McKinsey + Thomas Friedman make the business case for eduction...with numbers

Education and learning is often thought of as taking care of poor kids. But that's not the point.

The point is that when funny money goes away human capital goes directly to GDP, according to McKinsey. McKinsey's model may or may not be spot on.

It's why it would be so cool for any of the players in Print called themselves a learning company. Learning is the key to higher GDP. Learning is the key to GDP all over the world.

It turns out the Print is the best learning artifact on the planet and will be for a long, long time.

How about Xerox, The Learning Company?

Or Ricoh/IBM, the Learning Company ( they already have a leg up since IBM is the Think company) they might be able to use the same ads and just change Think to Learn.

Oce, The Learning Company?

Op-Ed Columnist - Swimming Without a Suit - NYTimes.com: "Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us. Suppose, it noted, “that in the 15 years after the 1983 report ‘A Nation at Risk’ sounded the alarm about the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in American education,” the U.S. had lifted lagging student achievement to higher benchmarks of performance? What would have happened?

The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher."