Poverty and Education in Developing and Developed Countries: Being More Educated Doesn’t Make You Less Poor

Educators, those in international and domestic development, and many others (there are plenty), commonly say that we can’t solve poverty until we solve education.

To be clear, let’s distinguish between three claims:

·         

      Education is A Way to end poverty;

·        Education is The Best Way to end poverty;

·        Education is The Only Way to end poverty.

All are false, but since number three is what the education reform crowd pushes, let’s start there.  It is simply inaccurate that to end poverty you need to alter education.  Americans already know this.  Starting from the 1960s, we as a society, cut outrageously high rates of elderly poverty by 71%.  We did that by sending old people checks called Social Security.  We also know from international data that low-poverty countries get that way through tax and transfer schemes just like Social Security and that high poverty countries get that way from tax and transfer schemes just the opposite of Social Security.

So, those that say nothing but education will dramatically cut poverty, when things other than education absolutely will, and have, only add to a discursive world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut poverty.  You are a bad person.

Claim #1, that education is a way to reduce poverty. In fact, we have dramatically ramped up educational attainment in the US in the last forty years or so and poverty has not taken a dive.

The basic logic goes something like: being more educated doesn’t make you less poor--having more money makes you less poor.  Even if you think education is necessary, it is not sufficient to end poverty.  You need distributive institutions that actually generate a specific distributive result.  Education is certainly not sufficient for ensuring that happens. A more educated populace will probably be more productive, but that too—as we have seen for the last four decades—is not sufficient for ensuring the gains of such productivity increases flow to the non-rich.  Education is good, but sufficient for solving poverty it is not.

Claim #2, that education is the best way to reduce poverty.  Since education is not even sufficient for reducing poverty, it certainly can’t be the BEST way to reduce poverty.  But even if it were sufficient for reducing poverty, all of the international and domestic evidence we have indicates that the best way to cut poverty in a rich, developed country is to simply change the distribution of income in society.  It’s not hard.  If the pre-tax distribution of income is no good (and it isn’t), you just tax and transfer money around.  That is the proven way to dramatically cut poverty.  It is surely the best way to do so, not education.

It is not clear if education reformers are stupid, riddled with ideology, or just trying to make their projects seem grander than they are.  But when they say you can’t solve poverty without education, they are wrong, wrong, wrong.  If they don’t stop saying it, they should rightly be understood as antagonistic to the interests of poor people.