Follows the suggestion Dutch historian Rutger Bregman gave at Davos

“It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water, right?” Bregman said. “Just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes. … We can invite Bono once more, but we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/30/18203911/davos-rutger-bregman-historian-taxes-philanthropy

But what about this part as regards improving the economic class situation? I.E. the whole Head Start meme?

The lighting of a fire: The benefits of pre-schooling may extend for generations

An educational experiment on small children in the 1960s seems to be benefiting their families half a century later

@ The Economist, June 11

[....] Between 1962 and 1965, 128 African-American children from the Perry Elementary School district in Ypsilanti, Michigan were enrolled in an experiment. After being sorted into two groups with similar IQs, gender balance, and socio-economic backgrounds, a coin toss selected one of the groups to receive two-and-a-half hours of pre-school education each weekday for the two years before they entered primary school. They also received an hour-and-a-half of home visits a week from Perry Elementary teachers.

Since then, the participants have been repeatedly surveyed; most recently, most of them were interviewed at the age of 55. James Heckman and Ganesh Karapakula, economists, have examined the long-gathered results in two new papers, using techniques designed to factor in the experiment’s small size, flaws in the randomisation process and missing survey responses. The researchers found that the pre-schooled kids—and in particular the boys—have had considerably different lives as a result.

The pre-schooled group, they found, had about half the average number of violent felony convictions as the control group. Males in that group spent an average of 27 days in jail between the ages of 20 and 50 compared to 136 days for boys in the control group. They also had more success in employment, increased earnings in mid-adulthood and better health. Perry Pre-school Project boys are significantly more likely to have been in stable marital relationships. And the effects appear to persist across generations: the children of beneficiaries have fewer school suspensions, higher levels of education and employment and lower levels of criminal activity.

Another pre-school experiment that has been followed up over years, the Abecedarian Project in North Carolina [....]