Interview s Jamesem Heckmanem

Rozhovor je už poněkud starší, z roku 2005, ale přesto zajímavý. S Heckmanem hovořil Douglas Clement z časopisu The Region, publikovaného minneapoliským Fedem. Heckman dostal Nobelovu cenu v roce 2000, to ho však nijak nepřimělo k tomu, aby snížil své pracovní tempo. Rozhovor je dlouhý, ale přínosný pro každého, kdo se zabývá trhem práce a ekonomií vzdělávání. Ve svém dřívějším výzkumu se Heckman zabýval otázkou rasové diskriminace - a věří, že hnutí za rovnoprávnost pomohlo při odstraňování segregace v 60.letech v USA mnohem více než tržní mechanismus.

Some want to believe that markets by themselves will solve problems like racial disparity. Markets do many useful things, but they did not solve the problem of race. Not in America. That's probably heresy to admit it as a Chicago economist, but I became convinced that a doctrinaire notion that markets would solve the problem of discrimination is false. Civil rights legislation and civil rights activity played huge roles in eliminating overt segregation in the United States.

Naproti tomu dnes pozitivní diskriminace nepomáhá.

On the other hand, I also believe that affirmative action in the post-civil rights era has played very little role in elevating the status of blacks. ... There's still disparity, of course, but it's not now primarily due to discrimination.

Heckman se detailně zabývá výzkumem nekognitivních schopností.

Enriched early intervention programs targeted to disadvantaged children have had their biggest effect on noncognitive skills: motivation, self-control and time preference.

Hovoří o významu vzdělávacích programů pro malé děti, cílených na znevýhodněné rodiny. Vytvářet takové programy pro všechny nemá smysl, protože stejně nenahradí dobře fungující rodinu. Ale pro děti z rodin se špatným zázemím mají velký přínos.

Functioning middle-class homes are producing healthy, productive kids. We don't measure their output very well in the national income and product accounts, but it's very well documented that professional working women spend an enormous amount of time after work in child development. It is foolish to try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing.

I think that the evidence suggests that we can target pretty well, and we can certainly deal with the major problems, by starting first with children from disadvantaged families.

O tom, že vzdělávání malých dětí je mnohem důležitější než tréninkové programy pro přípravu do zaměstnání - protože tréninkové programy nemůžou dohnat to, co se v mládí zanedbalo.

And the typical, short-term job training program tries to remedy lifetime deficits in a few months. They are based on the hope that society can solve 17, 18 years of neglect of a child with a short-term program that can transform people who have grown up in extreme disadvantage. ... Those who don't get those early skills are unlikely to benefit much from short-term public training programs later on.

O tom, v čem nesouhlasí s Adamem Smithem.

... Smith says people are basically born the same and at age 8 one can't really see much difference among them. But then starting at age 8, 9, 10, they pursue different fields, they specialize and they diverge. In his mind, the butcher and the lawyer and the journalist and the professor and the mechanic, all are basically the same person at age 8.

This is wrong. IQ is basically formed by age 8, and there are huge differences in IQ among people. Smith was right that people specialize after 8, but they started specializing before 8. On the early formation of human skill, I think Smith was wrong, although he was right about many other things.

O svém vlastní workoholismu.

I think I'm a very lucky person. I think what some people would call labor, I would call leisure. It stunned me in college—when I looked at my professors—that people were actually paid to read, discuss and create ideas. My eyes lit up; I'd never dreamed that was possible. My teachers were paid to discuss Aristotle, Plato, Joyce, the metaphysical poets and all the large issues of knowledge, and this was what I liked to do.

A konečně o módě posledních let - psaní paperů založených pouze na "chytrých" instrumentálních proměnných.

In some quarters of our profession, the level of discussion has sunk to the level of a New Yorker article: coffee-table articles about “cute” topics, papers using “clever” instruments. The authors of these papers are usually unclear about the economic questions they address, the data used to support their conclusions and the econometrics used to justify their estimates.