[...]
Education’s
importance is incontrovertible – teaching is my day job, so I certainly
hope it is of some value. But whether it constitutes a strategy for
economic growth is another matter. What most people mean by better
education is more schooling; and, by higher-quality education, they mean
the effective acquisition of skills (as revealed, say, by the test
scores in the OECD’s standardized PISA exam). But does that really drive
economic growth?
In fact, the push for
better education is an experiment that has already been carried out
globally. And, as my Harvard colleague Lant Pritchett has pointed out, the long-term payoff has been surprisingly disappointing.
In the 50 years from
1960 to 2010, the global labor force’s average time in school
essentially tripled, from 2.8 years to 8.3 years. This means that the
average worker in a median country went from less than half a primary
education to more than half a high school education.
How much richer
should these countries have expected to become? In 1965, France had a
labor force that averaged less than five years of schooling and a per capita income of $14,000 (at 2005 prices). In 2010, countries with a similar level of education had a per capita income of less than $1,000.
In 1960, countries
with an education level of 8.3 years of schooling were 5.5 times richer
than those with 2.8 year of schooling. By contrast, countries that had
increased their education from 2.8 years of schooling in 1960 to 8.3
years of schooling in 2010 were only 167% richer. Moreover, much of this
increase cannot possibly be attributed to education, as workers in 2010
had the advantage of technologies that were 50 years more advanced than
those in 1960. Clearly, something other than education is needed to
generate prosperity.
[...]
And
there is more bad news for the “education, education, education” crowd:
Most of the skills that a labor force possesses were acquired on the
job. What a society knows how to do is known mainly in its firms, not in
its schools. At most modern firms, fewer than 15% of the positions are
open for entry-level workers, meaning that employers demand something
that the education system cannot – and is not expected – to provide.
When
presented with these facts, education enthusiasts often argue that
education is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for growth. But
in that case, investment in education is unlikely to deliver much if the
other conditions are missing. After all, though the typical country
with ten years of schooling had a per capita income of $30,000 in 2010, per capita income
in Albania, Armenia, and Sri Lanka, which have achieved that level of
schooling, was less than $5,000. Whatever is preventing these countries
from becoming richer, it is not lack of education.
A country’s income is
the sum of the output produced by each worker. To increase income, we
need to increase worker productivity. Evidently, “something in the
water,” other than education, makes people much more productive in some
places than in others. A successful growth strategy needs to figure out
what this is.
Make no mistake:
education presumably does raise productivity. But to say that education
is your growth strategy means that you are giving up on everyone who has
already gone through the school system – most people over 18, and
almost all over 25. It is a strategy that ignores the potential that is
in 100% of today’s labor force, 98% of next year’s, and a huge number of
people who will be around for the next half-century. An education-only
strategy is bound to make all of them regret having been born too soon.
Autor:
Ricardo Hausmann is Director of Harvard's Center for International Development and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include issues of growth, macroeconomic stability, international finance, and the social dimensions of development. He holds a PhD in economics from Cornell University.
Autor:
Ricardo Hausmann is Director of Harvard's Center for International Development and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include issues of growth, macroeconomic stability, international finance, and the social dimensions of development. He holds a PhD in economics from Cornell University.
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