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| Television might actually have a positive effect on children’s cognitive ability |
It didn't take long after America started tuning in to television that people started to worry about what it was doing to children.
A generation later, the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of college-bound teenagers had fallen significantly. A 1977 panel appointed by the College Entrance Examination Board suggested television bore some blame for the drop."When it offers a daily diet of Western pictures and vaudeville by the hour, television often seems destined to entertain the child into a state of mental paralysis," wrote The New York Times in 1949.
Indeed, the decline began in the mid-1960s, just as the first students heavily exposed to TV took their SATs.
But University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro aren't sure that TV has been all that bad for kids.
In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year, they presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of television might actually have had a positive effect on children's cognitive ability.
The two are part of a tight-knit group of young economists using statistical techniques to examine how television affects society.
The group's research suggests TV enabled an earlier generation of American children in non-English-speaking households to do better in school, helped rural Indian women to become more independent and contributed to lowering Brazil's fertility rate.
