31 Quotes by James Heckman

There is a responsibility that goes with winning the Nobel Prize, and the responsibility is that if you have a forum, you should use it wisely.

It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.

I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics.

Some kids win the lottery at birth; far too many don't - and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy adults.

I think race is very important. I think generally speaking, we've to face the general problem, which is that we are seeing more children coming out of families which simply don't give them adequate resources for their development.

You have kids growing up in some of the worst circumstances financially, living in some of the worst ghettos, and they succeed. They succeed because an adult figure, typically a mother, maybe a grandmother, nourishes the kid, supports the kid, protects the kid, encourages the kid to succeed. It's as if the environment never happened.

There's no question that we have great value on the sanctity of the family, and there are a lot of competing visions about exactly how we teach a set of values and we teach skills to our children, especially in the early years when they're really forming their personalities, their personas, really.

The traditional story of economists has been to say education explains what the returns are to school. I say, 'Okay, that's fine, but what explains the education? How much is just a matter of my giving you a poor kid versus a rich kid?'

The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.