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 United States with very low literacy make about as much per hour as the average worker in Great Britain.
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 US and the UK:
“The same proportion of US 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 US earn 60% more than in the UK after adjusting for differences in living costs. Plumbers and electricians earn 90% more, and retail workers earn double.”
While the UK isn’t what it used to be, it’s still a major G7 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 real economic discontents — especially around high costs for 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.
Enter Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the patron saint of the Democratic Socialists of America, who on Monday posted on X a figure showing the United States with the highest child-poverty rate among a group of developed countries, at 21.1%.
“We must end the outrage,” he thundered, “that in the richest country in the history of the world, more than 1 in 5 children live in poverty.”
The problem with the number, which comes from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is that it measures income relative to a country’s median rather than absolute poverty.
In other words, the statistic tells us where people stand compared to others in their own country, not about material deprivation as such.
As critics of the Sanders post have pointed out, if everyone in the United States — including the poor — instantly earned twice what they make now, the OECD figure would find the same amount of “poverty”; the threshold for being poor would simply rise together with the median income.
(The official Census Bureau figure is 14.3%, by the way, and has substantially declined since the late 1950s.)
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What the OECD figure is really about is inequality — an obsession of Sanders and his ilk, but not a good indicator of economic performance.
In the United States, wealthy people are very wealthy, but Americans across much of the income distribution are also richer than their counterparts in Western countries.
With our wealth comes incredibly high living standards compared to the rest of the developed world.
If the UK or France were made states in the US, they’d rank near or below West Virginia and Mississippi in terms of nominal GDP per capita.
And we’ve been increasing the economic gap with peer countries — Canada, the UK and the members of the European Union — over roughly the last 15 years.
So, by all means, make particular critiques of our system and suggest improvements.
All such discussions, though, should begin with recognition of what we’ve built and a commitment to preserving it — rather than the DSA approach of hoping to guillotine as a class enemy the goose that keeps laying the golden egg.
X: @RichLowry
