Rich Lowry of National Review Online analyzes recent economic news that could change some Americans’ minds.
The United States of America may be the greatest place for functionally illiterate people to live in all of human history.
An eye-popping column in the Financial Times the other day noted how people in the U.S. with very low literacy make about as much per hour as the average worker in the U.K.
Is this the result of brilliant public policy, carefully crafted to boost the prospects of those on the margins? No, it’s a byproduct of the vast, endlessly dynamic wealth-generating machine that is the American economy.
The Financial Times also compared cohorts of low-literacy workers in the U.S. and the U.K.: “The same proportion of U.S. workers who score stunningly low on literacy earn an average of almost $30 per hour, and two-thirds of them are in work. Their British counterparts make the equivalent of $20 and fewer than half are employed.”
It continued: “Factory workers in the U.S. earn 60 per cent more than in the U.K. after adjusting for differences in living costs. Plumbers and electricians earn 90 per cent more, and retail workers earn double.”
While the U.K. isn’t what it used to be, it’s still a major G-7 economy — yet it has been significantly outpaced by its former colony across the Atlantic.
Our political debate is characterized by a mismatch between the extraordinary, world-beating economic achievement of the United States on the one hand and the determination of the left — and some elements of the right — to throw out our economic system as a rank failure on the other.
This is not to deny the validity of real economic discontents — especially the high cost of housing, education, and health care — but perhaps no economic system has been so vilified while so consistently delivering.
The case for revolutionary change relies on dishonesty and misleading claims.
