Is lack of eye contact really the problem? I’ve been in poor villages where babies and young children seem to have a huge amount of engagement with their moms and all the other adults. Many other posters suggest capitalism and inequality is the problem. Really? Full socialism was tried in Cuba and terrible inequalities remain. I know, Cuba suffered from the US hurting its economy. What about Venezuela? Did socialism, funded by an ocean of oil, help poor children in villages? What about Argentina, which seemed to go from a successful first world capitalist country to more of a failure as it shifted to socialism?
One highly consistent theme I’ve noticed in all these plans, whether it’s Head Start, or the Millennium Villages Project in Africa, or many others, is they get a lot of announcements about how exciting they are and how much progress they’re going to make, and then in the end the results are nothing, the excited donors and theorists are embarassed, and they fade away and nothing is different. Maybe this problem is intractable? Where’s the success?
