Education and Economic Productivity

Economists like to refer to productivity as a measure of how efficiently an economy is performing.  Of particular interest is the rate at which productivity is growing because there is a correlation between economic growth (in GDP) and growth in productivity.  This source provides a standard definition of the term.

“Productivity is commonly defined as a ratio between the output volume and the volume of inputs. In other words, it measures how efficiently production inputs, such as labour and capital, are being used in an economy to produce a given level of output. Productivity is considered a key source of economic growth and competitiveness and, as such, is basic statistical information for many international comparisons and country performance assessments.” 

All economic statistics are uncertain, including the determination of productivity, and there is more than one way to define it.  Nevertheless, there appears to be near universal acceptance of the fact that productivity growth has been trending downward in recent decades, perhaps extending as far back as the 1980s.  This conclusion extends to most wealthy nations, including the United States. 

A few years ago, the article 23 economic experts weigh in: Why is productivity growth so low? appeared.  These 23 experts produced nearly 23 different opinions on what the cause might be.  Not one of them mentioned education directly.  Thomas Piketty took a long-term look at the rise in productivity over time in his book Capital and Ideology and concluded that, historically, the level of a nation’s productivity was closely correlated with the universality of the level of education within its borders.  This correlation was particularly strong as universal primary and then universal secondary education (high school) were implemented.  The argument made was that as technologies and business practices became more complicated, a higher level of education became more important.  The countries who moved to universal education earliest attained the highest productivities. 

The era of presumed low productivity growth coincides with the move to greater participation in tertiary education (college).  One could assume that the huge increase in college attendance would also lead to continuing growth in productivity.  However, that does not seem to be the case.  Does this indicate that something has gone wrong with how college-level education has been implemented?

Let us consider the data presented by Piketty.

“At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the US population was small compared with the populations of Europe, but a larger proportion of Americans went to school.  The data we have, mostly taken from census reports, indicates that the primary schooling rate (defined as the percentage of children ages 5-11, both male and female, attending primary school) was nearly 50 percent in the 1820s, 70 percent in the 1840s, and more than 80 percent in the 1850s.  If we exclude the black population, the primary schooling rate for whites was more than 90 percent by the 1840s.  At the same time, the comparable rate was 20-30 percent in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.  In all three countries it was not until the period 1890-1910 that we find the near universal primary education that the United States had achieved a half century earlier.”

The strong public education system allowed the US to take advantage of the European brain drain provided by immigration.

“Another reason for the American lead was a phenomenon we see today among migrants.  Individuals in a position to emigrate to the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were on average better educated and more inclined to invest in the education of their children than the average European of the time, even controlling for geographic and religious origins.”

The US would move towards universal secondary education and maintain its educational advantage until the 1980s. 

“The key point here is that America’s educational lead would continue through much of the twentieth century.  In 1900-1910, when Europeans were just reaching the point of universal primary schooling, the United States was already well on the way to generalized secondary education.  In fact, rates of secondary schooling, defined as the percentage of children ages 12-17 (boys and girls) attending secondary schools, reached 30 percent in 1920, 40-50 percent in the 1930s, and nearly 80 percent in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  In other words, by the end of World War II, the United States had come close to universal secondary education.  At the same time, the secondary schooling rate was just 20-30 percent in the United Kingdom and France and 40 percent in Germany.  In all three countries it is not until the 1980s that one finds secondary schooling rates of 80 percent, which the United States had achieved in the early 1960s.”

It was not lost on the Europeans that the US gained an advantage, economically, socially, and politically, from its increased investment in education.  The value and need for a better-educated workforce followed the increase in complexity of the working environment.  Where once the ability to follow orders and work diligently was sufficient, eventually the need to write and to read and understand more complex documents such as manuals became more necessary.  Finally, technology and advanced product development would require expansion of tertiary education to a greater fraction of the population.  At this point, France and Germany would catch up, and for a time, lead the US in productivity before stagnating at the about the same level.  The United Kingdom would never catch up and seems to operate permanently at a lower level of productivity.  There is something to be learned from this data.

Piketty defines productivity as the gross domestic product (GDP) per hour of work in the economy expressed in euros at purchasing power parity.  Data for the US, Germany, France, and Britain are provided over the years from 1950-2015.

The US is clearly ahead of the Europeans in productivity in the postwar era.  In this formulation it is only over the past 10-15 years that any diminished slope in the productivity curves becomes apparent.  The French and Germans follow essentially the same track and catch up to the US, but the British never do.  In fact, they never even close the gap.  If, as Piketty claims, education is so important to productivity, what is it about Britain that suppressed the gains that were made by France and Germany in spite of spending about the same fraction of national income on education?  Piketty offers an explanation. 

“The British system in particular remains one of strong social and educational stratification, with stark differences between lavishly endowed private schools and garden-variety public schools and high schools—differences that explain some of Britain’s lag in productivity…”

Piketty explains why we should understand the British system by suggesting that our implementation of college-level education is copying the worst of the British practices.

“How did the United States, which pioneered universal access to primary and secondary education and which, until the turn of the twentieth century, was significantly more egalitarian than Europe in terms of income and wealth distribution, become the most inegalitarian country in the developed world after 1980—to the point where the very foundations of its previous success are now in danger?  We will discover that the country’s educational trajectory—most notably the fact that its entry into the era of higher education was accomplished by a particularly extreme form of educational stratification—played a central role in this change.”

During the first half of the twentieth century in the US, when secondary education was expanding throughout the population, public education predominated.  Private education was for a minimal number of the wealthy.  A person with a high school diploma could apply for a job and be judged by how well he or she could perform.  There was no national ranking of high schools that would allow an employer to discriminate against those from lower-ranked schools.  And there were no national tests that would allow the same form of discrimination. 

The situation would change when the expansion of college education took of in the second half of the century.  The elite colleges and universities were mostly private and used to dealing with the wealthy and socially elite.  Although these schools would expand their enrollment and extend a welcome to women and minorities, they would continue to service mostly the wealthy, even if some of the wealthy could now be members of a minority.  College ranking services would exacerbate the perceived excellence of the elite universities by holding beauty contests, asking people which they thought were the best universities.  Since the elite ones were the only schools with which most were familiar, the elite status became documented and quantified.  The result of this simplistic approach was to relegate many very good educational institutions to second-class status.  Now employers would have access to rankings which would allow them to discriminate against candidates from non-elite schools. 

The few elite universities could then charge large rates of tuition and find willing takers.  Thankful for being provided the pathway to high income, alumni would contribute large sums to the endowment of their school, particularly when they wanted their own children admitted.  And to no one’s surprise, the largest endowments earn the largest return on investment allowing them to invest even more in their excellence, or in the perception of excellence.

This perception that all but a few elite schools are second class becomes apparent in comparisons with international universities. 

“If one looks at the available international rankings, as imperfect as they are, it is striking to see that American universities are ultra-dominant among the top twenty in the world but fall well below European and Asian universities if one looks at the top 100 or 500.  It is likely that the international renown of the wealthiest US universities masks the internal imbalance of the system as a whole.”

Piketty provides data to support this notion of stratified higher education in the US.  There is a direct correlation between parental income and access to a college education. 

Access to a college education is further limited by the cost to the student for that education.  Whereas primary and secondary education is publicly provided, advanced education expenses are largely borne by families—as in Britain 

While the expense of a college education has been going up much faster than general inflation, stagnant incomes at the middle and lower levels have made it increasingly more difficult for the majority in the US to access higher education.  And when they do it is often at institutions that provide little return on that investment.

Higher education provides a path to opportunities to contribute to the enhancement of productivity.  The intelligence, knowledge, and creativity necessary to produce such a contribution are not limited to the wealthy few with access to elite universities.  Just as economic inequality reduces the ability of much of the population to contribute to economic growth through consumption, it also reduces the ability of the same segment to contribute to the enhancement of productivity. 

 It is not the number of people capable of contributing to productivity in the economy that is important.  It is the number of capable people who are provided the opportunity to contribute.  Opportunity is the controlling factor and a meritocratic aristocracy does not get it done.

 

On the Origins of Police Violence

Massive protests against police violence directed toward Black citizens have become a daily occurrence.  Calls are being issued to either defund police forces or to eliminate them altogether.  These are passionate responses to a status quo that cannot be allowed to continue.  Are our current police agencies so irredeemable that such drastic measures are required?  Two recent articles provide background on the history of our police forces that addresses the changes that have become necessary.  The first is by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker: The Invention of the Police.  She makes clear that Black people have always been a particular target for our policing agencies by opening with this comment. 

“Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.” 

The second article appeared in Foreign Affairs by Laurence Ralph: To Protect and to Serve: Global Lessons in Police Reform.  He agrees on the conclusion that controlling Black people has always been a specific function of our police.

“If Americans and their political leaders are to glean useful lessons from the experiences of other countries, they must first examine the practice of policing in the United States and try to define—as precisely as possible—the nature and scope of the problem. The aggressive tactics that U.S. police departments employ today were shaped by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. During the late nineteenth century, the slave patrols and militias that had regulated the movement of enslaved people before emancipation coalesced into more formalized police forces, and they continued to enforce the racial hierarchy in a segregated nation.”

“In the second half of the twentieth century, as the country slowly and often grudgingly integrated, police departments honed the tactics of those earlier eras as a new means of controlling and repressing Black Americans. In response to the protests and unrest of the 1960s, police forces developed the kinds of quasi-military techniques that Americans today have seen applied to a new generation of protesters. In recent decades, police departments have systematically harassed Black communities with stop-and-frisk methods and aggressive fines, which municipalities craved to supplement their shrinking budgets in an age of tax cuts and austerity.” 

Lepore provides the insight that in the establishment of modern police forces, the goal was always to produce an agency capable of applying violent methods to specific groups of “enemies.” 

“Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.”

“Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. ‘For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,’ he later explained. ‘After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society’.”  

A war requires an army and recruits who have demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence. 

“To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation.”

“Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.”

Of the enemies identified at the dawn of the twentieth century, all have dissipated or vanished except Black people.  Segregation left them an easy target for “the war against the enemies of society.” 

“Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.”  Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

Someone who has spent most or all of his/her life this side of the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in this country and the yoke of colonialism was finally lifted from peoples of color around the world may have trouble realizing how deeply imbedded racism was.  In the decades prior to that time, biologists, political scientists, historians, and politicians were out writing and lecturing about how the United States’ experiment with treating Blacks as equals during Reconstruction had been a failure and it was necessary that they be kept under control because of their demonstrated inferiority.  These beliefs were necessary to support Jim Crow laws in the South, segregated housing in urban areas, and white racial dominance around the globe.  These beliefs did not disappear in the 1960s, they merely became less politically correct. 

Black people have always been special targets for the police. 

Ralph includes data detailing the consequences of this policing approach.

“This kind of policing does not simply threaten the quality of life in Black communities; it is a matter of life and death. In 2014, ProPublica published one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of racial disparities in deadly police encounters. Its examination included detailed accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides between 1980 and 2012, drawn from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. During this three-decade period, ProPublica found that young Black men were 21 times as likely to be fatally shot by law enforcement as were their white peers.”

The Supreme Court would essentially provide police a license to kill when it ruled in Tennessee v. Garner that “a police officer could use deadly force if a suspect posed a threat to a police officer or to others.”

“In the four years preceding Tennessee v. Garner, “officer under attack” was cited in just 33 percent of police killings; 20 years later, over another four-year period, it was cited 62 percent of the time, eventually becoming an almost infallible legal defense for police officers who kill.” 

Data on police shootings are not readily available, presumably by design.

“Citizen-led organizations have tried to fill the void. A group called Mapping Police Violence maintains a comprehensive, crowdsourced database on police killings in the United States, scouring social media, obituaries, and criminal records in an effort to account for every lost life…Crucially, the group’s findings contradict the common assumption that police officers kill African Americans at higher rates because they pose a greater threat: police departments of the 100 largest American cities killed unarmed Black people at a rate four times as high as the rate for unarmed white suspects.” 

Ralph’s focus is on how policing in the United States differs from that in other countries and learning lessons from those comparisons.

“The analysis by Mapping Police Violence also contained another revealing finding: the group compared the victim data it had compiled against published crime rates and found no correlation between levels of violent crime in American cities and the likelihood of police killings. This presents a stark contrast with the rest of the world, where correlations generally exist between crime, social instability, and police killings.”

Police killing in the United States is much more common than in other developed nations.

“The United States is a wealthy, stable outlier in the list of countries with the highest rates of police killings. In 2019, the rate at which people were killed by the police in the United States (46.6 such killings per ten million residents) put it right between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (47.8 per ten million) and Iraq (45.1 per ten million), both of which are just emerging from years of conflict. Countries with levels of police brutality comparable to that in the United States are generally far more violent places to live and include ones, such as Egypt and Iran, that are often described by human rights campaigners as ‘police states’.” 

For comparison, the number of police killings per 10 million people are for Luxembourg 16.9, Netherlands 2.3, Norway 1.9, Germany 1.3, United Kingdom 0.5, Japan 0.2, Iceland 0.0. 

A major difference between the United States and other countries is in the autonomy that Police Unions provide.  Here they are reminiscent of crime families where snitches are not tolerated and loyalty to the family prevails over any notion of a public good. 

“Other factors also differentiate the United States from wealthy, stable countries with low rates of police killings. For one thing, the countries with the lowest rates, such as Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and Japan, have instituted mechanisms for police oversight at the national level. Although police unions exist in countries with low levels of police violence, these unions are generally affiliated with larger organizational bodies, such as Sweden’s Confederation of Professional Employees and the German Confederation of Trade Unions, and do not have as much power to insulate officers from punishment as police unions in the United States do.” 

Ralph indicates the existence of almost 18,000 police agencies in the United States.  The recruitment, training, and policing standards vary considerably among the various agencies.  A national approach would provide better practices on average and lead to greater transparency in police activities.  Uniform standards on when deadly force is justified would be extremely useful.  Recruitment policies that select candidates based on attributes other than previous military service should also prove important. 

“In Japan…police departments are coordinated and trained by the National Police Agency. In Luxembourg…and Iceland… that role is filled by the Ministry of Internal Security and the Ministry of Justice, respectively. In the Netherlands…the National Police Corps coordinates policing efforts in different regions of the country.”

“Another commonality among countries with low rates of police violence is the rigor of their training programs. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, the American quarterback who is widely believed to have been blackballed by the National Football League for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence, observed that in the United States, ‘you can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist.’ In fact, Kaepernick’s estimate was too generous: basic training can take as little as 21 weeks. By contrast, the requirements to be a police officer in Germany (1.3 per ten million killed by the police in 2019) include at least two and a half years of basic training, and in some circumstances, it takes up to four years to become an officer. Iceland, which has had only one fatal police shooting in its history, requires two years of training.”

It should be noted that countries similar in wealth to the United States provide greater levels of social support to their citizens and possess both lower crime rates and fewer police killings.  In a few other countries, ownership of firearms is quite common yet deaths by gunfire and police killings are much less frequent than in the United States. Guns are part of the problem—not all of it.

The cultures that have developed over the decades in our police forces are generally toxic and must be replaced.  Ralph lists other countries in which police forces were deemed irredeemably corrupt or otherwise socially unacceptable.  Wholesale firing was one way of producing a changed culture.  Defunding a police force and transferring funds to social programs or eliminating it entirely to be replaced by something else are not outside the realm of possibilities.  We must recognize that some of the qualities that make the United States exceptional are things for which we should be ashamed. 

Justice demands that action be taken—no matter how painful.