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An estimated 49.5 million people watched Barack Obama's first prime-time news conference as president.

Nielsen Media Research says Monday night's session was televised live on eight different networks - ABC, CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ), NBC, Fox, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and Univision.

It wasn't the most-watched presidential news conference. A month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush held a news conference watched by 64.8 million people. And a news conference about the economy held less than a month after President Clinton took office in 1993 drew 64.3 million viewers.

In 1993, the average U.S. home had 40 channels. Now, it's 118 channels, according to Nielsen.

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In my last column, I argued that all infrastructure investment is not the same. If we are to embark on massive investments to stimulate the economy, we should do so with an eye toward producing benefits in the long term. And I argued that education is one such investment.

This assertion generated a lot of pushback from people who feel passionately that any stimulus package should focus on creating jobs right now. Clearly that's important, but it is also not a long-term fix, particularly when the jobs to be created are not likely to be the high-quality, long-term career positions that make for a successful economy. From this perspective, investing in human capital is the way to go. This is not just opinion--there is a lot that we know about the returns to investing in human capital, and we know more and more all the time about which investments yield good returns.

The most essential reading on this topic is The Race Between Education and Technology, by Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz. Goldin and Katz give a broad historical view of the role of education in economic growth in the U.S. They make the case that, after a century of leading the world in supplying the educated workers needed to serve technology, the U.S. has fallen behind in education. There is other important research by James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Arthur Rolnick of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota on the returns to early childhood education.

Any discussion of investments in education with the goal of preparing the workforce of the future needs to begin in early childhood. In the first five years of life, children undergo tremendous development. If children receive support for growth in language, development of motor skills, social skills and emotional support, they are more likely to succeed in school subsequently and to later contribute to society. Absent that kind of early development, children are more likely to drop out of school, commit crimes and require support from the welfare system. These are the costs that society bears.

Estimates are that early childhood education programs that are focused on children at risk produce returns of as much as 7%-16%, a large portion of which are social returns. This is a good investment. Some of these returns will be lost if the K-12 education system is broken and some of the disappointing results on the benefits of Head Start programs are due to deficiencies in the school systems that the children encounter subsequently. Clearly more has to be done at this level.

Education, as we all know, is a cumulative process. Thus, calling for a highly educated workforce implies, almost by definition, that individuals receive both early childhood development and a solid education from kindergarten on up. Programs like Head Start are important, but without a strong K-12 education that builds upon those accomplishments, students will not be ready to move on to college education.

Unfortunately, as Goldin and Katz document, we have faltered--and even fallen behind--in K-12 education by many measures. One example is that the secondary school graduation rate has declined significantly in the last 25 years.

State TV says provinces are slating an eye-popping $1.5 trillion in stimulus spending. The reality is likely far more underwhelming.

More From Paul Maidment

If China knows about anything, it is propaganda. The considerable power of the state's propaganda machine is now being thrown behind the effort to stop the economy from slowing too much.

On Sunday, as Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was on the last day of a three-day tour of Shanghai and Zhejiang province exhorting local companies to show confidence that they would get through what he called "difficult times," state broadcaster CCTV was reporting that provinces across China would add 10 trillion yuan ($1.5 trillion) to the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package that Beijing announced earlier this month.

Ten trillion yuan is an eye-catching number. It is twice the level of all state spending in 2007, not to mention two and a half times greater than the central government's proposed package of investments in infrastructure and social programs over two years. Lest we forget, Beijing was meant to be financing only a third of that directly; the rest was to come from provincial and local administrations, and from state-owned banks and companies.

It has not been clear what was new money in the 4 trillion yuan package and what old, already budgeted for in the current five-year plan or earmarked for natural disaster relief, and just bundled up to provide an eye-catching headline number. The 10 trillion yuan suffers from similar opaqueness behind the headline number.

CCTV came up with it after doing the rounds of the provinces counting up spending plans. The two biggest sets it found were 3 trillion yuan in Yunnan in the southwest and 2.3 trillion yuan in Guangdong, the southern export hub. These, though, are spending proposals, not commitments.

What we suspect is happening is this: after three years in which provincial governments have found financing infrastructure projects difficult as central government tried to stamp down on inflation by restricting credit, they are now rushing to find projects with which to lay claim to the 80 billion yuan not yet allocated out of the 100 billion yuan Beijing wants spent in the final quarter of this year. Those with the fattest pipeline, local officials believe, have the best chance of securing funding.

CCTV interviewed one local official in Hubei province who boasted how his colleagues had put in extra hours over the past two weeks as policy had suddenly reversed from curbing inflation to slowdown prevention, and had come up with 100 infrastructure and local develop projects to pitch. The official said their marching orders were to find already started projects being held back for lack of capital, or new projects that could give a quick boost to the economy.