Image Source: PixabayThe Survey of Adult Skills was carried out across 31 mainly high-income economies in 2003. It’s a survey that’s done by having actual interviewers meet people in their homes. For the US, the sample size was 3,765, which may not sound like much, but it’s worth remembering that a typical Gallup poll is only about 1,000 people. As long as you remember that the results should be interpreted as plus-or-minus a few percentage points, you can can learn something from them.The results of the survey were published by the OECD as “Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World? Survey of Adult Skills 2023” in December. Here, I’ll focus on putting some of the US results in context.The survey focuses on three types of skills: numerary, literacy, and problem-solving. The skills tend to be correlated across categories: that is, if a country is good at one skill, it tend to be good at others. Here’s a figure showing numeracy and literacy scores. As you can see, the US falls well below average on numeracy scores, and slightly below average on literacy.
Perhaps more troubling is that within the US scores, the gap between the 90th and the 10th percentile is either widest, or close to widest, across countries. In other words, the US average score is made up of both exceptionally high-performing and low-performing scores. The bars in the figure show the gap between 90th and 10th percentile scores, and you can see the US bar graphs on the far left.
This matters. The world economy is evolving toward higher skills, which then can be combined with improved technology. A country in which adults are highly unequal in skills will be unequal in other ways as well. Here’s one more figure from the report, this one showing patterns of the tasks performed in US jobs over time. The intensify of “routine” tasks is falling. The intensity of “social” and “nonroutine analytical” tasks has generally been rising. Those who are only equipped for routine tasks are going to have a hard time in US job market.
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