Notes |
Invested 250,000 to launch.
The magnitude surprised everyone. Mr. Rolnick asked economist James Heckman, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, to check the work. The results matched Mr. Rolnick's.
Among those intrigued was Robert Dugger, a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill. He was working at the hedge fund Tudor Investment Corp. as a political and global-risk analyst. Using his own money -- $250,000 so far -- Mr. Dugger started his own think tank and commissioned a paper by Mr. Heckman.
The 2004 paper argued that extending preschool to the four million children under 5 then living under the poverty line would produce a net benefit to the economy of more than $511 billion. Disadvantaged children who start schooling early are more likely to attend college and "less likely to be teenage mothers and foster a new generation of deprived children," Mr. Heckman wrote.
The paper helped persuade Mr. Dugger's boss, hedge fund magnate Paul Tudor Jones, to contribute $1 million. Mr. Dugger's project has grown from a handful of people sitting around a table in his office to a group of more than 1,000 who gather -- some in person, some on a phone link -- in Washington for two-hour presentations monthly. Pew has kicked in $1 million.
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