Assumption without representation: the unacknowledged abstraction from communities and social goods

We have not clearly acknowledged the abstraction from unpriceable “social goods” (derived from communities) which, different from private and public goods, simply disappear if it is attempted to market them. Separability from markets and economics has not been argued, much less established. Acknowledging communities would reinforce rather than undermine them, and thus facilitate the production of social goods. But it would also help economics by facilitating our understanding of – and response to – financial crises as well as environmental destruction and many social problems, and by reducing the alienation from economics often felt by students and the public

Pre-school education and attainment in the National Child Development Study and British Cohort Study

This paper considers the effect of how children pass time before entrance to school on attainment in primary school. We find in National Child Developement Study data that Children perform marginally better at 7 and 11 if they spent time with their mother, or at a prre-school, rather than in informal care. This holds when one controls for parental education, social class and assessed parental interest in the child's education, as well as the quality of the peer group. In the British Cohort Study, however, time spent in nurseries effected no improvement in mathematics at 10 as compared with time in informal care, and pre-school children were performing much worse in reading. This worse performance was traceable to reduced vocabulary at 5. Pre-school children were more advanced in copying at 5 relative to children in informal care, but, while copying is a good predictor of scores in both mathematics and reading at 10, this advancement had been offset by then