Who Starts Ahead and Who Moves Ahead? Achievement, Social Adjustment and their Production in Children

A great deal of T. Paul Schultz’s professional career was spent looking at the forces behind economic development. As Adam Smith pointed out, the wealth of nations is in their inhabitants, making the development of children central to economic development and progress. Schultz made the case several times that there is a payoff to educating women in less developed countries. Many of the “gateways” through which children must pass on the way to adulthood can be characterized as sorting children into an ordering on social, emotional and especially cognitive outcomes. While economic development reflects aggregate child development, for individual economic outcomes, where a child ranks in their peer group has significant impacts. Here we use data from the Children of the NLSY79 to examine the process that sorts children by their cognition and behavioral problems. We can explain the ordering of children by cognitive and behavioral outcomes better before they enter school than their movement subsequent to entry. If the place a child occupies among their peers is largely set before entering first grade, changes to the educational environment due to policy measures may influence how a cohort fares, but may have very modest effects on which children attain the top of the cognitive distribution and hence have a chance to enter their careers from the most selective universities and all the advantages that follow from there. While not from a less-developed country, the evidence here points to the centrality investments in women in the development process. The research assistance of Carletta Bruno and Traci Mach are gratefully acknowledged.