"It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee, but it is very rare to find one who is ten times as ef

"It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee, but it is very rare to find one who is ten times as efficient." That's not really true for many of the newer industries that have arisen since then. Programming being the classic example. Factories made workers orders of magnitude more productive. To get the benefit you needed access to a factory, which is why workers in the wealthy West ended up so much richer than the rest. Our education system still works on the assumption that getting you into a factory is a good idea. But today factories are accessible to far more of the world, so their unique advantage has faded. They're still critical for our absolute level of wealth, but the relative wealth of a factory worker is falling and isn't going to stop. Now it's skill with computing can make a worker orders of magnitude more productive. The effect is obvious if you spend any time replacing manual processes with software. A team of three programmers can easily work for a year and produce a system that replaces the work of thousands of people forever. Which is why we need a completely different education system that helps people achieve this new level of productivity. Do we really need that many people who understand computing? Won't it just cause a glut of programmers? Industrialists worried about the same thing 110 years ago. They turned out to be wrong. People don't just suddenly say "Well, I'm 100x richer than my grandparents. I guess I have enough stuff now." Instead the extra wealth lets entirely new industries be born, and creates entirely new "needs" and wants. A world where basic education included reading, writing, and recursion would be a very productive, very wealthy world. I expect it will happen, because the economic incentives are huge. But it will take a long time to shift cultural inertia.