Modern research has suggested that the benefits of education for economic growth are far from obvious (12, 13). The total stock of human capital is not a sufficient statistic for explaining the growth rate of an economy; in addition, we need to know the composition of the human capital (highly educated versus more widespread education) and how close the economy is to the world technology frontier (14). For economies that are at the technological frontier, investing in the education of the best and the brightest may be as important as raising the mean of the entire distribution. For the rest of the world, which imitates and adopts rather than invents, investing in mass education is still the best strategy for economic growth.
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posted 3209 days ago