Nobel Prize laureate and economist James Heckman shared his insights in early child development in China in a lecture to the CUHK community last month, drawing a packed audience of students and academics.

In his lecture “Building Life Relevant Skills: Theory and Evidence from China and The World” held on 28 February, Professor Heckman, who joined both CUHK and CUHK-Shenzhen as Distinguished Professor-at-Large last year, discussed findings of his decades of work in child development.

Although traditional measures of excellence, such as IQ tests or exam scores of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), have been used to gauge the development of the young generations in a society, the professor argued humanity should also focus on more contextual factors — such as crime and parental education background — that were vital to children’s early development. This, he suggested, would be beneficial to society in the long run, “because the benefit is not just in their current investment, it’s the ability for them to take advantage of everything that life offers down the line”.

Professor Heckman believed that since evidence had shown time and again that “social and psychological skills that we previously dismissed play a very fundamental role in the modern economy”, it was imperative that those skills be developed in children from a very young age. He mentioned various projects he had embarked upon — as far as in Tibet — to analyse these societal factors in China, building on decades of data that showed promising trends when it came to early intervention. One of the ongoing studies, for example, looks at children’s health, overall development, adult-child relationship, social, emotional and cognitive support in the home environment. It will serve to inform policymakers in health and parenting policy.

The important thing for society, Professor Heckman said, lay in “how we can develop policies that will allow us to capitalise in what we know about how skills are formed”. The talk was concluded with a question-and-answer session.

Professor Heckman won the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his efforts to devise corrections for data-selection biases during research. He received an honorary doctorate in social science from CUHK last year. CUHK in Focus will run an in-depth interview with the professor later this month.

A video of the lecture can be found below.