literature review training and development

i would like to thank firstly on the behalfof everyone associated with icps planning these four speakers for coming we could nothave quite literally a more extraordinary set of speakers for this event our formatis as follows a contributors have been asked to speak for about thirty minutes each giventhe time we have in the schedule that means there will still be fifteen to twenty minutesat the end of the presentation this time will be devoted to a round so to speak table discussioninvolving our four contributors with of course time for input from you since there will bea substantial time for a round table discussion at the end it might be best if we reservequestions for individual speakers to that discussion period so now i'll get out of theway and introduce our first speaker who is

martha farah speaking on socioeconomic statusand brain development from science to policy let's welcome dr. farah my talk is on sesbrain development science and policy and as you can see by these questions in the nextthirty minutes i'm going to try to work my way with you from the science to the policylet me begin with a sort of prefatory remark on ses and poverty people kind of talk aboutthem interchangeably i will too undoubtedly you'll catch me doing that in the course ofthis talk they don't really mean the same thing obviously poverty refers if it refersto anything related to ses it refers to the low end of ses or socioeconomic status butin addition poverty as most people understand it has to do with money and not enough ofit ses is socioeconomic status that is there's

social factors as well including people'seducational attainment the prestige of the jobs they hold the kind of neighborhood theylive in many many factors that are confounded if you want to talk the language of confoundshighly correlated if you want to sort of view it as just the way nature is not necessarilya problem you know your research okay so low ses involves low education low money low incomelow other economic resources typically poor neighborhoods and many other associated stressorsnow the question of what are the correlates of ses is of interest partly because if wecan understand if we can describe what they are and then the third question understandthe causal pathways by which growing up in a low ses environment affects your cognitionyour brain function and other things we might

be in a better position to try to preventthe lower the sort of less good outcomes less good life outcomes that are typically associatedwith poverty or low ses you know decades of research starting you know before most ofus ever went to grad school have documented that kids people who grow up poor are morelikely to have a variety of physical mental disorders more likely to drop out of schoolhave lower educational attainment and have lower intellectual attainment iq scores arelower where by growing up poor sort of compromises you development in ways that make it all theharder to escape poverty how does neuroscience contribute to trying to understand these processeswe'll address that as well as what are the policy implications so diving right in abouti guess fifteen years ago now along with kim

nobel my graduate student helen herd a colleaguein pediatrics at penn we began studying the cognitive profile of poverty in children whatdo i mean by the profile well as i said there's a mountain of research showing that poor kidsperform less well on all kinds of tests we were interested in whether that whether howdepressed the test scores are might depend on what domain you're looking at what domainof cognition so we wanted to know in affect whether poverty kind of depresses all cognitiveprocesses kind of evenly across the board or whether it has sort of jaggier profilewhere certain abilities are particularly compromised and we divided up the abilities in terms ofjust a very simple rough and ready parse of cognition by neuroscience so you can see thevarious systems there sort of named by both

the functional nature of the process the cognitiveprocess and the associated anatomical area and what we found was that you know acrossdifferent ages of kids kindergartners first-graders middle-schoolers we found that let me justmake this a little bigger so i can read it okay well assessing these abilities by diffrent kinds of tasks we still arrived at a pretty consistent picture of that profileover studies and the picture was basically language was clearly showing a steep ses gradientthat is kids with higher ses had better vocabulary better ability to so syntactic comprehensionphonemic awareness and so forth executive functions particularly working memory andcognitive control showed a gradient and declarative memory showed a gradient and that surprisedus a little bit didn't seem like growing up

poor should affect your ability to just seesome stimuli and remember later that you saw them but this is in fact what we found nowour results largely agree with the sort of single domain studies that have been donebefore and since that is people who look at executive function in ses or people who lookat language in ses what was different about this is again we tried to see where was thebrunt of the effective ses and memory was definitely one of the big differences thatwe say between low and middle ses kids and for the sake of this talk to kind of narrowthings down a little bit i'm not going to inflict a comprehensive review of all thedifferent things about language and executive function across ses i'm going to focus onlearning and memory and i'm going to start

by beginning up this paper from what fifteeneighteen years ago now by herrmann and guadagno that simply did a literature review not afancy meta analysis or anything but just sort of looked across the literature and foundthat in general people's memory performance was better at higher levels of ses here'ssome examples of the kind of memory that's most relevant to what we found namely justthe ability to acquire and retain long term memories and they attempted to explain thisor to just to be very open about the fact that they didn't really have a lot of goodhypotheses about what's responsible so they said the explanation of the positive correlationbetween ses and memory performance is not possible at this time the relationship maybe due to heritability of acquired memory

ability across ses alternatively the positivecorrelation between ses and memory may be due to a variety of environmental influencesvariations in physical health across ses and emotional adjustment access to quality educationacross ses that affect the acquisition of memory strategies and indecently we are findour results were with an incidental memory task so it really minimized the likelihoodthat the strategy would be effecting the results they conclude with ses may even influencethe motivation to perform the memory tasks these are all possibilities that are out therethat can't be ruled out a year later john richardson a very emanate british memory expertwrote a critique of the herrmann and guadagno meta analysis where he basically you knowhe criticizes them and the horse they rode

in on you might say he also took issue withtheir handling of the review and he attempted to do a more quantitative systematic reviewwhat's what we now talk about as a meta analysis and interestingly what he found was even strongerevidence that kind of simple you know acquisition of a long term memory is significantly lowerin people of lower ses or higher ses his account of that finding well first he criticizes theway herrmann and guagagno considered it he says apparently they regarded ses as a setof characteristics that resided in someone's personality self concept and behavior to thatextent there is an essentialist's view of social class ses is something that lower classand middle class people have or are and low ses and high ses people differ in their memoryfunction just because they are low ses or

high ses people and you know reading behindthe lines of this and other things there's clearly a discomfort with the idea that thefindings that he reports as well as herrmann and guagagno maybe you know essentially blamingthe victim saying well yeah you don't get as far in life because you know you're inferioryou don't learn as well instead he suggests quoting again class related differences inmemory performance are actually constitute in particular relationships between researchersand their participants so it's has nothing to do with what you're like inside what you'reable to do it has to do with the situation you find yourself in well that is possibleand in fact i don't want to discount the possibility that power relations coming into you knowupper middle class kind of laboratory setting

do influence people's performance and thatcan show up as ses affect but i want to point to a very non-obvious explanation not amongthe ones named by any of the authors i just have quoted and suggests that it’s a verypromising one so as demonstrated by michael meany and many others at this point earlylife experience is rodents mainly it's been studied in but even in non-human primatesaffects learning and memory ability it affects brain structure and function and in particularwhat has been found you know in the most extensive research available with rodents is that ifyou stress a rat pup and they put it you know take it out of the cage stress it reuniteit with the mother rat the structure and later function of its hippocampus is determinedby how solicitous the mother rat is with the

pup if the mother rat does a lot of lickingand grooming and arch back nursing that has a protective effect on the development ofthe hippocampus protects it from the on slot of stress hormones and promotes healthy hippocampaldevelopment this is not a genetic effect again from meany's lab we know that he's done cross-fosteringstudies where genetically unrelated rat pups receive good or bad mother good or bad inquotes and finds the same kind of thing so the first bit of research i want to tell youabout from well not the first bit the second bit of research that i want to tell you aboutfrom my lab is an attempt to test this hypothesis with people and see if it extends to our specieswe used a cohort of kids that my colleague helen hurt has been studying since they wereborn in fact she’s a neonatologist so she

got them the second they came out and shehas spent you know over twenty years now studying their development among the measures she acquiredwere two that are going to be very relevant here one is she acquired home inventoriesfor these kids home i know some people here know about the home observation measurementof the environment scale an ra goes into the kid's home and both interviews the motheror caregiver and observes various things about the home it's self about the way the motherand the child interact and the items you know range from kind of clearly cognitively relevantsuch as you know are there books and reading materials in the home whether it's you knowjust adult reading materials are there children's books are there toys that teach numbers andcolors that sort of thing and items that unlike

these earlier cognitive stimulation itemshave more to do with maternal or parental nutriments does the caregiver slap or hitthe child while the interviewer is there does the caregiver report holding the child closeat least i think it's fifteen minutes a day is that right so we had these nice you knowfairly real world ecological measures of the children's early home life at ages four andeight and then when they were in middle school we had the cognitive testing that i mentionedearlier that helen and i had done to see which neurocognitive domains people were you knowgood bad or indifferent on and what we did to test this hypothesis about the origin ofyou know the environment the possible environmental origins of these effects that we found iswe just regressed their middle school age

cognitive performance using as predictor variablesthese home scores the home score for cognitive stimulation and the home sore for parentalnutriments along with a bunch of other variables to you know mother's iq gestational drug exposureand so forth here oh that should have been up there so what we're going to now do istry to test this idea in human kids that maternal care buffers in a stressful environment bufferskid's learning ability and stress response first for learning ability we found two ofthe neurocognitive domains were predicted by the home scores for language as you cansee you know perhaps not surprisingly the environmental the cognitive stimulation compositepredicted children's performance along with the age of the kid at time of testing theseare scatter plots that live up to their name

they are scattered but the point is thereis a systematic signal coming through here nonetheless that tells us that environmentalstimulation is associated earlier in life is associated with middle school languageability more surprising is the result with the memory task it was not cognitive stimulationit was not mother's iq you know a number of other things it was the parental nutrimentscomposite which is very consistent with you know this kind of rat lab based explanationof the ses memory difference again the idea that it was stress and maternal you know behaviorparenting behavior was not among the possibilities that any of the previous authors had thoughtabout but now that we have the work of meany etc. it's available this is some work showingin the same cohort of kids these this same

measure parental nutriments not cognitivestimulation effects stress regulation affects the stress response and it's resolution whichis also consistent with what we know from animal research broadly consistent okay solet's go now to structural brain measures this is a slide from kim nobel's project showingthat the income to needs ratio of the family of a child's family is related to the volumeof their hippocampus so higher income in your family bigger hippocampus gwen lawson oneof my current grad students undergrad aj winkleman and i just looked through the whole literatureon brain structure in studies that have ses as a variable of interest or a nuisance co-variantwhatever as long as we could find the relation in kids and we found six studies and fiveof them showed a significant positive relationship

so this i'm showing you one set of data butit looks like it's pretty much out there in general i'll also mention that it's not soclear in adults some studies show it but many more fail to show it and we'll come back towhy that might be later so the hippocampus oh let me also mention consistent with theidea that stress and parenting are key to ses effects on the hippocampus here's somework beautiful work by joan luby they had in their data set both ses variation thatwas known and stress variation that was known and parenting behavior was known and theywere therefore able to do a mediation analysis and they found that stress in parenting actuallymediate the effect of ses on hippocampal volume so there's definitely a convergence here ofjust descriptive findings and also evidence

that's supportive of this hypothesis of wherethose findings come from i think what we have here is a class that is half empty and halffull on the one hand there is a really encouraging consistency across labs on the question oflike descriptively what does a child a low ses childhood look like in the brain and inthe cognitive abilities and also concerning possible mechanisms on the other hand thereare plenty of inconsistencies too and i think it's fair to say we've just scratched thesurface here i don't want to say okay we can you know we can explain it all and get towork solving it let me go to policy and intervention and before i talk about the specifics of younow what if anything do these data call on us to do let me just make a few more preliminaryresults about this sort of the moral implications

of some of this work okay first thing i wantto talk about is are we blaming the victim here which was kind of i think where richardson'sdiscomfort was coming from are we saying you know the cause of lower performance and lessability to get ahead in life is in the person themselves so they have only themselves toblame right i don't think that any modern psychological scientists as we have come togetheras a group here would say that causal explanations are about blame right we look at you knowmechanisms by which people become depressed or whatever we don't say yes therefore you'reto blame for your depression and i think it’s more accurate rather than to say the causeis in the person to say the causal arrow goes through the person it clearly originates inthe environment as several of the studies

the luby work our own work have pointed toso i think it's important to we can maybe talk about this later to note that this isnot saying people are to blame for their own or even the parents are to blame for the children'sdisadvantage the other thing is when you bring the brain in you run the risk of evoking people'syou know automatic associations between it's a biological problem and therefore it's animmutable problem biology is destiny but of course much of the work that i was just showingyou had to do with the effects of the environment on the brain in fact you know plasticity isa huge topic of research in neuroscience now we know that if it's in the brain it's stillin principal completely changeable so this kind of work should not be viewed as evidencethat oh these kids are damaged goods there's

nothing we can do with them far from it okayso what are the implications i want to distinguish between framing of the issues and actual substancethat we can use to deal with the issues by talking about neuroscience and cognitive sciencein this context i think we're going away from sort of blame and other morally frayed wordslike effort surveys in the u.s. at least have shown that a very common view of why poorpeople are poor is that they don't try hard enough their irresponsible they make poordecisions because of their irresponsibility like they have too many kids they don't stayin school you know etc but the nice thing i think the sort of incidental nice thingabout the cognitive neuroscience approach here is that neurons don't get blamed theydon't expend effort you know they don't have

good or bad characters they just behave accordingto the laws of the natural world right i mean it's the laws of physics a neuron can't doanything except what the laws of physics tell it to do so i think it’s very helpful indistancing ourselves from the sort of blame mentality incidentally the center for developingchild at harvard which has done a lot of policy work using neuroscience when i first saw theirbriefs on you know toxic stress in the brain my first reaction was like oh you know thisis just a pretentious use of neuroscience it's just dressing things up with neuroscienceit’s not really using it it's not acknowledging what a work in progress neuroscience is buti actually came to appreciate that know what they're doing is they're providing a counternarrative to this view that poor people just

aren't you know they have themselves to blameand so why should society help them in terms of substance i think we have a little bitto point to i think it's certainly the works so far indicates that we need to be very attentiveto the stress in a child's environment as well as the parenting skills of the parentsthat's not nothing but it's also not anything that you could really you know take to nihand say therefore here's the right or you know education institute and say here's howwe need to fix things but i do think that in the next ten years neuroscience will havefully earned it's keep in this area if only by coming up with bio markers that will helpus understand who's at risk what interventions are looking like they're working and so forthfinally on this last point how do we increase

the substance i think there is no algorithmthis is the matter of scientific discovery particularly collaborative science and i thinkyou know there's no recipe book we have to do this and then we'll make this progressbut i think if we keep this community this like interaction among child developmentalistseconomists neuroscientists cognitive scientists if we keep this going i think that it is verylikely that we will develop a much better grasp of the way poverty impacts brain developmentand people's life chances and what kinds of intervention tools might be effective so letme just end by thanking my collaborators whose work i showed you and thank you to danielat aps for bringing us all together and thank you for coming so i'm going to be talkingto you and i don't have my slides in front

so i'm going to be looking and going backand forth and i use my hands a lot so hopefully that won't distract you or that will makesomething to keep you awake but i'm coming from carlos albizu university i spent thirty-sixyears in the u.s. having a wonderful career then i went back home so now i'm in a verysmall university bringing all the knowledge and also learning a lot about the third worldand how it works so the outline of my talk i've always worked interdisciplinary so ialways bring a slide that talks about my point of view because i think it's important forall of us to think about what the lens is that we are using i'm going to try like marthato give a sense of what we know from my perspective from my human development perspective goingto talk briefly about interventions because

i think that we're all interested in interventionsboth intervention research in terms of what it's telling us about human development butalso about interventions that we could institute i'm going to talk about some interesting exceptionsbecause we always think about socioeconomic income education as a linear factor and i'mgoing to show you some stuff about might be curvy linear which is an very interestingway of thinking about it but also the notion of where there's some exceptions in the worldwhere low socioeconomic does not correlate with all the negative stuff that we'll allbe talking about and then i'll bring some conclusions so what are the points of viewshere all of my co-authors are my students so we are both developmental and clinicalpsychologists and we're researchers and clinicians

so we have those two perspectives in formingwho we are and what i'm talking about today we have a north american education i thinkthat's important to say because we're very based u.s. based and we in the u.s. there'sthis wonderful custom of ignoring most of the world so i think that it's really greatto be here i'm very excited to be in this new and i'm see a lot more conferences thatare you know sort of trying to bring all of the different worlds we don't use first secondand third anymore ai don't know what we’re using anymore but i guess it's developingcountries maybe not low income but anyway i think it's important to keep that that'smy bias and of course i'm going to talk a lot about north american research and theoreticalperspectives on the other hand i was born

and raised in puerto rico so i bring a caribbeanperspective what does that even mean that means that i have a cultural critique butat the same time i am u.s. based in terms of my work and my education i've always beenvery critical of it the main organization that i'm a part of the society for researchin child development i'm the editor of child development right now and you cannot imaginethe battles we've had in the last forty years it's been great and of course there is a minoritystatus there's a notion of really coming into the main places of science being given sciencebeing trained being given all the wonderful experience of being in the u.s. but alwaysfeel that there is a minority perspective still there i can see where the science isgoing through cultural lenses that are not

really explaining to me the experience ofmany people in the world the experience with many people in the world so socioeconomicinfluences what do we know they start at inception and i'm using maternal income and educationas my variance and its related to maternal stress during pregnancy and we know that maternalstress has some implications for the fetus we know that maternal and fetal malnutritionalso has impact on development we know that there are lots of pregnancy complicationsthat if they go untreated may affect the fetus and we also have exposure to noxious toxinsand we know that all of these things are associated with low income and low education that theycan be associated in other studies with later social emotional cognitive learning languageand environmental problems so i'm very happy

to be following martha because i think shegave you sort of the background for this stuff low income may also limit access to basicdevelopmental needs such as an adequate diet so it might be that there might be some physicalof waves of low income getting into the body or into the child so for example familiesexperiences food insecurity and food insecurity is something that we've developed in the u.s.i don't know if everybody knows what that means but basically food stamps are givenout at certain times of the month and by the end of the month they don't have money forfood or the income doesn't last so there's food insecurity at some point it's not thatthey don't have malnutrition all the time it's that they can't buy the food all thetime so that might affect the mother's nutritional

intake and that might affect the fetus thenwe go to various outcomes we know that low maternal income and education is associatedwith more preterm birth lower birth weight even if it's at the same term and birth complicationsand again we know that these are associated with early developmental problems throughoutthe life span i mean asphyxia at birth is something that happens and there's nothingthat can be done later on so these are things that are very much part of living in povertyso poverty can have both direct and indirect effects for example it may affect birth weightby affecting the mother's health related behaviors so it might be not necessarily that she'snot eating well or anything like that but she might have some addictive behaviors andshe might not be able to get access to treatment

and those sort of smoking and drinking andthe stress chemicals compounded so it affects low birth weight and it might be more difficultto quit i don't know if you've how many of you have experienced poverty in their lifevery few interesting alright so when you are poor basically there are a myriad of thingsthat are not right it's not necessarily a particular so you might be smoking becauseof the stress that you're going through etc. lower maternal income and education is associatedwith negative aspects of the postnatal childrearing environment as martha was saying we psychologistsobserve mothers and children we video tape them we code their behaviors and stuff andwhat do we find? we find that there's less amount in complexity of verbal interactionsthey might talk but the talk is a different

talk there's less contingency on responsitivyfewer learning materials and cognitive stimulation and there might be parental inconsistencywith regard to the daily routine changes of primary caregivers lack of supervision etc.which in turn can be associated again in other studies has been associated with later socialemotional language learning problems so compared to their peers even if we move out from thebody and the family poor children are more likely to be to exposed to other environmentaldeficits what are these they live in housing that are crowded noisy and characterized bydefects such as inadequate structures toxins pest infestations lead you know all thosekinds of wonderful things that i said that we inhindge on people then we ask how comethey are not graduating from high school and

when i look at this thing i say how come anybodyis graduating from high school given this life that they're exposed to they go to schoolwith less educational resources and with teachers who are less prepared to teach so we findthis additive this cascading affect no they start with some sort of risk factors and theyjust keep on going from one to the other they live in neighborhoods characterized by crimeboarded houses abandon lots there are no parks you know this wonderful city that we haveright here you know how many of our cities can we think in our low income you know neighborhoodsthat could have the safety the wonder the exposure to so many different things and theyhave less access to quality health care so maybe they get some lead in their brain maybethey have some problems with that and there's

no follow up of trying to deal with thoseissues as a consequence of this multitude prenatal and postnatal influences associatedwith low maternal income and education there are a myriad of neuro developmental againi'm amazed at the resilience that i see so many low income children families that canreally deal with all the exposures that they have so we find very early on like twelvetwenty-four months you find the low cognitive functioning you find the more limited rangeor language capabilities and you find some less secure attachments this is not only cognitivebut it's also social emotional i love the work by dan keating i don't know if you knowit but if you don't you should read it he's a sociologist i think he's now he's from canadabut now he's in the u.s. and he has found

pretty much what we're describing from studiesthat are coming from studying particular families and neighborhoods he finds them at the levelof countries he's looking at it inequality income inequality is his independent variableincome inequality of the country level and he finds that all of these things that we'vebeen talking about that happened within a country in terms of income it happens withincountries so it's not necessarily the income of a country but it's really the inequalityof a country how much high and lows they are and so it's really interesting to see he'sschematic and he's theoretical framework and this is some of his data so this is lookingat inequality income inequality in twenty-eight different countries and he's finding afterhe controls for a lot of myriad of things

that basically there is an inequality to themean literacy of the country so basically it's not the income but it's the spread ofthe income the more spread the income is the less literacy is in the country and so it'sreally giving you a sense that this working not only in the individual family level neighborhoodschool but it's also working at the level of countries one of the greatest things thathe's talked about is this notion of biological embedding and i think i want to like marthatalk a little bit about what it means in biology biology is environmentally determined i meanbiology is if you look at darwin and everything he was interested in you know adaptation evolutionwas all basically environmentally determined now something changed in the environment whosurvived who did the adaptation who went on

that's the one that came on so he basicallyuses biological embedding which includes fro him synaptic pruning this whole notion thatnot only does the brain creates as it goes synapses but also the brain looses with isa really interesting model for human development right that at the same time that you gainyou lose some and the gene expression basically what we're finding right now is genes aregiving us various positions but they get expressed depending on the environment so let's alwayslook at biology as a function of both what the kid brings and environmental demand sothis is the way that i think about what's going on pregnancy birth outcomes care givingenvironments other environments it all comes out to a biological embedding that impactearly childhood development and basically

what we're thinking of right now which isreally sad to think that we can predict from where kids are at four and five years of agewhere they're going to be in life right we put them in a track and we just look at themgoing on that track downhill or upward in most places and i think that the basic notionof early childhood development as a base i say to my students you know sometimes fraudwas right we don't want to talk about it or early experience i mean he might be wronghe might have been wrong in the interpretation of what he was observing but he was a greatobserver this notion of early experiences being really critical are very much a partof the way that we're thinking about how socioeconomic get's into the individual so a little bitabout neuroscience because i want to talk

about that too that poverty early in lifemay be more harmful than later in life and this is not only from neuroscience but it'salso from work by greg duncan that has found that if you have poverty in the first fiveyears of life vs. the next five or the other ones he can isolate that the one that reallymakes the difference in the first year and why is that i think because a lot of neuroscienceis telling us that in the first five years of life for humans you know in other speciesit might be the first few months the first two years but for us the first five yearswhen a lot of the shaping the pruning the creation the enlarging all that kind of stuffthat martha was saying really is happening in those five first five years of life sothe human brain development is rapid and to

a certain extent even if it's plastic it'sgiving a lot of information is getting in it's like a sponge i just always think aboutthey're just sponges and not that we can't be sponges because i'm taking all this wonderfulexperience in and i know that i'm learning from here but it's very different it takesa lot less energy to do that so some of the research as martha did just to give you itaffects school readiness as i said by year by five years we find incredible differencesbetween middle class near poor and poor in all things from recognizing letters to mathabilities it’s not only in words it's not only language but also in fun and also interms of sequencing and reversibility we also find that children from better families andbetter educated parents perform in school

at the age of ten and this is some work thankgod from england so we can sight some other countries this is the only one i could findwhich is pathetic when i was looking at on my own ways of searching data in the u.s.but anyway this really gives you a sense of how these things just move down in terms ofmean scores at the age of ten and it also this is work by greg duncan and katherinemagnuson that really shows you that it's not only schooling but it's also rest workinghours food health and non-marital birth there's a whole siguela of living in poverty thatgoes through the adult years so myself i'm really interested in poverty of thinking itis a way that societies create all societies create social stratification processes andthis is something that i created a while ago

to think about minority kids in the unitedstates where anybody who for a social position variable which can be erased you ethnicityyour religion anything that puts you apart your social class your gender you sexual orientationand had how this sort of mechanisms of racism and segregation of how people get segregatedby systems that we don't even acknowledge that are there and how kids and families getrelegated to promoting environments or inhibiting environments no environments that are notnecessarily supportive of development on the other hand coming from a minority perspectivei also say you know there's an adaptive there's something in strength in humans in terms ofthat thing to amazing stress that really gives us a sense of hope and i'll present some ofthose findings and of course a child each

child is a different world you who have hadmore than one child knows that every child comes with a different set of personalityand needs and things like that that you have to react to and that the family makes a pointso how does this work in the united states for example if you're black or hispanic oranything like that what happens you end up being in the poor status of the u.s. so raceand ethnicity in the u.s. are basically confounded okay so this is a study where she basicallylooks at different kinds of interventions for poor families in the united states soyou can have income support programs they add you three-hundred dollars a month on topof what you make make it here you can have an earned income tax credit at the end ofthe year when you pay for your income tax

some money comes back there's casinos rightnow a wonderful invention from the native americans trying to get back to the whitepeople and then we have conditional cash transfers which basically just depend but what we knowmost about is early childhood education and that's the one in the united states that reallyhas made a difference and we have really good data to talk about that so what do we knowwhat are the lessons from the work that's done we know that the earlier the better preventionvs. remedial interventions are not cost effective right prevention is a lot easier preventionis cheaper for one dollar that you provide spend in prevention saves seven to ten dollarsin remedial intervention we have the sort of analysis made from and the more systemsare addressed comprehensive long term the

larger long lasting effects i also want totalk a little bit about structural intervention vs. compensation we there's something aboutpsychologists that i'm not sure maybe through integrative science we would do better onthis but we like for example to teach parents how to be parents in a setting where there'sno income stress drugs and other stuff and i find that really hard to believe that wesmart people can think that something like that is going to make a difference even takingthe kids and putting them on an early intervention to me the kids are still going back to thesame environment so basically the notion of why don't we invest in mothers instead ofteaching them how to be parents invest in their education so they can move on from povertyso they can become have less stress so they

can become better mothers because we knowthat parenting in those communities in particular examples are not good five minutes alrightquickly so it's not all about the money i some places and i'm going to talk about someinteresting exceptions this is work from a friend of mine suniya luthar where she's findingthat very high income kids are actually not doing that great alright affluence might benegative for your health alright so let's just keep that in mind i'm not going to sayanything more but in might be something very different to be very poor or very affluentbut there's a lot more morbidity with the very affluent than there is with middle classinteresting the next couple of slides are work from myself where we find that in a particularstudy that i did in providence when i was

looking at children of immigrants what i foundis the kids were from the lowest ses in terms of mothers education and income they wereactually doing the best right s i said hmm this is interesting and i started lookingat the public health data and it was called the immigrant paradox we had never talkedabout it in terms of psychological although now this was in the 2000's now we are butwhat was finally figuring out was what is the mechanism for this so i started doingother studies and so this is one based on health which is a national representativefollowing and this is looking at basically sexual risk and what you find is that fromthe first generation to the second to the third the risk keeps on getting larger alrightso something about i call my book becoming

american may be hazardous to your health andwe have it now in more in lots of other ways in cardio vascular in obesity in all of thiskinds of things there's something about acculturating to a society that it's not giving you thatin many of these cases are considering you poor minority dark skin whatever they're notgiving you any break but at home at least you have some hope right there's an immigrantdream that it's keeping you know alive so we found this that basically each generationwas getting worse and worse in terms of sexual risk we also found that in sex partners andthat seemed like the mediation so it's not that they were starting sex at a differentage at a different you know generations but it was that they were having more sex partnersby the third generation there was a monogamy

there was maybe a one boyfriend etc. so yousee the affect was quite big and we see it embody this work by amy marks one of my formerstudents also found that in terms of body max index entering middle childhood and basicallyit's explained by behaviors and not by fast food consumption and on this one this is workthat we are going to be publishing very soon that we looked at the medication by settingsbecause i'm always trying to find what our settings are doing for this and basicallywhat you find is that the initial model you see all the particular key values are significantbut then when we put the settings you can see the variables that are explained by thesettings and that that differences for latinos vs. asians again it's starting to tell usa lot of these things have to be very contextualized

and there is some work right now in europeand some places about the immigrant paradox damitra radosveta i don't know if she’shere darns she’s not she’s now in the netherlands has done a lot of work on thistrying to see if the immigrant paradox is working here she's doing a meta analysis rightnow so basically the impact of low income low maternal education in-country income inequalitystarts at conception right and maybe even earlier but at least we have data that saysat conception these things are already affecting human development maternal stress malnutritionpregnancy complications exposure to noxious toxins at birth we find the same mechanismsthis low income low maternal education is associated with prematurity low birth weightand birth complications that place the infant

at risk the postnatal environment are addingto that right so we are finding that families are not exactly in the same place to be ableto respond to the kids needs because of the stress and everything else neighborhoods arereally not there to compensate for what's going on health care and schools developmentaldeficits are seen very early on i actually have found that by eight months of age interms of maternal vocalizations and complexity the biological embedding is a way that i thinkabout how these early things can predict for so long although we know that interventionsthat talks about the plasticity that martha was talking about really makes a differencethere are exceptions to low income and location affects some cultural practices might be protectiveagainst poverty and question the affects of

income might be curvilinear when affluencemay actually be detrimental to your health implications for research policy and practicewe know a lot i would love not to stand here and talk about poverty and affects on kidsanymore i've done it in places that are full wonderful places affluent and stuff like thatand sometimes i get sick to my stomach there's a moral issue here there's a moral issue howmuch more do we have to talk about that really poverty is not good for human beings we knowwe need research that is to test contextually-adapted interventions we know right now from somework that earlier the childhood education and investments in maternal education ad wellbeing really make a difference the question is when where and how and i think that eachcommunity each section of the world needs

to really think about what we know and tryto contextualize it to the particular needs to the place of course we need effective publicpolicies and practices that are evidence based why do we do science if it's not going tobe used but our locally tested and adapted the earlier the more structural oriented themore comprehensive if the most cost effective and the question that we have to deal withwe have the knowhow do we have the will thank you very much the topic of my talk is on progressin societies and i have to decree i'm not a psychologist by training i'm a sociologistand i'm working in an institute of economic research so the majority of my colleaguesare economists and we discovered anyway the psychology also in our projects and in ourwork about twenty years ago and i will tell

you the story of bringing psychology intoresearch design that has a long tradition what i want to talk about first of all i willstart with the history of social indicators social indicators are has become a movementin the 60's and they try to chart the development of society and the progress of societies inour work and i want to point out then that there have been a strong links between psychologyand those early movements of sociological progress and economic terms and the conceptwas quality of life and i will come to this and bring an example for this bringing thoseconcepts together with a project i'm directing at the german institute of economic researcha social economic panel and i will tell you a little bit about the design and the resultsand the outcome of that study then i will

show you what our design of life course andlong-running household panel studies will bring also in aspects of this topic of progressin societies and i will point out when we become discovered the psychology and whatthe outcome of this development is enriching this tradition of social indicators so i willstart with and example from the u.s. this report was the first social indicators reportand it was published in 1969 so a long time ago and if you look to the preface of thatreport you'll questions we are also that are topics of our discussion here and this wasa time when not a lot of evidence and data were available it was forty five years agoand they started we need also necessary social indicators for monitoring trends in our societyand but it was clear what was the direction

they wanted to form a better world so it wasalso normative in some way and here are the chapters of that multi disciplinary workinggroup of economists sociologists but also some psychologists and the research questionsthey raised in the forty five years ago they are good questions they have normative contentor direction where we want to shape a better world and a better future for our next generationsand we are rich scientists and what should be the directions and this kind of multi dimensionalresearch question shows you it's not only health it's issues of social mobility thephysical environment but also income and poverty of course and indicators of education learningsociety but also on participation and social decoration of the society so this was thestarting point of a so called social indicator

movement and kind of definition of socialindicators they are statistic at times serious from by design so just informing the publicpoliticians and informs society used to monitor the social system and helping to identifychange and to guild interventions to alter the course of social change so this was multidimensional picture of social indicators and there have been attempts within that movementof social indicators for example for the new development index also to find composite indicesof to bring all those dimensions together and not to just report on gdp and income developmentbut also to bring the different dimensions to another kind of picture of progress insociety so as i said the movement started in the 60's in the u.s. and the internationalorganizations they invested a lot also to

bring a better database into place and tomake international comparative mappings of the development and there have been differentreports by united nations and of course to point out the initiative of the oecd thatstarted also with a special report on social indicators that in this tradition alreadyin the 80's and the 90's you had the first society at a glance that was a aggregatedpicture of the oecd countries by those different dimensions aggregated indicators on developmentand then we are here in europe and the european union has been also a big project for bringingdiversity into a better european development of integration and at the beginning of theenlargement of europe there has been also a strong concept of bringing indicators intothe world and tony atkinson he tried to give

benchmarks for good indicators and right nowwe have we are on the program of horizon 2020 that also aims of the europe of europe europeandevelopment for the next decade and as you know the sarkozy report with stieglitz andfitoussi commission beyond gdp was also in the public debate and the oecd again afterjust society at a glance made progress with the measurement of well-being and with differentreports although in germany where i come from there has been enquete study response on thiscritique of gdp as a progress indicator of a development of societies of a enquete commissionon growth well-being and quality of life and some years ago and this has been the chartof that commission and they chart what they want to integrate on a national level to bringbetter data and evidence on the development

within the life course and here you'll thatit's part of the psychology in that report and they also paid attention for the people'ssubjective experienced quality of life not only in germany also in great britain therehas been response to that sarkozy report and stieglitz and in great britain you have wheelof different dimensions and progress also in the in great britain you see well-beingas a part of the aggregated development and the number and the reporting system they justestablished two years ago here you have a picture from eurostat that is the statisticaloffice of europe and they are charting with integrated european social of official statisticsto benchmark the quality of life indicators the progress was in europe whether there arethey are converging in the level of well being

and quality of life or whether there are tracesof polarization in that process and as i already mentioned the oecd they also charted now youcan go in to the internet and make your individual bench mark and you can compare to the nationallevel of those eleven dimensions to your individual set of well-being and the different dimensionsquite actually one other response on this recent development of equality of life ingermany as an initiative by the german government and chancellor merkel she once has set uppriority program on well-being living well in germany and so she's trying not only tohave the indicators but also tries with one hundred citizen dialogues she will go to thepeople and talk to them and have qualitative enrichment of beside the indicators so thisis another outcome of this kind of development

so i will switch back now again to the rootsand the psychological and the sociological roots of that development of social indicatorsand in i think it started in a kind of tradition with the work of angus campbell in '72 whenhe for the first time had a national representative survey where he included a psychological conceptsand well being indicators this was the first source for those indicator reports to havepsychological concepts introduced on the concept of well-being and there first picture is wolfgangzapf he's a german sociologist and he was also a promoter of the investigation of subjectiveperceived quality of life and of course ed diener who approached as a psychologist qualitycriteria what are the benchmarks of measuring and operationalizing the concept of well-beingbut coming back to wolfgang zapf and his special

design because it is also a design of surveyi will introduce in a second so it was wolfgang zapf who had a cross tap of good and bad onobjective conditions and subjective conditions and his idea was well thinking of progressof society everybody goes and knows what is bad for society we have a perception povertywas an example we discussed already and so his idea was well we if we cover this ideawe meet not only the concept of well being but also have other situations if we combinethis idea of good and bad on objective and subjective level and this is exactly the ideathat is behind also the oecd level that we try not only on a objective perspective ofeconomic progress but also to bring it together with the same people who are in good conditionsbut don't feel good so that is a puzzle but

we should map also this kind and find a progressof this development well i will if we i'm very happy that you invited me and i willtake the opportunity make a little bit promotion for a study the study is named german socio-economicpanel and this study was designed by the creators of this social indicator movement of psychologistsof sorry sociologists and economists to benchmark on the one hand the economic progress andthe development of within germany but also to have a concept of subjective indicatorsthis study is has now finished thirty waves that are available in scientific use filesand it's one of the longest running longitudinal multi-cohort panel in germany what is themission of such a longitudinal enterprise well the mission of such or the possibilitiesof longitudinal surveys they show that you

have the possibility to look back in timeand to quote look at current events and conditions into the future so the life course idea isin that design represented for germany the mission is clearly we have on a nationallyrepresentative level longitudinal data to monitor the periodic trend this social indicatoridea but also in a multidisciplinary perspective covering the entire life span of the individualsliving in those households and what well we did not discover this kind of design gregduncan was already mentioned for he was working on child development he was director of thepanel study of income dynamics and we got also advice of course when we started withour panel study and but we made i think some very crucial innovations in our design firstwe did not allow proxy reports on the household

level we asked every adult member in the householdwith an individual questionnaire psid just asked one respondent who was in the householdon the other side we had wolfgang zapf and our survey and he wanted to have subjectiveindicators from the beginning so we started already in '85 with concept of cognitive wellbeing in our survey and it included also 2007 effective indicators of well-being well thena unique event happened unification and we expanded of course we included east germanyand could compare now the development of east germany and the development of social transitionsand progress with west german so that was also part of the puzzle and the discoveryof early childhood was also mentioned well we slept at the beginning we did not discoverwe discovered but at least in the age in the

year 2000 we started with eight specific conceptsof children and the early childhood and since 2002 so also quite long time we introducedmore and more short assessments of psychological concepts and elza dranskof she was in ouradvisory board and she always promoted well you have to include also some psychologicalconcepts and helped us to develop the early life cost what are we measuring well thisis just our broad picture of the indicators we have we decide the objective majority ofquestions like in the psid we have the biographical history and we measure stability and changeover the life course and we have different topic in economics political science and alsoin psychology this is our picture of our life course it's a little bit similar like thetradition of cohort studies that start with

the birth and great britain has a versionof first cohorts representative big birth cohorts started already in the 70's we don'thave in germany but we started in '84 with this kind of household design where we alsohave new births per each year then we start from the observation period until people getold and transition into labor market and so on those little red arrows show when we startwith individual questionnaires that was in age sixteen when we had adult respondentsbut you see well we started also introducing eight specific questionnaires first observedby the mother but now also since year age twelve the youngsters give individual reportsand what we have of course besides the family context of those individuals we have positiveand negative events within the family mother

of father gets unemployed what happens tothe child outcome in the transition and of course we have some rich indicators on regionalopportunity structure what neighborhood are they living where are they moving so we havetransitions and with comparisons to the u.s. or other longitudinal studies like the hildastudy in australia you can also look for social and cultural and economic conditions wellthose soep based study results go into a lot of reports also indicator reports for thegovernment and periodic development but so we are covering both the trends also of povertyin germany or richness and they are part of the official reports but besides the socialindicators we also are able with our longitudinal design to make really evidence based policyevaluations we don't have experiments within

our design but kind of natural experimentsbecause we cover a long time period and then there has been policy changes and then youcan with advanced statistical statistics address also this experimental dimension and lookfor causal events here you'll see the development of well-being and life satisfaction in germanyas you see well the arrogated level on the left part there have been some periodic shocksshocks like the 2004 that was the highest number of unemployed we had in germany wehad about five million then we had been tough policy reforms and you see well there wasalso this was the lowest valuation of well being in germany if you look on the rightside you see different pictures for the development of east and west germany and you see eventwenty-five years after unification on the

subjective well-being there's still a significantdifference between both parts of germany east germany catched up but well you see thereis still a gap and this also designed by our data and well it's the easterlin puzzle andparadox for germany if you look on the aggregated level of well-being starting in '84 well yousee some ups and downs but on the average it's more or less the same but if you lookon the income development on the same households that are reporting on the well-being the wellyou'll see a different picture and you'll see this paradox of that is well known byeasterlin well the discovery of the soep by psychologists it happened with adina's wordbut richard lucas and andrew clark they discovered the soep data and published the core resultsfor germany because they looked they centered

live events on the before and after well-beingperiods and they discovered in the mid 2000's this kind of data and well also daniel kahnemanand krueger they report it and replicate it and show this little picture and there reporton well-being in the journal of economic perspective then the discovery of the economist so onhappiness economics started and here you could see well there have been different life eventsand it's their adaption after some years that is a core question but the good thing on thisupdate you can replicate those results for example for the honeymoon results you'll seethe adaption after three years but replication means you get the data and address the sameresearch question but have some new ideas and zimmermann and easterlin they looked notonly when they looked before cohabitation

what select into cohabitation and if you lookfor the baseline before cohabitation then you see there is no adaption so this is thenice thing of such data that they are free of use that you can replicate them and usethem coming back as a resume to the social indicators movement we see a lot of reportsnow we see those figures the wheels and the indicator reports by the oecd and other groupsbut i share the skepticism of tom smith he already published in the 80's we argued wellthe big idea or basic idea of social indicators in the beginning was where we want to shapethe society by our indicators where we will design it by just having the indicators buti think there is the result well only the indicators don't bring you the really empiricalevidence of what how you should design public

policy but of course they are have their valueon just informing the public on the descriptive development of a society and comparative groupswith the society i come to my summary well i think in the european union we have nowsuch established concept of world wide data production also with new social statisticsand social reporting efforts and to evaluate the direction of our society i think we shouldfoster the interdisciplinary discourse of the concepts not only take attention to theeconomists who are like the objective world but also look on the social integration questionof social integration of political sciences and of course the psychology who draws attentionon those puzzles of perception bad but objective conditions good how can this happen i thinkpsychologists have the best expertise for

bringing or untangling these puzzles we needi think access to the data all i reported was either data from official statistics atleast within europe and i know also in the u.s. it's a culture that you get access tothe micro data of also federal statistics and micro data of representative data i wouldclaim well we need also access to data that run very nicely for example by gallup butas a poor phd. student in a small university you will never be able to replicate becausethey are too expensive if you want to get access to those data so i think that's notgood for the scientific development of such indicators and data if you cannot replicateresults with another eye and perspective and i think that fits also to the other presentationsthat the progress of human behavior we need

longitudinal analysis we need heterogeneouspopulations and this is best realized with randomized samples and then of course we cantry if we have treatment groups to make really experimental research but those also studiesthey come at least to quasi-experiments that you have the before and after and can thenmake a test assumptions on the self selection of different events i promote including arich set of psychological indicators and this kind of life course model and if possibleof course not only on a national level but in an international and multi-cultural settingthank you very much it's a pleasure to be here i want to take us a little bit back fromwell being back to deprivation and i want to talk about how to think about behaviorin context of poverty of scarcity more generally

and i'll explain the difference in a minutebut if you look at the literature on poverty most of it is work done with sociologistsand economists and there's basically a debate that goes between one slide that says thatthe poor are perfectly rational the way economists think about most decision makers they considertaking work of not depending on the level of generosity of the benefits programs offeredto them they have more or less children depending on benefits given by the government etc. andthe other side the pathology view that discusses mayopia lack of understanding lack of insightlack of planning culture of poverty etc. and it's interesting to look because there's obviouslyan alternative which would be the one that comes to mind for most people in this roomand most people in this room behavioral scientists

have not been engaged in this debate to alarge extent so one of my things today if i can is to recruit many of us to work morein a context that's of great importance but really has been left to some extent exceptfor a couple of remarkable examples you saw this afternoon has been left to others notthe behavioral researchers where there are important insights to investigate so i'm goingto focus really on kind of the behavioral view of poverty and again i want to just convinceyou poverty is a major issue it's not one that we should have the luxury to leave behindif you look if you take the world banks and the ocd standards of $1.25 dollars a day asthe cutoff for poverty which is a remarkably low measure even in developing countries wereleaving one point four billion people even

below that rate if you move a tiny bit ifyou simply move the poverty line that we assume to be important from one point two five totwo dollars a day you now have more than a third of our population below poverty lineif you go to ten dollars a day a wildly generous estimate the majority of the world populationis in poverty and you know we can talk more about there's something that should be remarkablyembarrassing for a species that considers itself rational in the year 2015 to have mostpeople living in deprivation when we've just seen by the way when you give the rich moremoney doesn't even make them feel any happier and we've done very little so we've been talkingabout poverty a lot in the last two or three decades if you look what happened this givesyou some sense that things are getting better

but a lot of this is due to the chinese whostarted very low and have done a very good job improving conditions if you take chinaout not that much has happened there's about a ten percent improvement on those who geta dollar a day and the rest has moved very little in the last thirty years and againwith something that you can consider of enormous importance now the issues of poverty are complexthey start from global to very individual issues to you know from relationships withnations to countries and towns so we can talk about all of it you may have hear bono walkingaround talking about forgiving debt to developing countries it's a remarkable issue to lookat basically developing countries are paying an enormous enormous amount of money to usthe western world for debt that they owe and

a lot of that debt that we gave them was givento juntas and dictators that wanted a lot of money from the west to give you one examplesouth africa today is paying twenty-two billion dollars a year for money that we generouslygave the apartheid regime so there's a real deep issue here and as we collect the moneyfrom the countries struggling to develop you know that requires international discussionsso i'll limit myself to something that we can think about a little bit more modestlyand something that we can actually do in policy locally look at the u.s. the u.s. is you knowclearly one of the more developed nations in human history we have right now about fiftybillion americans who are below the poverty line the poverty line by almost all estimatesis a crazy low estimate there are a lot of

organizations in the u.s. that estimate theliving wage the living wage is what's assumed to be the minimum amount of money you needto live a minimally acceptable american life in the year 2015 i'll come back to it in aminute and by that standard things are extremely different let me give you just an exampleof how this works so angelique melton is a woman who lives in charlotte north carolinashe makes about $7,500 dollars a year way below the american poverty line the u.s. systemsignificantly less generous than you'd get here nonetheless some and brings her to eighteeneight which brings her above the poverty line so angelique now that she gets these benefitsfrom the u.s. government is no longer in the fifty million that i showed you who are belowthe poverty line she's gotten out of it but

if you look at what a living wage in charlottenorth carolina is of course it depends where you live the living wage for angelique isalmost 34,00 so after all the help and being taken out of the poverty line she's makingabout half of what you would need to be living a minimally acceptable live if you look atthe living wage which most policy makers don't talk about the number of poor struggling inthe u.s. is somewhere around 100 to 150 million somewhere between a third and a half of thepopulation and some of the subjects i'll describe to you are those you've heard some stuff beforethe statistics about i'm giving you the u.s. now because it's not like the other countrieswe saw who are in deeper trouble but the data is kind of baffling so you know if you werean african american kid born in the u.s. today

there's a 90% chance at some point you'llbe on food stamps now again the reason this is so important is because it's not just nothaving money being poor is a deeply financial contextual social psychological situationin which you find yourself and that's what i'm going to try to address today for a fewmoments but again that's what i want to impose on you the importance of thinking about itfrom our perspective and what we might be able to do to alleviate the lives of peoplewho find themselves in those conditions okay one comment i would like to get rid of earlybecause when you give when you work on the poor in the u.s. there's always somebody whosays look what do you mean poor the american poor if you to them to shanghai they'd bemiddle class so what's the big deal and i

want to address that very quickly just toget it out of the way so this is a classic thing you read in the american press theycount how many color tvs as if you could buy black and white if you wanted to today buthow many tvs and blenders and other things the poor have and they suggestion what doyou want they're not really poor the most recent one was done just a couple years agothe heritage foundation again counted tvs and blenders and mixers and all this kindof stuff and said look the poor are not poor and the reason i'm bringing this up is wecan all see sort of where you come from it's true that you're not dying of starvation butthat's not the same as being poor when this came out the heritage foundation report cameout it got lots of press but very little critical

commentary it was just reported look that'swhat the american poor are doing except for a few deep observers of the american scenethose who are not american might not know their names but these are important observersso for example when this came out steve colbert said this report proves that poor are notliving down to our expectations if you still have the strength to brush the flies off youreyeballs you're not really poor now colbert is a comedian and he's being vulgar but that'smore or less what they mean and jon stewart said i never realized the poor people haveit so good in this country no wonder the middle class is pouring into their ranks in drovesand what's so remarkable about this is but all of this was resolved completely 250 yearsearlier so for example if you read adam smith

adam smith has this beautiful passage abouthow it used to be the case you were not expected to wear a nice linen shirt to work now youare expected to wear one if you can't afford it you're poor okay so the standards of whatit takes to live an minimally acceptable life changed from the middle ages to amsterdam2015 but now that those have changed take something like internet which ten years agowas an unthinkable luxury if now the school of your child assumes access to internet todownload her homework and she can't afford it well then you're poor and if grandpa findsthat funny that's cute but it's still the case that now that's what's required to livea minimally acceptable live and that's the definition i'll adhere to i'll take very muchadam smith's advice here and think about the

poor this way when you think about the poorthis way you discover that the poor behave very badly anywhere you look not just thepoor in developing countries but in the u.s. as well if you look at public health we havesolved many problems today in many cases all you have to do is take your medication ontime and there's a big problem in public health people don't adhere to their regimens andtake their medications on time if you look in the literature on public health the poorin developing countries as well are the worst culprits you move all the way to weeding inthe fields of india weeding is a simple activity that increases your income by a substantialamount people fail to weed as much as they should poor farmers as it turns out weed lessthan their neighbors in the field next to

them who are richer parenting there's if yougo to barnes and nobel or some store here there'll be many many books that discuss howthe poor are less good parents less attentive less consistent in their disciplining etc.and in the world of finance it's basically infinite the poor take pay day loans all kindsof very short term high interest loans that they cannot pay back and get into povertytraps and things look terrible so this is the world that we got interested in why thepoor are behaving badly you've seen many things already this afternoon and there's many othersanything from education to financial literacy to deviant values to neighborhood affectsand other things of that sort i'm showing all this because i want to say many of theseno doubt play a role i'm not going to replace

them i'm going to set them aside for a momentthe whole debate about whether it's individual or environment predominates as you heard earlierthis debate i'm going to abstract away from a lot of this and ask what is the psychologyi'm going to look at simply the psychology that emerges when people inhabit context ofnot having enough so that's the agenda this is work that we've done mostly with very dearcollege and friend and economists at harvard sendhil mullainathan and a lot of other studentsand postdocs we've been doing this for a number of years we ended up not where we startedbut where we ended up is roughly the following and that's what i'm going to spend ten minutesto give you a sense for the argument is going to be that when you inhabit context of nothaving enough that generates a particular

psychology and that psychology when you putit in context we don't have enough makes bad things happen okay in particular psychologyis going to be that you focus enormously on juggling you insufficient resources and thatjust leaves you less mind for a lot of other things you need to do with complicated consequencesand poverty traps and the things that are emerge okay that's going to be roughly thestory we use a metaphor and but of course it's not perfect but it will leave you a mnemonicthink about going through life with a suitcase if you are comfortable enough you have a bigenough suitcase and there's some space there's some slack in it things are easy if you wantto pack for a weekend say you go away for a weekend you open up your very bug suit caseyou start tossing things into the suit case

and you're doing this in decreasing orderof importance so you throw in a few things you're not going to take everything in thehouse after thing five or ten you're done didn't take you very long didn't require mucheffort you close the suitcase you're ready now think about the small thing with a verysmall suitcase you open it you start putting things in by thing three or four you're runningout of space and you have to stop thinking about other things you're doing focus on thispacking problem get into trade-offs ask do i take the big shoes or the small shoes youbecome an expert on the size of things it takes a lot more work and when you travelwith a very tightly packed suitcase everything is more complicated as opposed to when youhave a lot of slack there's actually computational

treatments about the packing problem thatare very relevant to this the idea is going to be that you go through life much more preoccupiedjuggling very tight budgets than you do if you have plenty i'll give you one simple intuitiveexample in standard economic treatments scarcity is everywhere every time you buy somethingthat's ten dollars you'll never have again everything is a trade off for many peoplein this room when you buy a cup of coffee or when you have a lunch with a friend youdon't stop to ask what will i not buy instead it's as if you're reaching into a infinitebucket of small expenses the person who sells you the coffee or serves you the lunch oftendoes ask herself repeatedly what will i not be able to do it i do this or if i do thatand the argument is this is going to keep

you busy a lot of the time and we have a lotof data on the poor being very careful in their budgeting and doing a very good jobthey devote a lot of attention to it they spend a lot of time knowing what they're doinglot of old research in marketing if you simply stand outside of a super market and ask peopleokay how much did you spend today how much was the pasta how much was the sauce the richhave no clue and the poor know exactly one thing that i learned that was lovely frommarketing research there is in american supermarkets they claim up to 20% that sounds high to methey claim up to 20% of items in a super market exhibit what's known as a quantities surchargequantity surcharge happens when half a pound of spinach costs $5 and a pound cost 12 soyou should stop and say to me now i'm really

confused and that's exactly i'm not confusedthat's quantity surcharge when you pay more per unit item when you take the bigger asopposed to the smaller box why would you do that you do that because the rich in the supermarket can't bother to check exactly they assume the bigger is a better deal they takeit they put it in the cart and they gave the company a gift what's so interesting is thatquantity surcharge is not found in supermarkets in poor neighborhoods because the poor stopand check they’re focusing on this they say aha two half pounds cost less than a poundi'll but two half pounds there's a lot of evidence that the poor are going through lifeattending carefully this is a study that i really really like so in this study in thecab study we stand outside the south station

in boston and ask people for the householdincome then we ask them when you do into a taxi in boston what does the meter read nowit's not just because clearly the rich take taxis much more often than the poor but they'remuch less likely to know the answer the rich enter the cab and kind of look at the charlesriver and how pretty it is and the poor are doing their calculations and computing theircosts and if you simply ask people what do you think about when you buy a tv the poorare much more likely to report thinking about trade-offs than the rich do so there's a lotof work showing the poor are focusing and juggling very very carefully but that comesat a cost so their argument is going to be when you tunnel when you think a lot and allthe time carefully and preoccupation on the

things that are most urgent other things thatyou know might be important are going to be you are going to lose focus in the peripherywhen you're preoccupied terribly with paying for food for your kids tomorrow you're goingto take that payday loan whose consequence for you is simply outside of the tunnel isgoing to prove to be very grave in the long run that's sort of the idea now a lot of thestuff that we do in the book and other articles is not just about money but i'll spend lesstime on it here so many of you in this room actually are time poor in ways that are verysimilar to my subjects you just don’t have enough time so for example you do a lot oftrade-offs when i ask a lot of you do you want to go to the movies you say what's themovie what will i not do tonight that i'm

going to have to do tomorrow you're doingtrade-offs in your very tight time suitcase temptations are an interesting one that lunchwith a friends for many of us is a completely standard thing to do for the poor it becomesa temptation that needs to be resisted think about time spending a couple of hour withyour kids in today's western world is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for many of us becauseyou've been successful enough spending two hours with your kids at the end of the dayhas become a temptation that you need to resist because it's too much out of your time suitcaseso again some very interesting examples of words similar this one i really like so there'san enormous amount of critique about the poor who cannot afford certain debts they havebuying small gifts for their kids and why

would they spend their money this way andi say to you how many of you right now are sitting on commitments time commitments thatyou know you won’t be able to abide by and if so what are you doing schmoozing here withme you should go back and do a little bit more so very similar very similar affectsand of course in all of these cases what's clear is when you make that mistake it's alot more consequential when you have no slack in the suitcase and things are more costlythan when you have more okay let me give you a couple of examples on the psychology ofscarcity i'll give you one quick story one at alid we do in the book we do a lot of thisit's a beautiful case if you don't know it it's about starvation so when in 1943 whenthe allied forces realized their about to

inherit all the hungry people in camps ineurope they also realized they didn't know how to feed them and feeding the hungry islike you know coming down mountain climbing it's a very important part they hired thisvery distinguished nutritionist ancel keys to do a study about feeding the starving inorder to feed the starving you have to starve them first he got thirty-six remarkable impressiveyoung men who were conscientious objectors and because they were objecting to the goodwar were eager to participate he starves then not to death but to massive discomfort andthere's a lot of data on this a lot of research a lot of things written physically these peopleare in terrible shape but it's not surprising they cannot hold their hands above their headslong enough to wash their hair they’re so

tired they cannot sit without a cushion there'sno padding left etc. but psychologically which is something key's hardly looked at its remarkableto see because basically these guys can't think of anything but food it doesn't makethem happy they don't want to think about food they plan to open restaurants it's kindof comical they compare presses of food items in newspapers they memorize recipes at somepoint the researchers feel so bad they show them a movie and the testimonials from thesubjects are you know they showed me this movie i could care less about the love scenesi wanted to see the meals that's all they can think about and this is very much whatwe're going to propose that somehow when you are dealing with something that's you don'thave enough of that's where your cognitive

resources go they go to by the way both systemone and system two both when you think fast when you think slow but when you choose whatto think about and when you just look at other people's reactions in half a millisecond orhalf a second that's what they think about the things they don't have enough of so hereis one study this is a study done in california with dieters half the participants are dietingfor them food and calories are scarce other are not dieting and as you can see it's aclassic word search with odd number words are cake donut sweets are diet related scarcityrelated and the even number words are controls the other condition we replaced the food relatedwords with neutral cake becomes street donut becomes picture etc. now we're going to takethe dieters and non-dieters and see how long

it takes them to find the same words treecloud that are common to both either in the context of food items of not and what yousee is that for the non-dieters this makes no difference the dieters take a lot longerto find the word cloud when it's proceeded by donut after you see a donut it's literallyhovering in your head when you're looking for the next word and impacts you performanceand if you go to financial issues this is a nice study that looked at people that havefinancial fears and worries you take a group of people shown to have financial fears andworries and a group that didn't at it's a classic strop i simply asked you to name thecolor in which the word appears and what you find is that those who are not worried aboutretirement of course name blue and red just

as quickly but if you were worried about retirementthis is half a second response if you're worried about financial issues it takes you longerto say red than it does to say blue so you're seeing it everywhere from discussions to halfsecond reactions what you are feeling you don't have enough of predominates in somesense your cognitive capacity and attention and this takes us to a study we did at a mallin new jersey we go to shoppers in new jersey and by the way if i forget to mention it laterthese are not none of the people i'll show you here are in object poverty they're justfinancially constrained americans somewhere between fifty and one-hundred million somewherein there we go to these people in the mall we ask them to participate in the study theyagree we put them in front of a computer screen

we're going to show them we're going to showyou financial scenarios that capture very something very similar to everyday life soyour car breaks down it's going to take you some amount of money to fix how are you goingto go about taking care of this problem the scenarios come in two versions manageableand challenging the manageable case the car is going to cost you $100 to fix which weknow for most people in this mall is perfectly doable the challenging is going to cost you$1,500 to fix which we know you'd be amazed by the data for a large proportion of americansthis is a very hard number to come by so that's going to be either 100 or 1,500 to fix whileyou're think about how you're going to take care of this problem just to keep things interestingwe're going to let you play certain games

and then you tell us what you're going todo we divide people by self-reported annual household income into rich and poor just mediansplit rich and poor in the mall the games they get of course are classic instrumentsthat we have used we as an organization as researchers have used for three or four decadesnow so the classic you know some version of cognitive control divide attention test onthe left and a classic you know fluid intelligence raven's matrices on the right they go throughthese tests of cognitive control divided attention fluid intelligence and they report what they'regoing to do and let's look at the results if you look at the cognitive control testthe rich people in the mall those in the high half show no difference in cognitive controlwhether they're worried about the manageable

or the challenging car the poor people inthe mall when they're worried about the manageable car look indistinguishable from the rich butwhen they're worried about the car that's challenging and posing a financial problemthey can't quite handle as easily they lose cognitive control they're distracted moveto fluid intelligence the rich don't care which car they're fixing the poor when they'refixing the manageable car statistically insignificant from the rich when the poor are fixing thedifficult the challenging car they lose fluid intelligence this if you make simple assumptionsabout a normal distribution of iq scores it’s a coincide of about .9 they lost about thirteento fourteen iq points thirteen to fourteen iq points in the american school system isenough to take you from average to borderline

gifted or from average to borderline deficientit's a giant affect if i kept you up all night literally all night like you know with eminemblasting in the background you'd be about nine iq points lower this morning what thisis saying to you is these people who were a minute ago when the car was manageable werejust like their rich friends are now functioning less well than you would with a night withoutsleep okay there's a lot of problems with this study because i mean everything is controlledfor but the american's rich and poor are different people they have different heart rates differentblood pressure etc. so there is some nuances here the dream was can we do this within subjectsand we did these are sugarcane farmers in india sugarcane farmer works in such a waythat you income comes in one shot and because

you fail to smooth you end up being poor beforethe next harvest so now we go to the same dudes the same farmers four months apart twomonths before and two months after harvest give them versions of these strop and othertests these are hand held devices and you find that basically these guys the same peoplenow same education same health when they have plenty function about ten iq points higherthan when they inhabit scarcity i'll tell you one quick study this is the most satisfyingstudy i ever did this is princeton undergraduates who it's hard to make them poor in money butit's pretty easy to make them poor in time so they come to the lab they're randomly assignedto be rich or poor in time in a game they're playing where they earn points depending onhow clever they are and they leave with more

money if they earn more points their verymuch into this there are two condition and one condition you cannot borrow you play theround when the round ends you move to the next one and the borrowing condition whenyou finish a round if you like you can borrow a few extra seconds at predatory lending ratesevery second you take costs you two seconds from the bucket of time available to you it'svery expensive loan how do they do these are people who cannot borrow if you just lookat rounds completed and points earned clearly the rich do a little bit better than the poorwho can talk more about it they should do a lot better than this if they simulated beingpoor because they're not trying as hard but anyway the rich are doing better now let'slet them borrow when you give the rich the

chance to borrow at predatory lending ratesthey're very clever and say this is not worth it it's high interest i'm not doing it whenyou give the poor and by the poor i mean the exact same princeton students who now don'thave enough time the chance t take a payday loan to take predatory lending they grab afew extra they're sure they know the answer to number two they grab two extra secondsthey pay dearly for it and they leave the lab with less money than had they not beenable to borrow and to me the reason it's so satisfying if you in the american contexttaking high interest loans is a paradigm case of the myopic poor and what you're seeinghere has got nothing to do with being poor you take princeton students and put them incontext where there's poverty and they start

doing the things that look so myopic whenthe poor were doing them okay last couple of slides and i'll be done i'm not going tobelabor this point there's and irony to poverty you're functioning with more requirementson your system than otherwise your system is less capable to deal with them and thepunishments for making mistakes are much higher so you know the world is conspired in somesense against you there's a lot of this is policy implication for one thing if you'rea policy maker when you have somebody who has a scarcity of money you have to keep inmind they also there's a scarcity of bandwidth they'll just have less cognitive resourcesavailable to them and that really changes how you might want to do things there's alot of things that we can talk about here's

something that's important from our perspectivethe scarcity you feel is not just how much money you get it's how you use it if i facilitateyour life and demand less cognitive resources from you you can live a better life with thesame amount of money if i make your life more complicated or if i help you less the samechallenges become bigger i can spend a whole evening here tell you about the disastersthat happened to the poor at least in the u.s. here's at least one simple i'm usingexample bank accounts in the u.s. when you have a checking account deposit money in youraccount five days a week and withdraw from your account seven days a week now when youhave enough money that's just a very cute exciting who cares fact but when you are balancinga bank account at near zero that fact imposes

an enormous puzzle on you that never goesaway and like these are many and policy makers when they don't appreciate it are going tomake bad policies as a result and it's going to be a real concern and i'll give you oneexample president clinton instituted a lifetime limit on welfare receipt for five years andthe fives well for five years that's the lifetime limit now i don't think that was clinton'sintention but in light of this ask yourself the following imagine we had a nice afternoonhere and i say to you please write me a one page report due in five years what would youdo nada for four years eleven months and three weeks and then you start planning somethingwhen you are an american poor tunneling in your problems and there's a five year limitthey've built a system that penalizes you

but completely fails to motivate it's completelyoutside your tunnel now how to do it i don't know ten half year limits reminders whatever'sgoing on what we know for a fact is the american poor woke up one morning and found themselvesrunning out of welfare not having had the chance or the mental wherewithal to thinkabout it until it was terribly late and then it takes us things as stupid as forms thisis important what does a long form do just a form for a benefit i'm offering you a benefitand there's a big form to fill when you do standard cause benefit analysis which is whatwe typically teach in policy schools okay a long form is another hour another two hourswhat's my time worth anyway it doesn't make a difference in this view it's all very differentbecause if i don't have enough bandwidth i

don’t have enough cognitive space that formcould become a real obstacle fafsa is one of the most generous benefit programs givenin the u.s. fafsa is aid to go to college that the government gives you it's many thousandsof dollars the take up of eligible americans is about one third very low and then they'vedone studies this is what the form looks like and you know somewhere on page fourteen itreminds you that you're doing this under penalty of perjury in case you misrepresent anythingetc. etc. so you do a study this is a beautiful study that reopose and his colleagues didthe purple is take up and enrollment in college the green they go in and say i know everythingabout you i know your case your parents income you are entitled to 4000 a year here is theform nothing happens version number three

i know everything about you i know your householdincome you're entitled to 4000 a year here is the form let's fill it out together andactually maculation in college not just applications goes up that's one hour at a minimum paidjob to get people to a place where we've spend so much more money 'til now trying to convincethem to go to college which has a lifetime impact so it's just a way of thinking aboutobstacles many of you have seen defaults into saving for retirement basically instrumentswe've build to help people typically not the poor live a more better more sophisticatedlive this is my favorite this is a glow cap it's a fifteen dollar plastic capsule thatcomplains if you don't open it on time to take your medication it screeches it lightsup it sends you and email can calls you on

your cell phone saying open me and the argumentis if you get hiv for example where taking your medication 70% of the time is not 70%good this could have life expectancy implications of many many years this is the people whohave the medication in their pocket and life interferes and so the metaphor i'll leaveyou with is that of a cockpit you know when we train pilots today you can't make themany better what you want to do now is take the best pilots you got and design a cockpitthat allows those you are talented and trying hard to succeed more in their flying and ifyou don't do that if you design cockpits that are not conducive to flight people will crashand that's one way to think about citizens struggling with poverty and for policy makersthis is a really new idea for the following

reason this bandwidth we're talking aboutthis little cognitive system you have is the the only one you have to do you banking lookat your kinds homework remember to take your medication on time it's the only one you haveif i give you a bandwidth gift make your banking easier i've now given you some bandwidth thatyou can use elsewhere you can look kid's homework we don't typically do this if you go to thetreasury department they alter your banking and then come two years later to see how you'redoing on your finances but that might miss something important because once you makemy banking easier i say thank you and i go take my medication on time and that's somethingwe might miss and my last slide i just echo something that cynthia said earlier if youlook at these behavioral studies and you buy

some of the implications of the kind of thingswe all here have been funding that changes things it means that when i give you a longform when i make your bank account deposit money five days and withdraw them seven i'mjust not making your life a little bit more annoying i'm actually hampering your abilityto succeeded and if you look at that that way we are consistently violating basicallythe international bill of human rights that forbids us from doing that in cases wherewe know that something simple to do could lead you to a better place and make you wealthierand happier and that's something that's really deep for us to think about and engage in okaythank you i believe that the cognitive neuroscience kinds of work that i presented are not somuch they don't lead to action items but i

also think that you know if you need a neuroscientistto tell you that children should be safe and not stressed and their families should besupported then you're pretty clueless so i think the neuroscience itself is more in ahelping position to help with the agenda that i think developmental psychology behavioraleconomics and so forth layout alright i'll talk i will not say that again i hope youknow we as scientists and social scientists primarily i guess we all are here have a responsibilityto the world that we study i mean that i think that it's to a certain extent immoral to studypoverty and then not turn around and work at it so my personal view is i've always beenan activist everywhere i go what i say is what i say to my students the person thati meet at the corner the person that i meet

in the tram i mean i'm always advocating forpeople to realize how much privilege we have and how much the privilege that we have isbased on the impression of other people and so that's my personal answer is basicallythat the way that i can live with being an editor and being a scientist and stuff likethat is that every opportunity that i have to make some wrong right to say to somebodywho's in a political power anything like that i just say it at the same time really thestress when you were talking about social indicators they were made in the 1960's i'mfrom that generation and our generation really we did believe that we were going to takeaway sexism racism and poverty we really did believe some of us that there was going tobe a change in the world and inequality in

the world actually has enlarged in the lastyear so i think that all of us should really think about how on a daily basis because ibelieve that you know you can send a check at the end of the year and feel comfortableand great about it but how can you really make a difference in your life is being politicalgetting involved talking to everybody you know empowering people that don't have powerand tell your students that hopefully the next generation will get it better than wedid that would be mine yes it happens all the time that i talk about these things ina scientific meaning but it's alright anybody else well i already said we have all questionsand the question now we have whether we really have a evidence problem or whether there ismore need for bringing knowledge into public

policy and i think that is a core questionand scientists can only help can argue what are the side effects of developments and youhad also some interesting stuff on the poverty issues that if you are poor you still havesome chances and outcomes that are good for society perhaps and for development and tofind this out i think is one of the key questions of the maker of scientific contribution tothis i think that the time of ideology that is passed behind us that also policy has tojustify if they invest public money to report to the tax payer whether this helped in someoutcome and increased the outcome and the hopes of the programs though the justificationalso from politicians has raised i think in the last twenty years to justify that thetax payer money for public policy is invested

in the way that you expect it when you tookthe honey in hand and so and of course some experiments of public policy they showed alsolarge negative affects and you had that reform the welfare reform that you restricted toa time period i'm sure they have been reports that this limitation which will be an optimumbut i think we have to make a cost benefit analysis more in doing our research than wenot only focus on one aspect look also on the side affect of our policies i don't needit what i'd add to this is a couple quick things one we have a science that's not alwaysintuitive not what has an impact or how big the impact might be and for those who arelooking who are compelled to listen and look and consider data some of the data that weas an organization produce we have a lot of

power a lot of impact a lot of surprise factori think another piece of good news is that policies don't work so far and so policy makersare very open to new suggestions they're very frustrated a lot of things they've tried havenot worked well and last thing economists have been in total control of policy and economistsare now much more open thanks to certain behavioral evolutions and behavioral economics there'sa lot much more openness to behavioral input into economics into policy and so if you putthose things together as long as you assume policy makers are well intentioned not thatthey all are but the others we can't convince but those who are well intentioned i thinkare open to input into data and i think a lot of people in this room could do a lotto alter where things go the last thing i

have to say i don't know you look at it ifit's good news or bad news you're not going to alter presidents and prime ministers theplace to start is to talk to mayors to talk to local leaders who can actually implementprograms quickly the mayor of amsterdam as it turns out is very involved in policy relevantprograms right now along with mayors in many other cities around the world and then youknow presidents and heads of nations will come later you know they have less time forit they have less a shorter time to be in office mayors and organizations non for profitsare the ones who can make a big difference thank you although our even technically hasa scarcity of time which will impair my thinking i think we should take a question from theaudience yes can you repeat it i'm saying

these wonderful presentations have failedto explain the personal exceptions of people poor to poverty to many generations of povertywho have changed the world they're the exceptions when cynthia asked how many people here havebeen poor and nobody raised their hand in a universe we know two thirds of the worldare poor that tells you something poor don't get phd's so yes of course here and therebut what are you going to do with that that just argues that it's not worth talking abouthi oh that's better i think this question raises an issues it's related to that issueof kind of biological essentialism biological determinism and so forth that is worry isif we try to make models that explain whether they explain through economic forces psychologicalforces or biological forces explain why as

a generality of people raised in poverty haveless enviable outcomes we're not saying that this is a 100% deterministic you know sentencefor everybody in those circumstances but what we are saying is that it greatly increasesthe chances of these poor outcomes statements you know the whole literature on resilienceright basically talks about i think now more than anything else is relationship right ifyou have a good relationship with a coach or parent or grandparent or something likethat tends to again support the probability that you're going to get out of there butyou know those of us who make it out it's at a very high cost too and that's somethingthat we really need to talk about and its really remarkable to me that most poor peoplethat i know have sort of healthy lives they're

actually more happier in their lives manyof the ones you know my friends who are really struggling when something really good happensit's not that it's going to pass or something like that they really celebrate the good thingsin life and those of us who have so many privileges are quivery and confecting about you knowparticular oh my cell phone died you know we call it what first world mentality thehorrors of first world so you know i'm part of a privileged cast right now and that'sthe way i live my life with sharing everything i have and i admire people who make it outbut i know that that's at a very high cost and that those are the fewer it's problematicit's just not great to leave under the condition that you were saying cognitively in termsof income in terms of well being in terms

of so many things going against you and youstruggling your whole life hi i have the microphone now i was listening to your talks and oneof the things that struck me is about viscous and virtual cycles and as i began to thinkabout that i began to think about systems and i was trying to think about from a policyperspective what is the biggest bang for our buck we could get from looking at systemsand looking at parameters in those systems that would really give us the biggest bangfor our buck so for example in terms of the second talk i was thinking that one of thethings that we know over time over generations if that children young girls have been cominginto puberty earlier and earlier and this is related to diet and exercise and the presencesor absence of fathers and so these things

all act as drivers for some of these viciouscycles and the age of onset of puberty and the age of first sexual debut the age of sexualactivity the age when having a child having young children and so all these things justaccumulate and affect all these other things so i'm wondering in your mind if you thinkabout this systemically what is the thing that we could do that would have the biggestbang for its buck in terms of the system that's really the question eliminate poverty justyou know i mean it's really to me we always try to compensate for it's like we have acancer and we're trying to come up with ways of how do we live with the cancer which iswonderful many more people are living with cancer right now than they used to but youknow my sense would be prevention my sense

would be in you want to deal with early pubertyyou would be empowering poor women you know women who are at risk for getting pregnantto have a different world view alright so i would start the earlier the better i wouldstart with prevention programs and i would start with not education necessarily but openingopportunities so that's why i love the notion of investing in parents so kids can have abetter life and really thinking that if we get parents out of poverty and they can livelives that are not necessarily so demanding than their kids will do better so my senseis early prenatal second grade interventions for something that's going to happen whenthey are fifteen i just i think when you ask for bang for the buck you know i don't knowwhat the buck is exactly i mean a lot of things

you could do don't cost anything you knowfor clinton to have devised the welfare system differently would not have cost more or lessit would have just been different for banks to deposit and take money the same numberof days in the week is cost free the u.s. does a lot of professional training for thepoor the professional training courses begin the first of the month three sections andwe always know that after week two or three many of the students drop out because lifeis complicated imagine instead you have a course begin and the sections start at thefirst of the month the tenth and the twentieth so now when i don't have childcare or i don'thave transportation and i miss a class i can get the next wave the same class the followingweek that doesn't cost more or less it's just

a different design that sort of you scarcityprove and it can make people's lives a lot better so i think some programs can be verycostly and others if you bring in behavioral insight could be very effective without incurringany cost at all it's just a different way of thinking about what works and doesn't iregret especially seeing colleagues in the audience with questions to play my administrativerole and point out that we'll be running out of time eleven minutes ago so i think whatwe should do is to thank our speakers one more time for getting this convention offto a very remarkable start thank you