build mental capital

Now that we are prepar­ing our 2010 mar­ket report we are ana­lyz­ing in depth a num­ber of impor­tant recent devel­op­ments. A major one, whose impli­ca­tions haven’t yet been prop­er­ly digest­ed, was the pub­li­ca­tion in the UK of a fan­tas­tic series of pol­i­cy, sci­en­tif­ic and tech­nol­o­gy reports by the Fore­sight Project on Men­tal Cap­i­tal and Well­be­ing. If you want to have a stim­u­lat­ing and sub­stan­tial read, you can down­load the Exec­u­tive Sum­ma­ry (and most oth­er reports) for free.

I was think­ing about their main rec­om­men­da­tion (the need to focus more atten­tion, as a soci­ety and as indi­vid­u­als, on build­ing men­tal cap­i­tal and well­be­ing tra­jec­to­ries along the life­course), as I came across these appar­ent­ly com­plete­ly sep­a­rate news. Does­n’t the life­long men­tal cap­i­tal frame­work add new light on these articles?

Study Sees Gains In Good Child Care (Wall Street Journal)

A study released Fri­day found that ben­e­fits asso­ci­at­ed with child-care providers and preschool pro­grams that encour­age such activ­i­ties as lan­guage, read­ing and game-play­ing last well into ado­les­cence. In par­tic­u­lar, teenagers who had such child-care per­formed sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly than those giv­en low-qual­i­ty or no care out­side the home.

High-qual­i­ty care was defined as an envi­ron­ment in which care-givers or teach­ers were warm, engaged and sen­si­tive to a child’s needs, and pro­vid­ed cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion through activ­i­ties that would pro­mote lan­guage, such as read­ing, con­ver­sa­tion and game-playing.

Time to Review Work­place Reviews? (New York Times)

The focus on work­place health comes as work­er sat­is­fac­tion in the Unit­ed States appears to be at an all-time low. The Con­fer­ence Board report­ed recent­ly that just 45 per­cent of work­ers are sat­is­fied with their jobs, down from 61 per­cent in 1987. The find­ings, based on a sur­vey of 5,000 house­holds, show that the decline goes well beyond con­cerns about job secu­ri­ty. Employ­ees are unhap­py about the design of their jobs, the health of their orga­ni­za­tions and the qual­i­ty of their managers.

Dr. Sut­ton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (com­ing from Busi­ness Plus) argues that good boss­es are essen­tial to work­place suc­cess, said sky­rock­et­ing health care costs should moti­vate busi­ness­es to focus on ways to low­er stress.

Alzheimer’s Pre­ven­tion or Cog­ni­tive Enhance­ment (blog post based on NIH inde­pen­dent panel)

“Firm con­clu­sions can­not be drawn about the asso­ci­a­tion of mod­i­fi­able risk fac­tors with cog­ni­tive decline or Alzheimer’s disease.”

(Note: which is true, but, as we dis­cussed pre­vi­ous­ly, this is being mis­un­der­stood to mean “there is noth­ing we can do to main­tain if not enhance our cog­ni­tive and self-reg­u­la­tion capac­i­ties,” which could­n’t be fur­ther from truth, based on the very sim­ple facts of life­long neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis and neuroplasticity.)