The Haves and the Have Nots

The following is a book review of "The Life Project" by Helen Pearson

Social class still powerfully affects life chances. But parents with high hopes for their kids offer the ‘strongest buffer against disadvantage.’

This spring, a group of British scientists threw what was surely the world’s weirdest birthday bash. Roughly 3,000 British men and women, all of them turning 70, all of them strangers to one another, celebrated their special day at two enormous parties in London and Manchester.

The septuagenarians were the surviving members of one of the first and longest “cohort studies.” Seven decades before, British researchers had begun the process of tracking—through childhood, adolescence and adulthood—every single baby born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week in March 1946. The original number, roughly 17,000, was soon culled down to a more manageable level, and death and attrition reduced it further over time. In “The Life Project,” Helen Pearson, a features editor for Nature, chronicles the research for the 1946 cohort and the four other mammoth studies that followed. All told, the studies have tracked 70,000 people from the day they were born—in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1991 and 2001—until the present.

And what a mother lode of now-settled findings those studies revealed! The cohort studies spawned 6,000 papers and 40 books bringing to light, among much else, the dangers of drinking alcohol during pregnancy; the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for babies sleeping on their stomachs; the long-term benefits for babies who are breast-fed and for children who have regular bedtimes; pollution’s lasting effect on respiratory health; and smoking’s connection to cancer. As late as 1970, about 30% of pregnant women smoked, under the smiling supervision of doctors who believed that the habit helped them calm their nerves and keep their weight down. A tabloid headline about one of the cohort papers published in 1972—“Mum’s Cigs Killed 1,500 Babies”—changed prenatal advice and behavior for good.

“The Life Project” is in part an amiable narrative about the perseverance, inspired improvisation and political maneuvering behind modern scientific discovery. In the early cohorts, data was laboriously entered onto tens of thousands of punch cards. A question about mothers’ smoking habits was added to the 1958 questionnaire only at the last minute, when a pediatrician remembered an “odd American study suggesting a link between smoking and birth weight.” Myopic politicians regularly threatened funding for projects whose payoff would come way past the next election.

But Ms. Pearson is well aware that the “The Life Project” is also a very British story. The early-cohort scientists come across as mildly eccentric characters still possessed of wartime “keep calm and carry on” resolve. Later ones showed a methodical, even obsessional, style. Though they had no immediate plans for them, researchers designing the 1991 study decided to collect placentas after their subjects’ birth. When the hospital where the organs had been stored closed years later, a convoy of trucks transported 9,000 buckets with sloshing placentas to a chilled basement near Bristol, where, to this day, they wait to serve the cause of science.

From the first cohort, scientists were struck by the effects of social class on life chances. Working-class babies were more likely to get sick than their well-to-do peers. They were less well-nourished and grew more slowly. Their early disadvantage continued into adulthood. They were shorter in stature and had higher blood pressure and higher death rates from cardiovascular disease. The scientists concluded that the gap between socioeconomic groups could be traced all the way back to conditions in the womb. The findings spurred the newly created National Health Service to expand free prenatal and maternity care.

In fact, inequality remains a major theme—and disappointment—in the cohort literature. The first cohort study coincided with a new egalitarian spirit following the war. The 1944 Education Act had made education compulsory and free; the British government also introduced the “11-plus” test to locate promising kids at the end of elementary school. Yet the better-off children of the 1946 cohort still out-achieved equally bright working-class peers. The 1958 cohort was no different. One researcher looked at the most disadvantaged children of that group—those living in overcrowded homes with a single parent or four or more siblings—and published a book called “Born to Fail.” Policy makers were duly alarmed and eventually increased funds for early childhood education.

If their efforts have created a more equal society, the cohort studies have yet to reveal it. Ms. Pearson observes that infant mortality has plunged and children are now healthier, yet class differences still take children down separate life paths. Performance gaps continue to emerge very early in life and even widen during the school years, a “trajectory of disadvantage” that American researchers have confirmed repeatedly.

In the 2001 cohort study, very young poor kids had smaller vocabularies than wealthier ones. By school age, they were more hyperactive and had more emotional and learning problems. Despite the rise in living standards, over 30% of them faced at least one of the childhood risks discovered in earlier studies, like domestic violence and parental alcoholism or depression.

Still, the notion that low-income children are “born to fail” turns out to be false. Over and over again, the cohort studies found that parents with high aspirations for their children “offer the first and strongest buffer against disadvantage,” as Ms. Pearson writes. Providing “a good ‘learning environment’ at home”—reading to a child, singing songs, teaching the alphabet and numbers—was more significant than “parents’ job, education, or income.”

One comes away from “The Life Project” with mixed feelings. The cohort studies stand as a triumph of scientific gumption and progress while also reminding us that, in Ms. Pearson’s words, the “same old questions go round and round like clothes in a washing machine.”

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal

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Kay S. Hymowitz is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal