Why do children of the successful do better than children of the unsuccessful?
VEDANTAM: Well, we’ve known for a very long time that family income really matters. This could be because schools in richer neighborhoods are better schools. But it could also be that rich parents are able to give their children more learning opportunities outside of school. I was speaking with the economist Barbara Wulf. She’s at the University of Wisconsin. Along with Jason Fletcher, she recently decided to explore another explanation. She asked if income disparities might also be linked to disparities in what are sometimes called non-cognitive skills. Many researchers think that it’s these skills that undergird not just academic performance in school but a host of other abilities later in life, including in the workplace. Here’s Wulf.
BARBARA WULF: When we think about who is a good employee and who’s likely to succeed in the workplace, you hear a lot of attention paid to these what I’ll call non-cognitive skills. So they pay attention, they are persistent, they are eager. So they have a set of characteristics that make them good employees.
GREENE: OK. So people who have these non-cognitive skills – better employees. But tie this to American education and sort of the income disparity.
VEDANTAM: Wulf and Fletcher analyzed data from a national survey, David, that tracked children from kindergarten through the fifth grade. The survey data allowed the researchers to track the effects of family income on what parents and teachers were reporting about these children as they went through elementary school. The researchers find there’s a very strong correlation between family income and these non-cognitive skills. In other words, when it comes to being cooperative or dealing with conflict productively, children from wealthier families on average seem to have more of these skills than children from poorer families.
GREENE: OK. So this is actually making the connection. We’ve always known that there’s this income disparity. Now we’re sort of understanding that income disparity might be because if you’re less affluent, I mean, you’re just not developing these skills you’re talking about.
“NPR searches valiantly, blindfolded,” in Charles Murray‘s words.
You don’t have to have a high IQ to concentrate, to persist, or to have distant time horizons. But it makes it a lot easier.
A primary characteristic of a high functioning person, according to Federic Bastiat, is Foresight. A society or community of citizens with foresight develop into high functioning societies. Foresight requires attentiveness, curiosity and action. People in the lower economic strata have learned foresight doesn’t matter when government benefits will at least give them the necessities.