[quote]NickViar wrote:
You can probably swap “more education” and “less crime, more skilled labor, higher wages, more wealth, fewer abortions, longer life expectancy, less Islamic fundamentalism (in a place like Pakistan)” and come up with the same result(i.e. you could probably say, “an area with higher wages produces more educated children”). [/quote]
There is a great deal of research that studies the direction of the effect and concludes that education is indeed a generational alleviator of poverty.
As for the rest of your post, the developed world is spending a great deal of money to try to deal with the problems generated by the impoverished and uneducated citizens of the undeveloped world. Perhaps some money can be redirected for the purpose of education, which is relatively very very cheap. (Charlie Wilson’s War, etc.) These kinds of things pay off (for all concerned parties) in the long run, what with trade and FDI. See the postwar reconstruction of Japan, which was literally a pile of rubble. There were some mild tendencies toward democratic civil society in pre-war Japan–or, pre-pre-war Japan, more accurately–but I would not expect results to be very dissimilar elsewhere.
Because, over the course of that long term, the kids who would otherwise have been languishing in sweat shops have been in school.
Which means that, once the sweat shop jobs actually disappear, they will be disappearing from a society that has already discarded of much of its dependence on them.
School a generation of kids and see how bent out of shape they are when they grow up to find that the horrendous, penny-paying labor they and their families would otherwise have been seeking (had they not been schooled) has dried up and died.[/quote]
Innovation comes from great minds, who may or may not have much of it. A society needs those great minds to generate the ideas that allow for luxuries.
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This is silly, great minds do require education as well.[/quote]
You have this all figured out. Now go write your thesis and become a great innovator.
Leave us clueless old plebes to our walkers and diapers.
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Don’t condescend–obviously I do not have it “all figured out”. Why the hostility? [/quote]
Not condescending or hostile man. I don’t approach this from a position that allows condescension and there really isn’t anything here that could incite actual hostility.
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
That is a fact. In the data amassed by the researchers, the wealthier the family, the less likely the children were to work.
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Data that does not distinguish between ascending and descending