South Africans are outraged to find themselves last in a prestigious survey of how well our fourth graders can read for meaning. And they should be angry. But the lack of education may not be, as so many people insist it is, the reason we cannot grow the economy. The reason we can’t grow is that we don’t have sufficient skills or we have discarded too early the people that do. In this episode of Podcasts from the Edge with Peter Bruce he revisits the argument for skills and the famous line from Harvard development economist Ricardo Hausmann that “to say that education is your growth strategy means that you are giving up on everyone who has already gone through the school system”.

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