 Hello, it's wonderful to welcome you here today. I'm Carol Christ, I'm the Chancellor. Good afternoon, thank you for this opportunity to join and welcome you to the Berkeley campus this afternoon for this terrific annual event which has been on a two-year hiatus. So it's wonderful to be able to be gathered together for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. We're honored to be one of only nine universities from around the world that are selected to host this lecture series each year. The other universities are Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Utah. This series was founded in 1978 by the American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist, Ober Clark Tanner, who was also a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Utah and an honorary fellow of the British Academy. Tanner's goal in establishing the lectures through the Tanner Philanthropies was to promote the search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. He hoped that the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in the area of human values and contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind. One need only conduct a cursory review of the headlines in recent years to know that Tanner's objectives and concerns are still very relevant. I also appreciate that the Tanner Lectures Board and our university share a common interest in and dedication to using understanding and education in service of the greater good. So too do we share his capacious perspective that human values should be defined as broadly as possible. Thus the Tanner Lectures may be chosen from any discipline, giving lectures, and the lectureships transcend national, religious, and ideological divides and distinctions. The Tanner Lectures are chosen not by virtue of their perspectives, but for their uncommon achievement and outstanding abilities in the field of human values. The lectures from all nine universities are published in an annual volume. In addition, Oxford University Press publishes a series of books based on the Berkeley Tanner Lectures. The 13th and 14th volumes of the series were published in 2021. Here at Berkeley, the Tanner Lecturer is appointed through a faculty committee of which the chancellor is the putative chair I've actually never met with this committee. So it's a kind of ideal committee. But I congratulate my colleagues who actually do the work. Professors Jay Wallace, Hannah Ginsberg, Christopher Coots, Ken Chokstra, Nico Kolodny, Kavis Goodman, Stefan Ludwig Hoffman, and Rebecca McLennan for their brilliant choice of the 2019-2020 Tanner Lecture. Carolyn Hockspie, this lecture has been delayed some two years, so I'm particularly eager to hear it today. Now let me call on my distinguished colleague, Professor Ken Chokstra, to introduce Carolyn Hockspie and today's commentator. He will also moderate the discussion. Thank you very much, Chancellor Christ. And we're deeply grateful to the chancellor for her support for our vision for these lectures. And thank you all to you hearty attendees who've turned out today. In November of 1885, far-sighted visionaries founded Leland Stanford Junior University, apparently in order to provide a steady supply of excellent guest lecturers for the University of California. And generally speaking, it has lived up to this purpose admirably. Never more so than in giving us the periodic honor of learning from Professor Caroline Hockspie. Professor Hockspie, the Scott and Donia Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford is a woman of really extraordinary accomplishments. Her stellar degrees and titles are listed in the program and in any way known to many of you. And the honors she has received are many, many, many. Rather than relisting these, I will just briefly characterize her impact as threefold. First, she has made impressive intellectual contributions to economics as an academic field. In this work, she draws upon models of market design, investment in incentives, optimal pricing, finance, behavioral economics, and social insurance theory. Second, trained as a public finance and labor economist, Professor Hockspie has brought her expertise to bear in particular on the economics of education in a wide range of policy relevant and indeed policy ready ways. Examples include her studies of charter schools, class size, teacher unionization, teacher incentives, peer influence on educational outcomes, teach for America, and the connection between education and economic growth. Third, her research has provided the foundation for really inspirational, direct, political, and economic intervention. The example of this with which I am most familiar is her expanding college opportunities project, which was designed to study and then take concrete steps to address what's called a matching problem. The problem is that high achieving, low income students frequently do not apply to competitive colleges for which they would be good candidates for admission. Despite the fact that those colleges would frequently cost them less than the colleges to which they do apply, if any. Professor Hockspie and her team showed that investment of a few dollars to put this information about likelihood of admission and likely funding in front of those students themselves has huge effects on low income student admissions and funding. This program and some imitators has been changing lives and furthering justice. For that work, Professor Hockspie was awarded a Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award. Years before, John Legend or John Krasinski or Lil Nas X won their Smithsonian Ingenuity Awards. She's received numerous other awards that I won't list, but I will mention that these include a number of substantial awards for teaching and advising and not just for research. Her research focuses on the student and above all the poor student and it's satisfyingly fitting that she is an outstandingly dedicated teacher. When I last heard Professor Hockspie speak at Berkeley on the research underlying the Expanding College Opportunities Project, I was struck then that she called it an attempt to harvest low hanging fruit. There is, I'm trained as a philosopher and I do think that there's a place for modeling justice and for envisioning wholesale change. But there's certainly also a place for work that is transformative for many people that is also politically feasible in the near term. And that's what her matching project had in its sights. And I think of her analysis and proposals today as akin to such an effort for optimizing transformative but realizable change. And I join you all in looking forward to her Tanner lecture on the fork in the road, the imperative of investing in adolescent education. Please join me in welcoming our Tanner lecturer, Professor Caroline Hockspie. Thank you, thank you Chancellor and thank you Professor Hockstrap. And this is my first Tanner lecture. So I'm showing you, I hope you can all hear me. I'm showing you actually brain synapses here that are taken from a slide of the human brain like a little slice that's stained so that you can see the synapses. And we're gonna look at a few other ones. More synapses, more synapses. More colorful synapses. Some of the images that we're gonna look at today. All right, so I think I'm kind of double mic'd. Can you turn off one of them? So is that gonna be okay? Does that sound echo-y? All right, sorry. Sorry, the podium mic is still showing that it's on. Should I have both of the mics on? Okay, so I thought I would just start this lecture by giving you a preview of where I'm going in my Tanner lectures. And in this first lecture, I'm going to argue that it's critical for society's health that a much, much larger share of the American public acquire advanced cognitive skills. And I will define what those are in a minute. Of course, advanced cognitive skills are needed at a top-flight research university like Berkeley, but they're also needed for economic growth, reducing inequality, reducing polarization, and many other outcomes, including health and crime. I'm going to discuss the hypothesis that skills grow endogenously, so that those by which I mean, those who acquire skills early on in their lives benefit more from educational experiences so that they create trajectories that grow further and further apart with age. Okay, that's endogenous skill growth. Next, I'm going to talk about what neuroscience has concluded about the ages at which various types of skills develop, and I'm going to emphasize the importance of early adolescence. I am not a specialist in brain development, unlike my commentator, Sylvia Pooja. So this is going to be a non-specialists review, and I hope that I get it right in the essentials, and then she'll correct me when I get it wrong, okay? I'm gonna show you some educational evidence that will hopefully convince you that the crucial age, which I'm going to call the fork in the road, is early adolescence for the development of advanced cognitive skills, and this evidence is in line with recent neuroscience. However, at the end of this first lecture, today's lecture, I will not yet have shown you that we could do anything to actually change whether the share of early adolescents who develop advanced cognitive skills could change. So I'm going to try to convince you of that in my second lecture, tomorrow's lecture. In tomorrow's lecture, I will provide evidence from three policy experiments or natural experiments, that's what economists like to call them, natural experiments, that at least some educational interventions are indeed more productive when we apply them to early adolescents as opposed to younger students or older students. And that is what I'm trying to make the point of in that second lecture is, if we make the interventions at the right stage during early adolescence, then they're more likely to take the fork in the road that leads to more advanced cognitive skills. I will also show you that ironically, early adolescents compared with both younger and older students suffer from having very poor educational resources. They are the least invested in of all of the students, at least in the United States. And this relative impoverishment is unintentional, but it is still a big problem. And then finally, at the end of the second lecture, I want to return to the themes that I am about, with which I'm about to start on having a larger share of the population, acquire advanced cognitive skills and how crucial that is for social health. As you know, the third session is kind of a seminar style, so there's gonna be time for lots of commentary, discussion and questions. Let's get started. So what are advanced cognitive skills? Advanced cognitive skills are skills that require higher order reasoning. They require a capacity to solve problems through logic, to think in the abstract, to engage in critical thinking, and to derive general principles from a set of facts. They are integrative skills. They are synthesizing skills. Advanced cognitive skills are important for planning. Advanced cognitive skills can also be meaningfully differentiated from skills that involve things like memorization, summarization, organization of facts and other methods that we use to acquire concrete information. These distinctions between advanced cognitive skills and less advanced skills have been recognized for many years and they now have attracted a vast body of research. So a couple of examples may be helpful instead of just the abstraction. For instance, arithmetic does not really require advanced cognitive skills, but algebra does require advanced cognitive skills. So think about the difference between arithmetic, adding up an equation and algebra. Algebra requires a person to translate a problem into equations and then you solve the equations to find a solution. That's algebra, right? So it requires abstract thinking and obviously the math that follows subsequent to algebra, things like trigonometry and calculus and so on, also require advanced cognitive skills. Now let's think about history. So advanced cognitive skills are not really required to learn historical facts or to organize them around historical events or historical personages, but advanced cognitive skills are required for an analysis of cause and effect by engaging in critical thinking, drawing abstract generalizations, understanding strategy and integrating over historical materials. So that's the difference between advanced and non-advanced cognitive skills. So why are advanced cognitive skills increasingly necessary to the health of our society? Well, owing to technological change and the globalization of trade, advanced cognitive skills are increasingly important to obtaining a remunerative job in the United States and in other highly developed countries too. It's not just us. Computers, robots and even artificial intelligence can perform many tasks that were previously performed by people and such substitution of computer-based technology for people is really unlikely to reverse itself in the coming decades. Regarding globalization, if we think about a country like Bangladesh, say, textile products can be made in Bangladesh just as well as they can be made in the United States but workers' wages there are far, far lower than we would need to survive in America because we have a much higher cost of living. Southeast Asia and Africa both have vast and elastic supplies of potential labor and that's combined with much lower costs of living. And then finally, I will just point out and I think you all know this for yourselves that the speed of economic change appears to be increasing so that you need advanced cognitive skills to keep learning new skills over the course of your career. You can't just stay with the skills that you had when you graduated from college. In other words, most people with advanced cognitive skills need them not only to work but to learn new skills in order to stay productive over the course of their lifetimes. So I started with a whole bunch of economic reasons why we should care about who does and does not develop advanced cognitive skills but that's not because I think economic remuneration is the only thing that matters or that good jobs are the only thing that matters. Rather, I think that some of society's problems stem from Americans not having the prospect of a career that is economically rewarding. According to the US program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, this is by far the best measure of cognitive skills among adults in the United States or elsewhere in the world. They do this all around the world. Only 10% of Americans have advanced numeracy or math related skills and only 14% of Americans have advanced literacy or reading verbal related skills. Or we can take data from another test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Its most recent data indicate that only 3% of 12th graders in the United States score at the advanced level in math and only 6% score at the advanced level in reading. And even if we set the bar significantly lower at the bar of just proficiency, not advanced but just proficient, only about a third of 12th graders reach proficiency in the United States in the 12th grade. So with statistics like this, is it really any wonder that many Americans feel cut off from a future in which they will hold remunerative and stable jobs? Is it any wonder that people who feel that they might have very little prospect of holding such a job might develop economic fatalism? That's a phrase that I'm going to use a bit because I think it's very important. Economic fatalism, it describes the idea that I'm never going to make it in this economy. I'm never going to have a remunerative job. I'm never going to make it to the middle class. My kids are never going to have the same opportunities as other people's kids. That's economic fatalism. So people who have economic fatalism might develop some other counterproductive coping mechanisms, for instance, substance abuse, resentment towards elites, so-called elites or even crime. So political polarization is another consequence potentially. So I'm going to show you now a little bit about polarization in the United States. This is the share of adults who have advanced cognitive skills. And let me just point out, okay, that's where we are. We have a lot of advanced cognitive skills because this is San Francisco and you'll notice those Bostonians and New Yorkers over there, they have a lot of advanced cognitive skills too. All right, so what about these other areas? I've circled in red, Appalachia, which you'll notice is quite light in color and that's because there are not very many people with advanced cognitive skills. Don't worry too much about the scale. Just know that the lighter is fewer advanced cognitive skills. This is the Ozarks and this is what I call the inland south. So it's not the coastal south, but it's the inland south. And there's also a kind of dearth of advanced cognitive skills in that area. So it's very, there is polarization in the, and don't worry about these places like New Mexico, Arizona, Utah. There are no people there, that's just desert. Okay, so you can see that there are differences in the density of advanced cognitive skills across the United States. So is it any wonder that people might not see the same way when it comes to politics or many other social things if they in fact have very different levels of skill and project themselves as having very different levels of future economic activity. I'm gonna show you a couple more maps at the end of my talk today, but that's the one for right now. So let me tell you about the theory of endogenous skill growth. So the economists are kind of obsessed with the idea of endogenous skill growth. It's been popular in economics for decades and it's really very simple. It goes like this. If people acquire skills, including non-cognitive skills, it could be your skill in a sport or it could be your ability to speak Spanish or something like that, then if you acquire it when you're young, then every time you come across an experience where you could learn more, you learn more from that experience than somebody who starts off at a lower level. So it's kind of like saying, if you learn to play soccer when you're a kid, every time you see a soccer ball, you learn more from hitting that soccer ball than somebody who doesn't know how to play soccer at all. Or it could be you learn more words because your parents start you off by teaching you more words. Maybe they use more words. And so then the next time a word comes up and you don't know what it is in a sentence, you're able to say, oh, from context, it must mean this, okay? That's endogenous skill growth. I hope everyone understands it. So it's something about I learn more because I started off in knowing more. So how does endogenous skill growth work if we look at it in a stylized figure? Here we have age going across the horizontal axis. So age three, age six, age nine, age 12, 15, 18. And we have cognitive skill on the vertical axis. This is a stylized figure. This is not data. And we have two groups of people. We have the purple children and the green children. And you'll notice that they start off at slightly different levels of cognitive skill when they're three years old. And then the children who are in green grow at a higher rate every single year in terms of their cognitive skills than the children who are in purple, okay? That's endogenous skill growth. I start off at a higher level, so I grow faster, right? Let's contrast this with what it would look like if we just started off with students, they start off at different levels, but they grow at the same rate all the time, okay? So this is not endogenous skill growth. This is, right? And if we look at, if we go on to think about what would happen in early adolescence potentially, sorry, mask. So the stylized groups that I showed you, sorry, this clicker is backwards to me. The stylized graph that I showed you starts off with, they're at different levels, and then they grow at different rates over time, right? And this makes it look like whatever you are at age three is fate, right? If you're lower down at age three, you're just going to be on a different trajectory than if you're at a higher stage at age three. And the groups just diverge, and then they never come back together. But what if there is an increase in the rate of divergence and it happens at adolescence? Then what we're going to see is something that looks more like this, so that you notice that the green group sort of takes off on a higher level, and the purple group really flattens out and doesn't learn very much in the way of cognitive skills after a certain age. And so, sorry, I'm having trouble with the clicker. So this shows you the difference between having the two groups start to diverge more at early adolescence. And I'm going to show you in just a moment that when we look at data on cognitive skills, it's going to look more like divergence starts to happen in early adolescence, unless like the dotted lines where they don't increasingly diverge in early adolescence. All right, so how did I get interested in this topic? I get interested in this topic essentially because I kept seeing data that showed something that looked like divergence occurring during adolescence in terms of cognitive skills with some students really stalling and some students taking off at a higher rate in early adolescence. And therefore, I eventually decided that I ought to maybe read some neuroscience or neuropsychology so that I would understand what's going on in a human's brain. And I'm going to read this quotation. This is from Lawrence Steinberg, who's a professor in Pennsylvania. And it just at length, just because I think it's so useful for thinking about what it is that I'm talking about in this lecture. And I know that Sylvia is going to give really terrific commentary on neuroscience as well tomorrow. So the abilities that develop in adolescence are not as necessary for survival as those that develop early in life. You can live without being able to reason logically, plan ahead or control your emotions. Unlike elementary skills, whose development is tightly regulated by pre-programmed biology, evolution left more room for variation in the development of complex abilities. That's why there is so much variation in how different people reason, plan for the future and control their emotions, but far less variation in how well people see, hear, and walk. I think that's crucial here. That there's something when we all, not all, but most of us learn how to walk, most of us learn how to see, most of us learn how to hear and distinguish noises from say conversation or something like that. But there is a lot of variation in how well people reason. And the argument that he's making here is that that's partly because that development of brain activity takes place somewhat later and is less pre-programmed for us. Okay, in the past, not all environments demanded advanced cognitive abilities, but in today's world where formal education is increasingly important for success, people who are bad at reasoning, planning, and self-regulation are at a serious disadvantage. And the fact that the development of these abilities is highly sensitive to environmental influence is a mixed blessing. And then finally, let me just emphasize this last sentence. For people in favorable circumstances during early adolescence, that's what he's referring to here, the plasticity of these brain systems is wonderful, but for those who are not in such circumstances, this same plasticity can be disastrous. So in other words, this is a time when your brain is changing. And therefore it's a time when we can potentially intervene for good, but if we do not intervene for good, we can, things can go the other way. Okay. So advanced cognitive skills are generally associated with the frontal lobe of your brain. This is right up here, the prefrontal cortex. And this has particularly important growth during adolescence. Now, I think there is some controversy about whether this is a second stage of Synapse development and pruning, which I'm about to talk about in one moment, or whether it's a continuation of the active brain development that's going on from the time you're born, or actually before you're born. But what is pretty clear, and I don't think is controversial, and this is what is necessary for my argument, is that this is one of the last periods when your brain is developing really rapidly. So Sylvia described it to me in a call as the door is closing on your brain during adolescence. You have this period, you're still plastic, you still have the ability to do all kinds of things, but if you don't take advantage of it, then the door is closing. Okay, so that's how I think about it. During adolescence, your frontal lobe, which has previously undergone exuberant growth of neural circuits, remember I showed you those neural circuits, intensely prunes synapses. So that means essentially, it's a lot like, the word pruning is very specific. It's like taking a shrub or a tree, and you decide which are the branches that are going to be the ones that are strong, and you prune off the ones that are weak. And that allows the synapses that are strong to have more electricity going through them, and they're stronger as a result. So it's just as one might prune a tree or a shrub. And then pruning is followed by a process called myelination, which is the development of a specialized membrane around the axons in your brain. Myelination essentially speeds up the circuits. You can tell I'm not a brain specialist here. It essentially speeds up the circuits that remain after the pruning. And intuitively to me, as somebody who does electrical wiring, but not pruning, but not myelination, it's a lot like taking a circuit and you wrap the rubber around the circuit so that then you can send more electricity across the circuit more safely. So myelination to me, that's how I like to think about it. And these stages, synapse generation, then pruning and myelination are kind of like, you make all the possibilities for the brain, then you train the brain about which priorities to have, that's the pruning, and then you make the brain work faster. So whenever the brain is more plastic, it is more susceptible to experience and it makes more changes when you're able to learn something more. So it could be like you're going to a better school and that could matter if your brain is more plastic. So people have emphasized a great deal in the past the importance of early childhood. And I certainly do not, I'm not trying to deemphasize that because synapse growth, pruning and myelination do begin before birth with the caudal brain cell, which is kind of the back of your brain. And then it's almost just though, gradually they reach the front of your brain. So development of your sensor motor skills, your perennial skills and your temporal cortex follow, those are kind of more like your central brain. And the most rapid and intense period of your back and central brain have already occurred by the time you're about two years old. So that's why people tend to say zero to three, that's the crucial period. So the key stages of brain development such as pruning and myelination do occur both in very early childhood and throughout adolescence, but the period that your frontal cortex may be the most affected is during early adolescence, which sort of depends on how you think about it. So these are again slices of brain cells, brain that have been stained so that you can see the synapse formation. So here we have a newborn three months, six months, two years, four years, and notice between two years and four years, the synapses are decreasing, not increasing, that's the pruning, okay? That synapse is actually being removed as we, this is supposed to be early adolescence and late adolescence. And if you look at the two between early and late adolescence, you'll notice again, synapses are disappearing, they're not being created. And that's because there's pruning going on during that period of time. So the window is shutting. This is adapted from a recent neuroscience paper in which the authors try to predict when you have your most important brain development at different ages. And I'll just note for you that the blue line is your sensory motor cortex that's about understanding of things like that, walking, that sort of thing. The next one is your temporal cortex and your parietal cortex. And that's more like knowing where you are in space and time, things like that. And then your prefrontal cortex that's up here where your advanced cognitive skills generally develop. And you'll notice that both the height of the line shows you when you're getting the most new synapses and then when they're being pruned. And myelination is going on the whole time. So look at this, the key thing to look at here is as we look at the adolescent years, you can really see that that's this sort of closing of the window as you're going through that. Okay, so neuroscientists and neuropsychologists generally identify adolescence as a period of both great opportunity and great risk. And I'm going to just quote from Lauren Steinberg a little bit more, because I can't resist. The childhood developmental period from birth to about age 10 focuses on learning how to be a human being, learning to move, to communicate and to master basic cultural knowledge and social skills. And the adolescent development period focuses on learning how to be a productive human being. Until recently it was believed that no period of development came close to the early years in terms of the potential impact of experience on the brain. Because the brain approaches its adult size by the age of 10 or so, many had assumed that brain development was more or less complete before adolescence even began. We know now, however, that internal transformations in brain anatomy and activity are not always reflected in the organ's outward appearance or size. Adolescence is a period of brain growth that is far more sensitive to experience than anyone previously imagined. So, I know that this is a little bit controversial, but I think what's not controversial is that adolescence is still an important part of the brain developmental period. It's not too late. And so what he suggests is that we should revisit our steadfast belief and the unique importance of the first years of life. And while the brain is specially malleable during the first few years of life, and it does lose this malleability after infancy, we still have brain plasticity during adolescence. And I'll come back and talk about that in a moment. Why do I think adolescence is so important? Okay, this is kind of sort of saying the same thing. I just wanted to emphasize the last sentence here. The fact that the adolescent brain is malleable is both good and bad news. As neuroscientists are fond of saying, plasticity cuts both ways. By this, they mean that the brain's malleability makes adolescence a period of tremendous opportunity and tremendous risk. Feels both ways. All right, so remember that I showed you some stylized figures before where I said, what happens to cognitive abilities as we age? And this is the sort of graph that I showed you, right? And I speculated that maybe adolescence was a key period because some students or children, the green ones sort of took off during early adolescence. And some children, the purple ones, really flatlined. Or just didn't learn very much during early adolescence and afterwards. When we look at real data, okay, it's not as pretty as my stylized graphs. On the horizontal axis, we have age. So this is age five, six and a half, eight and a half, 10 and a half, 13 and a half. This is about eighth grade. 15 and a half, that's about 10th grade. 17 and a half, that's the average age of a 12th grader in the United States. We're just looking at the reading scores here for females and I can tell you that the math scores and the scores for males are not going to be all that different. So what do we see here? What we see is that first of all, students who start off, children who start off a little better are doing better over time. They have faster growth. So that would be consistent with endogenous growth, right? These are the two top desciples, I should say. So these are the top students, the top 10% of students in the United States. These are the second to top percent of students. So between the 10th and the 20th percentile and then these are the two bottom desciples. So this is the lowest achievers. And there is a difference at age five. You can already see there's a difference and you can also see that the students who start off at a higher level at age five end up growing faster over time. So that's endogenous skill growth, right? Okay, what I was trying to draw, I wanted to draw your attention to this important period of time. So here we have age eight and a half, age 10 and a half. And you can see that they're actually growing at about the same rate between age eight and a half and about 10 and a half, right? And then somehow something happens between age 10 and a half and 13 and a half where these students who are in the bottom desciples just stop making any progress at all. And in fact, they kind of lose some progress over time towards the very end of their high school years. Whereas these students, the students who are gonna make it into the top desciples are students who they really start taking off between 10 and a half and 13 and a half. And then they just keep going and they're growing faster and faster. And so the difference between the bottom desciples and the top desciples grows a lot over time. But it particularly somehow this divergence just happens during adolescence. And this is not specific to females in reading. It's actually prevalent for males and also for math skills. And I think that this type of evidence is really useful because neuroscientists do wonderful randomized control trials where they will give some children an experience and hope that they are able to see cognitive development and brain development occurring in the children who are in the randomized control trials. Or sometimes they look at children who self-select into experiences. So if you join the chess club or you join the model UN or you're very into speech and debate in high school, maybe that's not accidental. It could be that you are the sort of child who really wants to be in math club or who really wants to be a participant in that sort of thing. So is it that those activities stimulate your prefrontal cortex or was it that your prefrontal cortex was already stimulated and so then you decided to do chess club and math club and whatever else, the model UN. And so instead I'm gonna be showing you data today and then tomorrow's lecture two in which we look at real data from real educational experiences that students routinely undergo and we are gonna see whether adolescents benefit from those more or whether there are really divergences among students who do or do not take off during adolescence. And I think that it's important to use, to my mind, it's important to talk about actual educational interventions because I think that's what we really are able to do and control is to put people in different schools with different settings. So to create this figure that I've just shown you, I use a bunch of longitudinal studies from the National Center for Education Statistics. I'm not going to name them all. They cover all of the relevant ages and the first type of evidence that I've just shown you here is really how much this looks like the stylized graph, right? Where you see some people really taking off during adolescence or we're not taking off. So what we're gonna do is just look briefly at these cognitive skill trajectories and let me just point out one thing about the trajectories is that I want to understand where you end up. So at age 17 and a half, where you're in high school, you're at the end of high school and I'm tracing people back, okay? So if you were at in this highest and I'm in the second-decile here at age 17 and a half, I'm gonna trace you back until you're a five-year-old, right? So that's the way this graph works. If you're in the second-decile here, I'm tracing you back until you're five years old, okay? So that's the way this graph works. So this figure shows reading scores and for females. And I'm not showing you the intermediate dust house because they make the graph look too messy, frankly. This is for males and you can see it looks very similar in reading. They sort of take off or they don't take off at this same point in time. There's females and this is now math performance, not reading performance. And you can see that there are differences. Math and reading don't follow exactly the same trajectories, but we can still see that somehow during early adolescence, if you don't get to students during that period of time, they're not going to be on the higher trajectories because otherwise they sort of flat line after that. And this is males for math performance. So I take a few things away from all of these figures. Although they are less tidy than my lovely purple and green stylized figure, which looked so neat. It really, the lines do suggest that there's something going on in early adolescence where you either end up on the high growth trajectory or the low growth trajectory. And so I think that it comes back to this quotation that I had earlier. With regard to vulnerability, I'm sorry, this did not give you earlier, but it is a good quotation. It's from a different author, Chapman. With regard to vulnerability, the years when adolescents are in middle school, which is the fifth through the ninth grades, represent a period metaphorically referred to as a transitional black hole in education. So if we think back to a graph like this, you can see that those middle school years are somehow the years when you either make the transition to being on the high growth trajectory or you just don't make any progress after that. I often remind people of the fact that the most commonly taken college class in the United States is algebra one. And you might think, well, how can most students in the United States be taking algebra one? It's because they took it in seventh grade. They took it in eighth grade. They took it in ninth grade. They took it in tenth grade. They took it in eleventh grade. They took it in twelfth grade. They get to college and someone says, you need to take algebra one again, okay? Because they haven't actually learned it. And that it is by far the most commonly taken university or college class in the United States. And that's kind of the students who are just flatlining after eighth grade. They're really not learning any math. They're doing about the same thing that they would have done when they were in the seventh grade. Okay, so just to sum up where we are, I think these figures are consistent with early adolescence being a period in which cognitive skill growth either accelerates or it stalls. And the figures are also consistent with endogenous skill growth. Because I showed you that if you start off with slightly better initial conditions, you do end up on a higher trajectory. And we talked about the fact that middle school was potentially a bit of a black hole. Now I want to show you a different type of evidence which is about another quotation that I gave you earlier, which is that the doors closing as we go through adolescence. And that skill trajectory is really hardened after this age. In other words, if you haven't managed to get into one of the top deciles, you're probably not going to get into one of the top deciles. Okay, so that's what I'm calling the hardening of your trajectory. And I'm going to again use a bunch of longitudinal surveys sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics. So let me explain how one of these matrices works. On the rows, this is for age one and a half to ages three and a half. So these are like infants or toddlers. And this is the worst decile, decile one. The top decile is decile 10, okay? So as we go down here, what we're doing is we're dividing up the one and a half year olds into 10 deciles of mental acuity. One and a half year olds don't read or do math, so they're just tested on mental acuity. Okay, and as we go across the columns, what we're doing is we're going from the bottom decile at age three and a half all the way up to the top decile at three and a half. Okay, now this doesn't like, you're looking at this and you're thinking, I don't see anything here. This looks just like a bunch of sort of font colored, pink colored squares with little numbers in them. That's okay, because you're not supposed to be able to see anything. All right, so the idea is though, that if I started as a one and a half year old in decile one, and I was always going to be in decile one again when I was three and a half years old, then 100% of the probability would be here. So this number instead of being 13.5 would be 100, okay? And if we look, for instance, let's look across decile eight for the one and a half year olds, you can see that they have a 7.2% probability of ending up in decile one. They have an 8.7% probability of ending up in decile four. They have a 9.8% probability of ending up in decile seven and between a 12% and a 15% probability of ending up in deciles nine or 10. So the children who start off better off at age one and a half, they are more likely to end up in higher deciles, but they're not all that much more likely, right? Because you'll notice a lot of the probability is not on the diagonal, it's off the diagonal. So that's why the whole thing looks like it's kind of just blurry, right? So if we look from age one and a half to ages three and a half, there's not very much pattern. Most of the numbers are kind of close to 10%, which means essentially there's not very much of a pattern. And if you look at the majority of the probability, about 90% of the probability is off the diagonal. Okay, so that's telling you that for the most part, if you start off as a one and a half year old, you can end up wherever you like as a three and a half year old, not quite, but that's about right. So the differences in probabilities are relatively small at that age. So children we know in this age range, one and a half to three and a half are still highly plastic in terms of their brain development. So now let's look, that was females, they're males, you can see it doesn't look very different. Now let's look from age eight and a half to age 10 and a half. So this is grade three approximately and that's grade five. So now we're getting close to adolescence, but we're not really in early adolescence yet. So grade five is not really early adolescence. You can already begin to see that you can pick out the diagonal, right? And that's the sign of the trajectories hardening. So you'll notice that somebody who starts out in Decile one has an almost 50% probability of ending up in Decile one. And someone who starts out in Decile 10 has a more than 50% probability of ending up in Decile 10. So you can start to pick out this diagonal. That's the trajectories hardening up. It's harder and harder to transition as you get older. But still there's a lot going on off the diagonal. So the off diagonal cells contain about 75% of the probability now. It's down from about 90%, but there's still quite a lot of off diagonal activity. That was females, there's males, looks very similar. Now as we get into early adolescence age 10 and a half, so that's about grade five to grade eight, which is about 13.5 on average in terms of years. You will see that the diagonal is becoming more and more prominent. So if we look at this one row again, this is the people who started off in Decile eight, they now have a 0% probability of ending up in Decile one. And they used to be almost a 10% probability. Or ending up in Decile four, they only have a 1.3% probability of ending up there. And you'll notice that they have now started to have a pretty high probability of ending up where they started. Which is most of the action is kind of in Decile seven through nine. So they started in Decile eight, they kind of end up in Decile seven through nine. So you can see that something is hardening up. They're now on a stiffer and stiffer trajectory. They're less and less likely to transition to being either a low achiever or a significantly higher achiever. That's for females. This is for males, looks very similar. And then finally, as we get to ages 15 and a half to age 17 and a half, so these are sort of 10th graders going down the rows and 12th graders going across the top. You'll notice that the diagonal is now really, really strong. So essentially someone who starts off in the 10th Decile has a more than 70% probability of staying in the 10th Decile for over 10th grade to 12th grade. And you can just see how strong the diagonal, you can just pick it out really easily. And even someone in the 9th Decile, their probability of remaining in the 9th Decile is over 40%. If you start off in the 1st Decile at age 15 and a half, you're gonna probably be there in the 1st Decile again at age 17 and a half. So these trajectories are really hardening over time. And that's this shutting of the window, right? But essentially you're not going, these children are not very plastic after a certain age. So earlier on I quoted you from Lauren Steinberg, not only is the brain more plastic during adolescence than in the years that immediately preceded, but it is also more plastic than in the years that follow it. And this is this drop in plasticity that we see as we go from adolescence afterwards. So I guess what I'm trying to make the point of here with these transition matrices is the idea that students' cognitive trajectories do get sort of locked in. And after a certain point, they are past the fork in the road. That's not to say that there's no brain development that occurs after the age of 15 and a half because that's certainly not true, but that the window is closing, the door is closing. And so we need to try to get students when they're still adolescents. And if we neglect it, then we're neglecting one of our last and potentially most productive opportunities to transform a person's trajectory. So finally, I want to talk a little bit about economic fatalism and whether all of these things, you've been looking at a lot of cognitive scores, you've looked at reading scores, you've looked at math scores, you've looked at scores of mental acuity. Do any of these scores actually matter for anything later in life? Well, the answer is yes. And it's not unreasonable for people to actually recognize that as they get to adulthood, if they are lacking in advanced cognitive skills, that they will probably, I'm not talking about causality, I'm talking about association, probably have worse outcomes. So for instance, if we compare students who score in the highest versus the lowest assiles on those 12th grade tests, the ones that are shown here across the columns, then those people in the highest assile have 63.3% probability of obtaining a BA by the time they're 26 years old, as opposed to only a 2.9% probability for those in the lowest assile. And the high assile students have a good probability of also attaining a graduate degree, whereas the lowest assile students have literally a zero probability of obtaining a graduate degree. High assile students have much more income in their mid 30s, about 237% of the income of lowest assile students. And even in their mid 20s, they have significantly higher income, despite the fact that many of them are still in graduate school. High assile students, if you ask them, they say that they have greater job satisfaction, they believe that their jobs are more secure, they're less worried about losing their jobs, and they have lower incidents of a whole bunch of behaviors that might indicate that they are suffering from economic fatalism. So for instance, they're less likely to have unstable family lives, like partner breakups. They're less likely to indulge in binge drinking, substance abuse, smoking, and I could go on and on. There are a whole bunch of outcomes like this where we can see that possibly what is causing them to feel this way is that they don't feel that there is as much hope for the future. So I believe that economic fatalism, the sense of being shut out of a future of prosperity and feeling valued by society and by the economy is potentially responsible for some degree of polarization that we see in the United States for dysfunction and for resentment of so-called elites. So I'm gonna show you just two maps that are helpful for thinking about political polarization and resentment of elites. The first one is this one. This is the share of voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, not 2020, because the 2020 map is not out yet. And it's by county again. So you may recall that earlier on, I showed you a map of advanced cognitive skills in the United States and that we could pick out Appalachia, which was very light in color. And it's right here. And the Ozarks right there. And you'll notice that it's almost like a mirror image that for people who live in these areas, they are not surrounded by a lot of other people with advanced cognitive skills. And so it's no wonder that they may feel like, oh, this economy is moving away from me in the United States. All the good jobs are in places over here that are very pale, okay? The coastal elites are over here and people in Appalachia are maybe feeling depressed about their situation. I should mention that this is part of another paper that Eric Hurst, who's one of my commentators, has read very carefully previously and that this represents political polarization, which I think is important. But it's also interesting to note that even in areas that have low cognitive skills in general, you can always pick out the college towns because they are, you can find them if you look, if you know where to find it, Huntsville, Alabama, you can find the University of West Virginia and West Virginia. And so it's not as though there are no people with high cognitive skills in these states, there are, but they're very concentrated often in a few college towns. So it's the political polarization that you can see, the coasts really stand out from other areas of the country. Another map that I'd like to show you is the share who agree that most scientists think that the climate is changing. Okay, so first of all, let me, yes, isn't this a bizarre? This is a weird question. This is not, do you think that the climate is changing? This is, do you think that scientists think that the climate is changing? So this has a yes or no answer. Okay, it turns out the answer is yes. 90 for 90 some percent of scientists think that the climate is changing. So there's really no doubt about the answer to this question. But so what they're asking people is essentially, do you think that you ought to listen to scientists or do you think that you ought to pay attention to what scientists think or something like that? It's not whether you think the climate is changing, it is whether you think scientists think the climate is changing. Okay, so I hope that's clear. All right, and so what you'll notice is again, we're back to this sort of look where you can pick out Appalachia right there and you can pick out the Ozarks right over here and you can pick out all of the same places where people, I would say people probably are resentful of elites. They're resentful of scientists. They don't want to believe what scientists think. Okay, so I picked that question because there is a yes or no answer and I don't have to rule on whether climate, the climate is changing or not. So I'm definitely not the sort of person you should ask about that, just an economist. All right, so if we don't want to have economic fatalism and polarization and resentment of elites and other societal dysfunctions, then we should want to have as few as possible young adults sense that when they get to be about 18 or 19 somehow without knowing it, without realizing it, they have passed the fork in the road so that there's no way now for them to catch up with others or at least it's going to be very difficult for them to catch up with others. And I truly believe, I really do believe that this situation can be transformed for many people who are now at the fork in the road. In other words, they're still in their adolescence or earlier. So I wish to emphasize, just finishing up now, that I see adolescence as an age of opportunity. I see it as an age of unusual plasticity in a good way, not in a negative way. Perhaps this is just a matter of my personal outlook, but I see the glass as half full, not half empty. And let me emphasize one thing that I really like about adolescence that we could not say of toddlers and infants. If you are the parent of a toddler or an infant and I say to you, I would like to take your toddler infant and train your child differently than you were going to train him or her, you probably are going to say, you're not taking my toddler, okay? You're not removing that toddler from my house. Actually, adolescents are already removed from their houses. They're in these, they're in schools for lots of hours a day. They are in custodial care. They are a captive audience. And so therefore, they're in some ways a much more malleable group of people. Even if their brains are not more malleable, they're in a situation where they can be affected much more easily than we can affect a toddler or an eight month old or something like that. So I see opportunity for people to achieve. I don't want to focus on the non-achievement of adolescents, some adolescents. Instead, I truly believe that the majority, and I think actually the vast, vast majority of Americans can attain advanced cognitive skills. But if we are to be able to do this, then we can't neglect the crucial period of adolescence. We need to concentrate attention on adolescents, on middle schoolers, on fifth through ninth graders. We need to be conscious of whether they're experiencing the best teachers, the most challenging curricula and the extracurricular activities that tend to foster cognitive development. So it's one thing to try to identify early adolescence as a key period when students should start developing advanced cognitive skills. And it is one thing to conclude, just as a matter of logic, that successful educational interventions might be especially productive at this age, but it's a completely different thing to be able to show you that there are realistic educational interventions that would be especially productive if they were implemented in early adolescence. And that is what I'm going to try to do in my second lecture, tomorrow's lecture. Smart money, educational investments in adolescence earn higher returns. So thank you. Thank you for a very stimulating first lecture. Because Professor Hawksby kept so well at the time, we have time for 10 minutes, and we'll reconvene, is it 5.15 just now? We'll reconvene at 5.25 for Professor Müller's first comment. Thank you. All right, welcome back. I'm pleased to welcome our first commentator for this year's 10-year lectures. This is fellow political theorist Jan Werner Müller, the Roger Williams Strauss Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Professor Müller works on the history of modern political thought and on democratic theory. He also plays a very active role as a public intellectual of the intellectual variety. His several books include his 2007 Constitutional Patriotism, A History of Political, and then A History of Political Thought entitled Contesting Democracy, Political Ideas in 20th Century Europe from 2011. His most popular book, What is Populism? from 2016, which has been translated or is being translated into more than 20 languages. And a bracing recent book entitled Democracy Rules published last year. Professor Müller is currently writing a book on architecture and democracy based on his own Tanner lectures, which were delivered at the University of Cambridge some five years ago. When I asked Professor Müller if there was anything in particular he might wish me to say an introduction, he replied, the less said, the better. Well, I prefer to attribute this to his modesty rather than taking it as anything personally directed at me. The requisite brevity does mean that we will accordingly have somewhat more time to listen to Professor Müller himself to whose commentary we now turn. Please join me in welcoming Professor Jan Müller. Thank you, Kimsch, for the kind introduction. Nothing to do with you whatsoever. It may have had something to do with, shall I say, some of our colleagues who would insist that all their prizes from elementary school must be mentioned too on these occasions. So first of all, thank you generally to the committee for having me. It's a huge honor to be a commentator for this very, very interesting, very instructive set of lectures from which I've learned a great deal. The good news is that I'm utterly persuaded by Caroline's arguments and evidence. The bad news is that this might not mean much, given that I'm not an economist, I'm not a neuroscientist, and my research in education is generally confined to fieldwork among three children who happen to be my own and who happen to be in middle school right now. But what I think I can offer is a little bit about the larger political picture. And in particular, what I want to do is offer three sets of remarks. First, I'll try to draw out three particular implications for what Caroline has been referring to as economic fatalism. Secondly, I want to say a little bit about that much contested concept of populism and how it relates to polarization and various political pathologies in our age. And then lastly, taking off from the fact that in this country, not necessarily everywhere, debates about education themselves have become absorbed into a political conflict between populists and, shall we say, anti-populists, I want to sort of at least gesture at possible ways in which we could have these debates without potentially having pernicious effects on our democracies. So first chapter of my brief remarks, economic fatalism. So as you all know, there's plenty of talk these days about democratic decay, crisis of democracy, a book per week about this crisis, and so on. But if you look at the research by fellow political scientists who have done the most interesting work on these questions and who also very often have cautioned us not to have all these inflationary talk about crisis, not every policy challenge is a crisis of democracy. But those who've looked at what is happening very closely have indeed pinpointed two factors which they think are new and which do indeed spell trouble for our democracies. I'm thinking in particular of the work of NYU's Adam Chaworsky, arguably the world's most important comparative politics scholar. So Chaworsky has said, well, one thing that is new and for him at least very troubling is an unprecedented degree of instability in party systems. One can certainly debate that point, you may as well also say that actually as societies change, why shouldn't we have new parties, new party systems, and so on. I'll leave that aside for the moment and focus on the other point that he has made. He has said that for the first time in the history of modern democracies, you have very clear majorities in a whole range of countries who do indeed think, who are utterly convinced that their children are going to be worse off than themselves. And this for Chaworsky and for many others is indeed very bad news. Why? Well, for one thing, it raises the stakes of elections. If the kids are not going to be all right, elections are about more things, and more particularly, and we have fairly strong empirical evidence for this, once you have societies which have become very polarized, where it's really about us versus them, those in one group very often are more willing to basically put up with very clear violations of democratic norms. It's not true that people don't know what's going on, or that they don't know what democratic norms are, but they are in a sense saying so much is at stake, and it's either us or them that they are basically willing to go along with democratic norm violators. And related to that, one thing that is so absolutely crucial for democracy, and alas in this country after 2020 and 2021, probably doesn't need a hell of a lot of elaboration, namely losers' consent, the fact that those who lose elections are willing to say yes, we accept it, we'll try again next time, that also becomes more problematic because so much is at stake, and you have in a sense so much to lose because your outlook on the future is so bleak. Secondly, some of you may already have been thinking but wait a minute, some of these elements of crisis in democracy today is not just economic, surely it's also cultural, which as you all know, very often can be euphemism for ethnic, racist, all kinds of other stuff going on. And that's true, except that I think many of us are by now convinced that this sort of debate that we had for a couple of years, oh, is it more economic, is it more cultural? In a sense, more is about a false choice. It sort of assumes that there is a need separation to begin with when in fact, the economic is also always cultural in certain ways. Work is never just work. Work is never just about income, at the risk of saying the obvious, what's at stake is also self-respect. What is at stake is a sense of social reciprocity that you are involved in a larger scheme of social cooperation, questions of self-realization. Are at stake, especially in the United States, there's a long history of how work is also bound up with basic conceptions, normative conceptions of citizenship. So that's all a long-winded way of saying the obvious in order to then make the perhaps also obvious point that as understandings of work change and as certain sets of practices are seen as less valuable and as certain virtues that may have been associated with certain forms of work. Endurance, courage, all kinds of things become less important in comparison to those who have advanced cognitive skills, those who feel themselves to be on the losing end very often, as you all know, do indeed feel resentful. And they feel that this is not a kind of inevitable development. This is not going along with Tony Blair's famous or for some people infamous formulation where he said, look, globalization, it's like the weather or it's like the year. We're not going to debate whether the fall follows the summer. It's inevitable. You would just all have to get on board with it. Plenty of people, of course, feel that no, this is still a social or maybe even political decision, how we think about work. And if this doesn't seem blindingly obvious, just think about how people think about care work and how that is or is not thought of as worthwhile, as validated in certain ways, not to speak of how it's remunerated or not. So resentment matters, I completely agree, except that I think there's a story that leads from resentment to something that can be clearly worse. Resentment isn't a terribly sort of positive term to begin with, but if you go back to thinkers like, let's say Adam Smith in the 18th century and various other moral psychologists, they would have said, look, resentment is not something necessarily bad. It can be a reflection of the fact that people have a sense of justice and that they think that something unjust is going on and that's why they rightfully resent certain other, certain other people. But you fast forward to a famous, for some people still infamous 19th century philosopher, also a supreme moral psychologist, Friedrich Nietzsche. And all of a sudden we get from this kind of maybe justified resentment to what Nietzsche always conscious of using the French term here, called ressentiment, which had a very particular meaning for him and which I partly was reminded of when I read Caroline's first lecture and when I thought, look, the fatalism in a certain way seems very justified. It's true that the door has closed, the windows have closed, there's not for many people really a fork in the road anymore, it's a one way street and it's one that is not gonna lead to a happy place. And that sort of made me think of Nietzsche's insight that well, sometimes those who are objectively in a worse situation or are weak or have no real power might also be tempted to engage in what Nietzsche again, famously or infamously for some people called a great politics of revenge where you really don't wanna take it out on the more successful, the more powerful and so on. And this might hold an insight for our time because if you think about plenty of right-wing populist actors and parties when they finally come to power, you feel like all they really end up doing is a certain kind of trolling. It's sort of annoying powerful people owning the libs if I may use that sort of formulation. No real constructive policymaking whatsoever but a kind of resentful revengeful in certain ways approach to politics. But before going down further this dark and possibly for many reasons obscure path in the history of ideas, let me bring it back to the present day and also remind ourselves that of course we must be careful with some of these generalizations. In many countries, it's actually not empirically the case that the most disadvantaged actually vote for what can plausibly be called populist, especially right-wing populist parties. In many countries, the most disadvantaged don't vote at all. And this can lead to a sort of vicious circle where because certain people don't vote, political parties also don't care about them and less and less is going to be on offer for them. And the more likely it is that they will check out of the political system altogether. And furthermore, it's maybe also worth reminding ourselves that plenty of times it's very advantaged people who help, especially right-wing populist actors to come to power. This might be a bit of a stretch as a generalization and maybe some of you later on wanna challenge me on it. But I think it remains true that up until today, nowhere in Western Europe or in North America with a possible exception of Italy has a right-wing populist party or politician to come to power without the collaboration, I used the term quite consciously with all its historical connotations, without the collaboration of very established conservative elites. So we should always be careful with this idea that populism is so obviously the revenge of the disadvantaged, the revenge of those who have no prospects, who see a road that will lead to nowhere. That can be part of the picture, I'm not doubting that. But if we think of the most sort of obvious success stories of right-wing populists today, there's always also something else going on. And we shouldn't forget about that, that other thing. Which brings me to my second and I hasten to add much briefer chapter. So I've used the term populism as if it was self-evident. But as you all know, our era has seen an absolutely inflationary use of that term. And what I would like to make plausible to you and at the risk of going against the kind of established historical semantics around populism, where as you all know, this goes back to the late 19th century, often refers to an idea that this is about, you know, Main Street against Wall Street, critique of elites, against that rather general understanding of the term, I'd like to put forward something somewhat more narrow. And want to make it plausible to you that yes, it's true that populists criticize elites, especially criticize governments when they themselves happen not to be in government. But that especially if you think that there might be something politically or even morally problematic about populism, then this in and of itself doesn't really seem to be enough to claim that this is somehow dangerous. Because I think up until recently, any good civic educator would have told us that keeping an eye on the powerful is actually a sign of being a good democratic citizen. And all of a sudden at the beginning of the 21st century, we hear day and night, oh dangerous populists because they constantly criticize elites. But what's wrong with criticizing elites? Is that in and of itself such a bad and dangerous thing for democracy? No, but the point is that at least in my view, populists will also always do something else. They're going to claim that they and only they represent what they often refer to as the real people or also the silent majority. And what follows from this kind of claim, a claim not really made by so-called ordinary people, as if there were any others, but usually by political leaders and parties is that they then usually proceed to claim that all other contenders for political power are fundamentally illegitimate and more particularly corrupt. So it's never just about a policy disagreement or even a disagreement about values, which is completely normal, ideally even productive in a democracy, no, it's always saying that the others are, to coin a phrase, crooked characters. And then maybe less obviously, another consequence, once you've invoked the real people, and I can see from your face that I'm not telling you anything new, is that you are of course implying that some people aren't quite real, that some people among the people themselves are at best second rate citizens or perhaps don't truly belong at all and perhaps should just, if you forgive that expression, should just go back to their shit-hole countries. So this is I think what is pernicious about populism and it's related potentially to questions of education, not I hasten to add in the sense that all voters of these kinds of parties necessarily must be irrational, but especially in the United States. It's basically become very typical to absorb different positions on education into these sorts of practices or to put it more bluntly, into a certain type of culture war. I only remind you of a particular phrase that I'm pretty sure everybody remembers. I love the poorly educated. That's another way of saying, okay, we're gonna structure a political conflict around questions of education, such that all of a sudden being educated, being poorly educated, takes on a particular cultural and larger political meaning. And I dare say the United States is somewhat unusual in this regard. This is not true, let's say, of right-wing populists everywhere. If I think about the country from which I come originally, the right-wing populist party then on its candidate list for parliamentary elections, you know what they put there? With in front of all their candidates, professor-doctor, professor-doctor, professor-doctor. Here, this would be the case of death in many cases, I dare say. There, it's a sign that yes, this is a great party. If all your candidates are professors, you can't go, you can't possibly go wrong. So I think it's a specific challenge in this context. How we somehow move to a way of doing poor conflict that doesn't end up making education and important policy innovations, like you're putting forward, sort of the plaything of populist slash anti-populist anti-populist forces. And here's my modest suggestion in this regard. It is, of course, entirely legitimate to have debates, disagreements, conflicts around some of these, some of these questions. There's not gonna be a uniquely correct technocratic answer to solve all the problems today. And contrary to, to put it bluntly, the kind of communitarian kitsch that we read so often where people say, oh, democracy is only the case. If everybody is super civil and we don't ever really disagree, that's of course not democracy. Democracy is not about consensus. Democracy is about conflict. But the question is, how is conflict done? How is conflict rendered compatible with basic elements of democracy? And I think two very basic requirements are first, that in conflicts around democracy, you don't deny the standing of the other side. You may really strongly disagree, but you don't insinuate that others don't truly belong or don't really have standing to speak in a certain, in a certain debate. And this, I think, can come out in a particularly pernicious way with regard to education. When so-called cosmopolitan elites, and we all know what cosmopolitan can be shortened for in this, in this context, who are also highly educated, who hence don't truly belong, are citizens of the world, and so on, where basically they're standing in a certain way is being denied in some debates. I'm not whining like, oh, why is everybody denying, denying our standing and so on, but you see hopefully what I'm trying to get in terms of how this is a boundary that must be observed in conflict, and you can still disagree on many, many other points. And secondly, and if there are any journalists in the room, I think they will now break out into hearty, spontaneous laughter to kind of make conflict work and productive, we do need some basic agreement about some basic facts. So we've heard a lot of very, very instructive things about facts, at least I find it hard to disagree with a lot of what you showed us and come away and think, no, we could really have a sort of fundamental debate about whether this is a plausible story or not. What follows from this in terms of policy, who pays for what, I mean, that's all a political debate, which can be entirely open, can involve fairly, fairly deep disagreements, that's completely fine. But if we can't have a minimal set of facts in common, if to pick up one of your examples, if you tell me, look, climate does nothing going on, this is all made up, all the Chinese are telling us propaganda or whatever, how are we gonna have anything that could be remotely be seen as a productive political conflict? We can't see each other as legitimate adversaries because you're gonna tell me that there's nothing to talk about. This is all not true, not the case, no facts to even have different interpretations of and so on. So there are obviously many, many other requirements for democracy, but these are two I would highlight. So don't deny the standing of the other side, don't insinuate that they don't really belong in certain ways and try as hard as you can to kind of stick with at least some facts, as among many others Hannah Arendt taught us, facts are not opinions, you can still have plenty of opinions about the facts. Again, this doesn't mean that we have to have consensus, but if we don't have anything in common anymore that we can talk about empirically, gets very, very difficult to do conflict in a sort of democratic way. I apologize if this is not super helpful for how you take your research further, but I hope it's been somewhat interesting at least in terms of how we can think more broadly about the populism, polarization, and also in particular the economic fatalism picture. Thank you for your attention. So first of all, I want to thank Jan Werner, for his comments. Thank you very much. Tremendously interesting. Let me just highlight a couple of things that he talked about to which I'd like to be able to respond. The first, one of the first points he made is about how if you do not believe that your children will necessarily be better off than you are, it raises the stakes all the time in politics, because you think it's not just me, it's not just me, it's also my children. Somehow they are fated to not be any better off than I am, or maybe they're even fated to be worse off than I am. And I think that economic fatalism is, that's the essence of it. It is not so much that people can't, they can't face the fact that maybe I won't ever have the best job, but they somehow believe I've already made a mistake. I'm still a young adult, I have my whole life in front of me, and I can't see much of a future for myself. And furthermore, I have this toddler, and I think that my toddler is going to be even worse off than I am today, because all of the manufacturing jobs in my area are disappearing or something like that. So I think that it just raises the stakes a lot, and it makes people feel like this is a pie. The pie is going to be divided up. I'm gonna be getting a smaller and smaller size of the pie, my children will get an even smaller size of the pie, so they won't be able to survive in this expensive country. And it just, okay, whatever. I guess I'm an optimistic person, it just does not have to be like that, right? You know, when we talk about advanced cognitive skills, one of the things that I'd like to remind people is it's not, they're not that advanced. So if you take the test for, it's called the PIAC, that's the adult competency test for numeracy and literacy, the last time I showed it to people, people laughed at this test, and they said, these are not hard questions. I think Eric will remember that I have some questions in a previous paper of mine. People just said, these are hard questions, these are not advanced skills, these are very easy skills, right? So it is, when we talk about Americans being able to achieve advanced cognitive skills, what we're talking about is a reasonable level of cognitive achievement that most people can master. We're not talking about everyone becoming a physicist at Caltech or a mathematical theorist or someone who's as brilliant as Jan Verner. So we're talking about a modest level of achievement that is possible for the vast majority of Americans. We spend the most money on education of any country in the world on a per pupil basis. So we should be able to get, and we have an amazing, amazing array of colleges and universities in the United States that serve all different sorts of levels of achievement, not just the highest achievers, but there are all kinds of different colleges here, community colleges, vocational and technical schools. We have all kinds of different levels of education for in higher education. And so I think it's, I just don't see this idea that we have to be doomed to have the haves and the have nots in education. I believe that the vast majority of us can just be the haves when it comes to having cognitive skills. And there's, you know, every year there are many people who migrate to the United States from other countries. And part of the reason they migrate here is that they know that our economy has a constant demand for people with cognitive skills. And so many of the smartest people in the United States, many of the most skilled people in the United States are not born in the United States. They come from someplace else. So we clearly have opportunities for people who want to come to our economy and be part of it. Many of my most prominent graduate students were not born in the United States. There's one of them in the room and he's brilliant. So yes, raise your hand. You can say you're brilliant. He's brilliant. So I think that therefore what I really, really agree with Jan Werner's ideas about populism, about setting people aside who are elites and saying essentially they're not real people. They don't have real opinions. They're not valuable Americans. I agree with everything he said, but I would like us to not have the next generation be so much like this generation. I, you know, I often, one of the frustrating things about working on education is that people will often ask me, oh, is this educational intervention working? It's an educational intervention for, say, two-year-olds or something like that for three-year-olds. I think, well, you know, you have to let them grow up first so that we can see. So, but children actually do change quickly. They don't change that quickly. Okay, you can't do an intervention with three-year-olds and have them turn into 18-year-olds overnight. But they, you know, today's 12-year-olds are going to be 18 in six years. It's not that long, right? Six years is not a really long time. So if we somehow managed to do better with all of the 12-year-olds, then we would have six years from now, we would have a bunch of 18-year-olds who would have different skills, potentially. And so it's not that long. And we need to try to, we need to try to make the changes while we still can. And I'm convinced that they can be made. I really think that we can make these skills change. And what I'll try to convince you of tomorrow is that we at least know some ways of changing children's cognitive skills when they're young. But thank you very, very much for the comments. They are a little dark. But let's hope that we can get to a better place. And I can show you some maps of the United States that show everyone having been about equal. It just shows how far we've come when political scientists are darker in comparison to the dismal science. And all this is... We are the dismal science, by the way. So it's truly... So I'm going to stand over here to make clear that I don't have anything to say, but also so that I can see questioners. Yes, you're up first. I'm up tomorrow and I'll promise that we don't. And oh, just one second. Before we get to your darkness, we're gonna switch this microphone from questioner to questioner. It's on already. Perfect. So my darkness will come tomorrow. But I wanted to ask a question that's at the intersection of Jan and Caroline's comment. So there's other surveys that are about, parents seem not to want to think that a college education is right for their children or some sort of thing. And so how do we do some of these interventions if we're gonna try to think about maybe in the school when the parents themselves aren't being bought in? And that kind of ties together some of what Jan was talking about and that. So how do we think about when we get towards policy, the buy-in from the households even if we're getting interventions are in the school? Okay, so the way I think about it is this, and we're gonna talk about this a little bit tomorrow, that one of the most important persons in a child's life is his or her teacher in school. And those people are almost always college educated. Basically, you can't be a teacher in the United States unless you're college educated. And so maybe your parents don't have the buy-in. Maybe they say, I thought that this working in the minds or working in this manufacturing job or something else is the way I see the world. And I don't think you need to go to college or anything like that. But you are exposed to some other people. One of the most important people is your teacher. So we're gonna see tomorrow that teachers make a huge difference to children. And that's one of the reasons why I think when we actually have kids in schools, having them, they're a captive audience for that teacher. So that teacher can express herself. I'm not gonna talk about this tomorrow, but Teach for America, which I'm sure many of you have heard about is a program that takes students who go to often very prestigious colleges and universities and it sends them into schools where most of the students are very disadvantaged and they come from places like Berkeley or Stanford or wherever. And we can show that they really raise the aspirations of the children whom they encounter because they are young people themselves, typically. They've just gotten out of college and they say, I went to this kind of school. Maybe I came from a type of disadvantaged background like yours, but you can go on to a good college or university and we can really see that they actually raise kids' aspirations. So I think that that's probably the most direct route. But parents can be a problem, let's be honest. Some parents are wonderfully encouraging about their kids going on. I do, as someone who works on education, I do worry about people who say we should not have kids going to college at all in the United States. College is a total waste of time and so forth and so on. That's just not realistic about the way the economy is changing. The economy is changing so much in the favor of those who have college or university education or at least some sort of vocational or practical education that's post-secondary. And so advising people, don't do this, don't get this seems to me like it's fine for some, but it's a really bad idea for most people, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so I completely defer to Carolyn of course on the actual interventions. I would just stress that this is of course also a question of larger cultural frames. And these shift over times, they can be manipulated. So you'll be surprised to hear that I'm not an expert on West Virginia and the cultural status of coal mining, but I've heard it often enough from colleagues that I said, look, in the old days it was clear that nobody wanted their kids to be a miner. And then the whole Friends of Coal campaign started and all of a sudden the lifestyle was validated and glorified in certain ways. So that's also part of what in a sense can, to put it bluntly, can go wrong. And it's maybe also worth emphasizing that we sometimes are just tempted to kind of take certain cultural, supposedly cultural differences as quays are given on natural. So if you, every second New York Times column is gonna be about, oh, the Midwest, the heartland, bicoastal elites and it's so horrible that we have all these divisions, et cetera. As if this was just a given and if other countries didn't have cultural divisions they didn't come out politically in quite the same pernicious way. So I think anybody who talks about polarization or these sorts of divisions without taking into account that polarization is also big business. What's the medium with which Americans spend most time? It's radio. What happens on talk radio? Well, I know this can all sound slightly cliche, but it's gotta be part of that story. And obviously it's very hard to push back against some of that. It's also sometimes very tempting to kind of say, oh, but I wanna know more, but who's gonna tell me more? Oh, JD Vance, right? So he's now the official spokesperson for Appalachia. Nevermind what he says today and so on. And that is also very convenient for short-hand liberal elites to sort of take one particular story, which on one level is very critical of them. And again, we've neglected all these people. At the same time, it's sort of perversely flattering. And the same thing sort of happened after Brexit in the UK and other countries, where then liberals kind of end up saying, oh, if only we reoriented ourselves now completely and no white male can have a quiet diner in the Midwest without being surrounded by 10 anthropologists, five sociologists, five reporters from the New York Times and so on. It's sort of this contrition that's performed at the same time it's perversely flattering because then these liberals think it's still all about us, right? So if we did this, the world would change. If we didn't do it, it would change as well. So I think all of which is a long-winded way of saying this is enormously complex and clearly not amenable to quick fixes or changes, but that plays a huge role too. And I'm not sure that one has really figured out how to approach this in a way that's neither condescending nor falls into the trap of taking certain things at face value, but in fact, they're not sort of cultural givens. Jay Wallace. Yeah, thank you very much, Caroline, for a wonderful initial lecture. I guess I just wanted to hear a little bit more about the connection between improvements in the cognitive skills of citizens and contemporary democracies and fatalism. I mean, it seems like even if we succeeded through the kind of interventions that you're interested in promoting and improving the cognitive skills of adolescents, there's still gonna be differences. There's still gonna be people who are in the top desal or in the lower desal. If we keep the higher education sector at its current size, that seems like it's just gonna result in more competition for a scarcity of places at universities. And it seems like, so for those improvements in cognitive skills to really generate a sense of economic opportunity, one thing you might think is that we'd also need to couple them with dramatic increases in the availability of higher education for a better qualified population. And even if we pulled that off, maybe that's part of the ultimate program here, is there reason to believe that there would be attractive economic opportunities for all of those people who are graduating universities with their higher cognitive skills or would there still be a structural scarcity of attractive positions that wouldn't get us out of the rut that you're ultimately interested in addressing in some way? Okay, so a couple of answers. The first is that of the cohort that is graduating from high school, say this year, about 85% of them will attempt to go to college or university. That means that they'll start college or university. About 25% of them will graduate by the time they're age 25, 26. So the vast majority of people in the United States actually try to go to college or university and they just fail, okay? They leave, they drop out. So I don't see there being, and it's not that they want to fail, it's that if you come to, they actually want to try, which is why they're doing it, right? And they're spending money or they're taking out student loans or they're using up their Pell Grant or whatever, but they're spending someone's money to go to college or university. They want to succeed, but if you have gotten to the age of 18 and you are still really behind in terms of your cognitive skills, college or university is just hard, right? And it's less controlled as an environment than high school is. In high school, your parents sort of make you go to high school in the morning. You have to stay there. You're not supposed to leave in the middle of the day and do something else. And you get to, you know, you go home at the end of the day and they have you there sort of as a captive person for six hours a day. That is not true when you go to college. You can never show up to class. You can not do what you're supposed to do. You cannot take the right classes. You have all of these choices and people make them very badly. And so that's, I worry less about, oh, we're going to have these crowded colleges and universities overflowing with people. When we get to that point in time, I'll worry about that, that point in time. It just isn't true today. What we have is a lot of people who start college and then they drop out after their first year or after the first semester or something like that. The most common time to drop out is just as long as you have taken out a whole bunch of student loans for your first year and then you leave. And you do not have a degree and you probably didn't pick up much in the way of skills. And so I don't worry about that, the sort of overabundance. There was one period of time when people worried that we had too many college educated people in the United States. There were some famous books. I'm looking at Hillary Hoynes because she probably remembers some of them called Like the Over-Educated American was a famous book by Richard Friedman. However, that was the only book that was ever given that title. And it's because it was such a short period of time. It was basically during the Vietnam War when a lot of people decided to go to college or university who would not otherwise have gone to college or university. And finally, I'll just make one additional point. And that is that although we have a big population in the United States, even if we had a college graduation rate that was let's say 60% instead of more like 25-ish percent, we still would not be supplying that much of the world-skilled population because we're just not that big a population relative to the rest of the world. There are a lot more people who are going to compete for manual labor jobs and things like that. And we could educate a lot more of the American public and we wouldn't crowd ourselves. I'm pretty confident. First Hillary Hoynes and then Hannah Ginsburg. Thank you so much. I wanted to go back to that stylized diagram you showed us in the beginning. And I think I understand why you were telling a story that seemed in some ways to pit against each other the endogenous growth model talked about so much in the early years versus what's happening in adolescence. I think I understand why you set it up that way. But it's not obvious to me that they couldn't both be taking place. I think obviously you kind of talked about that in your comments, but if you just look at the empirical diagram that you, the data that you showed us with respect to the tests it looks like if anything the endogenous growth is much more important in the adolescent years. That is you, it is the case that at the initial condition as at age 11 then you see much greater growth of those that's come into that age with more skills. So why isn't that also endogenous growth I suppose? It's just about when it's happening. All right, so I completely agree. I definitely think that the endogenous growth doesn't have to be true, right? It's a theory about you were sort of started off with advantages and then you have faster growth every year. It seems to really, there's a spurt in adolescence, but it definitely starts earlier as well. So it's not, these are not two mutually exclusive theories. Rather it is, I guess what I would like to, endogenous growth just does seem to be true in education. You start off with advantages and you seem to then have faster growth with every year. And that sort of, a lot of people feel that that's true too. Like you take your child to school and your child reads better and so your child learns more in class and it's just easier to learn things. So that probably starts very, very early. But I think the point that I'm trying to make is that it doesn't end early. It's still going on when you have kids in adolescence. And I think that, well, you and I both do a lot of the economics of children and childhood. And a lot of people emphasize this idea that by the time the child is three or four, it's kind of all over. And that's the point that I was trying to make is not that it doesn't matter what happens to you up until the age of three, it matters a great deal what happens to you at that age. But it's not all over. We can, we still have an opportunity to try to intervene with, there's still an important growth opportunity. And some of it does happen relatively late. So that's kind of the idea. So if I can just tell a little story, I, well, I guess I'm gonna tell part of this story tomorrow too, but I'll say it, I'll say a bit of it today. When I teach early childhood education in my class, I teach the economics of education. I always have students who say, they're very disappointed, weirdly enough, that everything is not determined by the age of three. And I always think, why are you disappointed that this is not true? And they say, well, because somehow it would mean that you knew exactly when you needed to intervene, you could just do it at this one age and it would be great and then you'd be fine. And I always say, no, it's like the fact that there's still a lot to be determined after this age is a good thing because you don't have all the two-year-olds in front of you able to give them the most meaningful, rich education. But they're always disappointed every time. It's always this weird thing where I have to walk them back from this level of disappointment that the regression does not have an R squared of 100% on what you were like when you were two. Yeah, thank you very much. That was terrific. So one of the things that was so impressive about your results were the way that you've got these two apparently independent but converging sets of data, one lot of data from neuroscience and the other lot of data from children's performance on tests. But I was curious to know whether for you, one of these sources of data is more important or whether you can say something more specific about how you see the relation between them? For example, whether you think there are problems with one set of data which are addressed by bringing in the other set of data? So I guess that I, the way I think about it now, looking backwards is that how could I have been studying education all these years without thinking about brain development, right? What is education if it's not brain development? And yet somehow a lot of people like me who study education or the economics of education, we didn't learn anything about neuroscience. We learned absolutely nothing about when your brain is actually developing, what your brain is doing at various stages, whether it matters that you learn algebra at this age or that age, we learned nothing about it. And that strikes me as being very wrong because I don't see how we can become really good at educating people if we don't know how brains work. So I happen to be more of a test score person myself. I don't slice open people's brains. I have to be dead anyway to do that. But I don't take MRIs and look at brains and try to understand how different parts of them are developing. But on the other hand, I think it's been a huge mistake for those of us in education to not take more account of neuroscience because neuroscientists know so much about what's going on in our brains. And so therefore we need to be not just measuring test scores. One thing that I will say, I think I hope it relates to your comment, is I tend to think of a lot of people just look at education and they think educational attainment is all that we need to look at. There are the college educated and the not college educated. There are people who are high school graduates and not high school graduates and so forth and so on. And I don't really find that to be true. I think what really matters is your cognitive skills. And you can be not a college graduate and if you have great cognitive skills, great. Or you can be a high school dropout and have great cognitive skills, great. Or you can be a college graduate and not have great cognitive skills. This is totally possible. So that's, I want to get more at the fundamental thing that's going on. And so I think that's part of what's driving me towards looking at neuroscience because that's what's going on in your brain. It's not a matter of I have a degree stamped on my head that says I got a BA and I got it from a good university regardless of what kind of skills I illustrate. I'd rather know about your skills and know less about your degree. Hannah, the next questioner is behind you. Thank you so much for your lecture, it was very interesting. So what are the problems I always think about with these sort of cognitive tests is how do you distinguish between the psychometric that the test is trying to pick up and the psychometric that is your motivation to take the test? So you might think there's intelligence, something like that, something that you're picking up or trying to pick up. And there's also conscientiousness, patience, these other things. And just in general, how should you think about distinguishing between those things? Especially with like infants who are taking these tests. Like I'm just wondering like, like what's the motivation of this one year old or three year old kid taking this test? Do they know what they're doing? And maybe that could be a reason why there's so much more movement. Cause if you have like a one year old who's very smart, who's like decides not to pay attention, you could see like that being a cause of a lot more like intermoving between the desiles earlier in life. And the other thing I was thinking about was sort of an alternative hypothesis, maybe for why there's divergence for adolescents. So I've read a few different places where a lot of the things that children go into later in life can be determined by what they perceive their comparative advantage to be earlier in life. So if you do STEM and humanities, there are a lot of people who are good at both, but they're slightly better at one or the other. And some people think this explains gender divergences. I don't know if that's true or not, just an idea. So could it be also at early adolescence, maybe you're more socially aware of, I'm towards the bottom of the class, I'm not gonna be very good at this test, or you're someone who says, oh, like I'm a bright kid, I'm gonna like buckle down and prove how smart I am. So just a hypothesis about like your motivation also mattering and maybe that being affected in early adolescence also. Yeah, so adolescence is this really interesting period because people are, they're starting to go through puberty. They're starting to be much more socially aware. They're probably much more aware of their sort of ranking in their class than a, you know, someone who's a kindergarten or a first grade or something like that. And they understand that people with different educational attainment have maybe different status or prestige or they start to understand all of these types of things. So yes, I definitely think that motivation becomes very important as you enter adolescence. So it's not just about your cognitive, your brain is trying to develop, you know, the ability to read or at a high level or to do algebra or something like that. But also your brain is also trying to understand all of the other things that allow you to be an adult at that age, to plan, to be mindful of things, to be reasoning, all of those kinds of things are going on at the same time. So when we think about motivation, it is a huge problem psychometrically. I can tell you though how they test one and a half year olds and three and a half year olds. You have to have like a mom or a dad who sits there and then tries to get them to do various things like count blocks or put blocks on top of one another or something like that. And there is a lot of test to test variation because not all moms and dads or other guardians are equally good at doing this sort of testing. So it's very, very difficult to test little tiny people because until they learn to read themselves, you can't really just stick them with a test booklet and say, you know, here, take this test. So testing is very difficult for the smallest ones. And we also know that when you get to high school, really towards the end of high school, students who do not think that they are going to go on to college or university are very under motivated to take tests at that point in time. They want to pass them if they need to take them for a graduation exit exam, something like that. But they don't want to do better than just passing if they're not going to go. So people who want to go to Berkeley, they're very motivated to take the SAT or they're very motivated to take the ACT. They're motivated to take AP exams, but it's because they're looking at that next stage. But if you think I'm leaving this high school in two months, you're not that motivated to take those exams. So we actually notice that there's a drop off in exams for 12th graders. And then also psychometricians have a CF phenomenon that's called, it's really like the first questions that you answer on an exam, people are usually pretty motivated to answer those questions. And then over time on the exam, they get bored and they start looking out the window. And we can see that there's this test drop off. So that if you put the hard questions all at the end of the exam, it will look like people just can't answer them. But part of it is just that they're bored by that time. And they figure, hey, I've answered enough questions to pass the exam. So motivation is a thing. Apparently in Singapore, they do not suffer from this motivational problem at all. So it is often used as, often their results are used to see like how many questions can students actually answer on these tests because they apparently just stick to the end. There also is a test that's given on the National Longitudinal Studies, which is extremely easy, but only requires you to just keep chugging away at the test. And some people just do that. It's a very good predictor of how motivated you are because it's very, very easy, but it does require you to answer a lot of boring questions repeatedly. And it's a very strong predictor of your earnings later in life. Turns out. So there's something about that motivation that just keep chugging away. It's actually good for your earnings. Okay. That brings us to the end of our program for today, but before I ask you to join me in thanking our speaker and our first commentator, let me just remind you that tomorrow, same time, same place, we have the second Tanner lecture, a second of two, and not one, but two commentators. So please come back. And with that, please join me in thanking our distinguished speaker and commentators. Thank you.