"Looking Backward: How Childhood Experiences Impact a Nation's Wealth", Dan Trefler -- Rotman School -- Lifelong Learning, May 30, 2003, 8:30 a.m.

Dan Trefler, J. Douglas and Ruth Grant Chair in Competitiveness and Prosperity and Professor of Business Economics, , Rotman School of Management, U. of Toronto; and Research Fellow, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi).

Introduction by Roger Martin

• Dan is Toronto boy, U. of Toronto, Cambridge, UCLA
• 1984-1994 taught at U. of Toronto, then went to Chicago, back to U. of T. in 1997
• Also at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
• Research fellow, policy analysis, U. of Toronto
• Research fellow, U. of Chicago

[Dan Trefler]

Lifelong learning people are special

• Why should an audience member miss a day away from work (or golf) to hear about an early childhood agenda?
• How does this relate to capital?
• If you're not a socialist when you're young, you have have not heart; if you are when you're old, you have no brain.
• Would like Toronto to be success and Canada to be successful.
• Research:  there is no silver bullet.
• Have to think of a set of policies.

Need policies that complement each other -- a good fit, enhance each other.

• Early children's agenda is one of these, that complements others.

Convince you of three things:

• Not a soft thing, research from physiologists.
• Early children's inventions are cost effective.
• They should interface with other government policies

How the early children's agenda feeds into things we care about, e.g. the supply of researchers

Plot:

• Each dot is a country
• GDP per capita vs. % of population with post-secondary education.
• Strong correlation

Canada does well because of a large college system -- much larger than others.

• How do we boost postgraduate?
• Standard view driven by this picture:  plot
• Teens from rich families go to university much more often than the poor.
• Reasoning then says need to subsidize university tuition
• Is it possible instead that teens from rich families have enjoyed stimulating environments, lifelong learning, so that when they go to university, they're ready for it.
• It's not about financial, it could be that we haven't worked on supply of students.

U.S. study:  AFQ (IQ) test at age 12 -- students in top 1/3 of bright students

• These students are bright enough to go to university.
• Even for these bright kids, the rich kids tend to go to university more than poor kids.
• Suppose we control for children's background younger:  broken home?  parents education?
  • These two would explain it -- early childhood.
• Could use other variables, with similar results.

Could make this same analysis for whether graduating in high school, for whether in grade 10 you decided to take math courses, down to early childhood.  Same pattern

• Early lifestage, that cumulates.
• When you're 18, the student is either ready for university or enough.

All of the above seems soft, not enough serious science.

• Serious science means doing an experiment.
• This is difficult to do with people, and is unethical..
• Where do we go?
• Animal studies, and cell biology

Two things:

• Brain plasticity:  when the brain develops
• HPA access:  how the stress system develops in the human body.

Brain plasticity:

• Embryo, 2 weeks, a neural tube develops; the 4-1/2 months, neurons migrate to spine, connecting
• When you're born, there are a lot of neurons in place, but they're not connected.
• Next five years:  process of neural pathway creation and pruning.
• Every time a synapse it used, a chemical is used; when it's reused, then the chemical stays there.
• If not used, the neuron is killed off
• By age 3, you've lost 1/3 of the neurons you were born with.

Research by cataract surgery, on people with congenital cataracts, where surgery is ineffective

• Experiments with cats:  suture one eye shut for 3 months, then unsuture it.
• After 3 months, the cat is permanent blind.
• This leads to thinking about brain plasticity in life.
• Binocular vision is early on, before age 2
• 10 months:  emotional stability
• Habitual ways of responding, e.g. pessimistic vs. optimistic children -- after 6 month
• Who raised this kid?
• Social skills, 3 years
• Language skills
• Cognitive skills
• In teens, front lobes still developing
• Even in old age, stroke recovery
• Most of development happens before age 6.
• Instead of remediation after age 6, should work on it before age 6.
  • This is economics.

HPA access:  the stress system

• The more I read about this, the less I understand.
• e.g. fighting a tiger
• 3 organs: 
  • Hypocampus secretes CRH, signal pituatary to kick out PCH, then adrenal gland creates cortisone and cortisol
• Stress, then will freeze for 10 seconds
• Cortisol kicks in, sends sugar, tells immune system that trauma is coming, sends white blood cells
• Cortisol eats up the body, not good long-term survival strategy, turns off cortisol
• Cortisol is picked up by hypocampus -- long term memory system -- travels back to hypothalamus to stop secreting CRH, cortisol
• Self-regulating system, could be flawed
• Spiking too early, spiking too high, or bringing cortisol to too low a level
• Too low:  arthritis or lups
• Too high:  depression
• This reseach by Canadian reseach at McGill in the 1930s

Recently have discovered that the cortisol system can be trained

• Training early in the life course
• Overwhelming evidence
• Szepalski (spelling?) working with rats: 
• Handled baby rats 15 minutes per morning, then at age of 6 months, stress out rats and see how their stress system is influenced by early handling.
• Throw rats into pool of water to sink or swim.
• They need to find a submerged platform
• At 6 months, both handled and unhandled rats take 5 meters
• By age 2, non-handled rates swam a lot longer -- 16 meters
• When you dissect the rats:
• Find the hormone receptors are much greater in handled rats.

Natural experiment:  state collapse in Romania by Ceaucescu, influx into orphanage system as they're not funded

• The only attention a baby gets when its screams is negative attention by caregivers.
• Canadians adopted a lot of these orphans, some before age 6 months, much aged later
• Was early deprivation important?
• Absolutely.
• IQ test:  late kids 85, early kids 110
• At level 85, communcation, socialization and motor skills lower -- these could be co-workers
• See web site for childrens of adult orphans:  lots of research

These people have inappropriate cortisol spikes -- alcoholism, depressions, aggressive

• Same research:  a bad day care.

One last example in science, on aggression:

• Extreme aggression is genetic, related to seratonin
• Steve Sumi at NIH in Maryland
• Rhesus macacs colony, studied for 23 years, grandparents, children, etc. x x
• Breeded some who were very aggressive, then put them with "good parents"
• Result was positive -- monkeys normal
• Still the serotonin levels are normal, because of nuturing.

Can do a lot with children, it costs a lot later

Now returning to the economic view:  productivity

• How effective are learning interventions in the life course?
• Will focus just on one.

Want to think about policies that make Toronto a rich society to be in, and Canada

• Want to be rich, and caring.
  • Policies need to work together.
  • A policy that doesn't fit together won't make the country rich.
  • Early childhood fits into a lot of policies.
• Innovation agenda:  may not be doing the right thing at the university level
• Need to create a supply of students
• Productivity agenda:
  • Who do you want as office mates?
• Health agenda
• Cities agenda
  • Tend to focus on it as one big infrastructure project, e.g. rail link, Harbourfront.
  • Missing the single most important asset:  people
  • If you want develop to have a superior asset, should invest in people, and the cheapest way to do this is invest early.
• Immigration agenda:
  • How to get early childhood agenda into immigration?
  • Immigration is a federal agenda
• Quality of life agenda:
  • Early childhood education has a huge impact on crime rates
• International trade agenda:
• Free trade is important to a country, but there's globalization effects, with low wage
• Trade adjustment assistance for these countries are failures.
• Do we can free trade, because we can't find policies to help these people?
• Take a long view:  if you don't want adverse consequences from globalization, don't want workers in those industries, then should think about early childhood education

Would like more affluence, showing a caring side

• Early childhood agenda touches on the other agendas
• Not a panacea, but it helps

[Questions]

Book:  Myth of the first five years.  A lot of people in the U.S. galvanizing in the U.S., but criticisms:  no hard science which you've covered.  But no instructions for parents.

• Underlying science isn't easy
  • Don't see dissent in the scientific community on this agenda (although some at a lower level).
  • See press with Naomi Klein that says we need to abandon free trade, but that's misinformed
• Instructions for parents
  • We can intervene a lot in people's lives:  legally, children K-12, parents not in the classroom.
  • For very young kids, we say that this is the preserve of parents, and no right to intervene.
  • Tying one hand behind the back, at the policy level
  • Some restriction on what can be done
• Every few months, more research. e.g. daycare issues, need to regulate.
• Toronto School District Board, extraordinary results.  [Will look for slide]

Are there countries doing things like this?

• Can see trends, e.g. as Japan ages, going through crisis.
• We think immigration will keep Canada moving
• We forget the demogrphic crunch is happening in all other OECD countries.
• Japan is already there.
• Europe and U.S. will encourage more immigration, so we need to think about more home-grown solutions.
• Singapore has focused on cognitive skills
• Last few years, Singapore is worred about creative and imagine skills are in business, and are refocusing their education system.
• Even a country that thinks it's getting it right, is getting second thoughts.

[Looking for slide on Toronto District School Board]

• Readiness to learn program
• Age 4, community-based rich environment
• When you look into the school system, what makes the education hard is a few bad apples.
• A few kids who are behavioural problems will bring down the class.
• Research into 1/3 of students who are really doing poorly.
• How well are these students doing in two aspects, when they enter kindergarden?
• Teacher assessments and psychometric studies show same results.
• Non-congitive and cognitive 28% better
• Peri-preschool program is $8 per $1 invested.
• Costs about $10,000 per child

Before the talent gets too expensive, where could we go?

• Out of depth.
• Alberta may be buying into this.
• Have to ask Mr. Klein about why he thinks early childhood education impacted him

Where could business play a role?

• Came to the Rotman School, because believes that there's a number of public policy decisions.
• If you're not part of the business community, it's hard to make a voice with policy makers.
• Since coming here, the phone has been ringing off the hook.
• The business community gets heard in Ottawa.
• Seattle and WTO incidents were because business community didn't get behind them.

Any evidence of improved productivity, of policies that could be improved in the workplace, on stress balancing work / life, daycare possibility, programs for women

• Sound like I should ask you that question.
• Still early in research, have focused more on international trade.
• The answer is:  I enjoyed your question.  You may be pointing at some areas I should look at.

Trying to create larger pools of talent.  Referring to Roger Martin's talk, how much do we want to do this?  Will people go elsewhere where there's no talent?

• Almost a no-brainer.
• In 1970s, ascendency of Japan.
• We don't think about Japan as a talent place.
• U.S. has been the powerhouse of innovation since the 1980s
• Don't want to think about too much talent in a geographic setting.
• People with talent will hire people with talent.
• Person at the apex gets a large reward.
• Research into compensation:  superstars that can draw on others.
• This has caused high income disparity in the U.S.
• Won't have a problem with too much talent.
• Could have head office in Canada, with cores of talent throughout the world.

Should there not be a similar call to work with our children?  Where do you see the progress in early childhood invention?  Are we better off, or is everyone double income, no time for children.

• Do need to invest in children.
• We're not doing well compared to other countries
• GDP per-capita spending on pre-school, Canada is way behind other OECD countries.
• Child poverty rates aren't going down over long periods of time.
• This is a big indicator of what is happening in the home.  Poor homes, many fewer resources, less stimulation
• Federal government is trying to inject some money into the issue, it may not be done in the right way.
• Giving money to poor parents doesn't necessarily get to the children.
• Community-based programs would be better.
• $5B
• Problem:  federal government doesn't think it can enter the provincial arena of early childhood

Example of rats swimming.  Does it mean non-handled rats can swim longer?

• Every study I read, I say "but it's not quite designed right".
• Interesting, but not persuaded.
• Need to be persuaded by human physiology, which points the same direction as other studies

Can point to some directions.  Ontario's Promise, from Mike Harris' government, lists partners with agencies that have interventions.