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There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens — i.e. their nation’s children — are happy, healthy and productive, and that therefore governments have policies that work to achieve that. But good intentions never guarantee good policies.

Here’s where economist Janet Currie steps in. Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where she co-directs, with Pascaline Dupas, the Center for Health and Wellbeing. In this Social Science Bites podcast, the pioneer in assessing the nexus of policy and parenting explains to interviewer David Edmonds how programs like Head Start in the United States and Sure Start in the United Kingdom provide real benefits over time to both their young clients as youths and later on in life.

After looking at a variety of programs and interventions, she details that “the general conclusion [is] that the programs that were spending more money directly on the children tended to have better outcomes.”

Her findings suggest this holds true even when similar approaches don’t have the same effect on adults. “[I]n the United States,” she says, “if you give health insurance to adults who didn’t have health insurance, they use more services, and they are happier about that, that they get to use services. But it doesn’t actually seem to save very much money. On the other hand, when you cover children from a young age, that is cost effective, that does save money, and in fact, the costs of the program probably pay for themselves in terms of the reduction in illness and disability going forward.”

In addition to her work at Princeton, Currie is also co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Program on Families and Children. She has been president of the American Economic Association for 2024 and has also served as president of the American Society of Health Economics, the Society of Labor Economics, the Eastern Economic Association, and the Western Economic Association. Two years ago, she received the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize “for her foundational work on the influence of context such as policy decisions, environment, or health systems on child development.”

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: How much do socio-economic circumstances affect a child’s future life? Janet Currie teaches economics at Princeton and is a leading expert in the economic analysis of child development and the policies that are designed to boost prospects for the most disadvantaged.

Janet Currie, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Janet Currie: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here.

David Edmonds: What factors influence how children will do in the future? That’s our topic for today, and also whether and which interventions can make a difference. So can I start with a very basic question? If we want to judge how successful a child’s life becomes as an adult, what criteria should we use? Should we use future income, educational attainment, some kind of subjective levels of happiness or what?

Janet Currie: So I think the answer is all of the above. When people are evaluating programs, they tend to look at the measures that they have at hand, which might be something like income or education. But I also think it’s important to think about people’s happiness. In my own work, I’ve been doing increasing amount of research looking at mental health and how we can measure that as well.

David Edmonds: OK, we’ll come on to mental health later. Another definitional issue, I guess, is what counts as childhood when childhood ends, and that might vary a bit from place to place, from culture to culture. Is it generally the case that policies or interventions are more successful the younger the child?

Janet Currie: I think what we know is that there’s a lot of successful interventions for pregnant women. That is that they have healthier babies, and their babies do better after these interventions. There’s also a lot of evaluation of programs for very young children, say, preschool children, which have been very successful. I think we know less about successful programs for, say, adolescents, but we do know that there are some, and so that’s an area where there’s increasing research, realizing that childhood doesn’t end at age 5, and there are many other children out there who need help, and there’s things that we could do to help.

David Edmonds: You mentioned pregnant women, obviously an intervention on a child can’t get earlier than that. So what’s the evidence about what works?

Janet Currie: So that is a very well-researched topic. In fact, that might be the start of some of this research on children was observations that, especially bad things that happen during pregnancy, like starvation, famines, stressful events like natural disasters, seem to have long, lasting effects on children. And so then the kind of reverse of that is, well, if you make conditions better for women while they’re pregnant, say, through income support or nutritional supplements, does that have a positive effect on the child? And there’s a lot of evidence that that’s also the case, that you can make things better.

David Edmonds: How much better?

Janet Currie: So it’s not that difficult to get a 10 percent reduction in low birth weight, which is significant because low birth weight is related to all kinds of future cognitive issues, asthma, ADHD, and so if you can reduce that at birth, you give somebody a much better chance to have a healthy life.

David Edmonds: So one thing you’re known for especially is assessing the Head Start program. Not all listeners will know what that is. In the UK we’ve got something similar the Sure Start program. Can you tell us something about those programs and how you went about analyzing, calculating their effectiveness?

Janet Currie: Yes. So Sure Start was actually modeled to some extent after the Head Start program. So what Head Start is, is an early childhood program. It initially served 3- to 5-year-olds, and now it can serve even infants. And it’s sort of a manualized program. So there’s all kinds of different requirements that a program has to meet to be a Head Start program. It’s also kind of an interesting model, because the federal government puts up the money, but the local community has to do a lot of the thinking about how to develop the program within the guidelines, and I think that’s also true for Sure Start. So the idea is that it’s supposed to reflect community assets and community goals as well.

David Edmonds: Does it tend to be a universal program? In other words, can everybody access Head Start? Or is this a program for those below a certain threshold of income?

Janet Currie: So Head Start in the United States is for people who are below a certain income threshold. It’s also supposed to serve kids who are at risk for some reason, so somebody who is of a higher income but, say, had a disability or perhaps there’s some suspicion of maltreatment, might get referred to a Head Start program.

David Edmonds: You mentioned it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, state to state, city to city, but what sort of services are on offer through the Head Start program?

Janet Currie: So usually they have a curriculum, so they have set goals for things that they’re trying to accomplish, like maybe recognizing letters, recognizing colors, those kind of pre-kindergarten skills that you hope kids have. But they also do health checks. So all the kids are supposed to get the mandated health screenings. A lot of these kids are eligible for those screenings through other programs anyway, but the Head Start program actually helps them to get them. It provides healthy meals; it provides parent training; it provides home visiting often. So there’s a lot of different comp