By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
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 U.S. with very low literacy make about as
much per hour as the average worker in the U.K.
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 U.S. and the U.K.: “The same proportion of U.S.
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 U.S. earn 60 per
cent more than in the U.K. after adjusting for differences in living costs.
Plumbers and electricians earn 90 per cent more, and retail workers earn
double.”
While the U.K. isn’t what it used to be, it’s still a
major G-7 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 the validity of real economic
discontents — especially the high cost of 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 Bernie Sanders, the patron saint of the DSA, who
recently posted on X a figure showing the United States with the highest child
poverty rate among a group of developed countries at 21.1 percent.
“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 is that it is from the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and measures income
relative to a country’s median rather than absolute poverty. In other words,
the statistic tells us where people stand compared with 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 percent, by
the way, and has substantially declined since the late 1950s.)
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 with the rest of the developed world. If the U.K. or France were made
states in the U.S., 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 U.K., and the EU — 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.
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