Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1980

come back to this point later on in m y brief comment about Hong Kong and about China. It appears, in looking at the industrialized nations of the world, that one requisite is that about at least 10% of the young people in each generation be given some education beyond the high school—— not necessarily, or perhaps even particularly not at the university level, but perhaps in the form of short courses of a year or two years in length. It takes about 10% of the young people getting education beyond the high school to make an industrial system work really effectively; and it is possible to make use of the trained talents of about 25% of the young people in the nation as industrialization move s along. This 25% figure is the one which applies roughly to the U. S. today. W e are of course sending more than 25% of our young people to colleges and universities or some other form of post-secondary education, but only about 25% of that total can be said, I think, to have made some use of their additional education. In the United States, as our occupational structure has changed with advance in industrialization, we now have 25% of all of our employment in what our Bureau of Census calls professional and technical positions and in managerial positions, i.e. one quarter of the total labour force in a highly developed industrial society in professional and technical positions and managerial positions. Of course some people with college degrees will find employment outside these two categories: we find today that salesmen in very technical fields need a college degree to be fully effective. The Japanese figure is also roughly 25% of their young people getting more than a high school education and being employed and having their education used. It is also the figure in Russia. (And I might say these are three quite different systems.) The Germans are making their plans for the future. Among other things, they have studied the American system. Some of the people working on these plans have talked with me about our American experience ； and they are planning to make available, beyond their high schools, places for about 25% of their young people, as the German system becomes more advanced and more complex. Second, the expectation that higher levels of education, particularly higher education, would lead to a spread of democracy around the world. I think that expectation has been grievously disappointed. Were it true that more freedom and more democracy follow the more highly educated population, one would expect that the Russian political system today would be quite different from what it is. I have seen the studies of political scientists wh o have compared the political systems around the world with the degree of education of the citizenry, and generally a rough correlation can be drawn between the average level of education and the average degree of participation by citizens in the conduct of their society ； but it is extremely rough, and there are very great variations from the general norm. So I would say that was an area of great disappointment. The third expectation was that, with more higher education, there would be more equality of opportunity, and also over a period of time more equality in earned income. By and large around the world this has turned out to be quite true: that higher education has drawn talent from many more layers of society in nations around the world than has ever been true historically ； that enormous contributions have been made in almost all societies to drawing talent out of the portions of the society which have been previously totally neglected in the leadership groups. There is a recent study being made in the United States showing the origin of our business leaders over a period of time. And once upon a time (I might say that this might not be explained only by the advance of higher education but also the advance of the modern corporation with its meritocracy) there was a very great search for talent. In the United States——a nation which has never had a class structure at least of any strength——one would have expected historically we would have been drawing our executive talent from all parts of American society; but actually it was not true: American executive talent historically has been drawn almost entirely from the upper and middle class. With the spread of higher education and the big corporations, we now have a really absolutely fundamental change in the source of American economic leadership, drawn from all ranks of American society. Wha t is true in the United States is even more true in some societies which have had more of a class structure. So higher education almost everywhere has become a method for finding talent throughout the society and not just in the upper circles. It also appears, in the United States, that there is a tendency for the spread of higher education to narrow the range of income; and studies made elsewhere by Kuznets and Tinbergen and other famous economists and mathematical economists come up with the same conclusion. What normally happens in economic development is that, in the very early stages, income becomes less equal as some people in the more advanced part of the developing society get 6