An excellent conversation with Janet Currie on how, in America today, choosing the right parents does a lot to determine your life-chances in America today. But it does not have to be that way: Janet Currie: In Conversation: "It is hard to talk about prenatal influences without sounding deterministic, but outcomes aren’t deterministic at all. One way that you can see that is that the same negative shock, such as a given level of air pollution, will typically have a much greater effect on a poor infant than on a richer infant. What that observation tells you is that there is something that can be done to mitigate the effects of a harmful shock, and the richer parents are doing it, whatever it is. If you could find that and put it in a bottle, or put it in a program, then you would be able to mitigate the effects of these early-childhood insults. And in fact, we have had reasonable success in mitigating the effects of some types of prenatal disadvantage through public programs. There is a great deal of evidence, some to which I have contributed, on the positive effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children during pregnancy on infant health outcomes. These positive effects are striking, given that the dollar value of WIC benefits is fairly small. It may well be that modest amounts of money combined with improved access to medical care and some psychosocial support can go a long way toward improving the health of mothers and their babies...
#noted
