Not just smart, but persistent as well

By A.G. | LONDON

EXACTLY what makes children who succeed at school and prosper in life different from those who do not? It is a question that has been bothering James Heckman, an economist and Nobel laureate, whose thinking chimes with a less decorated but achingly fashionable political thinker, New York Times journalist David Brooks.

Mr Heckman, who won his most prestigious laurels for developing mathematical techniques that enabled him to estimate, among other things, the effect of length of unemployment on the probability of getting a job, is concerned about how inequality emerges and whether it is possible to boost the life chances of those starting from a relatively disadvantaged position.

For the past decade or so, academics have argued that early intervention is essential if the playing field between rich and poor is to be levelled. Their thinking has been informed by a classic paper published by Leon Feinstein of the London School of Economics, which purports to show a disturbing trend: by the age of six-and-a-half, a child from a well-to-do family who was dim at the age of two outperforms a child who had been identified as bright but was raised in a down-at-heel family (see figure 2 on page 19, here). The graph is invoked to explain not only school performance but also health outcomes, for example, Sir Michael Marmot included it in his recent review of how people living in salubrious surroundings live longer and in better health than do denizens of housing estates.

One of the criticisms of the paper is that it is based on a group of children born in 1970 and so the data were almost 30 years old when they were analysed and are now even older. So even if the research is right, its conclusions could well be out-of-date. But a second, more interesting possibility has been raised by John Jerrim of the Institute of Education. He questions the validity of the findings, given the problems with measuring just how clever a child is prior to his second birthday.

Even if Mr Jerrim is right and it turns out to be a myth that bright, poor children lose their talent as they age, early intervention is still essential because there is a significant gap in academic performance between children from rich and poor homes, and it emerges early in childhood. The rationale for the introduction of the Sure Start programme, which aims to give disadvantaged children a good start in life (but was poorly targeted: your correspondent's first-born was a recepient of the scheme), remains valid.

This is where Mr Heckman's line of thought becomes most interesting. He thinks that academics have neglected the soft stuff in their quest for hard data, and that by omitting the importance of character, they have missed something significant. In a lecture at the London School of Economics this morning, he outlined this thesis that rich families instil in their children desirable characteristics such as gumption and good-heartedness.

The extent to which someone is open, conscientious, extraverted, agreeable and neurotic determines success in life just as much as (and in some cases, notably thick men who wish to avoid jail, more than) their academic ability. It is not enough to be smart, you must be tenacious as well. (Though I have often thought that the famous experiment that purports to demonstrate how self-control leads to success does nothing of the kind. I refer to the experiment by Walter Mischel, in which he showed that those four-year-old children who can resist eating a marshmallow, if promised a second one for not indulging immediately, go on to great things. Surely it shows only that children raised in families in which parents keep their promises tend to prosper.)

All of which fits snugly with the arguments developed by Mr Brooks in "The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens", which one of my colleagues reviewed here. Non-cognitive skills are just as important as cognitive ability: the decisions that are most important in making people happy are the ones in which reason plays little or no part.

Which brings a little cheer: if Mssrs Heckman and Brooks are correct, then there may be more than one opportunity to build a better society through education. After all, character is crafted not just during early childhood but also throughout the teenage years. If early intervention fails, there is still a second chance for those persistent enough to insist on it (Katharine Birbalsingh springs to mind) to transform the lives of children for the better.