> Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy
Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?
Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-a...
That's how Asian countries like Japan and Korea pulled themselves out of poverty in the matter of decades. During the 1950s and 1960s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, and by the 1980s, was considered an economic miracle.
Japan's and Korea's economic miracles came from embracing free markets. The same thing happened in Vietnam and China. Free markets => prosperity, every time.
That's not a free market, it's more like heading from communism towards free markets and then continuing over the other end of the horseshoe.
It has the problem that everyone in the country is now working themselves to death and is obsessed with plastic surgery rather than having children.
Japan didn't have this, but the chaebol/zaibatsu systems are unnatural too, and Samsung seems to own like half the Korean economy.
In the period 1950-2000, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and China all achieved their economic miracles through heavy government intervention in markets to build new industrial capacity, what is sometimes called state capitalism. in the period 1930-1950, Germany, the USSR and the US did the same in rising out of the Great Depression through national mobilization before and during WW2. And well before that, Britain became the world's economic leader in the 19th century in part through state capitalist practices that began in the 18th (e.g. the British East India company) - the British parliament was arguably the most actively interventionist state apparatus in Europe at this time. Many have also argued that Silicon Valley itself emerged from state capitalist actions by the US in its technological and industrial competition with the USSR from 1950-1990.
Free markets certainly have an important role to play, but they usually work best after the heavy lifting has been done by huge investments and interventions on the part of government to create fertile ground for entrepreneurs. That is, the government invests heavily to kick start development, creates a legal framework in which smaller scale enterprises can contribute and reap rewards for themselves, then steps back to allow the market to do its work, adding regulation as needed to keep it running smoothly.