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PERSPECTIVE
Economic, neurobiological, and behavioral perspectives on building America’s future workforce
*Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5125; Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637; Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; and ¶The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110
Edited by Solomon H. Snyder, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, and approved May 10, 2006 (received for review February 2, 2006)
A growing proportion of the U.S. workforce will have been raised in disadvantaged environments that are associated with relatively high proportions of individuals with diminished cognitive and social skills. A cross-disciplinary examination of research in economics, developmental psychology, and neurobiology reveals a striking convergence on a set of common principles that account for the potent effects of early environment on the capacity for human skill development. Central to these principles are the findings that early experiences have a uniquely powerful influence on the development of cognitive and social skills and on brain architecture and neurochemistry, that both skill development and brain maturation are hierarchical processes in which higher level functions depend on, and build on, lower level functions, and that the capacity for change in the foundations of human skill development and neural circuitry is highest earlier in life and decreases over time. These findings lead to the conclusion that the most efficient strategy for strengthening the future workforce, both economically and neurobiologically, and improving its quality of life is to invest in the environments of disadvantaged children during the early childhood years.
child development | early experience | economic productivity | critical and sensitive periods | brain development
Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared.
This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.
||McCormick, K., Kerr, D., Rockcastle, N., Bytheway, J., Colosimo, D., Singer, L. & Cameron, J. L. (2004) Abstr. Soc. Neurosci. 426, 20 (abstr.).
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: eknudsen{at}stanford.edu
© 2006 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
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