According to CBS’s Sixty Minutes, the new Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland cost $8 billion over twenty years. When asked why it was worth spending $8 billion, American physicist, Bob Stanek told Steve Kroft, “It’s in humans’ interest to know everything, right? And why wouldn’t you want to know that?” He went on to say that the research could lead to our ability to tele-transport people.
That’s nice.
Given the resistance to funding science, I don’t want to suggest that we shouldn’t have a super collider. But it got me to thinking about what would happen if we invested a similar amount in behavioral science solutions to our most pressing problems.
Having witnessed the destruction of two Japanese cities, people have little doubt about the power of physics. But the power and progress of the behavioral sciences is a well-kept secret. In the past 40 years, behavioral scientists have learned how to treat or prevent each of the most common problems of human behavior, including crime, depression, anxiety, drug abuse, academic failure, and marital discord. If we haven’t achieved widespread reductions in these problems, it’s only because we haven’t translated that research into widespread action. So here’s my $8 billion, 20-year plan for a better society.
So, here’s my eight billion dollar, twenty year plan to get us to a society with much less crime, mental illness, and conflict.
Start with making sure that every baby develops successfully. The Nobel Laureate economist James Heckman analyzed the value of investing in early childhood success and concluded that there is a substantial return on investing in infants’ and young children’s success.
David Olds and his colleagues did a series of experiments over the past twenty years showing that putting $7,000 per family into good support to high-risk pregnant moms pays a $41,000 dividend in reduced maternal welfare, less child abuse and neglect, and lower rates of crime when kids reach adolescence. Olds is already disseminating his program; more than 20,000 families around the country are receiving it. Let’s put $100 million a year into this program over the next 20 years and improve the lives of 285,680 children, their families, and their neighbors.
Then let’s bring Positive Behavior Support (PBS) to every school in America. PBS is a scientifically based system for teaching and rewarding positive social behavior. Teachers explicitly demonstrate what it means to be cooperative and prosocial in every setting in the school. They use a web-based system for tracking students’ behavior. Teachers substitute praise, reward, and gentle teaching for criticism and punishment. Schools with PBS have less bullying, safer and happier students, and better academic outcomes. There are about 95,000 schools in the U.S. So far, about 7500 are implementing PBS. For a hundred million a year we could get PBS into every school in America.
For another two billion over twenty years, let’s bring scientifically validated family supports to every family that needs them. Scientists have done at least fifty careful experiments on how to help families become more nurturing. These programs show parents how to reduce punishment, gently set effective limits, and reinforce the skills and activities that children need to develop successfully. Such programs reduce drug abuse, aggressive social behavior, and academic failure. If they were available to every family that needs them, we could prevent much of the delinquency and drug abuse that plagues our communities.
For another billion dollars, we might use the media to teach every
American about the core features of nurturing environments. All of the programs I mentioned encourage people to create environments that minimize stress and aversive stimulation, richly reinforce desirable behavior, and foster acceptance. We reduced smoking by telling people about the harm of behavior, why not encourage people to make their home, school, work, and community environments more nurturing. The benefit of doing this isn’t well-established the way these other programs are, so let’s spend that last billion on evaluating this campaign for nurturance.
A project I led at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences concluded that youth with multiple problems cost the nation more than $400 billion a year. The Washington State Public Policy Institute has provided solid economic analyses showing that interventions like these can significantly reduce such costs. Imagine that we spent $8 billion over the next twenty years on getting these science-based prevention programs widely and effectively implemented. We might cut the number of youth with multiple problems in half and save far more than the $8 billion we spent.
That just might be more valuable to the world than learning how to tele-transport a person from point A to point B. Especially if point B is ridden with crime, drug abuse, and depression.
Tags: Prevention