Some types of political shortsightedness look like the right thing to do on paper. Budget cuts like reducing funding for preschool, early intervention programs, and help for low-income families with young children are often seen as examples of good financial management. The savings happen right away. It takes decades for the effects to show over time. And by then, no one has linked the dots.
James Heckman put everything together. The Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago has spent most of his career using strong data to make the economic case for early childhood education. This is hard to argue with, even for people who don’t agree with spending money on education. His main point, which he has said many times since at least 2012, is that spending money on disadvantaged children in their first five years of life gives the best return on any public investment. Not grades K–12. Not money for college. They are not job training programs. The first five years.
There is no doubt about the numbers behind this. Heckman looked at the Perry Preschool Program, an initiative in Michigan in the 1960s that gave low-income kids a good early education. It showed a return of 7 to 10 percent per year. Higher employment rates, better grades, less crime, and lower costs for healthcare and remedial education all add up to that number. His most recent work on the Abecedarian Project, a North Carolina program for poor children from birth to age five, raised that return even more, to 13% per child, per year. It’s not easy to find an asset class that consistently gives you numbers like that.
The really interesting and a little unsettling thing about this study is what it says about when to step in. Heckman has made it clear that beginning at 3 or 4 is already late. The brain grows and changes the fastest in the first few years of life. These years set the cognitive and character foundations that affect everything that comes after. And he means character in a very specific and useful way: being able to pay attention, control your impulses, be persistent, and work with others. These aren’t “soft skills.” You build them or don’t build them before most kids even go to kindergarten. They’re the building blocks of a successful adult life.
If there is one myth that sticks out in education policy, it might be the idea that you can fix early disadvantage later. The evidence keeps pointing in a different direction. Kids who don’t get the basic help they need to grow and learn don’t just catch up when better resources come along. The gaps get bigger. They show up in things like dropping out of school, health problems, lower lifetime earnings, and more people going to jail. What starts as a child in a poor family not getting enough to do turns into a public cost that is shared by many government departments. The money is still being spent; it just moves around and is spent later and less efficiently.
When you watch budget debates right now, you get the sense that this is still a lesson that needs to be learned. When policymakers are under a lot of pressure to cut costs, they often choose programs that seem like extravagances, like preschool funding, parent coaching programs, and early intervention services for families who are at risk. Most of the time, these don’t have the kind of vocal supporters that can mount a strong defense. Kids younger than five can’t vote. In politics, their parents are often the people with the fewest resources. The return on investment is real, but it takes years to show up, which is longer than most people’s attention spans.
Heckman’s work doesn’t beg for help. It needs math. Costs for poor kids to get a good early childhood education are real, but they are limited. The cost of not providing it is higher, spread out over time, and long-lasting. It includes the cost of corrections, healthcare, criminal justice, and lost productivity. We know how much that trade-off is worth. The facts are not new. What’s interesting is how little it seems to change the subject.
