1% Smarter Newsletter No. 008
What I'm reading, listening to, and learning from the week ending 1/8/22
Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, when the world seemed to be falling to pieces, I remember being comforted by one fact: at least the disease was largely sparing children.1 That society’s youngest members would make it through the pandemic relatively unscathed was a much-needed silver lining.
My optimism, however, may have been premature.
It is not the disease itself that has proved to be ruinous to so many children, but the seemingly reasonable restrictions imposed to stop Covid-19’s spread. A recent study out of Brown University, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, finds that children born during the pandemic have suffered a drop in IQ by 22 points.
22 points.
This drop almost defies description. According to the lead author Sean Deoni, in uncharacteristically blunt language for an academic, “It’s not subtle by any stretch. You don’t typically see things like that, outside of major cognitive disorders.”
In what is becoming a depressing but common trend during Covid-19, this impact has not been evenly spread. Deoni and his co-authors write, “[M]ales and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected.”
David Leonhardt of the New York Times summarizes the effects of social restrictions on children and teenagers in this week’s featured content. The impacts are pervasive and extreme. They include:
Stark declines in student achievement, especially for black, Hispanic, and poor students
A spike in mental health illnesses so severe that three leading medical groups2 have declared a “national emergency in child and adolescent mental health”
An increase in suicide rates for teenagers. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of 12–to 17–year–old girls admitted to the E.R. for suspected suicide attempts rose by 51%
A record-high 42 school shootings in 2021—up from 27 in 2019
Anecdotal reports of atrocious behavioral problems, vandalism, and classroom disruptions
In conclusion, Leonhardt writes,
Communities have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults, often without acknowledging the dilemma or assessing which decisions lead to less overall harm. So it is not surprising that children are suffering so much.
So what does this all mean? Policymakers, educators, children’s mental health experts, and epidemiologists who are smarter than me are grappling with these hard truths. I do not pretend to have any sage perspective to add to their conversation. I simply hope we can course-correct and reverse the extreme mental health impacts on our youth before they suffer more.
But there is still a lesson for the layperson here: beware of the planning fallacy. The fallacy describes human’s tendency to provide overly optimistic estimates of an action’s benefits, costs, and time to complete.
When schools transitioned to Zoom class, canceled daycare, prohibited student socialization at school, and called off prom and sports seasons, the trade-off seemed reasonable: tolerate a disruption for a few weeks or months before returning to normal. In exchange, we would “flatten the curve” and “stop the spread.”
22 months into the pandemic, “normal” is nowhere in sight. We dramatically overestimated the benefits3, and underestimated the costs and time to completion, of these measures.
Let this be a reminder to check our natural positivity bias when planning for the future. As the old proverb goes, “Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”
💡 Featured Content
My top pick this week
🐤 Twitter thread on Covid-19, children, and mental health by David Leonhardt
🎨 The Arts
🎧 Dawn FM by The Weeknd
🏛 Government and Policy
📄 To keep our country safe, we need a national Cyber Academy. Think of it as West Point for technology defense by Kirsten Gillibrand
🖥 Web3
🐤 Twitter Thread on Jeff Bezos by sumitgarg.eth
📄 My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike
🧪 Science
🎧 The Science Behind Why We Age | Episode 1 on Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair
🌐 Miscellaneous
📄 Interview: Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport by Noah Smith
📚 Books
📘 Reamde by Neal Stephenson
📘 The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
COVID Infection Fatality Rates by Sex and Age, 11/18/2020, Alex Bezerow
American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association
Says Loenhardt, “Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures even reduce Covid cases. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit.”