WATCH THE TED TALK HERE

In this well-argued talk, Timothy Bartik makes the macro-economic case for preschool education — and explains why you should be happy to invest in it, even if you don't have kids that age (or kids at all).

The economic benefits of well-educated kids, it turns out, go well beyond the altruistic.

Now, one objection you often hear, or maybe you don't hear it because people are too polite to say it, is,why should I pay more taxes to invest in other people's children? What's in it for me? And the trouble with that objection, it reflects a total misunderstanding of how much local economies involve everyone being interdependent.

Specifically, the interdependency here is, is that there are huge spillovers of skills -- that when other people's children get more skills, that actually increases the prosperity of everyone,including people whose skills don't change.