Comment by collinmcnulty

America's post-war strength was built on unusually strong education. After the war, America had far more schooling overall than other countries. It was one of the many factors that made America a powerhouse in the 50s and 60s.

Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who are essentially the gold standard reference here, show that the US became the richest nation precisely because it led the world in mass education (first universal high school, then mass higher ed), not in spite of it.

>> America’s preference for common wisdom over book learning is a strength, not a weakness. Formal education filters for risk averse, process and credential-oriented people.

High-education countries don't look like basket cases. Among 25-64 year olds, the countries with the highest tertiary attainment shares are: Canada (64%), Japan (56%), South Korea (53%), USA (50%), and the Nordic countries hovering around similar rates. These are some of the richest, most technologically advanced societies in the world. If "credential worship" made a society brittle and unproductive, you'd expect these places to be obvious failures.

India's problem is not too much college. It's that gross tertiary enrollment ratio is only 33%, below the world average. The development-econ diagnosis of India is actually the reverse of your claim: too many people with too little quality education, especially basic literacy, numeracy and foundational skills, plus a small highly-credentialed elite at the top.

>> The GI bill isn’t a counterpoint. GI’s still had to gain admissions at a time when colleges were far more selective than today: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/01/23/why_college... (undergraduate IQs fell from 119 in 1939 to just 102 in 2022). So you created a filter that was extremely rigorous. It supported college education for people who were both significantly smarter than average, and also had served in the military—the Marcus Aurelius type.

The GI bill massively expanded college. Half of all college students in 1947 were vets. It is widely credited with building the post-war middle class. The IQ meta-analysis you cite explicitly says the drop in average student IQ is a mechanical result of more people going to college, not evidence that universities got worse. The researchers in fact explicitly say this.

> be like India where you worship credentials and degrees like religion.

Or China, Japan, Korea…

I see very little evidence for this abundance of American "common wisdom". If anything, America has always had a deeply anti-intellectual vein running through it, whether it was the Scopes monkey trial, the Know Nothing Party or what you see in the present political scene. Higher education, especially the affordable kind at public universities, has been a bulwark against the paranoid delusions that often dominate societies that revere superstition and "common sense" over reason, empiricism and humanism.

> There are so many factors involved in that that attributing it to just investment in higher education and GI bill is a gross oversimplification, so is previous post's attribution of the drop afterwards.

Your comment sounds like you didn't quite understood the point I made.

The whole point was that US benefited greatly from WW2 to reach the position of world's hegemon. But that happened nearly a century ago, and reaching the position vs maintaining the position are two entirely different sets of challenges.

My point was that WW2 gave the US a running start, but it still required work to preserve that advantage. The US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D was the key competitive advantage that allowed the US to preserve it's dominance until the present day.

To put it another way, WW2 helped attract the world's finest research talent, but the technological and scientific achievements that followed were the result of the investment in domestic talent that followed. You cannot have the likes of silicon valley without the US's postwar investment in higher education and R&D.

Exactly. In <pick random developing nation that isn't too poor> a man who wants to construct a septic for a house pays a man with backhoe who understands the nuances to make it happen. Concrete and diesel are bought, etc, etc, etc. Let's say $5k USD added to GDP.

In US same thing happens. But the man is compelled by threat of law to pay for engineering studies, permits, as are the man with the backhoe and the man making the concrete, etc, etc. $10k is added to GDP.

Has anymore wealth actually been created tho?

You can argue there's a difference because the latter septic is superior because on average they fail less and there's some amortized cost to that but if you're arguing about marginal differences in the face of an integer multiple you've kind of already lost.

This generalizes to just about all products and services. No more value is being created. There's just a bunch of hands in the pot that look like value if you squint and apply motivated spreadsheet magic.

The last great economic expansion or at least economic reconfiguration was internet services (which of course is mostly distinct from financial services) and the US ended up with a very dominant trade position in internet services.

I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located

Not to discount physical infrastructure, but the world is quite digital these days and being at the absolute top of the software + associated techs economy is nothing to sniff at.

That's because they are "elite" in their credentials, not actually elite in their competences/qualities.

By definition you cannot have an elite that is comprised of a large part of the population. The problem is that education institutions have an incentive to bring in more and more people for the money and the power it affords them but that's completely contradictory to the goal of production elite individuals.

A true elite is only possible if you select for the top individuals each year and it cannot be determined solely by the capacity to pay for the school.

A good implementation would use qualities from both US and EU style institutions: education at no cost but very selective process that only accept around 5% of each generation. Otherwise you are just wasting money/ressources on people that will never pay back, whether it is paid by the taxpayer in the EU or by the individual/family in the US is an implementation detail.

And when it comes to "liberal arts" education, in a world where information is extremely cheap/free, it makes absolutely no sense. It was always about credentialism. The reality is that it was about assigning a fake value to people who are kinda useless. The primary selection features are obedience and industriousness which are not necessarily valuable qualities if they are not focused on worthwhile goals but it's very useful for the powers in place. Anybody knows that working hard isn't that desirable when the objectives are not useful. But this is exactly why we get DEI and other dysfunctional policies/systems.

> Why would I want my DEI consulting to actually solve the underlying problem

This applies to any consulting. Normally you want to solve a problem, because there's another thousand of companies that need similar problem solved. You don't get many people coming into a company with an immediate "I'm going to try to not improve anything" plan.

> The left-extremists say "you need to give me a job in order to make your team more diverse".

This is seriously weird even as a misrepresentation. The extreme left is for changing diversity overall rather than just "give me a job". (If we actually go extreme left, it would be closer to "we've got enough resources for everyone to not need jobs to survive" anyway)

The overproduction issue is interesting, but it really didn't need the exaggerated caricatures as examples.

Those numbers actually back up the point. The jump in education after WWII happened during the biggest boom years the US ever had. The rise to 40 percent college grads happened much later, during globalization and offshoring. So the slowdown is about the economy changing, not people getting more education. It is just a bad correlation.

I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor.

However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family.

That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.

> Most useful skill and knowledge is still learned on the job. The "education" is just a selection process.

It selects for the ability and intrinsic motivation to learn.

If you were running a factory or a building construction company, wouldn't you want that in someone you hire?

Are there high school dropouts who have the ability and intrinsic motivation? Of course there are. Many drop out due to poverty and family/community strife, or mental health challenges.

But as an employer would you risk assuming a high school dropout had the same motivation?

> when partisanship has to be disguised.

The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...

Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the ratio drops considerably to only 1.6:1 in engineering, and around 5:1 for economics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Langbert notes:

> The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.

Duke: https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-faculty-su...

> When asked for their political identities on a scale of “very liberal” to “very conservative,” 23.2% of respondents identified as “very liberal,” 38.53% identified as “somewhat liberal,” 24.48% identified as moderates or centrists, 9.92% identified as “somewhat conservative” and 3.87% identified as “very conservative.”

Yale: https://buckleyinstitute.com/faculty-political-diversity-rep...

> Across 14 departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities, the report identified 312 Democrat faculty (88%) and only 4 Republicans (1.1%), a ratio of around 78 to 1.

> Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power

To be fair, they kind of are. In the 20th century there were conservative academics at elite universities and they've since largely been excommunicated as heretics. Which has been a mistake, because then the people who would have agreed with them instead reject academia as a whole and latch on to demagogues, which is so much worse.

It's about who you know not what you know is sadly true.

Let's not pretend that 4 years in an average US/European university creates a renaissance Uber man.

In your view the benefits of university are that rich people go there? Did I somehow completely misunderstand?

I don’t see how you can be so confident in that. It’s not at all straightforward to tease apart all the factors.

I dunno, google any university ranking and you will find the top ten has many from the US?

In my country the only restriction for university is that you have a highschool diploma.

Getting into the medical faculty is harder because the government does pay for everything and training doctors is expensive- for those the university picks the best and brightest.

The government also has programs in place to send out students to Harvard and MIT as the future elite of the nation.

True, but with respect to the university visa system at least it is pretty vague. The ICE stuff is not targeting Chinese and Indian uni students.

I'm not talking about Ivy schools. I mean regional state and private schools that educate the majority of people who attend college. These do not have multi billion dollar endowments unless you are summing them all up.

At 4% a billion dollars yields 40 million per year, if you have 1000 staff that's 40k each, barely pays a salary.