I lived in Tulsa for 1 year, and it seemed to me that one of the great community benefits of their Pre-K program is that it has been completely absorbed into the K-12 system, both at the policy and funding level and in the minds of just about everyone else, so that school starts at 4, or 3 even now in some parts around Tulsa, and everyone views this as the status quo.

The first policy move by the Obama and the Department of Ed to me would seem to be to mimic this, so that Pre-K and its funding isn’t something additional we tack on if we have the extra money, and cut when we don’t, but rather it is something we just start “schooling” with.

It also helps that Tulsa has George Kaiser.

Thanks!

Seems a tad dismissive. It’s understandable that job training programs have limited success for those who’ve already been laid off, unemployed for some time, and thus automatically dismissed as undesirables by prospective employers, to take only one possibility. I understand that in Germany, for example, workers receive their job training upgrades while on the job without being fired. I can well believe these remedies are ineffective “as currently constituted,” but that seems to miss the point.

97″…. if the poor behave more like the middle class, the middle class will have more trouble voting for policies to hurt the poor. ”

That was part of the rationale behind Clinton’s welfare reform, as I remember. Low regard for the poor does not appear to have been unduly mitigated in the decades since.

Lane Kenworthy, btw, has an opinion piece up on CSM, where he cites Heckman’s work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't_We_Got_Fun%3F

Worth a look. We Americans have been here before (or never really left).

If you want to reduce poverty a good start would be to double the minimum wage.

Then maybe those ignorant poor folks could take their kids to private ballet lessons.

in other words, while we can debate what the causes of the “culture of poverty” are and whether it’s “real”, to the average person it sure LOOKS real. hell, it even looks real to me, a lifelong democrat. on a pissy morning, i wonder why i vote with the guys who are not subjected to the tyrranny of an outlook calendar (answer — in part because the other side also has those guys, and they want me out of the country fur being a goldurn commie immigrant jew).

on the other hand, the number of people who recently viciously turned on their neighbors who are teachers and nurses because they were in a union may make my comment look stupid.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t read any Heckman before this. I have read quite a lot of Becker. It appears from a casual glance at Heckman’s work that he is more empirically oriented and less theoretical than Becker, but that his empirical research is very much consistent with the theoretical framework established by Becker and others. I’ll be glad to be corrected if that’s not the case.

Now, it’s true that Friedman proposed a negative tax, although he never really did much to advocate for that, certainly nothing even close to his advocacy for privatization, deregulation, etc.–leading one to question how much that was a cover for what were otherwise regressive policies social welfare-wise.

It’s also true that other neoliberals are okay with some forms of assistance to the poor, but notice that the basis for that, as it appears to be with Heckman, is not really a question of promoting equality, social welfare, or even the general well-being; it’s a question of efficiency. For neoliberals like Becker and Heckman (and, yes, their position is fundamentally the same on this), looking through the lens of human capital means seeing poor people as wasted resources, as symptomatic of an underinvestment in their human potential.

While it is certainly laudable to wish to invest in people (and how could one not be in favor of this?) this leaves out the more important question of why some people have less ability to thrive than others. Or, rather, it focuses on the individual instead of the larger social and economic structures that are productive of the poor, the precarious, and the marginalized. But this is a point made others have already made here and in response to Heckman’s original article.

mpowell: Okay, even if we accept that for neoliberal theory competition between individuals for jobs leads to technological innovation (and I’m not convinced that’s the case), it’s still tangential to my argument.