Cash Incentives and Raising a Genius

Two more interesting articles...

The first is a Boston Globe Magazine piece about how to raise a genius child.  It starts with a couple, the Andersons, and their 34 month year old daughter:

While other moms-to-be were dog-earing their copies of What to Expect When You're Expecting, Anderson spent her pregnancy searching for the best approaches to help boost her baby's brainpower. Through a Web search, she stumbled onto the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, a half-century-old operation outside Philadelphia more commonly known as the Better Baby Institute. The place was founded by Glenn Doman, a physical therapist who took what he learned helping brain-injured children recover function and applied it to well infants and toddlers in the hopes of accelerating their development. Anderson read about the Better Baby Institute's regimen of intense intellectual and physical stimulation for babies. She lingered over the organization's message that time was of the essence, since the rate of brain growth drops off precipitously after a child reaches age 6. And she took to heart the well-honed refrain from the avuncular, white-goateed Doman: "We are persuaded that every child born has, at the instant of birth, a greater potential intelligence than Leonardo da Vinci ever used."

The second is a New York Magazine article that looks at Mayor Bloomberg's controversial policy of offering cash incentives to families in poverty who do things like attend a PTA meeting, or have their children get a library card.  This article follows the Mieses, a family of six living on $20,000 a year in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn:

The Mieseses are poor—a family of six living on $20,000 a year—which qualifies them to become one of the approximately 5,000 families enrolled in Opportunity NYC, a two-year Bloomberg initiative begun in September that gives low-income families money when they complete certain activities, such as attending a parent-teacher conference, obtaining a library card, or taking a child for an annual checkup. The technical term for this approach is conditional cash transfers. Pay poor families to do things that are in their best interest, the thinking goes, and maybe their kids won’t be poor—the “intergenerational cycle of poverty” will be broken. Although the cash will undoubtedly help families pay bills, the real hope is to change behavior by adding an extra incentive to focus on long-term goals, which often get lost in the stress that characterizes a life lived from paycheck to paycheck. “Poverty,” as George Orwell wrote, “annihilates the future.”

If you click through to these articles you will note that each was published on October 30th.  As visitors to my humble abode know, I have a large pile of books, magazines, and printed articles piled up on my living room table.  I just now got around to reading articles that I printed out a month and a half ago...