Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,

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Today is August 5, 2013, and my guest is Eric Hanna-Shek, the Paul and Gene Hanna

senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He's the author of numerous articles

and books on the economics of education. His latest book co-authored with Paul Peterson

and Ludwig Rusman is Endangering Prosperity, a global view of the American school. Rick,

welcome back to Econ Talk. Thanks for having me again. So what's the cost for alarm? Why do you think

our schools and our school system are? Why are they Endangering Prosperity? The simple fact is

that our schools don't produce a very high quality output. Our achievement levels as measured by

international tests is considerably below what we see in other developed countries in many

development countries. And why is that so important? If we look at the last 50 years, we see that

countries where the population has higher achievement, knows more math and science, grow faster.

And their GDP gets larger because they have a more skilled population.

Anything that affects the growth of GDP has huge implications for future well-being of societies.

So for us, the trial, there's many, many questions raised by those ideas. One being,

how do we know? How do we know that our schools are doing a bad job,

casual empirical anecdotal evidence, casual evidence, suggests that that's the case.

There's a lot of horror stories that we hear. How do we know that those horror stories are

real? And how do we get an idea of the magnitude of what we're talking about?

...