Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility by Anthony Kenny & Charles Kenny

Author:Anthony Kenny & Charles Kenny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social, moral, society, morality, Philosophy, Economics, economy, history, welfare, happiness
ISBN: 9781845402754
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2011
Published: 2011-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

To the extent that education itself is part of the package of goods that might be thought to comprise value dignity, it is worth noting that here again the link with income growth is weak. There is no statistically significant relationship between growth in gross primary or secondary enrollment and growth in income per capita globally or for a subsample of countries with incomes per capita below $3,000 over the 1975-2000 period. Over a longer timeframe but a smaller group of countries, there is no relationship between growth of literacy and income growth 1913-1999. Indeed, if anything, countries that have grown faster have seen slower rates of improvement in education (C. Kenny, 2006). Between 1950 and 1990, Angola, Nicaragua, Mozambique and Bolivia all saw declining real incomes per capita. Over the same period, they all saw dramatically increasing literacy and primary school enrollment. In Angola, where income per capita fell from $986 to $654 over the forty-year period, primary enrollment as a percentage of the population increased from 0.3 to 11.7 percent (it was 12.4 percent in the US in 1990) (Kenny, 2005b).

Conversely, the limited impact of education even in many of the richest countries suggests that even they have some distance to go in ensuring even a basic level of skills. One in four adults in the UK are functionally innumerate (they cannot figure out change from a simple shopping transaction) and one in five functionally illiterate - they cannot find the entry for plumbers in an alphabetical listing in the Yellow Pages (Westwood, 2002).

As with health, that per capita income increases are weakly related to improvements in levels and quality of education is likely to be connected to the fact that universal basic education is very cheap to provide. Budget scarcity is not a significant barrier to expanded enrollment rates, as suggested by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, who noted that widespread education could be provided ‘for a very small expense.’ The barriers to enrollment, and learning once enrolled, are only in small part created by limited absolute income.

Child labour is an issue connected to dignity both directly and because it reduces opportunities for education. The International Labor Organization estimates that there were 206 million child labourers in 2000. But it appears that the relationship between economic growth and child labour rates is not straightforward. Indian state level data suggests that while child labour rates have been decreasing over time, states that saw faster growth rates over the 1982-93 period saw higher rates of child labour in 1994 (allowing for a range of other factors including income, education and religion) (Kambhampati and Rajan, 2006). A similar story can be told regarding trafficked children. Studies in Benin and Burkina Faso suggest that a range of factors beyond income are important. The presence of televisions and soccer clubs in the village, the death of a parent and the search for better educational opportunities all increase the supply of children for trafficking while the use of children for commercial sexual exploitation is one factor increasing demand (Fitzgibbon, 2003).

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