Paul Krugman has it all wrong.
Paul Krugman has it all wrong in a recent NYTimes op ed piece. “If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word,” he writes, “that word would be ‘education.’” Op Ed writers, even Nobel Prize winners such as Paul Krugman, ought to avoid writing about subjects about which their own knowledge and experience is definitely limited.
One might even question if economic success has ever depended on education? Russia’s, and before that the Soviet Union’s, economic successes, what there was/is of them, depended and depends almost entirely on oil and natural gas riches, and wasn’t much helped by what was, in the Soviet Union, an excellent school system (at least for the relatively few who were the beneficiaries).
One might make a case for education being all important in the continued economic success of, and especially, Germany and Japan, but also of the other developed countries, but when one looks more closely at these countries one sees that it’s much more the culture and the traditions of the people that explain the work ethic, which in turn is most behind their successes.
In America there are other, much better explanations of our economic success than as Krugman would have it, our schools. Three come immediately to mind, (although no one of them would be sufficient by itself): The wealth of natural resources (also present during pre-Colombian times when substantial economic success was unknown), democratic governance, and a free market permitting and encouraging the creation and exchange of unlimited quantities of both goods and ideas.
But even these three by themselves would not be enough. Take Canada, for example, which hasn’t known our economic success in spite of a wealth of natural resources, democratic governance, and the free market of goods and ideas.
What is lacking in Canada is people. And in fact one might say that immigration, of all the factors mentioned, most accounts for our economic success. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have always freely come here, pell-mell as Tom Wolfe would say, and more than anything else have been responsible for this country’s economic growth and prosperity.
Look out! Some of our politicians are trying to stop this. As if we could do without the constant resupply of people who most want to be here, and who are ready to work in order to obtain for themselves what we already have. We can’t do without them and we certainly should stop trying to keep them from coming here.
Krugman is right in that the overall performance of our schools is unsatisfactory. But this has always been true. This is not more prevalent now than in the past.
But he is outright wrong to put down the real achievements of our schools (more about this below). And he is wrong to say that more money is what the schools need. The debate about the importance of additional funding in school reform efforts has been over for a long time. It’s not important.
But Krugman’s greatest mistake is to overlook that small segment of our school population that has always done extraordinarily well (and accounts for our economic success?). And is he even aware that many of these children who have done best of all have been the children of immigrants to our shores? This in itself is an extraordinary success story.
Was it the schools, or the strong work ethic and ambition that these children brought with them that most accounted for their success? My vote would go to the latter.
In any case, regardless of our failure to educate many of our young people in our K-12 public schools, especially those of the inner city, we do have a highly successful, probably the world’s best, system of higher education. Our colleges, and in particular our graduate schools and research universities occupy 17 of the top 20 places in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), 37 of the top 50.
This is today. This situation is not in decline. Bright young men and women continue to flock to our graduate schools from other countries, making up nearly one half of our graduate student population. And many of these students will choose to remain in this country, thus strengthening our economy and contributing not insignificantly to its success.
One might even say that our universities most account for our economic success, but only because they are continually resupplied by the world’s best and brightest young people, and, no less important, because our democratic political system, our emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities, and our active promotion of a free market exchange of goods and ideas encourages them to remain here and go to work.
What is one to think, other than we must be doing a lot of things right when we read, as we have just recently that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to three Americans (two women to boot), that the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to three men, all with U.S. citizenship, two of whom did their Nobel work at the Bell Laboratories in NJ, and that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two men, one American, one Brit, and an Israeli woman?
O.K. The prizes were for work done years ago, but is there any indication that similar good work is not going on right now in our public and private work spaces and laboratories? Somehow our educational system, with all its faults, and with its admittedly great failure to educate all of our young people, is in some all important ways leading the world into the future. And no other country is doing this as well as we are.
