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 the United Kingdom.
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 United States and the United Kingdom: “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.”
While the United Kingdom is not 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 healthcare — 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 one in five children live in poverty.”
The problem with the number is that it comes 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 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.”
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 United Kingdom or France were made states in the United States, they’d rank near or below West Virginia and Mississippi in nominal GDP per capita.
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.
Rich Lowry is on X
@RichLowry.
