New Study: Americans Are Terrible at Words, Math, and Technology

Who knew that in this here country totally incapable of self-governance that also happens to be increasingly disinterested in paying for science research or higher education that we might have a problem with, uh, knowing stuff. You understand this, of course, at least intuitively: America is slip sliding toward idiocracy. Well, here's a new report bearing that out: the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Skills Outlook 2013, "designed to provide insights into the availability of [information-processing and other high-level cognitive and interpersonal] skills in society and how they are used at work and at home." In other words, how human civilization is doing meeting the demands of the techno-future.

Not well. Basically, the United States is near the back of the pack on everything, with Japan, Sweden, and Finland out in front. I’ll just share a few graphs of results already excerpted by the Atlantic.

First, it appears that more Americans are barely literate than very literate:

What’s sort of interesting is that we don’t hear so much these days about literacy rates. When I was growing up (figure early-‘90s), reading ability was the country’s favorite hand-wringing subject. Everything was "read a book." Now, the crisis is math or I guess STEM in general. This is more fair than it might seem: as a needed skill, math has exploded over the past 15 years. And, here, we're not even in the back of the pack; we're scraping the very bottom of the industrialized world.

I learned trigonometry from a gym teacher. He always seemed a bit embarassed. Moving on …

Finally, we have computers, or “computer literacy” combined with the “cognitive skills required to solve problems,” in the words of the report.

So: back of the pack again, in the country responsible for Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

Interestingly, according to a 2011 OECD report on education, the United States does much better, coming in above-average or even near the top (depending on the metric) as far as percentages of adults that have attended or graduated from college. However, that same report notes that the U.S. spends far less than most countries on education as a percentage of GDP.