James Heckman, the Nobel-prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, spoke briefly on National Public Radio. My favorite part was Michael Martin asking why an economist (and there are quite a few of us) is interested in early childhood education:

MARTIN: I hope the question doesn't bore you. But there are…many people who will wonder why and how an economist got interested in early childhood education. Prof. HECKMAN: If you start looking at how human beings develop and diverge and you start realizing how poverty really gets created and you start tracing the origins of poverty back, it's hard not to go back, back, back to the earliest years in the lives of people.

The audio and transcript can be found at the link above.