Can someone explain to me the relevance of Gordon's study to education,
employment, or poverty? Can someone explain why I should supposedly believe that
in a rich country in which productivity still increases steadily, that somehow
that reflects a problem with what or how much students allegedly learn or know,
as based on standardized tests? I don't mean these questions at all
rhetorically. But what I draw from the data is that most Americans don't benefit
from increased productivity, and that educational achievement literally pretty
obviously has nothing to do with it.
http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP_American_Dream_F6.pdf
David Green
>Like I said the other day, the U.S. is about the only country in the
>world in which young adults are not surpassing the educational
>attainment of older adults. This is one reason why Robert Gordon
>http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/w15834_future%20productivity_100301.pdf
>
>
>is gloomy about our productivity future.
Another interesting point from the data I was citing is distributional. The younger adults' skills shortfall (relative to their predicted values) are concentrated toward the bottom but they're still visible toward the top. The average shortfall was about 20 points. At the 25th percentile it was about 30 points. But even at the 75th percentile it was still around 11 points -- i.e., a third of the score gap between 25th-pct and mean scores. In other words, even high-literacy US adults born in the 60s have experienced much smaller gains relative to their counterparts born in the 30s than in other countries.
SA