This New York Times Sunday review opinion essay, "The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent," is an interesting read and has prompted a very interesting set of comments here on HN overnight in my time zone. As I turned in yesterday, the top comment was by kamaal, pointing out that India provides a useful reality check on some of the assertions about the United States in the article. As I woke up this morning, the top comment was (and is) by acslater, posted not long after kamaal's comment, pointing out that United States public schools are well funded by international standards. Can both comments be true? Yes they can.

I agree with the main claim of the submitted article that a society in which many people have opportunity to make it into the top earning echelon of the society is a better society all around. "Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing." And I still think of social mobility as a good thing, having lived in more than one country in my life. International rankings with annual revisions produced by nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations reveal that the United States enjoys huge advantages outside its government-operated school system. One of those advantages is an exceptionally high level of political and economic freedom for ordinary citizens and residents, as reported in The Freedom House rankings of countries by freedom (both political and economic):

http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-world

Another advantage the United States has for progress and prosperity is low level of corruption in private business and government as reported by The Transparency International rankings of perceived public corruption:

http://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview

Both of those societal advantages continue to draw into the United States bright, high-initiative persons from around the world who received their primary and secondary schooling in other countries.

It is simply a matter of fact that public spending on government-operated schools in the United States has long been high by world standards.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...

"'There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,' said Barry McGaw, education director for the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which produced the annual review of industrialized nations."

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/education-spend...

"As you can see, the United States is exactly on the line of best fit [on a scatterplot of country GDP and country means on reading test scores]. American students scored about as well as you’d expect them to if all you knew about them was their average standard of living.

. . . .

"So if money doesn’t appear to have a strongly predictable impact on students’ test scores, what does?

"How educated their parents are seems to play a bigger role."

From "America's Assets" section of the OECD report "Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States":

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/46623978.pdf

"One of the American assets is the amount of money American citizens are willing to invest in public education – more per student than any other country save one. This means that there is a lot of room to get better performance by reprogramming what is currently being spent."

Eric Hanushek, an astute economist who has many peer-reviewed publications in a variety of journals about education evaluation and education reform in the United States and other countries, has repeatedly examined the vexing issue of teacher quality and how to measure it. His latest publication on the issue, "The Distribution of Teacher Quality and Implications for Policy" Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin, September 2012, Annual Review of Economics, pp. 131-157,

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...

points out that variance of teacher quality within each school is generally much greater than the mean quality of instruction differences between schools. The paper examines what data are necessary to fairly assess "value added" of individual teachers in classroom service.

Hanushek's article "The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality," Eric A. Hanushek, June 2011, Economics of Education Review, pp. 466-479

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...

provides evidence supporting the proposition that simply encouraging the bottom 5 to 8 percent of teachers currently in service in the United States to change occupations, replacing them with teachers of average effectiveness, could move the United States, with its current diverse population, to near the top of international mathematics and science rankings and add trillions of dollars of economic growth to the United States economy.

So to the point of the submitted article, yes, let's make sure that ALL young people in the United States (and everywhere, for that matter) enjoy schoolteachers who are effective at teaching, societies that are free, governments that are not corrupt, and thus upper economic classes that are open to new participants. That will help all of us and all of our children and grandchildren prosper.