>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Hello, and welcome everyone.
I'm Tom Sherwood from NBC4,
on the Kojo Nnamdi Politics
Hour on WAMU FM Radio.
[ Applause ]
Kojo always get a lot of applause,
but he never does these damn things.
[Laughter] Thanks for being
here, the 15th Annual Library
of Congress National Book Festival.
One housekeeping note,
you're on videotape.
Your presence is your permission.
Our Pulitzer Prize winning
authors today, Nicholas Kristof,
and Sheryl WuDunn,
have done it again.
Out in paperback this month is
their book, "A Path Appears."
The New York Times warned
that if you are comfortable
with your life, skip it.
[Laughter] The book tells us that
worldwide social despair, poverty,
the abuse of women, children,
only appear to be hopeless.
Change is possible.
You may find that this
book causes you to act.
Now, my tagline on every email I
send says, "Local Washington is only
as good as the people active in it."
Now, apparently that saying
is true for the worldwide.
So would you please welcome
to the stage Sheryl WuDunn
and Nicholas Kristof.
[ Applause ]
>> Sheryl WuDunn: Thank you.
Do I have to turn this on?
Greetings; hi it's so
wonderful to be here in DC.
We just got off the train, and
but we're delighted to be here,
even if this is -- this
convention center is the jungle
of the developed world.
I want to start off
with a proposition.
How many of you would like to take
a drug that would make you happier,
live a little longer, be a better
person, with no side effects?
[Laughter] How many of you
wouldn't want that drug?
What would you do with that
extra few years of life?
What would you really do
to add greater purpose
to that extra length of life?
You could continue as you are now,
extend your career a little bit,
make a little bit more money,
do as you're doing right now.
But would that really be the best
use of this extra bit of life?
Now that you're thinking about this,
and, you know, what you might want
to do, in reality we all want to
have a very fulfilling life, right?
I mean, after all we want a
path to a meaningful life.
Given that you have a little bit of
superhuman qualities added to you,
maybe you might try taking
on some super problems,
some of the world's super problems.
And what might those be?
Well, some of the polls have shown
that Americans think
the greatest threat
to our country right now
is growing inequality.
Look, we all know the facts.
So the richest 85 people on
earth actually own about as much
as the bottom half of humanity.
And -- is that showing?
And in the US the top one percent
own about as much as the bottom 90%.
I actually can't see it, so.
There we go.
Okay; I think I need to do this.
All right; well you get it.
So those are just the highlights.
But you know, in fact it turns
out that inequality is
not just about money.
It's actually about opportunity;
inequality of opportunity.
And there's a rubbing fact most
Americans, despite the polarization,
the political polarization we
have here in this town and also
in the country, most Americans agree
that opportunity is
really important.
In fact, the polls show that
97% of Americans all think
that all Americans should
have opportunity in life.
That's more Americans than that
agree that the earth is round.
So how do we deal with
this inequality?
What can be done?
What we do know one major lesson is
that you need to intervene early.
We have learned that one of
the reasons we fail here is
that we intervene too late.
And research has shown that the
earlier interventions are the way
to break the cycle of poverty,
and to actually be the
most cost-effective.
There is a revolution in data-driven
evidence-based solutions that point
to the importance of intervening
early, partly and mainly
because the brain is going
through radical transformations,
the greatest transformations in
the first thousand days of life.
So how do we know this?
Some highlights; first
let me take you to some --
let's see, oh now it's working.
I think I have to point
this somewhere.
I'd like to change the
-- there we go, rats.
Oh, we went too far.
Rats, okay.
Really rats, okay.
So actually rats may be
the key to the solution.
There was a Canadian scientist
called Michael Meeni [phonetic],
who basically noticed that some
mother rats were much more cuddly,
licking their baby rats, and
other mother rats were not really
very cuddly.
In fact they were more
paws-off, so to speak.
And he wondered if that meant --
if that made a difference in
the way these rats were raised.
It turns out actually the rats
who were licked, and cuddled,
and hugged were -- became much
better in many different things,
including being better at mazes.
So he wanted to make sure
that this wasn't biological,
so he switched the rats at birth.
He took, you know, the baby rats
of the cuddly and licky mothers,
and gave them to the other mothers.
And sure enough it was
not genetic or biological,
it really was that the
licking, and the cuddling,
and the hugging was
what changed the rats.
Well, that is also true for humans.
Let's see here.
There we go.
This photo was much easier to find.
You have no idea of how hard
it is to find cuddly rats.
But indeed maternal
attachment, meaning yes we have
to lick our babies -- no I mean that
we really have to cuddle, and hug,
and kiss our babies, that really
is a sign of maternal attachment.
And maternal attachment
is far more important.
In fact, it's a better predictor of
high school graduation than IQ is
at the age of three-and-a-half.
So by three-and-a-half years
of age you can actually tell
if a kid is going to graduate high
school as -- you know, with --
whether or not the kid is
being hugged and kissed.
That's a much more successful
predictor than IQ is at that age.
So why is it this?
What's going on?
It turns out that the brain actually
is developing at a rapid pace,
as I said earlier, in
the first thousand days
of life, and a little bit beyond.
So when a baby is actually
under stress, when it cries,
when it has a dirty
diaper, if it isn't soothed,
cortisol is actually
coursing through its brain.
And we all have cortisol coursing
through our brain every now
and then, but when
it happens to a baby,
and the brain is actually
bathed in a bath of cortisol,
that's when impairment of the
development of the brain is working.
In other words, the
physical architecture
of the brain is impaired
by all this cortisol.
And so that's what is going on.
The hippocampus in fact is
actually developing, you know,
in a smaller fashion, and
the prefrontal cortex,
which actually has to do
with impulse control
sometimes is constrained.
One neuroscience put it this way
-- neuroscientist put it this way,
she said that growing up poor
is really bad for your brain.
It's pretty explicit.
So how do we know about this?
I mean, you know, we do know
that, you know, it's very visible
when kids are not hugged, or
when they're not even spoken to.
Even speaking to the baby
in the first two years
of life is extremely important.
They have shown that kids
-- a four-year-old baby --
kid who was on welfare has heard
30 million fewer words than a child
of professional parents,
according to one study.
So that means that these
disadvantaged kids basically are
growing up with a twin deficit,
a deficit of hugs, and
a deficit of words.
And that makes a huge difference.
So how do we hear about this?
One study back to 1989
happened in Romania.
It happened after the collapse
of the Romanian Regime,
and they discovered
all these orphanages.
There were thousands of
children in orphanages.
They had a chance to
do an experiment.
They took 68 kids and they
placed them in foster homes,
and they had 68 kids that
they left in the orphanages,
and they actually looked
at what happened;
they observed what happened.
It turns out that the 68 who were --
of the 68 kids, those
who were removed
from the orphanage before the age
of two well they fared pretty well.
They actually were able
to lead independent lives.
Those who were removed from
the orphanage after the age
of two, didn't do quite so well.
In fact, their IQ remained stuck
in the '70s, you know what that is?
And they did some brain
scans and they saw
that there was less brain
activity in those kids,
and there was less gray matter.
In some cases the brain
architecture actually shrunk
or did not grow nearly
as big as it should have.
So we know that there's a window
in the first two years of life.
And after that it becomes
much more difficult to --
you never recapture that time,
but it becomes much more difficult
to help a child's brain development.
But does that mean that all
is lost after the age of two?
No. You can actually, you know,
address some of the problems
after the age of two, but of course
before the age of two addressing,
you know, the real causes of
poverty, not just the symptoms
in a very cost-effective way occurs
in the first two years of life.
But there are other
windows: elementary school,
middle school, high school.
And you can have successful
interventions,
but the odds are not as great.
Let me give you an example of one --
a girl who basically was
-- had had an intervention.
Her name is Khadijah
[assumed spelling] Williams.
She basically was born and
raised in homeless shelters.
She lived with her mother and
her sister in Los Angeles.
Khadijah basically
didn't go to kindergarten.
She went to half of first
grade; not much of second grade.
She did go to third grade
and to fourth grade.
Fifth grade she went to half of
fifth grade, she missed sixth grade.
Seventh grade she was moving from
city to city, shelter to shelter.
And in eighth grade she went
to school for two weeks.
But, you know, she knew that she
was smart, because in the third
and fourth grade when
she was at school,
she took those standardized
tests, and she scored
in the 90s, you know, the upper 90s.
She did very well.
And she also tried to get her
hands on any reading material.
If someone threw out a
book, or if they threw
out a magazine, she
would snap it up.
And she also sought help.
She knew that she -- well she
was smart, but she needed help.
But she also knew that she -- living
in homeless shelters she had to,
you know, tidy herself up
so that she wouldn't smell.
She did all sorts of things to
try and overcome her upbringing.
By the high school, she said, you
know, "I really want to learn."
And so when she entered her junior
year she vowed that she would stay
in one high school, the Jefferson
High School, no matter what it took.
And what it took was getting
up a four a.m. to take the bus
to school -- buses to school.
And she would stay at the
school, she would do all
of her academic work, she
would engage in all sorts
of extracurricular activities, from
sports, to chess club, to debate.
And then she would get
home at eleven p.m.
and do it all again
the next morning.
But she was encouraged by
a lot of mentors at school.
There was the Central
Scholars Program.
There were other programs
that helped her.
And she sought out help.
She said, "I need help."
There was counseling,
all sorts of methods,
and people who encouraged
her to keep working hard.
And she did work really hard, and
she ended up graduating number four
in a class of 300 in her high
school, which was remarkable.
Everybody wanted her to
go to school, of course.
She took the SATs.
She scored the highest
SAT score of people
in her grade, which was remarkable.
And finally when she -- it was
the fall of her senior year,
and she was going to
apply to college.
Of course people were encouraging
her to apply to college.
Let's see.
Oops, okay, this is Khadijah
doing her applications.
No; this is Khadijah
actually working.
This is her desk.
When she was embarking on her
college application process,
there was a couple, Pat and Jim
London, who said, "You know,
Khadijah, really, a homeless
shelter is no place for you
to be writing your applications.
Why don't you spend a
few weeks in our home,
so that you could have
a nice peaceful place
to write your college applications?"
And Khadijah did that; and she wrote
powerfully about her background,
about her upbringing and her
determination to get to college.
And two years ago -- a little
bit over two years ago,
Khadijah she won a scholarship,
and she won a scholarship,
and then graduated from
Harvard University.
She got a shout-out
from Oprah Winfrey,
who gave the commencement
address that spring.
Khadijah really did achieve
something very special.
She has a remarkable
intellectual gift.
She has unsurpassed self-discipline
and determination and
grit, that's true.
But she also had something
that we all can offer,
which is help, advice.
The London's helped her, the
Central Scholars Program helped her.
And what that shows is that it
doesn't take superhuman effort
to actually help someone.
It takes superhuman effort on
the part of people like Khadijah.
But on the part of every,
you know, people like us.
If we just help a little bit we
can give the support to people
like Khadijah that most
kids in middle class
and wealthy backgrounds have.
And so that's one of the
lessons that I take dearly.
So I'm sure you also want to
hear about the revolution,
and for that I turn
you over to Nick.
[ Applause ]
>> Nicholas Kristof:
That's Khadijah,
by the way, with her diploma.
Thanks so much for
having both of us here.
It's one of the treats of being on
a book tour is you meet all kinds
of old friends and some of
Sheryl's family is here.
I just ran into my best friend when
I was about five or ten years old,
which is a good 15, 20 years ago.
[Laughter] And so we're so
delighted to have all of you here.
People are always kind of curious
how it is that we should have ended
up writing a book of all
things about sort of how
to change the world and this sort
of emerging science of
making a difference.
And in part it's really
because Sheryl and I wanted
to find a little more
purpose in our lives,
I think like a lot of our friends.
We wanted to model better
behavior for our kids,
we wanted to get our
kids more engaged.
We have three kids, and we've tried
all kinds of things in our case
that [inaudible] exposed
them to greater needs.
And so given our line of
work we tended to take them
with us our reporting
trips, which sometimes led
to some awkward situations.
I remember one time when my daughter
was maybe about 14 I was taking her
on a trip with me into Honduras
covering kind of gang-ridden slums.
And we were -- we had just driven
through one really hairy
gang-controlled checkpoint
in the capital.
And I said, you know, "It's
okay, Caroline, in just a couple
of days we'll be in
rural Nicaragua."
[Laughter] And she looked at
me and said, "You know, Dad,
when my friends on vacation, you
know, the go to the Caribbean."
And so Sheryl and I
decided she had a point,
and actually our next family
vacation we took all three kids
with us on a family vacation over
Thanksgiving to the Caribbean.
It was Haiti during
the [inaudible], right?
[Laughter] See, you do what you can.
And actually one of the
indications that the kids were sort
of absorbing this -- trying to --
revolution and trying to make a
difference came a few years ago
when I got the best
Father's Day present ever.
Those of you who might want to get
a Father's Day present, take note.
You know, it wasn't a necktie,
which as you see might not have
done me all that much good.
Let me show you a picture
of my Father's Day present.
Well, I say that confidently;
let's see.
Here we -- oh one back.
Well, imagine -- [laughter]
here we go, here we go.
This is my Father's Day present.
This is a giant Gambian pouched rat.
It's a special kind of rat.
It is three feet long nose to tail.
We released five here
in the audience.
You can see them firsthand.
[Laughter] And they're almost blind,
but they have an excellent
sense of smell.
So I didn't actually take possession
of my rat, but it was trained
in my name to detect
landmines in Angola.
And there are too light
to set off the landmines,
but they're quite quickly
trained, and they --
you know, a human land
detection is incredibly slow.
Every time -- it's used as metal
detectors, and every time you --
there's an old AK-47
shell, everybody stops
and scrapes away the sand with
more or less a toothbrush.
The rats respond not to the metal,
they respond to the
smell of explosives.
And so a human being can clear
20 square meters of a minefield
in a day; my rat, 400 square meters.
And my rat works for bananas.
[Laughter] Earlier this year I
visited my rat in the minefields,
and you know, that was sort of
an example of this revolution
that we were trying to
describe in "A Path Appears."
It is underway.
In part it's a revolution
and innovation,
and new ways to address old
problems more cost effectively,
more intelligently, trying to
use often the techniques learned
in business to address
social problems.
But it's not just about innovation,
it's also about evidence.
And one of the real transformations
in the world of making a difference
over the last generation
is that it used to be
about a gut sense of
what would work.
Now it's often based on really
careful randomized control trials,
as if approaching in an intervention
is a good war pharmaceutical trial.
And when you do that, you
learn all kinds of things
that are sometimes unexpected.
There was a lot of
excitement, as you know,
about microfinance some years ago.
When it was very carefully tested,
it turned out that
micro-lending was helpful but not
as transformational
as people had hoped.
But micro-savings, the other half
of microfinance, the one that tends
to get less attention,
micro-savings,
helping people save
small amounts of money,
that actually really
was transformational,
especially for women in the
developing world; less so for men.
And one of the results of this
research is what Sheryl was talking
about earlier, it's the
importance of early interventions,
that if you want to improve
high school graduation rates,
if you want to reduce
teen delinquency,
if you want to improve even things
like homeownership and adulthood,
then often the beset traction you
get is working with kids early on;
that it's so much easier to help a
six-month-old, or a six-year-old,
than it is a troubled 16-year-old.
And, you know, this is -- I'm hoping
that this country will finally
absorb some of these lessons.
And there seems actually
to be a certain amount
of bipartisan interest in early
childhood education; and not just,
you know, pre-K, but really
the whole zero to five space.
So let's hope that this is
an area that we're going
to see some more leadership on.
One of the -- those
who read my column know
that I write a lot about education.
And one of the things we've
learned in this wave of evidence is
that often the most cost-effective
ways to get more kids in school
in the developing world aren't
what we tend to think about,
which is building more schools;
but maybe the most
cost-effective way is something
that almost never occurs to us.
Any guesses about what it might
be; and I'll give you a hint.
It has to do -- this
is only for those
who haven't read "A Path Appears."
[Laughter] This has to do with a
medicine that I'm guessing would be
in quite a few of your homes, but
that none of you or almost none
of you would ever have taken.
How's that for a riddle?
And it improves high school
attendance very, very cheaply.
Any guesses about what that is?
>> [Inaudible Response].
>> Deworming?
>> Nicholas Kristof:
Very good; you win.
Deworming; you know, we
don't think about deworming
because our kids don't
have intestinal parasites.
But in much of the world kids do.
And we actually -- in the years
early in the 20th Century,
the Rockefeller Foundation
dewormed American kids,
and all of a sudden American kids
were doing so much better in school;
because their nutrition isn't going
to the worms, it's going to them.
They're less anemic, and they
can focus on their studies.
And when you do the -- when you
crunch the numbers, well let's see.
Here we go.
Oh. [Laughter] Let
me try one more time.
Here we go.
Here's the number crunching
on basically the cost
to get one additional
child in school,
if you do it through
bricks and mortar.
This is based on Kenya data.
It's $350 to get a
marginal child in school.
If you do it through deworming,
three dollars and fifty cents.
Domestically one of the lessons
we're learning from this kind
of research is the
incredible importance
of helping at-risk teenagers
avoid getting pregnant.
When that teenager becomes
pregnant at 16, usually the outcomes
for her aren't that good; she
typically drops out of school,
and likewise for her baby.
And in the US 30% of American girls
become pregnant by age 19; 30%.
American kids don't have sex
anymore often than European kids,
as far as we can tell from surveys,
but have babies three
times as often.
And in part that's
because we don't have
as good comprehensive sex education
in this country, and in part it's
because we don't provide as
good access to contraceptives,
especially long-acting
reversible contraceptives, LARCs.
And there have been a number
of studies now, by Saint Louis,
most recently Colorado, that show
that when we do help teenagers
who don't want to get
pregnant avoid pregnancy,
then this is not only good for
them, it saves the government money.
Every dollar invested in
these programs saves more
than the six dollars in
public funds later on.
And so one of the things that Sheryl
and I wonder is given that some
of these programs not only
improve opportunity and equity,
but also actually save public money,
then why don't we invest in it?
And the answers are complex.
But I think in part they go
to something I might
call "the empathy gap."
What do I mean by that?
One way of approaching that is that
if you look at American donations
to charity each year,
the wealthiest 20%
of Americans actually donate
significantly less to charity
as a percentage of incomes
than the poorest 20%.
It's actually about half
as much, as a percentage.
Now, why would that be?
Affluent Americans aren't
any less compassionate,
any less good than poor Americans.
It seems, as far as we can tell,
that it's a matter of insulation;
that if you were affluent
in American today,
then to a considerable extent
you wall yourself off from me.
You live in a better neighborhood,
most of your acquaintances
are somewhat better off,
and so need becomes something
you're intellectually aware of,
but not something you
encounter every day.
In contrast, if you were
poor in America today,
then every day you encounter need.
Confronted by it, you respond.
And one of the other burdens
of this kind of insulation is
that it becomes easier to
develop a narrative which we see
in this country in which
disadvantaged is fundamentally not
about circumstances, but it's
about personal responsibility.
And I just want to
address that for a moment.
You know, let's be clear,
there are real issues here.
And there was no doubt that at
times people compound disadvantage
with self-destructive behaviors.
But we're learning a
lot more about these.
And it's immensely complicated.
People who perceive
hopelessness sometimes then make
that hopelessness self-fulfilling,
by engaging self-destructive
behaviors,
conversely giving people a sense
that they have a trajectory
out of their circumstances,
whether it's with role models,
whether it's with counseling,
whether it's by actual doing
some kind of intervention,
then in turn make that sense
of hope self-fulfilling.
And if we can -- and also I must
say that it just seems that as long
as we're talking about
personal responsibility,
that's a fair discussion,
but we should also talk
about our responsibility as a
society to undertake interventions
that not only will
equalize opportunity,
but will also actually
save government money.
That is a responsibility
for all of us as a society.
And if we can bridge that
empathy gap, then it's sort
of astonishing what one can see.
And one of our -- one of the stories
we tell in "A Path Appears" is
about a fellow called "Olly Neal,"
an African American kid growing
up in rural Arkansas in the
late 1950s; really smart kid,
but also kind of a troublemaker.
And he was fired from his job at
a local store for shoplifting.
He was regarded -- at school
he reduced the sainted English
teacher's, Mrs. Grady, to tears.
And then one day in school, 1957,
he's skipping English class,
and he's in the little library
that Mrs. Grady has set up.
And a book catches his eye
by an African American
author named Frank Yerby.
He says that it catches his eye
because the cover shows this woman
with this very risqué top.
And I've always wondered about it.
This is 1957.
I mean, what does a risqué
top even mean in 1957 terms?
But it caught his eye,
and so he looked at it.
And he's not a reader,
he's a tough kid.
But he thinks, "Okay;
this is his chance."
And he's embarrassed to
be seen checking it out,
so he puts it under his
jacket and walks out.
He steals the book.
Well, he reads it at home and
it turns out to be a great book.
He really enjoys it.
So he returns it a week later,
and he notices another
Frank Yerby novel.
So he steals that one.
Again, it's a great read.
So he eventually returns
it to its spot
and he notices a third Frank
Yerby novel he hadn't seen before.
He steals that one.
This happens four times.
It completely changes
Olly Neal's life.
He becomes a reader.
He moves from these novels, to more
literary fiction, to current events.
From this segregated school
in rural Arkansas he goes
onto college, then onto law school.
He becomes a leader in
the Civil Rights Movement.
He becomes a prosecutor,
and a judge.
This is Judge Olly Neal.
So around his career he's dedicated
to helping disadvantaged kids
like the one that he had once been.
And at one of these reunions for his
school, he sits down with Mrs. Grady
and he says, "You know,
it's your little library
that turned my life around.
But I've got a confession to make.
I stole some of your books."
And Mrs. Grady said, "Well,
Olly, I have a confession too.
I saw you steal that first book."
[Laughter] And she had
been really indignant.
She was ready to confront
him, you know,
"What is this jerk doing
stealing another book?"
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.