More Education Just Teaches You How to Steal More Efficiently

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Lant Pritchett on why improved education doesn’t always improve the performance of poor countries:

His research has shown that countries whose education system improves actually grow slower on average. He suggests that one reason for this may be that putting more educated people into a corrupt bureaucracy may result in more sophisticated corruption.

This sounds disturbingly plausible. And not just for poor countries, either.