It was 1947. Leo Durocher’s pitchers were complaining because an African-American, Jackie Robinson, was being allowed to play in the major leagues.
“He’s just the first. Just the first,” responded Durocher, one baseball’s most famous managers. “They’re all going to come and they’re going to be hungry, damned hungry, and if you don’t put out, they’ll take your jobs,” he concluded, according to author David Halberstam, in his book “Summer of ‘49”.
I wish Durocher were alive today to give U.S. high school and college students this pep talk. The thought occurred to me the other day when some of my students complained about the level of mathematical difficulty in my economics class. I was not asking them to do differential equations, but rather simple problems such as figuring out by what percentage 4 is greater than 3 and finding one unknown quantity with the simplest of algebra.
Their reaction illustrates why educational reform may involve changing attitudes more than increasing funding. It also gives an early glimpse at how a nation’s productivity may be compromised—that is, nations with many citizens who are “damned hungry” may experience faster productivity growth than nations whose residents are complacent.
Here’s why: Labor is the most important resource in any economy. And broad-based, effective education is the key to labor productivity.
Historically, nations that leapt ahead of their neighbors in economic growth–the Netherlands in the early 1600s, Great Britain in the mid-1700s, the United States from independence through 1900–had more effective education systems and higher levels of educational attainment among their general populations than their rivals.
The same has been true in recent history. South Korea and Taiwan, two of the greatest economic success stories in modern history, were much more successful than nations such as Brazil, Mexico and Iran in broadly extending good education to the general populace.
Also-ran nations in the 20th century growth race such as Brazil and Mexico did manage to achieve high growth rates for several consecutive years. But they never were able to sustain such growth over 45 years the way the Asian tigers did.
Some of the shortfall in the also-rans’ performance came from bad macro economic policies. But much of their failure to sustain rapid growth stemmed from their unwillingness or inability to reform public education and fund it adequately.
In the United States, the increase in the “earnings premium” for post-secondary education is one of the salient developments of the last 20 years. In 1979, college grads could expect to earn about 30 percent more than their schoolmates who went to work right out of 12th grade.
By the 1990s, that gap had increased to over 70 percent. No economist predicted such an increase in the earnings premium. It occurred because technological innovation in the form of the “information revolution” ended up rewarding workers who could adapt to its needs.
Increased imports of manufactured goods and the decline of unionization also played a role in stagnant earnings for high school grads, but there were relatively less important.
The information revolution has also had the unanticipated effect of opening more career fields to foreign competition. Hand-written insurance claims forms can be imaged and sent via satellite or fiber-optic cable to Dublin or Bombay where highly motivated–”damned hungry” in Durocher’s words—workers can do the processing and have the output ready by the next business day in the U.S.
The average high school graduate in Dublin or Bombay has better math and English skills than the average graduate of our better suburban high schools. They can write a simple declarative sentence without using the phrase “so, I was, like.” They are not intimidated by fractions or percentages. And they are going to easily out-perform clueless kids in the U.S. whose parents really don’t care how they do in school as long as they stay off drugs and get on the volleyball or hockey team.
Nor can trade restrictions protect the futures of the complacent. You can stop a container of sweaters or auto components at some port and tax it, but information does not flow through similar choke points.
There are some U.S. citizens who can do algebra, and we can attract the brightest people in science and engineering from countries around the world. The U.S. economy as a whole will continue to grow.
But unless many American families change their attitudes about what their children need to learn, the stagnation of earnings for working class households is not going to improve much.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.