Economic, neurobiological, and behavioral perspectives on building America’s future workforce

By Eric I. Knudsen, James J. Heckman, Judy L. Cameron, J. Shonkoff. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006

1,202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing proportion of the U.S. workforce will have been raised in disadvantaged environments that are associated with relatively high proportions of individuals with diminished cognitive and social skills. A cross-disciplinary examination of research in economics, developmental psychology, and neurobiology reveals a striking convergence on a set of common principles that account for the potent effects of early environment on the capacity for human skill development. Central to these principles are the findings that early experiences have a uniquely powerful influence on the development of cognitive and social skills and on brain architecture and neurochemistry, that both skill development and brain maturation are hierarchical processes in which higher level functions depend on, and build on, lower level functions, and that the capacity for change in the foundations of human skill development and neural circuitry is highest earlier in life and decreases over time. These findings lead to the conclusion that the most efficient strategy for strengthening the future workforce, both economically and neurobiologically, and improving its quality of life is to invest in the environments of disadvantaged children during the early childhood years.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3281c2a6422c5fed972215b82e9a6aa0a41f7d69

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Citations in the corpus

Non-Cognitive Child Outcomes and Universal High Quality Child Care (2010, neutral): “The view that disadvantaged children benefit from high quality care is also put forward in Knudsen et al. (2006).”
Money for Nothing? Universal Child Care and Maternal Employment (2011, neutral): “[31] Knudsen, E.”
The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress (2012, background): “Although debates about early childhood policy focus almost entirely on educational objectives, science indicates that sound investments in interventions that reduce adversity are also likely to strengthen the foundations of physical and mental health, which would generate even larger returns to all ”
Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability? (2009, neutral): “5 Some studies provide indirect evidence, e.g., showing that aversion to losses is less pronounced among people with more education (e.g., Guiso and Paiella 2005; Eric Johnson, Simon Gächter, and Herrmann 2006), and that precision in probabilistic thinking relates to portfolio choice (Lee Lillard an”
Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment* (2018, neutral): “Interpersonal and negotiation skills are also non-cognitive skills of particular interest since, in contrast to other non-cognitive skills that may be difficult to change after early childhood (Knudsen et al., 2006), interpersonal skills develop in adolescence (Choudhury”
A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety (2011, result): “With respect to timing of programs to enhance self-control, our findings were consistent with “one-two punch” scheduling of interventions during both early childhood and adolescence (29).”
The Production of Human Capital in Developed Countries: Evidence from 196 Randomized Field Experiments (2016, neutral): “…has suggested a second possibility – that the critical period for language development occurs early in life, while the critical period for developing higher cognitive functions extends into adolescence (Hopkins and Bracht 1975; Newport 1990; Pinker 1994; Nelson 2000; Knudsen et al. 2006).”