Ed. Note: This is a very brief excerpt from “Conversations With Tyler,” a podcast hosted by Tyler Cowen, an economist professor who also writes the blog Marginal Revolutions. His guest is Daron Acemoglu, a professor at MIT who has won many awards, including the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences . Cowen and Acemoglu have a wide-ranging conversation that includes whether we’re giving up on educating Americans and if teacher unions need to be “reconstituted.” The episode and transcript are here.

ACEMOGLU: That educated elite that we’re talking about—let me not use a different word, although I feel uncomfortable with that word, but let’s use that educated elite—has given up on the education of Americans because they think that they can fill any skill gap with importing those skills, whether they are nurses, whether they’re doctors, whether they’re programmers. That’s the problem.

I would love to have skilled immigration, but I would love also to renew the, I call this the social compact, to distinguish it from the social contract, the social compact of America such that the influential people, be they politicians, journalists, or tech barons, really have a commitment to the education of Americans.

COWEN: COVID era aside, test scores are pretty flat for decades. Higher education right now, because of President Trump, has a crisis, but in general, longer-term, it’s been getting better and better. Quality of economics research been getting better and better. Why think we’ve given up on education in this country? I don’t see that.

ACEMOGLU: Well, about half of people in the United States in middle school read and write a couple of grades below.

COWEN: That’s longstanding. Immigration is much more recent, right? It’s not because of immigration that that’s coming down.

ACEMOGLU: No, but we’re not doing anything about that despite the fact that everybody recognizes that we are moving into the skills age where we are going to need more and more human capital. We’re not doing anything. We’re just giving up on these people. I think that is what really bothers me, that somehow we have, as the most powerful, arguably the richest, country in the world, have resigned ourselves to give up on the education of about a third to a half of the youth.

COWEN: When you say given up, you look at New York City, which is a complex place with some real problems, but per capita spending per student is through the roof.

ACEMOGLU: Oh, yes, I know.

COWEN: It’s arguably way too high.

ACEMOGLU: We’re spending money. We’re throwing money at it, but we’re not really dealing with the root causes. Some of that money goes to a dysfunctional education system that’s become ideological.

COWEN: We should break the teachers’ unions.

ACEMOGLU: Well, I am, in general, as you know from the book, in favor of unions because labor needs to be represented, but yes, teacher unions, right now, I think they need to be reconstituted because they no longer serve children’s interest.