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.
