Comment by locknitpicker

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.