Edward Alden

“Over the last decade, other G7 countries have made more dramatic changes to their pension programs than the United States has to Social Security.33 Germany and Japan have put automatic stabilizers into their public pension systems so that the pension benefits rise or fall automatically with the country’s ability to afford them. Italy linked pension age eligibility to life expectancy, while France indexed part of its public pension system to price inflation. These changes amount to huge spending cuts by 2040 compared with previous law—roughly 30 percent in France, 40 percent in Germany and Japan, and nearly 50 percent in Italy.34 Some of the reforms were delayed because of the recession. Nonetheless, the public broadly understands that future benefits should be cut, and the push for reform has come equally from the Left and the Right. The United States, meanwhile, has not managed to pass a major Social Security reform in thirty years.”
― Edward Alden, How America Stacks Up: Economic Competitiveness and U.S. Policy

“Less headway is being made in figuring out how to improve teacher quality, an undertaking more complex than simply recruiting new teachers with better academic credentials or offering higher salaries. In high-achieving countries, such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, teachers come from the top of their high school graduating classes, teaching schools have a high bar for acceptance, and teachers’ salaries are competitive with those of lawyers and scientists. It is generally the opposite in the United States.”
― Edward Alden, How America Stacks Up: Economic Competitiveness and U.S. Policy