
Should children do more enrichment activities? Correcting for endogeneity - imgabe
https://privpapers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3624929
======
theontheone
I was in disbelief at the paper title, so I looked at the slides:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/4gzotq077orblwq/CaetanoNielsen_sli...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/4gzotq077orblwq/CaetanoNielsen_slides.pdf?dl=0)

Read slide 17. The key assumptions are that: the confounder present at
bunching point is representative of the confounder present everywhere, and the
confounder affects outcome linearly. The second assumption is what strikes me
as too strong, and you can read the paper Appendix C for how they address it.
The reasoning is quite weak and they even phrase it as such: "Our main
empirical findings therefore do not seem to be an artifact of this linearity
assumption". Overall I would take this paper with a grain of salt, from a
cognitive science point of view it just makes no sense that doing more reading
would have no cognitive benefits (in fact, we know the opposite to be true.)

Also, the paper hasn't even been reviewed yet. We should revisit it after it
has been peer reviewed.

~~~
Konohamaru
These kind of papers (those with the theme of "taking any kind of action for
the growth of your cognition will always be in vain") seem to have a strong
bias toward biological determinism. But God gave human beings the ability to
solve problems for the purpose of overcoming nature, which includes the nature
of our cognitive type and our cognitive capacity.

~~~
lutorm
That's not what it's saying though, it's merely saying that structured
enrichment activities are _no better_ at improving your cognitive skills than
the other things kids choose to spend their time on if they weren't forced to
do structured enrichment.

They even point this out as a specific point in the abstract: You can't
compare kids doing enrichment activities to kids not doing enrichment
activities while controlling for every other variable to be the same, because
it is manifestly true that time spent on enrichment activities can not be
spent on other activities, such as sleep or socializing, which _also_ have
benefits.

~~~
Konohamaru
> They even point this out as a specific point in the abstract: You can't
> compare kids doing enrichment activities to kids not doing enrichment
> activities while controlling for every other variable to be the same,
> because it is manifestly true that time spent on enrichment activities can
> not be spent on other activities, such as sleep or socializing, which also
> have benefits.

Please double-check my reading comprehension of your comment. Are you saying
that it is not possible to analyze the benefits of enrichment activities as
opposed to what normal kids do, because there is no way to have a group of
kids who do exactly what normal kids do + enrichment activities, because
taking the time to do enrichment activities necessarily knocks out at least
one activity normal kids do, thereby making control impossible?

------
pocw
But after-school programs DO cause a drastic drop in teen crime, alcoholism
and substance abuse. Those effects are probably more important.
[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-
families...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-
families/iceland-knows-how-to-stop-teen-substance-abuse-but-the-rest-of-the-
world-isn-t-listening-a7526316.html)

~~~
moltar
But what is the mechanism of action here?

It’s probably just (1) added adult supervision, (2) lack of free time for
those negative activities.

~~~
grugagag
How about if they discover some books that turn out life changing.

~~~
awesome_dude
Like the series by Carlos Castenada?

Or Huxley's Doors of our mind?

~~~
grugagag
Yeah, why not?

------
Cactus2018
> Abstract

>We study the effects of enrichment activities such as reading, homework, and
extracurricular lessons on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We
take into consideration that children forgo alternative activities, such as
play and socializing, in order to spend time on enrichment. Our study controls
for selection on unobservables using a novel approach which leverages the fact
that many children spend zero hours per week on enrichment activities. At zero
enrichment, confounders vary but enrichment does not, which gives us direct
information about the effect of confounders on skills.

>Using time diary data available in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID),
_we find that the net effect of enrichment is zero for cognitive skills and
negative for non-cognitive skills,_ which suggests that enrichment may be
crowding out more productive activities on the margin. The negative effects on
non-cognitive skills are concentrated in higher-income students in high
school, consistent with elevated academic competition related to college
admissions.

~~~
enkid
This study sends all kinds of red flags for me.

First, they are looking at a very wide range of activities and calling them
enrichment. They include tutoring, music lessons, reading, and other
"extracurricular activities" as an "enrichment activity." That seems like too
wide of a net, as many extracurricular activities and homework likely are a
waste of time, therefore diluting the extracurricular activities with positive
effects.

Second, if I understand their methodology, they are checking students with no
enrichment activities to children with a few minutes a week of enrichment
time. Skill acquisition takes more than a few minutes a week, so of course
those children would not be receiving benefit.

Third, the results seem absurd. They are saying there are no cognitive
benefits to taking music lessons, but I guarantee that the children who took a
music lesson is much better at playing an instrument than a student who
didn't.

Fourth, there's already a lot of statistical and neurological evidence that
reading is good for your thinking and your brain, and I don't think this study
overcomes that evidence.

~~~
zeroonetwothree
> Third, the results seem absurd. They are saying there are no cognitive
> benefits to taking music lessons, but I guarantee that the children who took
> a music lesson is much better at playing an instrument than a student who
> didn't.

They say that since time is finite, the benefit from music lessons seems to be
canceled out by lost opportunities of doing other things. It’s totally
reasonable to think that, in fact if enrichment was positive in net then that
would actually mean kids are doing too little.

~~~
mattkrause
Given the very limited readout of "skills", how could it be otherwise? Nothing
in their measurements captures the actual skills taught by music lessons
(piano-playing ability, music appreciation, etc).

Perhaps music lessons have some second-order effect on "does neat, careful
work", but it doesn't seem impossible that might have opposing effects on
other so-called skills too: "too fearful or anxious" for stage fright,
"disobedient" for not practicing when told.

------
EricE
I agree - homework did nothing for me when I was in school. I could always ace
the tests but teachers insisted homework "because" \- never made sense and was
a constant source of friction. Jackasses.

~~~
chongli
Homework is totally different for me in university compared to high school.
Math in high school was easy. The homework just felt like a waste of time:
repeatedly applying what you learned from one example.

In university, homework is everything. If all you do is attend the lectures,
you will fail the midterm and final. In order to do well in the course you
need to do all the homework which really pushes you to learn. The examples
given in lecture are completely trivial compared to the homework problems
which can often take hours to solve.

“Enrichment activities” would actually be useful if the content was actually
enriched. Advanced students would get a lot more out of school if they were
given work that was genuinely challenging for them and took a long time to
figure out.

~~~
DubiousPusher
I feel similar.

My first collegiate math class, the teacher came in and asked the class, "do
you know how to get an A in this class, two hours of math homework a night". I
followed this advice and bam, A. Despite the fact that this math class was
much harder than anything I did in high school and I was always a B+ math
student.

The next semester I followed this advice again but let myself slip a few weeks
and bam B+. The next semester I strictly spent the time again, bam, A.

Through upper class years my diligence in school was consistent but I
sometimes had to focus on programming over math. I noticed a near perfect
correlation between the time I spent on out of class work and my performance.

------
TCSoft
I think I'm not quite understanding what they're saying. In section 5.1 of the
PDF tsumnia linked, the author talks about how it's not that enrichment
activities have no benefit (despite saying actually writing that), is that the
enrichment activities have no greater benefit than leisure activities. Did I
get that right?

My older daughter loves to read, so she reads a lot, and her teacher (when
school was in session) says she's one of the best readers in the class. So is
this paper saying that if my daughter had done activities instead of read
(like play video games or run around outside) she'd be just as good a reader?
That doesn't seem right based on my experience.

Also, I read a lot about the benefits of having children learn to play music,
especially starting with a piano. Some studies referenced here:
[https://www.lindebladpiano.com/blog/benefits-of-playing-
pian...](https://www.lindebladpiano.com/blog/benefits-of-playing-piano).
Doesn't this paper suggest those other studies are wrong? I'm kind of slow
when it comes to understanding papers like this.

~~~
zeroonetwothree
> So is this paper saying that if my daughter had done activities instead of
> read (like play video games or run around outside) she'd be just as good a
> reader?

No, they are saying that your daughters overall cognitive skill would be
equal. So maybe she’d be worse at reading but better some other cognitive
skill (say, special recognition). Basically there’s no free lunch—if you spend
on one thing you aren’t spending it on something else.

~~~
TCSoft
Aha, that makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

------
jungletime
One of the things that they get right in Russia, and even places like England,
is that its much easier for a poor city family to have a cottage outside the
city or an allotment garden that is subsidized by the state.

And I think benefit to city kids is enormous, as far as an entire new
environment to be exposed to. And even the growing of food.

This should a program in North America too. Giant farms have taken almost all
the land. And some of it is just a waste anyway. If the government can
subsidize growing corn to turn into car fuel. An extremely wasteful energy
inefficient process.

Government could be buying some of that land back, and letting return to
nature or forest, and allowing building even tiny cottages. For poor families,
it could be such a quality of life boost, especially for kids.

------
waheoo
People seem to be confusing this and taking it like a personal attack.

Its not saying music is pointless. Its just saying it isnt going to help you
in math. And over doing it, may in fact hurt your math due to burnout.

(Sub math for whatever non enrichment activity, sub music for any enrichment
activity)

~~~
wokwokwok
That’s definitely not what the paper is saying.

People aren’t reading the paper, just the headline, is what’s happening, and
projecting their personal experience onto the 1 liner conclusion.

------
kaetemi
I'd have a guess it's because the kids simply aren't paying attention to stuff
they're not interested in.

If you want smart kids, just give them what they need to explore, and provide
the materials they need for whatever they choose to focus on.

------
tehjoker
Even if their conclusion is correct, which after a quick skim I didn't see how
they measured "cognitive" skills the result is kind of dumb.

Working on math problems might not make you a quicker thinker overall, but it
will teach you math! The specific skill you enrich will become stronger at the
expense of the rest of your life. I agree that time spent not socializing
damages the ability to socialize (it's a joke among engineers in school).
Clearly we are not making great tradeoffs, but I'm not sure this result helps
us very much beyond what we already knew.

------
jonnypotty
I worry that people read things like this to inform what they do with their
children. A child is a person and its reasonable to explore what they need and
want through your life with them. We should always remember that children are
not simply another of life's projects to be maximised.

------
annoyingnoob
I think in my kids it depends on the activity. Some things are better than
others I'm sure. Nothing wrong with trying things to find what you like, maybe
find your passion.

Is there some perfect version of achieving cognitive and non-cognitive skills.
Are people happy if they achieve it?

------
kalium-xyz
Anyone have a direct link to the actual paper?

~~~
tsumnia
PDF:
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2020036pap...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2020036pap.pdf)

Slides can be found on the lead author's homepage:
[http://carolinacaetano.net/](http://carolinacaetano.net/)

------
blondin
this paper is very hard to read and full of jargon for the non-initiated.

the conclusion is just one sentence and is very clear. but i was left with the
feeling with all these big words that i am not supposed to understand what
they are studying or their methodology...

~~~
catalogia
You're meant to be dazzled by the jargon and trust the Experts™.

~~~
082349872349872
It's a normal paper for its discipline. We are not the target audience.

(something that Nature did in the redesign that led to me dropping the
subscription —I use "table of contents on the cover" as a sibboleth— was to
introduce a section of summaries, written for a wider audience, for some of
the articles, which I found, on the contrary, to be a very positive move.)

------
tsumnia
I decided to provide my feedback on the paper because judging from some of the
comments I've read, some of you did not read it. To those that did read it,
remember that the authors are people too and can offer any clarifications or
address any concerns you have.

After reading through the paper, I'd like to say the authors did an excellent
job addressing a sensitive subject. Part of me likes to think that they, like
many of you, thought that enrichment programs were a given positive addition
to life. The authors do an excellent job attempting to use mathematics to
model human behavior - Sections 2-4 are almost entirely used to explain what
they mean and how their equations operate. While reading the paper, I thought
about some of the negative comments on this thread about economists. To that,
I reasoned that we use mathematics as an attempt to model the world. Physics
is our attempt to model the physical world and economics is the closest thing
we have to modeling human behavior. If you disagree with that sentiment,
become an economist and change the domain or dual major in data science and
psychology (or sociology or any other degree used to model humans).

My biggest takeaway from this paper is that additional HOMEWORK does not help
in improving a student's cognitive ability. In the paper, enrichment is
defined as "investments in children's skills" which 87% of their dataset
consisted of homework, reading, or before/after school academic programs.
Doing or adding an additional hour of these activities does not provide any
benefit to the child. This does not mean that learning is bad, as class time
was a separate category, it meant "doing more" didn't help. Again, this is a
sensitive subject, and I can agree that the authors don't account for "bad"
instruction.

I will say there are limitations to their results, which they do acknowledge.
Their dataset is small, but one of the closest datasets we have to mapping
long-term human activities. I'd say this limitation grows exponentially
because the CDS/PSID dataset they use only addressed 3 days in an individual's
life. If I am wrong please correct me, but that is what I assume they used
based on the paper. PSID contains 75,000 individuals and they only sampled
4,330 children. However, if you assume a nuclear family (4 people), that means
the dataset contains ~18,750 families, which means the sample is ~25%. Again,
this is a limitation, but one of the only approximations we have. The other
limitation is that they are using self-response surveys, which have limited
reliability.

With that, what can we take from this paper? My takeaway is that people are
effectively equal but different at the same time. This was addressed with
their h(X) value. Using all controllable variables, some h() function exists
that produces what they addressed as "ability". This is once again where I, as
did the authors, recognize that it is a sensitive topic. It is also one of the
additional limitations I would say to their paper - assuming ability is a
fixed value.

However, as a discussion point, 'ability' would account for some ugly truths.
The g-factor and IQ are methods to address cognitive ability with sensitive
undertones. Likewise, it is a commonality that networking is a key factor in
successful employment often mentioned on HN. This could be accentuated by
their findings that additional enrichment negatively impacted non-cognitive
skills. Just because you are smart does not mean you are employable. However,
I acknowledge that assessing cognitive ability is a sensitive topic, ripe with
misconstruction. Likewise, I think the authors do their best to NOT say your
ability is determined at birth.

I would caution against using "ability" as a metric for determining worth.
Doing so would encourage early testing to see if someone is "worth the time"
and I imagine would be vulnerable to prejudice and confound the features of X,
e.g. a low-income child is not worth investing in. Instead, I would argue that
this paper doesn't fully address "potential" with their unboservable ε. The
job of the individual instead is to identify and maximize their potential (X)
or at the very least improve the potential of their future selves (X+1, or
children). This would acknowledge the concept of "expertise", or practicing a
task makes you better at said task. It still presents an uncomfortable truth
that some people aren't able to achieve success in a given task, but does
address improving one's self.

I'll end there for some discussion and because it is late.

~~~
082349872349872
Table 7 p.43 is the list of "cognitive" and "non-cognitive" skills. Figure 12
p.46 shows the "enrichment activities."

From these the conclusions should not be surprising. "Reading a book" and
attending a "before or after school program" may help with the non-cognitive
skills, but those are only 10% or so of "enrichment" time, and the only non-
cognitive skill homework (unless it has changed greatly from my day?) would
significantly help with is "Demands a lot of attention."

(silly authors: enrichment isn't meant to develop _skills_ [1], it's meant, by
choice of enrichment activities, to develop the sorts of people the children
think are "one of us" as young adults, to influence whom they will hang out
with, whom they will date, etc.

In _Brave New World_ this starring of sneetches is managed in infancy by
hypnopaedic suggestion:

"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the
middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to
play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to
be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly
colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta." There was a pause; then the voice began
again. "Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because
they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta[2], because I
don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas.
Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no,
I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.
They're too stupid to be able …")

[1] I like the french idea of "education" (education), as having components
not only of "how to" (savoir faire), but also of "how to live with others"
(savoir vivre) and even of "how to live with oneself" (savoir être).

[2] the list of "non-cognitive" skills also shows a distinct bias towards (in
_Brave New World_ terms) Beta-Gamma ideals. How many of these soft skills does
someone from a high SES background need to become, say, President of the
United States?

------
Chiba-City
I doubt it. Mastering an instrument and music reading/writing trains
linguistic, focus and cooperation skills. Acting in plays trains memory and
cooperation skills and performance skills. Field sports trains spatial
reasoning and competition skills. Camping and hiking trains preparation, map
reading and cooking skills. And so on. We know what we know and live our lived
out metaphors.

------
touchpadder
Sounds like BS

------
viburnum
The incredible arrogance of economists, blundering into every field that has a
convenient data set for them to abuse.

~~~
elliekelly
Time is the most valuable resource we have, why shouldn’t economists study how
to most efficiently allocate that limited resource?

