[ludston]

> USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us

It doesn't.

> look where it's got us

Richest nation on earth. To be fair that's as much tied to population size, resources, colonial-style capitalist exploitation as it is to American Exceptionalism and a good education system. And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.

[jazzyjackson]

Thanks for the correction, I was late night scrolling and didn't want to look it up, but looks like we're behind UAE, Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Belgium.

I do want to push back that higher level of education attained equates to universally better outcomes, because there's opportunity cost to being in school into your twenties, not becoming a taxpayer, getting deep into debt only to become underemployed. Again, people I've met who entered work at a young age are plenty intelligent and more skilled in their field than peers who went to grad school. I don't know that schools increase your intelligence, just your credentials.

[smegger001]

Well that and decades of being the only industrialized nation not carpet bombed in a world war we have been riding on that and being issuer the global reserve currency for decades.

[red-iron-pine]

more than just carpet bombing -- the nukes, the genocides, the Communist purges before (USSR) and after (Red China)

all advanced countries basically got slaughtered to varying degrees and the US saw no real systemic damage and comparatively light levels of dead.

it's like if all of NATO and the Asian Tigers collapsed today except for China -- already a dominant player they jump to superpower status

[fooqux]

> And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.

I'd love to hear how. I'm a firm believer in education, but saying we can fix the wealth gap by just educating our kids even more is like saying we can stop deforestation if only we had even sharper axes.

The wealthiest are the luckiest, but also the best at exploiting resources like an educated work force. I can't think of a single invention of our modern day that has lessened the wealth gap. (The last one that did was probably the guillotine, and even that was a small blip on the graph.) The latest invention AI, is only accelerating the widening of the gap, just like other inventions before it. Point being, just being smarter seems to only accelerate the gap, not fix it. Unless you know of some hidden inflection point coming up.

I do think having a good understanding of our political systems, etc is obviously important. And I suppose that would fall under the umbrella of education. But if we just pumped out more doctors, each doctor just gets a smaller slice of the doctor pie. Elon isn't magically going to get less money.