And the Big Fix Is... Talent.

Read The Big Fix in Sunday NYT Magazine, and you'll find that the answer to our economic woes is more college graduates.  Yes, that's right.  It's the Talent Dividend, exactly what we've been saying.  And it's worth $124 billion to the nation... every single year.

Note writer David Leonhardt's conclusion:

"As answers go, green jobs and health care are fine. But they probably aren’t the best answers. The best one is less concrete. It also has a lot more historical evidence on its side.

"Last year, two labor economists, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, published a book called “The Race Between Education and Technology.” It is as much a work of history — the history of education — as it is a work of economics. Goldin and Katz set out to answer the question of how much an education really matters. They are themselves products of public schools, she of New York and he of Los Angeles, and they have been a couple for two decades. They are liberals (Katz served as the chief economist under Robert Reich in Bill Clinton’s Labor Department), but their book has been praised by both the right and the left. “I read the Katz and Goldin book,” Matthew Slaughter, an associate dean of Dartmouth’s business school who was an economic adviser to George W. Bush, recently told me, “and there’s part of me that can’t fathom that half the presidential debates weren’t about a couple of facts in that book.” Summers wrote a blurb for the book, calling it “the definitive treatment” of income inequality.

The book’s central fact is that the United States has lost its once-wide lead in educational attainment. South Korea and Denmark graduate a larger share of their population from college — and Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom are close on our heels."

[I just finished editing my Smart City interview with Larry Katz last night and was struck again by how smart this book really is.[

As Leonhardt explaines, "There really is no mystery about why education would be the lifeblood of economic growth. On the most basic level, education helps people figure out how to make objects and accomplish tasks more efficiently. It allows companies to make complex products that the rest of the world wants to buy and thus creates high-wage jobs. Education may not be as tangible as green jobs. But it helps a society leverage every other investment it makes, be it in medicine, transportation or alternative energy. Education — educating more people and educating them better — appears to be the best single bet that a society can make."

Ok.  So could we please now recommit ourselves to completing what Katz calls the "third transformation in education" and make universal access to college relatively cheap or even free?  Radical idea?  Yes.  But so is an $800 billion stimulus.  And producing more college grads really is "the big fix."

Thanks to Lumina Foundation, we'll be pushing this message out to urban leaders in 21 cities starting this Spring.

  

free power, November 27, 2009

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to comment on this post. It was very insightful. It may also serve as interest to you to know that some of the topics that have been mentioned here I will take to the CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting) being currently held in my country where the issues of climate change as well as alternative forms of energy will greatly discussed at the People Forum Kevin Castle

Link: http://www.free-power.org

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