So you\u2019re spending a lot of time trying to help people understand the importance of the early years. And this is something that science is now, I think, in a much better position of being able to help people understand that the early years are not just important for an individual\u2019s development. The early years are important for a society\u2019s development. It\u2019s an old saying that, you know, our children are the, you know, the nation\u2019s future, but we\u2019re beginning to understand what that really, really means on a biological and scientific level. We\u2019re beginning to understand that our concerns about health care for the older generation, the seeds of those problems are sewn in early development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019re beginning to understand how early adversity increases your risk for cardiovascular disease. Boy that costs a society a lot: for diabetes, for obesity, which of course is also, you know, influences diabetes, all sorts of health problems for alcoholism. I mean you have to, it\u2019s not just modeling that people are drinking, but these early adversities shape the way your nucleus accumbens functions, and your dopamine system and it makes you at risk for becoming an alcoholic if you ever start drinking, etcetera. We\u2019re beginning to understand this biology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So if we want to have a society where we can solve our problems, and we have people who are making enough money to pay enough taxes, so that we can solve our problems, we need to worry about what we\u2019re doing in those earliest years. We know that we can probably always do things that will fix what didn\u2019t happen right early on. But to fix it is costly, it\u2019s not as certain, and our biggest expense, of course, prisons which fix it by getting rid of them, are probably some of the most expensive things we can do and we\u2019re understanding the biology of how early adverse life events increase the risk of these negative outcomes later. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So you\u2019re spending a lot of time trying to help people understand the importance of the early years. And this is something that science is now, I think, in a much better position of being able to help people understand that the early years are not just important for an individual\u2019s development. The early years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2502","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2503,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2502\/revisions\/2503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}