Must-Read: Heather Boushey: Investing in Early Childhood Education Is Good for Children and Good for the Economy

Must-Read: Ross Douthat’s citations here are to journalist Joe Klein’s 2011 unprofessional trashing of Head Start and Republican Tennessee political Kevin Huffman, plus Baker, Gruber, and Milligan (2008) and Lipsey, Farran, and Hofer (2015). These are not the four citations that anybody would choose who is not actively attempting to misrepresent the state of knowledge about early childhood education programs.

This is one of the many, many things that makes me think that the New York Times does not have a long-run future. Its only possible edge is to develop a reputation as a disinterested information intermediary as the legacy position it had gained as a result of its role as central place for upper-class New York print ads ebbs. Things like this make developing such a reputation materially harder.

Smart New York Times executives would kill the op-ed page and give its budget and its newshole to David Leonhardt to fill, and then back off and let him do his thing. But these are the executives who let Nate Silver walk at least in part because of the political staff. As Nate said:

This guy Jim Rutenberg…. Jim Rutenberg and I were colleagues at the New York Times in 2012 when 538 was part of the New York Times. They were incredibly hostile and incredibly unhelpful to 538, particularly when 538 tried to do things that blended reporting with kind of more classic techniques of data journalism…. When we went to New Hampshire… the New York Times political desk is literally giving us the cold shoulder like it’s some high school lunchroom…. We filed the story pointing out… that Rick Santorum had probably won the Iowa Caucus, a story that involved a combination of data work and reporting…. They were apoplectic because their Romney sources were upset…. A story that… got things totally right pissed them off because they didn’t get the scoop and it went against what their sources wanted…

But the executives aren’t that smart…

Heather Boushey protests about the lack of journalistic quality control here:

Heather Boushey: Investing in Early Childhood Education Is Good for Children and Good for the Economy: “Ross Douthat used his New York Times column to express frustration that hoping for a “substantive debate about domestic policy” in this presidential election year is “delusional”…

…He imagines a scene from a future debate between… Hillary Clinton and… Donald Trump… over the benefits of early childhood education. Douthat even added several hyperlinks… links that alas fall short on revealing where the evidence actually stands today….

Randomized control trials that follow children from pre-school through adulthood… children who participate… do better in school, are more likely to attend and graduate college, and are less likely to smoke, use drugs, be on welfare, or become teenage mothers… the Carolina Abecedarian Study… the Milwaukee Project… Project STAR… Raj Chetty and his co-authors find that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes at age 27, such as college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. Like in the Perry Preschool/High Scope study, in Project STAR, researchers found that while the cognitive effects on test scores fade as a child ages, the non-cognitive effects did not. Of course, not every study found such results… the Early Training Project….

Overall, though, the evidence points to the conclusion that investing in early childhood is important for future outcomes both for the children themselves and our economy more generally. If columnists provide hyperlinks to real-life academic studies to buttress fantasy debates between the two presidential candidates, they should at least point to the best studies available. In this case, the preponderance of evidence shows that early childhood education works for the children, their families, and the broader U.S. economy.

Must-Read: Josh Bivens: Larry Summers, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget, and the Abandonment of Fiscal Policy

Must-Read: Josh Bivens: Larry Summers, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget, and the Abandonment of Fiscal Policy: “Federal budget season came and went this year without any budget proposal hitting the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives…

…This was an odd (and ironic) bit of incompetence by the GOP leadership, who couldn’t even wrangle a majority to support their own budget proposal. But it was especially damaging to U.S. economic policy debates because it limited attention paid to the budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)…. The need to resuscitate fiscal policy was usefully underscored in a widely-discussed speech by former Treasury Secretary and National Economic Council Chair Larry Summers earlier this week….

I am here to tell you that the most important determinant of our long term fiscal picture is how successful we are at accelerating the economy’s growth rate in the next three to five years, not the austerity measures that we implement…. What are the crucial elements of changing the fiscal monetary mix I would highlight?

One, the only one I have a slide on, is a substantial increase in public investment. It is insane that [net] federal and infrastructure [investment] is now negative at a moment when interest rates have never been lower and ten-year real interest rates are essentially zero and precious little good is happening at the state and local level either….

Second, strong support for social insurance. When Keynes came to the United States in 1942, he pointed out that an important virtue of Social Security was that it could absorb the excess savings that would potentially hold back U. S. economic growth after the Second World War. Those considerations were not relevant in the succeeding 60 years but they potentially are relevant in our current period of secular stagnation….

The Summers speech has been widely commented-upon, and rightly so—it contains a lot of wisdom. People should know, however, that the ideas in his remarks are embodied in real-world legislation proposed earlier this year, and which sadly disappeared without much attention, all because the Republican-led House could not even organize themselves to have the annual debate on budget proposals.

Must-Read: Eric Loomis: Jobs for Those Who Lack College Degrees

Must-Read: Perhaps I have fallen down on the job. Perhaps I have not EconomistSplained enough to the very sharp Eric Loomis that the Education Fraction does not believe that everybody ought to get a college education. The Education Fraction, rather, believes that the demand for college-educated workers is relatively inelastic, so that small increases in the relative numbers of college-educated workers will produce large decreases in the college wage premium and large increases in the wages of high school-educated workers. They–we–may be right and we may be wrong. But it’s not that we completely ignores the fact that some people are simply not cut out for a college education. Rather, we believe in supply and inelastic labor demand…

Eric Loomis: Jobs for Those Who Lack College Degrees: “As I have stated many times here…

…the United States has to create dignified work for people who can’t or haven’t earned a college degree. It’s simply terrible policy to blithely claim that education will solve our problems because it completely ignores the fact that some people are simply not cut out for a college education. And that needs to be OK…

Must-Read: Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralf R Meisenzahl: The Protestant Reformation, Economic Institutions, and Development

Must-Read: Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralf R Meisenzahl: The Protestant Reformation, Economic Institutions, and Development: “Origins of growth: How state institutions forged during the Protestant Reformation drove development…

…Throughout history, most states have functioned as kleptocracies and not as providers of public goods. This column analyses the diffusion of legal institutions that established Europe’s first large-scale experiments in mass public education. These institutions originated in Germany during the Protestant Reformation due to popular political mobilisation, but only in around half of Protestant cities. Cities that formalised these institutions grew faster over the next 200 years, both by attracting and by producing more highly skilled residents.

The state can be a rent-extracting institution or a provider of public goods. What happens when the state becomes the provider of public goods?

Recent research suggests that where states have greater capacity to provide public goods, economic outcomes may be superior (Besley and Persson 2009, 2010, Acemoglu et al. 2015). The economics literature has emphasised expansions of state capacity that emerged for geostrategic and military reasons in European history ‘from above’.

In a recent paper (Dittmar and Meisenzahl 2016), we study a unique experiment that shifted legal institutions at the local level – the institutional public goods programme of the Protestant Reformation in Germany.

The institutions that we study were city-level laws that established Europe’s first large-scale experiments with mass public education and significantly expanded the social welfare bureaucracies and state capacities of cities. These legal institutions established a fundamental innovation in funding and oversight for municipal activities – the ‘common chest’, a literal box of funds used to support public services. Significantly, the adoption of these institutions reflected popular political mobilisation.

In our research, we study the local variation in institutions and answer three interrelated questions:

  1. How did these innovations shape development?
  2. Why did some but not all cities adopt these institutions?
  3. What was the political process driving these transformations in German society?

Mapping an institutional upheaval: The local adoption of these new legal institutions was highly variable. In fact, fewer than 55% of cities that adopted Protestantism established legal institutions to support the provision of public goods. We observe variation across neighbouring cities in the same territory, subject to the same territorial lord.

The Protestant Reformation economic institutions and development VOX CEPR s Policy Portal

The impact of institutions on long-run development: We test the hypothesis that cities with city-level Reformation laws by 1600 subsequently grew relatively quickly. Our first finding is that cities that adopted the Reformation institutions grew to be at least 25% larger in 1800 than observably similar cities. In contrast, we find no variation in growth associated with Protestant religion conditional on public goods institutions.

Historical evidence suggests that migration drove city growth in pre-industrial Europe (de Vries 1986, Bairoch 1991, Reith 2008). Existing quantitative evidence on migration is limited. We collect novel microdata on the migration and local formation upper tail human capital (Mokyr 1999, Squicciarini and Voigtlander 2015). Our data, drawn from the Deutsche Biographie, comprise thousands of the most important cultural and economic figures in German history between 1300 and 1800 – jurists, merchants, writers, artists, composers, and educators. We use the data to document the human capital response to institutional change.

Figure 2 shows how migration responded to institutional change by plotting the number of upper tail human capital migrants observed in cities that adopted public goods laws, cities that became Protestant but did not formalise public goods provision, and Catholic cities. These cities were attracting similarly small numbers of migrants before the Reformation, which is marked by the vertical line at 1518. A large shift in migration towards cities with public goods institutions appears in the 1520s, as legal reforms were passed. This gap persisted over the next 200 years and notably was driven by differences in migration from small towns to cities, not by a ‘brain drain’ from less to more desirable cities.

The Protestant Reformation economic institutions and development VOX CEPR s Policy Portal

We similarly find that cities with public goods institutions began producing more upper tail human capital starting after 1520. We find no differences in the local formation of upper tail human capital before the Reformation and 50-200% higher formation of upper tail human capital after the Reformation when we compare cities with laws supporting public goods provision to cities without these institutions.

Why not all cities adopted public goods institutions: The Protestant Reformation was both a religious revival movement and an anti-corruption movement with an institutional agenda. The institutional agenda was designed to expand the provision of public services.

Popular political mobilisation drove the Protestant Reformation. Local elites and city councils initially resisted the introduction of Protestantism (Cameron 1991, Dickens 1979). Civil disobedience and unrest pushed policymakers to meet citizen demands and pass laws establishing the public goods institutions of the Reformation. Differences in institutional outcomes across municipalities reflected differences in local preferences and in political mobilisation, which varied across cities even within the same territory.

How plague outbreaks shifted politics and institutions:The very features that led some communities to welcome religious innovation and to mobilise in support of institutional change may have had independent implications for economic development.

To untangle cause and effect, we study how plague outbreaks in the critical juncture of the early 1500s shifted local politics and pushed otherwise similar cities towards institutional change.

During plague outbreaks incumbent wealthy elites typically fled their home cities or died, reducing their political power (Dinges 1995). Following plague outbreaks, migration into cities increased, changing the composition and politics of the population (Isenmann 2012). During these periods, suffering was acute and civic order could break down. Before the Reformation, plagues led to religious innovations within Catholicism – such as the development of penitential rituals and marches and the construction of church altars to ‘plague saints.’

During the Reformation – with the introduction of political and religious competition – plagues suddenly operated as institutional shifters. Plagues operated as institutional shifters not only because they caused extreme suffering, but specifically because Protestants and Catholics were differentiated in the market for religion in their institutional programme and teachings regarding the plague.

We study local plague outbreaks in the early 1500s as a source of plausibly random variation in institutional change. The intuition is that plagues that hit the generation in place when the Reformation broke across German cities were random, conditional on long-run levels and trends. In the data, we find that an additional plague in the early 1500s increased the probability of adopting the new legal institutions by 10-25%.

To illustrate the research design, Figure 3 shows the timing of plague outbreaks in select cities. In Figure 3, we highlight the period 1500 to 1522, which serves as the baseline period that we use to study the implications of the plague for institutional change.

The Protestant Reformation economic institutions and development VOX CEPR s Policy Portal

To document the unique relationship between plagues in the early 1500s, institutions, and growth, we study plague outbreaks across the entire period from 1400 to 1600. Figure 4 plots the point estimates from rolling instrumental variable (IV) regressions that study log city population in 1800 as the outcome. We estimate these regressions shifting the time period, which we use as the plague exposure IV for institutional change year-by-year. There is no significant relationship between plagues across the 1400s and subsequent institutional change and the 2SLS estimates of the population growth impact of induced variation in institutions are insignificant. In the early 1500s, these relationships change. With the introduction of religious and political competition, we see plague exposure being activated as an institutional shifter with development consequences in the early 1500s.

The Protestant Reformation economic institutions and development VOX CEPR s Policy Portal

Conclusion: During the Protestant Reformation, some but not all German cities adopted new municipal legal institutions. These institutions expanded state capacity and established public schooling. The cities that adopted these institutions grew faster over the next 200 years. These cities attracted and produced more upper tail human capital individuals and embarked on more dynamic development trajectories. Cities that adopted Protestantism but did not formalise public goods institutions in law had no similar advantage.

Our results strongly suggest that human capital was not dormant, waiting to be ‘activated’ during the Industrial Revolution – it was instead a fundamental driver of growth over the early modern period. More broadly, our findings suggest that the Protestant Reformation was a canonical model of the emergence and implications of state capacity driven by political movements that challenge elites.

Authors’ note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.


References:

Acemoglu, D, C Garcia-Jimeno and J Robinson (2015) ‘State capacity and economic development: A network approach’, American Economic Review, 105: 2364-2409.

Bairoch, P (1991) Cities and economic development: From the dawn of history to the present, University of Chicago Press.

Besley, T and T Persson (2009) ‘The origins of state capacity: Property rights, taxation, and politics’, American Economic Review, 99: 1218-44.

Besley, T and T Persson (2010) ‘State capacity, conflict, and development’, Econometrica, 78: 1-34.

Cameron, E (1991) The European Reformation, History Reference Center, Clarendon Press.

De Vries, J (2006) European Urbanization, 1500-1800, Routledge.

Dickens, A (1979) ‘Intellectual and social forces in the German Reformation’, in Mommsen, W (ed), Stadtburgertum und Adel in der Reformation, Ernst Klett.

Dinges, M (1995) ‘Pest und Staat: Von der Institutionengeschichte zur Sozialen Konstruktion?‘, in Dinges, M and T Schilch (eds) Neue Wege in der Seuchengeschichte, Franz Steiner, Stuttgart.

Dittmar, J and R Meisenzahl (2016) ‘State capacity and public goods: Institutional change, human capital, and growth in early modern Germany’, Working paper, LSE Centre for Economic Performance and Federal Reserve Board.

Isenmann, E (2012) Die Deutsche Stadt im Mittelalter 1150-1550, Bohlau.

Mokyr, J (2009) The enlightened economy: An economic history of Britain, 1700-1850, New Economic History of Britain, Yale University Press.

Reith, R (2008) ‘Circulation of skilled labour in late medieval Central Europe’, in Epstein, S and M Prak (eds) Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400-1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Squicciarini, M and N Voigtlander (2015) ‘Human capital and industrialization: Evidence from the age of Enlightenment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130: 1825-83.”

Must-Read: Larry Summers: Four Common-Sense Ideas for Economic Growth

Must-Read: Larry Summers: Four Common-Sense Ideas for Economic Growth: “Since the summer of 2009, the US economy has grown at about 2 percent…

…The 10-year interest rate at the end of trading today [February 18, 2016] was just a bit below 1.8 percent…. We are having trouble achieving… a 2 percent inflation…. This is the judgment of a market that thinks that the Fed is not going to do anything like what it says it’s going to do…. The real interest rate is at least a kind of measure of the certainty equivalent of the productivity of capital. If the market is saying that’s below 1 percent, that has to be of concern as well. [And] the Fed has been substantially too optimistic in its one-year-ahead forecast every year for the last six….

What should be done?… First, there is an overwhelming case in the United States for expanded public infrastructure investment…. Yt the rate of infrastructure investment is lower now than it’s been anytime since 1947. If you take depreciation out, federal infrastructure investment is negative…. Second, we should increase support for private investment in infrastructure…. With respect to private investment, tax reform is critical…. Third, we should grow our effective labor force…. What we do to educate our workforce matters. What we do to incentivize our workforce—through the design of our social safety net, and through disability insurance—matters. What we do to change our immigration policies—particularly our immigration policies on highly skilled workers—matters….

Fourth, our financial system requires continuing attention… the 1987 crash, the 1990 real-estate bubble, the S&L crash, the Mexican financial crisis, the Asian financial crisis, the internet bubble, Enron, and then the Great Recession of 2008. On average, a crisis every three years for the last 30 years. That surely has taken a toll on growth. At the same time, because pendulums swing, at a time of substantial unemployment, a large number of middle-class Americans are not able to get mortgages today with reasonable down payments. It appears, though the matter is in some dispute, that there are significant impediments in the flow of capital to small businesses as well. Financial reform, labor-force support, stimulus to private investment, increases in public investment—this stuff is not rocket science. Most of it operates on both the demand side and the supply side….

If all you care about is that we’ve got an excessive federal debt, the most important determinant of the debt-to-GDP ratio in 2030 is how rapidly the economy grows between now and then. If what you care about is American national security, the most important determinant of how much we are respected and how much influence we have in the world is how well our economy performs. If what you care about is inequality and poverty, the most important determinant of the employment prospects of the poor is how rapidly the economy is growing…

Must-read: Susan Dynarski: “Why Talented Black and Hispanic Students Can Go Undiscovered”

Must-Read: Susan Dynarski: Why Talented Black and Hispanic Students Can Go Undiscovered: “Broward County…. More than half of its students are black or Hispanic…

…Yet, as of 10 years ago, just 28 percent of the third graders who were identified as gifted were black or Hispanic…. Broward County introduced a universal screening program, requiring that all second graders take a short nonverbal test, with high scorers referred for I.Q. testing…. David Card… and Laura Giuliano… studied the effects of this policy shift…. The share of Hispanic children identified as gifted tripled, to 6 percent from 2 percent. For black children, the share rose to 3 percent from 1 percent. For whites, the increase was more muted, to 8 percent from 6 percent…. Teachers and parents were less likely to refer high-ability blacks and Hispanics, as well as children learning English as a second language, for I.Q. testing. The universal test leveled the playing field….

Broward requires that schools with even one child who tests above the I.Q. cutoff devote an entire classroom to gifted and high-achieving children. Since a school in Broward rarely had enough gifted children to fill a class, these classrooms were topped off with children from the same school who scored high on the district’s standardized test. These high achievers, especially black and Hispanics, showed large increases in math and reading when placed in a class for the gifted, and these effects persisted…. All of these gains came at little financial cost….

Despite these positive results, Broward County suspended its universal screening program in 2010 during a spate of budget cutting in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Racial and ethnic disparities re-emerged, as large as they were before the policy change…

Must-read: David Card and Laura Giuliano: “Can Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?”

Must-Read: David Card and Laura Giuliano: Can Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?: “We study the impacts of a tracking program in a large urban school district that establishes separate “gifted/high achiever” (GHA) classrooms…

…for fourth and fifth graders whenever there is at least one gifted student in a school-wide cohort. Since most schools have only a handful of gifted students per cohort, the majority of seats are filled by high achievers ranked by their scores in the previous year’s statewide tests…. Participation in a GHA class leads to significant achievement gains for non-gifted participants, concentrated among black and Hispanic students, who gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth grade reading and math scores, with persistent effects to at least sixth grade. Importantly, we find no evidence of spillovers on non-participants. We also investigate a variety of channels that can explain these effects, including teacher quality and peer effects, but conclude that these features explain only a small fraction (10%) of the test score gains of minority participants in GHA classes. Instead we attribute the effects to a combination of factors like teacher expectations and negative peer pressure that lead high-ability minority students to under-perform in regular classes but are reduced in a GHA classroom environment.

Must-read: John Quiggin: “Education: An Investment, Not a Filter”

Must-Read:John Quiggin: Education: An Investment, Not a Filter: “Implicit in this statement is the ‘screening’ theory of education…

…The idea that doing a degree might equip you with useful specific knowledge, or with general skills in reasoning, writing and so on, doesn’t get mentioned…. However, the long-term evidence is clear: in Australia, as everywhere else in the world, the wage premium for graduates has remained large enough to make going to university a very good decision, even as the proportion of young people undertaking university education has risen from a tiny minority in the mid-20th century to around 40 per cent today. One interpretation of this is that, over the past century or more, the entire world has been engaged in more and more elaborate screening for no good reason. A more plausible explanation is that technological change has eliminated the kinds of jobs that used to employ kids with a Year 10 education (the median level of achievement when I was young), and replaced them with jobs that need the skills (specific and general) of a university graduate. There’s every reason to think that these trends will continue in the future, so we are going to need more education not less…

Must-read: Richard Mayhew: “School Lunches and Medicaid: a BFD”

Must-Read: Richard Mayhew: School Lunches and Medicaid: a BFD: “[‘Interested State agencies that administer the National School Lunch Program (NSLP)…

…can now use Medicaid data to certify students for free and reduced priced lunches.’] Kids who have enough to eat and are not worried about having enough to eat have two significant advantages over kids who don’t have enough to eat and have to worry about that. The first is simple, they have more energy to spend on high intensity activities of play and learning (speaking as a dad of a first grader, those two things should be very close to the same a good chunk of the time). Secondly and slightly more subtly, kids who are not worried about their next meal are able to devote high complexity cognitive processes to other things. Kids (and adults) have a finite amount of brain horsepower available at any given time. Not worrying about food frees up capacity for other things. Kids who are worried about food are devoting a limited brain budget to that task and not to other things.

The free and reduced price school lunch program in most districts… has a significant amount of paperwork and potential stigma…. People who… have signed up for Medicaid or CHIP… have routine income verification processes…. Allowing states to use pre-exisiting data to pre-qualify kids for free or reduced price school lunches will help a few more kids get a quality daily meal or two in their stomachs which should their well being in addition to school performance. It is also an example of the government working to actively improve peoples’ lives while streamlining the interaction. If we could only make it mandatory that states use Medicaid or SNAP eligiblity data to drive the full array of income qualified social services instead of silo-ing different categories of assistance, so duplication and administrative burden increases wasted costs without providing qualified individuals the services and assistance that they need.

Must-read: Harry Brighouse: “Get your students to know each other and make them write for each other”

Must-Read: Harry Brighouse: Get your students to know each other and make them write for each other: “A brief conversation with 2 students crystallized for me why two things I have been doing in my classes for a while work well…

…and I want to recommend them to other teachers; and also make a recommendation for students…. R: ‘MA might come to class on Wednesday. I mean, it’s like she’s in the class, so she might as well just come along’. Me: ‘What do you mean?’ M: ‘Well, we all just argue about class in our apartment for half the week, and she can’t really avoid it’. R: ‘Yes, as soon as the memos start coming in on Sunday, we start reading them to see what everyone says’. M: ‘We always look to see what S [a very poised, provocative, freshman] says, because at least one of us will disagree with her’. R: ‘And even if M and I agree, G always disagrees with us. Our apartment is just full of argument from Sunday through Wednesday’

So what are the two things I do?… Requiring students in my smaller class to post several memos a semester online. I’ve scaled it up lately…. The benefits for me are huge: first, everyone has done the reading, and second, I know what they do, and do not, understand…. The fact that they have done the reading transforms class discussion…. 2.The other thing I have started doing in my small classes is requiring the students to introduce themselves over and over again. Probably the first 6 or 7 class meetings in a row I make them do this, and then again occasionally, later…. The more important effect, that I have become increasingly deliberate, and explicit, about, is that they learn one another’s names…. The idea behind getting them to know each other’s names is to induce them to spend more time talking to one another outside of class…. The memos give them something to talk about…