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> Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy Is it? Any evidence that supports
by HWR_14 3y ago
> Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy
Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?
- jschveibinz 3y agoGood question, and it probably depends on what you read. Here is one report that suggests there is a correlation, but I would continue to gather data: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-about-social-mobility-and-the-role-of-education/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-a...
- pessimizer 3y agoWe seem to expect it to fix poverty. We should fix poverty, and use public education to fix dumb kids.
- blindriver 3y agoYou fix poverty by educating children and letting them grow up in a safe area free from crime. Educated children get put on the right path in life and lift themselves out of poverty. That's how Asian countries like Japan and Korea pulled themselves out of poverty in the matter of decades. During the 1950s and 1960s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, and by the 1980s, was considered an economic miracle.
- WalterBright 3y agoThe Soviets had a good public education system. No economic miracle. Japan's and Korea's economic miracles came from embracing free markets. The same thing happened in Vietnam and China. Free markets => prosperity, every time.
- c_crank 3y agoBut to have a functioning free market, you need a basic functioning legal system, so people exchanging goods and services don't get robbed.
- WalterBright 3y agoThat's correct.
- c_crank 3y agoIt means if you try to apply a free market system to a place without law and order, you'll have about as much of a mess as you started with. So the first step is to enforce governance.
- WalterBright 3y agoN. Korea and the Soviet Union and pre-free market China also had effective governments.
- throw9away6 3y agoFor the market to be free the legal system has to exert a lot of pressure. The natural state of markets is not free.
- astrange 3y agoKorea's economic growth came from export discipline, a kind of industrial policy where the dictator threw businessmen in prison if they didn't manage to get overseas customers. (See How Asia Works.) That's not a free market, it's more like heading from communism towards free markets and then continuing over the other end of the horseshoe. It has the problem that everyone in the country is now working themselves to death and is obsessed with plastic surgery rather than having children.
- WalterBright 3y ago