McKinsey's PC Extravaganza

"The most ambitious US presidency in living memory hardly needs to extend its list of tasks, you might think. Yet the country's long-term economic prospects turn on something that is all to easy to neglect, just as it has been in the past. The US is failing calamitously in primary and secondary education. The average quality of its workforce is falling, and its schools are adding to the problem rather than mitigating it. ... The trouble is, fixing the schools is not something that a crisis ever forces you to do. The consequences of a third-rate education system creep up on you and, experience shows, can be tolerated indefinitely. Many vested interests prefer it that way. ... Just how badly is the US school system failing? A new study by McKinsey bravely attempts to come up with some numbers--and its estimates, though arrived at conservatively, are pretty startling. ... Forty years ago, the report points out, the US was a leader in high-school graduation rates. Today it ranks 18th out of 24 industrial countries. As recently as 1995, the US was tied for first place in college graduation rates. Ten years later it had slipped to 14th, and only partly because other countries had improved in absolute terms. ... Drawing on work by Stanford's Eric Hanushek, the McKinsey team estimates the economic consequences of this educational deficit. If the US had raised its educational performance between 1983 and 1998 to that of countries such as South Korea and Finland, its output last year would have been $1,399bn-$2,300bn ... higher--a gain of about 9 to 16 per cent of gross domestic product. In other words, the education deficit imposes the equivalent of a permanent depression on the US", my emphasis, Clive Crook at the FT, 11 May 2009.

"Vested interests"? Like the "school teacher-expert-diversity consultant" complex? Does an "education deficit" impose "the equivalent of a permanent depression on the US", or our post-1965 immigration policies? This is another McKinsey farce. Bravely? Come on. Pretty startling, to whom? McKinsey could have asked me. I could have told it. I distinctly recollect McKinsey was the most IQ-obessesed of all potential Chicago MBA employers when I was there. How did McKinsey not see what I see, i.e., post-1965 US demographic changes caused in large part, the output gap? I refer to my 1 September 2008 post: http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/09/dead-elephant-in-living-room.html. Properly understood, there is no achievement gap, my 18 September 2008 post: http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/09/todays-sat.html. As to the output shortfall, La Griffe du Lion is years ahead of McKinsey, with his January 2005, "Cognitive Decline: The Irreducible Legacy of Open Borders", link: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/imm.htm. La Griffe writes, "Prodigy's Laws of Immigration. 1. A Western country may be approximated as a nation composed of two distinct populations, one indigenous, the other third-world, differing in mean IQ by approximately one standard deviation. ... 3. Per capita GDP, declines linearly with the third-world immigrant population fraction. 4. Each percentage point increase in the third-world immigrant population, will eventually cause the per capita GDP of a Western nation to drop by approximately 0.76 percent of its zero-immigrant value". If 1960 the US was 88.5% white. We had a few Asians, let's assume the NAM population was 10%. Now assume it's 27%, a 17% increase since 1960. Now multiply, .17 x .76 = .129. McKinsey gives us 9 to 16 per cent. Not knowing McKinsey's base year, I'll stand with this. Coincidence? We don't think so. I bet, if he's so inclined, Steve Sailer (SS), top blogger in this area, could take McKinsey's study apart in a few hours. Finland is of special interest. SS wrote about it on 1 March 2008, link: http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/03/01/wsj-wonders-why-is-finland-so-finlandy/

McKinsey, you should be ashamed of yourself. Again. As IQ-obsessed as you were and probably still are, what's your excuse? You want more HHS consulting contracts?

McKinsey please note James Fulford's 21 May 2009 post, http://vdare.com/fulford/090521_fulford_file.htm. In referring to a book by Richard Lynn, Fulford writes, "IQ has consequences". What is it McKinsey doesn't understand? It has consequences for "crime, ... immigration policy, education, and all kinds of other things". Even foreign policy! Yes!