"America the Anxious" article

[ucbalumnus]

<p>[David</a> Frum on High-Anxiety America - Newsweek and The Daily Beast](<a href=“http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/05/david-frum-on-high-anxiety-america.html]David”>http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/05/david-frum-on-high-anxiety-america.html)</p>

<p>

@David Frum

In the past, rapid economic growth enabled Americans to honor commitments that looked impossible at the time. The debt from World War II was paid down in a single generation, at the same time as the interstate highways were built, a man sent to the moon, and a war waged in Vietnam.</p>

<p>This time, though, the road ahead seems to point to hugely rising expenses for boomer retirement at the same time as economic growth slows. Forecasters predict a half-decade or more of slow growth partly because of the crushing burden of debt on consumers and workers, partly because of the bad news besetting the European and Chinese economies, and largely because the future American workforce will be older, slower growing, and less skilled than the workforces of the recent past.</p>

<p>In fact, Educational Testing Service, the company that runs the SAT, issued a major report in 2007 warning that the future U.S. will experience an outright decline in both math skills and English literacy by the 2030s.</p>

<p>[…]</p>

<p>Of course, two thirds of American young people do not complete college, a rate that has barely changed in 30 years. (Once No. 1, America now ranks 12th in the world for college completion.)

</p>

<p>Perhaps the rapid economic growth in the 1950s to 1970s had a lot to do with increasing the use of “human capital” through increased educational attainment by people who would not have been highly educated in earlier times (meaning their economic output was less than it would have been had they been able to attain higher education levels).</p>

<p>But now, it seems like we have already mostly “used up” that potential source of economic growth, since increasing college degree attainment from where we are now would be very difficult, given the state of K-12 education in the US. Better K-12 education would allow for increasing college degree attainment, but improving K-12 education overall seem to be very difficult in the US.</p>