economy at large is experiencing basically the opposite of what most of academia is experiencing.  While old academics are lingering in their tenure track positions long past the traditional retirement age, leaving little room for the ranks of new professors seeking to fill their shoes, in hot parts of the private sector, the millionaire entrepreneurs and executives and physicians of the last long economic boom are making way for their ambitious, young, tech savvy successors.

Indeed, one of the many reasons that upper middle class managerial and professional workers experience low rates of structural unemployment than less skilled workers is that upper middle class workers can afford to retire early and free up jobs for younger workers.  In contrast, many blue collar workers often can't hope to save enough too retire early and continue to fill jobs that reduce the opportunities available for their younger successors.  Still, many middle class, as opposed to upper middle class retirees are workers who have been laid off from long, physically demanding careers as soldiers, as cops, as firemen, and factory workers whose unions, aware that large numbers of them would experience permanent disabilities anyway if they didn't retire early, worked with management to desire jobs that allow for early retirement.

Getting up and going to a paying job is something that people do because they need to support themselves and their families, and because the economy needs certain jobs to get done.  There is no shame in working and no one wants to be unable to support themselves.  But, it is a mistake to assume that getting up and going to a paying job has intrinsic moral value.  There is nothing morally wrong with an early retiree in his early 50s lingering over the newspaper while having breakfast, and spending the rest of his day doing what he thinks is the most valuable use of his time when money is not an object.

Economists tend to think that rational actors want nothing more than more money.  But, most people simply want to have enough money to allow them to be secure in their ability to meet their comfortable but modest economic needs.  Once that goal is accomplished, increasingly sooner for much of the nation's upper middle class in this more prosperous age, earning more money becomes a much lower priority goal.  Sometimes these activities will produce money anyway, but money is no longer the point.

I'm sure that a reporter with a little gumption could find men who don't fit the narrative that I've outlined and fall into the stereotype that David Brooks is trying to conjure. 

I know of several men with good educations and/or professional experience in Denver who spent time as homemaker husbands and/or returned to school for more education, when their own careers hit bumps during bad job markets and their wives had jobs.  Yet, isn't this something that the feminist revolution has been bracing us for, and encourging us to welcome, over the last several decades?  And, at any rate, this remains a statistically minor blip that only accentuates a larger trend of more people seeking graduate educations, blue collar boomers wearing their bodies out, more people spending long years in prison, more people retiring early, and a bad economy driving up unemployment rates.

I'm sure that a not insignificant number of working aged men, particularly men with criminal records or substance abuse problems have simply given up after long, fruitless job hunts, are dependent upon family or friends or lovers, and do little but drink too much and watch television.  In earlier days, when our economy needed lots of unskilled labor for mindless jobs because we hadn't yet mastered automation, people like that would have worked at abundant assembly lines all work and gotten drunk and wasted time after hours and on the weekends.  Now, a lot of that work has been offshored or automated.  There are still unskilled mindless jobs in our economy, but there aren't nearly as many as their used to be, while there are almost as many people chasing after them.

But, for the most part, America's meager safety net doesn't afford men who are not financially secure early retirees the option of leaving the labor force whether they want to or not.  More so than any other developed nation in the world, Americans must work or starve and die.  Leaving the work force is a very expensive luxury purchase for most Americans not to be made lightly, and men and women alike do so in our economy at their peril.

Like any other nation, we have "loser men."  We also have "loser women," "loser children" and "loser seniors."  But, for the most part, those loser men are the men who have no choice but to continue working at unfulfilling, dead end, low paying jobs because they have no other choice and didn't manage to save anything for their futures, not the early retirees who have left the work force entirely.

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Physiological Test Predicts Effectiveness of Talk Therapy For Depression

[A] quick, inexpensive, and easy to administer physiological measure, pupil dilation in response to emotional words, not only reflects activity in brain regions involved in depression and treatment response but can predict which patients are likely to respond to cognitive therapy[.]. . . activity in the brain's cortical emotion regulatory systems is strongly related to pupil size when people are viewing emotion-laden words . . . It is because of this relationship between eye and brain that pupil measurements predict the response to cognitive therapy."

Cognitive therapy is a type of psychotherapy designed to help individuals overcome difficulties by modifying negative or irrational thoughts and behavior, which, in turn, can improve mood and reduce stress. It is usually completed in weekly sessions, with 10-20 sessions being effective for most individuals who benefit.

From here, citing Greg J. Siegle, Stuart R. Steinhauer, Edward S. Friedman, Wesley S. Thompson, Michael E. Thase. "Remission Prognosis for Cognitive Therapy for Recurrent Depression Using the Pupil: Utility and Neural Correlates." Biological Psychiatry, 2011; 69 (8): 726 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.12.041.

The abstact of the paper provides more details:

Although up to 60% of people with major depressive disorder respond to cognitive therapy (CT) in controlled trials, clinicians do not routinely use standardized assessments to inform which patients should receive this treatment. Inexpensive, noninvasive prognostic indicators could aid in matching patients with appropriate treatments. Pupillary response to emotional information is an excellent candidate, reflecting limbic reactivity and executive control. This study examined 1) whether pretreatment assessment of pupillary responses to negative information were associated with remission in CT and 2) their associated brain mechanisms.

We examined whether pretreatment pupillary responses to emotional stimuli were prognostic for remission in an inception cohort of 32 unipolar depressed adults to 16 to 20 sessions of CT. Twenty patients were then assessed on the same task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Pupillary responses were assessed in 51 never-depressed controls for reference.

Remission was associated with either low initial severity or the combination of higher initial severity and low sustained pupillary responses to negative words (87% correct classification of remitters and nonremitters, 93% sensitivity, 80% specificity; 88% correct classification of high-severity participants, p < .01, 90% sensitivity, 92% specificity). Increased pupillary responses were associated with increased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions associated with executive control and emotion regulation. For patients with higher severity, disruptions of executive control mechanisms responsible for initiating emotion regulation, which are indexed by low sustained pupil responses and targeted in therapy, may be key to remitting in this intervention. These mechanisms can be measured using inexpensive noninvasive psychophysiological assessments.

The small study obviously needs to be replicated in a larger sample before being used on a widespread basis, but the 88% rate at which this simple test determines if high severity depressed patients will respond to cognitive therapy, compared to a 60% response rate in the absence of screening, is a major improvement for a technique that requires no investment in drugs or equipment and only minimal additional training for mental health practitioners. This test could spare more than half of severely clinically depressed individuals time and misery trying cognitive therapy that is unlikely to be effective for them, allowing them to use alternative therapies like drug treatments that are likely to be more effective for them immediately, while allowing about half of severely clinically depressed individuals to receive cognitive therapy, knowing that it has a very high probability of being successful, and avoiding the need for them to undergo a psychiatric drug treatment regime that is unnecessary for their recovery. The fact that the benefit is statistically significant at the 99% level in this small study also makes a study calculated to replicate this result look like a promising good investment.

Given that clinical unipolar depression is one of the most common mental health conditions, and is by far the most common one that is not typically congenital, which makes it disproportionately likely to be a condition dealt with by a primary care physician as opposed to a specialist mental health care professional, this kind of advance has particularly great practical relevance. Also, since unipolar depression is so common, the cost savings to the health care system of a diagnostic tool for determining what kind of treatment will be most effective could be an evidence based medicine technique that could make a material dent in the overall cost of mental health care.

Since this is a diagnostic approach, rather than a drug or device, it also doesn't need a long and costly approval process from the Food and Drug Administration. Funding of a simple large scale replication of this study which could be completed in a year or two, would be enough to include this diagnostic technique as part of the standard by the book treatment regime for unipolar depression nationally. Of course, since this isn't an approach would have a biotech company backing it, this kind of study almost necessarily would need to be funded by the public sector, for example, through a National Institute of Mental Health (NIHM) grant.

The real value of treatment effectiveness prediction tools as a means to improve the quality of patient care while reducing health care costs, a field which is coming into its own as a subfield of psychiatry and psychology, also suggests another funding possibility. Health insurance companies have historically viewed themselves primarily as financial institutions and as institutions through which patients can collectively bargain for provider health care pricing. But, the health insurance industry might be well advised to develop and fund a non-profit research foundation to develop treatment effectiveness prediction tools that do not have drug companies or medical equipment makers to fund them, as a way to promote health enhancing quality control.

The benefits of this little study aren't just practical in an immediate sense either. This is some of the hardest empirical evidence yet that there are medically relevant subtypes of unipolar depression in existence, with some indication of what the underlying neurological basis of that subtyping might involve. One of the deep issues in psychiatric classification of mental health conditions, for which the DSM-IV is the current industry standard, is that diagnosis of psychiatric conditions is almost entirely based upon non-physiological symptoms. It is entirely possible that some common DSM-IV conditions are really a cluster of separate conditions with similar symptoms but different causes (and hence different courses of treatment that are likely to be effective), and that other common DSM-IV conditions currently viewed are in fact merely distinctive syndromes that arrives when separate co-morbid conditions are present.

For example, this study shows that there are at least two types of unipolar depression, one of which is talk therapy responsive and one of which is not. This very likely indicates that the causes of the two types of unipolar depression are different. If this insight in incorporated into prior research on the causes of unipolar depression, the sometimes muddy and contradictory theories about what causes unipolar depression and how it can best be addressed might be clarified. One leading theory regarding the cause of unipolar depression conceptualizes it as a situation where prolonged stress and anxiety cause the body's normal responses to stress to shut down and try the new strategy of becoming depressed to deal with the situation. This might be a primary causal mechanism in one but not the other of subtypes of unipolar depression. If so, somewhat muddy data linking this cause to depression might become much more definitive with regard to the relevant subtype of depression, while clearing the decks for a search for one or more alternative causal mechanisms for the other subtype of depression.

Another possibility is that the pupil dilation response to emotion laden words may be a congenital element of a person's personality that is present even in the absence of unipolar depression. If this is the case, this trait might be one of many that is routinely tested for in children or young adults along with traits like blood type. Children with the trait might be at higher risk for the cognitive therapy responsive subtype of depression. Similarly, medical records could indicate which children are at risk for non-responsiveness to cognitive therapy as a treatment for unipolar depression. Since the physiological test for this trait is quite objective and easy to administer on a mass basis, it might also be possible to see if this trait corrolates with other mental health conditions, particularly those which are often co-morbid with unipolar depression (a co-mordidity pattern that might be more stark when restricted to a particularly subtype of depression), and to determine if it has a hereditary component. Patterns of co-morbidities associated with a particular subtype of unipolar depression might shed insight into the causal mechanism of a variety of mental health conditions which in turn might shed light on the kind of treatment regimes that are likely to be effective for those co-morbid mental health conditions.

Indeed, it might even be possible to provide these children or young adults, on a prophylactic basis, the kind of cognitive training that people with unipolar depression receive after they are diagnosed to help these individuals deal with situations that could lead to clinical depression before they happen.

There is no obvious reason that the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy, which boils down to teaching people habits of thinking and mental tools for coping with certain kinds of problematic cognitive habits or tendencies, in general, can't be almost as effective when administered in advance as they are when administered as therapy after the fact. It might be possible to put together a set of empirically validated cognitive behavioral therapy regimes into a comprehensive set of coping skills that could be transmitted on a mass basis in a manner not unlike the model by which we instruct people in first aid, CPR, rescue breathing, the use of abdominal thrusts to respond to choking incidents, the proper way to respond to house fires, tornados and tsunamis, or suicide and bullying prevention programs. People who experience cognitive behavioral therapy responsive conditions anyway may benefit for refresher instruction and may be able to make more sense of what these therapies involve when they actually have the conditions that they are designed to alleviate, but it isn't unreasonable to think that this kind of public health preparedness model could materially reduce the overall incidence and impact of many common mental health conditions, some of which are subclinical or would otherwise never be diagnosed as such.

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The Case For D.C. Statehood

There are two ways that the residents of the District of Columbia are disadvantaged in our political system relative to other states. First, they lack a representative of Congress or Senators of their own (although they do get electoral voters as if they did in Presidential elections). Second, the Congress in which they lack voting representation messes around with how they run their local affairs on a routine basis.

District of Columbia officials expressed outrage on Saturday about two provisions of the budget deal between Democrats and Republicans, saying they dictate how the capital should spend money. One bans it from using its own locally raised funds to pay for abortions for poor women. The second is a federally financed school voucher program, which city officials said was unnecessary because 40 percent of students already go to public charter schools.

There are upsides, of course, as well. The District of Columbia has far more revenues than it would as a state with mostly less affluent residents and a very large share of the District's tax base in the form of tax exempt governmental and non-profit enterprises.

There are also legitimate concerns that the District of Columbia, as a mere part of a larger metropolitan area, doesn't have a "complete" enough economy to be an economically viable entity, and that an independent District of Columbia, through its local control of the place where the nation makes its laws, could have undue influence on the legislative process.

Some alternatives that have been suggested to statehood for the District of Columbia (or all of it except a small federal district), which could be accomplished with a vote of Congress alone, would be the retrocession of the territory of the District to Maryland with Maryland's consent as well as that of Congress. This would follow the precedent of the retrocession the territory of the District that came from Virginia, called the County of Alexandria, in 1846 which allowed it to retain its slave trade. The slave trade, although not slavery, were banned in the District in 1850.

A retrocession of territory to Maryland would probably give Maryland an additional safe Democratic seat in Congress and would make some Senators accountable to D.C. residents, but would not tip the balance in the Senate any further towards Democrats, would actually slightly reduce the power of D.C. in the Presidential election (assuming that rump D.C. loses its electoral votes via constitutional amendment), would make already Democratic party leaning Maryland more safe politically at the state level, would provide greater local control, and would alleviate any doubts about economic viability. On the other hand, it would also suddenly impose upon the residents of D.C. a great many unfamiliar Maryland laws, in lieu of the laws that residents had crafted themselves in the District.

READ MORE - The Case For D.C. Statehood

Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

READ MORE - Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

Colorado Secures State Budget Deal

Colorado lawmakers – in both houses – appear to have reached a tentative agreement on the state budget[.]

Via Tim Hoover's blog at the Denver Post.


GOP Wins:

Restores "tax exemptions for certain agricultural products and for downloaded software."  The bull semen and other ag products exemption costs Colorado $3.7 million  The downloaded software exemption could have been worth $24 million (a disputed amount).


Democratic Win:

No local control over PERA contributions.

Hick Win:

The deal will maintain "a general fund reserve of 4 percent, keep at least $100 million in the State Education Fund[.]"

Compromises:

There will be a K-12 cut of $250 million not $332 million.  This is about $377 per kid instead of $500 per kid.  This works out to about $150K from the local elementary school that my son attends, and about $300K from my daughter's middle school.  Thus, each school will probably have to make some painful staffing cuts.  Don't ask me how the K-12 cut is constitutional, I don't understand myself although I have some hunches that aren't worth stating given my lack of confidence in them.

The deal will "transfer about $71 million in severance tax funds to help balance the general fund budget."

"The deal would allow retailers to keep 2.2 percent of the taxes collected instead of the [scheduled] full 3.3 percent [which was suspended during the recession], allowing the state to keep $20 million that otherwise would have gone to businesses."

Caveat:

This summary omits that ugly cuts that everyone agreed upon as necessary before negotiations began, and there are many.

No ballot issues to raise more revenues will be requested by the legislature in 2011, and many of the citizen initiatives to do so have been canned based upon poor opinion polling.  It isn't clear what happens if revenues turn out to be better than expected, as a recent state forecast suggested, or if the budget reflects the revised revenue estimates.

READ MORE - Colorado Secures State Budget Deal

Who Supports School Vouchers?

Education vouchers are generally disliked by poor whites and are liked by rich whites (if they happen to be Catholic or evangelical Protestant), poor Hispanics, and poor blacks in the Northeast.

From

The Monkey Cage, reacting to inaccurate op-ed statements in the Wall Street Journal with actual facts.

As someone who believes that good data analysis is the only hope we have of saving the world, I also add this from the Monkey Cage post:

P.S. Why does this irritate me so much? I analyze survey data for a living. If I were to go around making up numbers about the atomic weight of potassium or international trade, people would rightly ask what I know about chemistry or economics. But when people start spreading false statements about public opinion, they're believed without question--even by a science writer who prides himself on defying conventional wisdom--and used as part of a pseudo-populist argument about that despicable group, "rich whites," It all just makes me want to barf. If you want to attack rich whites, fine. But use a more plausible argument, please!

READ MORE - Who Supports School Vouchers?

Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

Democratic socialists, including those in Britain, are much better at conducting very large scale, multi-purpose longitudinal studies than Americans, and those studies are starting to bear fruit. The British National Child Development Study tracks 17,634 children born in March 1958 for fifty years, checking in on the subject's progress at nine regular intervals from birth to the present and gathering detailed and accurate informaton each time from multiple sources in multiple institutions. What did they find?

In this article we assess and compare long-term adult socioeconomic status impacts from having experienced psychological and physical health problems in childhood. . . . Large effects are found due to childhood psychological problems on the ability of affected children to work and earn as adults and on intergenerational and within-generation social mobility. Adult family incomes are reduced by 28% by age 50, with sustained impacts on labor supply, marriage stability, and the conscientiousness and agreeableness components of the “Big Five” personality traits. Effects of psychological health disorders during childhood are far more important over a lifetime than physical health problems.

From Alissa Goodman, Robert Joyce, and James P. Smith, "The long shadow cast by childhood physical and mental problems on adult life", PNSA 2010.

The abstract poses the question as one of a particular childhood "problem" having a long term effect, but the results are equally consistent with the notion that psychological health has a large congential component, with much of the rest of the environmental component been based on the quality of one's early childhood environment, rather than later environment. In this view, the "problems" that a child experiences are simply manifestations of who a child is that persist throughout life rather than being the cause of later in life difficulties. In our mental health and IQ focused world, in which capacity to labor physically is largely unimportant socio-economically, it also isn't surprising that fitness that is physical, or the lack of that fitness is comparatively unimportant.

Alas, the early childhood window may be surprisingly narrow, and social class effects tend to be much more powerful than instructional effects. For example, according to another very large longitudinal study (n=13,776), the beneficial effects of full day kindergarten programs relative to partial day kindergarten programs in low income children tend to vanish by the third grade:

[T]he study found that the reading and math skills of children in full-day kindergarten grew faster from the fall to the spring of their kindergarten year, compared to the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten.

However, the study also found that the full-day kindergarteners' gains in reading and math did not last far beyond the kindergarten year. In fact, from the spring of their kindergarten year through fifth grade, the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten grew faster than those of children in full-day kindergarten, with the advantage of full-day versus part-day programs fading by the spring of third grade. The fade-out can be explained, in part, by the fact that the children in part-day kindergarten were less poor and had more stimulating home environments than those in full-day programs[.]

Social class linked intellectual achievement gaps are already great at age two.

Implications

The good news, for the parents of older children, I suppose, is that whatever good or bad your parenting has had on their lives, the older your children get, the less the quality of your parenting seems to matter. So, the pressure isn't as intense. A child's academic progress and character as a late tween is immensely predictive of the rest of the course of that child's life.

Then again, this may simply be a product of the fact that whatever parenting and educational quality was present early on continues to be present and having the same effect, with interruptions of these patterns being too rare to be statistically significant. Unless you are comparing kids who experience late childhood misfortune against their otherwise equal pre-misfortunte peers, you can really accurately measure the impact of those misfortunes on a child's life chances.

On the other hand, these studies are really terribly discouraging for those whose job it is to try to get people on track in life once their early childhood years have passed. The school system, for example, frequently becomes involved in a child's life only starting in kindergarten at age five or six years old, and the second study seems to suggest that it is already extremely hard to help kids who are developmentally behind at that point catch up to their more academically ready peers.

Needless to say, if your job is to turn around the lives of kids who have already started high school, fifteen years of accumulated inertia is just that much harder to reverse. If your job is to turn around the lives of adult prison inmates, the burden you must overcome is surely even more profoundly difficult to surmount.

As previous posts at this blog have noted, you may be born with a gene which is a powerful predicter of your capacity to sustain a long term marriage, and people who commit violent crimes as adults overwhelmingly are already continuing to have discipline issues that their peers have grown out of by the time that they are in elementary school: "it is extremely unlikely that an adolescent who has not been highly physically aggressive in the past will suddenly manifest significant problems with physical aggression." Such seemingly learned and social traits as succeptibility to bullying and one's likelihood of being a teenaged crime victim likewise show powerful genetic predispositions. The non-IQ factors that play an important part in life success seem to manifest just as early in life as academic ability does: Your ability to defer gratification at age four turns out to be a powerful discriminator for your life success a decade and a half later. Children likely to grow up to be psychopaths already start acting differently at age three (also here). A group of three non-IQ related genes can account to up to a 0.5 point difference in your GPA on top of any IQ effect.

We may live in the post-nature v. nuture synthesis of genes x enviroment, but the more we know, the more predictable our lives seem to be. For us, like characters in Greek tragedies, it seems that knowing our fates offers us surprisingly little help in changing our fates. Our genes are seemingly immutable, and most mental health genetic conditions are incurable, even if they are treatable in some cases. Many psychological predispositions have no established treatment. Even if you know you have a gene that makes you likely to have short lived relationships, there is no drug you can take to fix that and no solidly evidence based therapy that will solve your predisposition. Gene therapy hasn't reached that point yet, and given the implications it would have for personal identity and neurodiversity in society as a whole, perhaps this is a good thing.

Our enviroments, while theoretically mutable, aren't easy to change. And they seem to matter. People in the top fifth of the income distribution are twenty-eight times as likely to attend a selective college as those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, for example. We don't choose our parents, and it seems as if those of us who are raised by someone other than our parents are usually worse off in the bargain - although perhaps starting off in a spot like that leaves one off poorly even with great improvement. And, of course, unlike J.K. Rowling or Eminem, most of us who find ourselves in poverty don't readily emerge from it to great riches by virtue of our intellectual talents. Parents who know that their poverty and lack of education is dragging down their children have little capacity to do anything about it. Even the heart wrenching option once available of sending tween or teen children into domestic service for a more prosperous family, or a scholarship funded tenure at a boarding school, in hopes that some of the benefits of that social class will rub off on them has largely vanished as options. Assortive marriage trends are reducing the availability of marriage as a means of class advancement, and American social class lines are deeper than those in contemporary Europe or earlier eras of American history. Just about the only thing a parent can do to improve the environment that the parent provides his or her children is to transform him or herself, which is a profoundly difficult matter.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people do indeed change sometimes. But, the overwhelming weight of the statistics and studies tell us that this is the exception and not the norm, and becomes ever more exceptional as we get older. Kids who are well behind grade level in reading in the third grade are almost certainly not going to go to Harvard, are exceedingly unlikely to go to medical school or law school, and will have to struggle mightily and have considerable good fortune to earn a college degree of any kind. Kids who are perfect angels in fifth grade are exceedingly unlikely to have criminal justice problems or violence issues in the remainder of their lives unless they have a family history of a late manifesting mental health condition like bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or substance abuse, or experience a brain injury, or sustain PTSD.

I don't want the world to be this way. I'm a liberal. I believe in progress and opportunity and social mobility. I value education. Environment does matter, especially for the less well off, even if they can't change that environment themselves.

But, one can't simply ignore what study after study after study tells you either. One can look for loopholes and exceptions and ways to beat the system. There clearly are some and they should be leveraged for all that they are worth. The more I read these studies, the more that I am forced to conclude that policies designed to secure social justice have to focus more on developing meaningful productive paths for the people who we have in our society, and less on trying to transform people into something that they are not and cannot reasonably aspire to become -- especially for older youths and adults for whom the die is more firmly cast.

READ MORE - Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

Bullies

Earlier this week, I went to my son's elementary school play. It was a series of skits put together by groups of several kids each in the drama class as part of the bullying prevention program at the school (with vocal and instrumental renditions of "Stand by me" as an intermezzo between each one).

A pattern illustrating the operational lesson that the children had learned from the program quickly emerged. A kid ("the target"), usually alone, gets bullied, sometimes by a bully alone, and sometimes by a ring leader and some henchmen. While alone, that kid can't win. But, another kid or group of kids intervenes on behalf of the kid being bullied and prevail - sometimes by force of numbers and sometimes combined with an appeal to authority (the principal or in a particularly overwhelming situation, a cell phone call to the cops).

The lesson seemed to be that you can't stop a bully alone, and when you are being bullied are often in a poor position to help yourself without assistance. After all, you were singled out when you were alone precisely because you were perceived in the first place, often accurately, as vulnerable. But, the program argues, you as a member of the school community have a moral obligation to help out your fellow students when they are in this kind of bind, because the secret to overcoming a bully is to have allies. The key ingredient that the program seeks to internalize in the kids and drill into their consciousness by repetition is that there is a moral duty to intervene on behalf of kids who are being bullied. Kids need to stand by each other to stay safe.

While the scenes weren't very realistic, the basic strategy that was proposed is plausible and the virtue of seeing a solution to the problem in terms of social context and personal obligation to others in the community is a refreshing and useful lesson for the kids that can extend far beyond the school yard.

As a practical matter, resorting to authority without peer support is often not very effective, and the old standby of the last generation - learning to box or do karate, reinstated into the debate by a Chinese setting remake of the Karate Kid movie, also doesn't work that well in real life. But, peer support does work, and the intervention of someone else on your behalf can make all the difference and resolve the problem in a stable way.

Moreover, this kind of strategy doesn't have to be completely successful to its full extent to work. As long as a small minority of kids in stronger positions than the target of the bullying are induced to intervene when necessary, and a great majority are induced to be less inclined to encourage or support the bullies, the strategy will work. A community in which a significant minority of kids who are in reasonably secure social positions feel a moral obligation to stand by isolated vulnerable kids who are being bullied and are ready to act on it is a community in which bullying is likely to become an undesirable option for would be bullies.

Bullies and Foreign Affairs

A natural analog to this view is what I see as an emerging conventional wisdom in foreign policy and military affairs. The single most decisive factor in determining the outcome of wars is who each side has as allies are in the conflict, and who watches without getting involved. Similarly, cops almost always win in individual confrontations with criminals because they can resort to the resources of a much larger and more cohesive team. Only when criminals band together into gangs, or organized crime families or cartels do they pose a serious challenge to police authority.

The protesters in Egypt and Tunisia couldn't have prevailed if the armed forces in those countries hadn't refused to back the current dictator. Protesters in Bahrain look doomed to failure because Saudi Arabia and other little Gulf monarchies have sent in troops to back that regime.

Protesters in Libya had a harder go of it because Gaddafi was able to utilize family ties and mercenaries to secure greater loyalty from his troops. The willingness of the French to stick out their neck and recognize the rebels in Libya as the legitimate government of Libya, an international consensus to freeze sovereign wealth and leadership group wealth, and yesterday's UN Security Council vote to authorize military force against Gaddafi (with usually anti-interventionist permanent members of the Security Council abstaining rather than vetoing the action) supported by the Arab League, British and French and American military might, and Qatar has changed that game, forcing Gaddafi to reverse his course of action by declaring a cease fire and probably insuring victory for the rebels, at least in the Eastern Benghazi area.

The Taliban were swiftly removed from power because they too found no international allies in the wake of 9-11. Serbia, in contrast, was able to maintain its control over Kosovo for much longer, with Russian backing, and Russian backing has been key to determining who prevails and who does not in conflicts over control in the Caucasus republics. Iraq's lack of allies against broad international coalitions in both the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, led to its defeat in each. Kuwait's ability to secure allies allowed it to resurface despite the fact that it had been crushed militarily and occupied by Iraq.

Tibet fell because no one inside our outside the Chinese government intervened on its behalf against China in 1959. Hungarian reformers in the 1950s, Czech reformers in the wake of the Prague Spring, and Chinese protesters in Beijing were defeated for the same reasons. Outside support from France was important to the success of the Americans in the American revolution. In World War II, decision of the United States to stop sitting on the sidelines was pivotal to the resolution of the conflict.

Until a couple of generations ago, the basic public policy stance on domestic violence was that "what happens in the home is not anyone else's business." And, the basic public policy stance on foreign affairs was that sovereignty provided local political leaders absolute authority to run their domestic affairs as they saw fit.

The attitude towards domestic violence has changed. Now, we arrest people who beat their wives and kids, and people who know about it feel some moral responsibility to summon outside intervention.

The attitude towards sovereignty has changed too, albeit more slowly. The Holocaust, reinforced by examples like genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and Cambodia, and the rediscovery of the Armenian genocide in Anatolia, have helped shape that attitude. In U.S. history, something akin to this view (i.e. that the Civil War was justified because it freed the slaves) legitimatizes the U.S. Civil War. We no longer trust that those in political power will show enough restraint to prevent epic catastrophes in the absence of outside intervention. Increasingly, the international community feels that political leaders for show excessive brutality towards their own people forfeit their sovereign immunity from outside intervention. The international community increasingly feels a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of nations that are being bullied by their neighbors and domestic populations that are being bullied by their leaders.

Even Russia and China have reached a point where they are not going to object to international military intervention when a leader who has lost the support of half of his own military and many of his senior civil servants starts attacking his own people with jet fighters, and promising to slaughter whole cities that have risen up against him. And, even now, this support comes only with the implicit understanding that the international community is intervening only to the extent necessary to prevent mass slaughter of civilians and level the playing field.

Sovereignty still trumps a wide panoply of repressions. Apartheid was sanctioned, but direct intervention wasn't taken; the international community waited for it to collapse from within. Isolated unjustified killings of individuals aren't enough to forfeit it. Very repressive regimes, like those of Burma and North Korea are tolerated. Disregard for electoral outcomes or electoral fraud don't provoke international intervention, nor do illegal coups. But, we have at least reached the point where large scale killings of one's own people crosses a line, after which outside intervention is viewed as acceptable if anyone can be found to volunteer to take on the task.

The citizens of nation that is repressed can secure meaningful international intervention only by taking to the streets or taking up arms, and producing a response from the leaders of that nation that crosses the line.

Still, the international community has advanced from a situation where there truly wasn't any authority beyond the sovereign to one a bit like Medieval Iceland, which had courts to adjudicate when someone's misdeeds rose to the level that justified action, because executing that order, once rendered, was a private affair to be organized and financed by those who show an interest in taking action. Similarly, off the coast of Somalia, the international community has reached a consensus that Somali pirates are legitimate targets, but this determination is being enforced by a loose knit collection of national naval assets.

Excessive isolationism and respect for sovereignty sends a message that greater misconduct by national leaders will be tolerated; while an international community in which some kinds of domestic conduct is viewed as unacceptable and likely to provoke international intervention with real consequences discourages this kind of misconduct by national leaders.

READ MORE - Bullies

The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

There are lots of differences between the prevailing American model and the Japanese model for K-12 education. One of those differences is that Japanese schools often have class sizes that many U.S. schools would consider unacceptably large, but use these larger class sizes to make it feasible to pay teachers higher salaries and generally, to build up the prestige of teaching as a profession. Also, many tasks that would be done by paid staff in American schools, like a significant share of the janitorial work and photocopying, is done by students in Japan, again, freeing up resources for higher teacher salaries. American law professors routinely teach classes of ninety students. Almost no high school teachers in the United States do that, although such large class sizes are unheard of in Japan.

Nicholas Kristoff argues, reasonably, that teachers are underpaid:

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

He also cites some studies that argue that good teachers produce good student results, although the general trend is that instructional inputs are related only dimly as second or third order effects to student academic performance and life success.

But, part of the reason that demonstrated results from instructional inputs are so equivocal, is because almost everybody is using the same basic model: 180 days a year of school for days of less than eight hours, modest amounts of homework, teachers mostly drawn from conventional teacher certification programs in public schools with reasonably similar class sizes, and low career long pay prospects for someone with a college degree. Private religious schools don't pay teachers very well either. There are differences, but those differences are mostly modest.

A few elite secular private schools pay teachers very well, but given the elite character of the incoming student body which is overwhelmingly either upper middle class, rich, or extremely academically talented, it is hard to tell if good teachers or good students are driving the results. Also, these schools typically have not only highly paid teachers but very modest class sizes, which make their model unattainable without immensely larger K-12 budgets.

The public will simply does not exist to pay for a system of public schools where the average student-teacher ratio is 8:1 and the average teacher makes $90,000 a year. The more typical story is like this one from today:

The fifth-largest school district in Colorado this afternoon expects to announce $30 million in cuts — including jobs and student activities, as well as increased class sizes — to meet its 2011-12 budget.

Today at 3:30 p.m., Adams 12 Five Star Superintendent Chris Gdowski will announce the proposed cuts, including an anticipated 185 job cuts. Last year, the district cut 188 full-time positions. Over the past five years, the district has cut $38 million from its budget.

For the 2010-11 school year, the operating budget was $268.8 million, about 88 percent of which was devoted to employee salaries and benefits.

Even if we did, we wouldn't get the results you see at Groton in classes full of kids who are two grade levels behind by the third grade, may not get a square meal on the weekends, have an older sibling in a gang, live in a single parent home with a parent who dropped out of high school, and are intermittently homeless. Government stinginess towards children in the United States is not limited to education spending.

On the other hand, the Detroit model: dramatically increasing class sizes while paying their teachers 30% below the going rate for teachers in the state, despite the fact that they are teaching students with the greatest educational needs, and simultaneously increasing commuting time for students on their way to and from school, is pretty surely not a good way to improve educational quality either. To some extent, you get what you pay for.

Nobody has ever tried in recent history for a sustained period to set up a K-12 education system in which entry level teachers teaching ordinary average neighborhood kids are paid as much as entry large law firm lawyers in the same area, and can expect to receive that kind of compensation for their entire careers, but teach very large classes by American standards with very little staff assistance.

Of course, it isn't at all easy to break out the impacts of particular parts of the Japanese or American models. The Japanese spend more days in school. A larger share of American kids are college bound than in Japan. Cram school for college entrance exams to supplement ordinary high school education are the norm. Japanese educators are less reluctant to use drill and kill instruction methods, and more liberal in putting social pressure on kids to perform though public disclosure of academic performance. Extra-curricular activity participation is more of an expectation in Japan. Many American kids have more educational choices that comparable Japanese kids. American higher education, particularly at the graduate level, has a better reputation for rigor than Japanese higher education. American teachers have a much larger proportion of very low income students and far more students who are non-native speakers of the language of instruction. Japan starts foreign language instruction sooner and has very little sex education.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, given the tendency of K-12 education systems to pay teachers of older students more than teachers of younger students, the evidence on educational performance and education seems to indicate that the importance of educational quality is greatest when kids are youngest and lower when kids are older. Kids who need remedial work upon entering college were mostly behind already by the time they were in the 6th grade.

If we are to set compensation based on potential lifetime educational performance impact (and no school system in the world does this, to the best of my knowledge, although many do mandate smaller class sizes for younger students), we should be paying the highest salaries to pre-school and kindergarten teachers, the next highest salaries to elementary school teachers, the next highest salaries to middle school teachers, and the lowest salaries to high school teachers. Instead, the pay of teachers seems more closely related to the proportion of the teachers who are men, which is greatest for the older ages. As usual in the American labor market, the supply of similarly skilled labor is more important in setting compensation levels than the value of what workers produce.

But, moving in the direction of the Japanese business model for teacher pay, and paying early education teachers much more than we do, is certainly something worth considering.

READ MORE - The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay