In Martin Varsavsky recent blog post, Why Europe’s GDP is the largest in the world, the author makes a controversial statement stating that the lack of spending on education in the US may be one of the causes of higher rates of incarceration vs. countries in Europe. I would have to remind the reader (and the author) that this type of statement is a common error that confuses correlation with causation – just because two things occur simultaneously, that does not make them automatically related. The specific quote is below, and some more commentary on causation after the quote:
“Education in general and university education and training in Europe is mostly free. Education and training in USA is occasionally free but frequently extremely expensive. In the end the entrepreneur in USA has to pay salaries that allow his/her employees to educate their children. Moreover expensive education spills over in other areas of society. Europe has an incarceration rate of less than 100, USA has an incarceration rate of 750 people per 100K inhabitants. In my view there is an inverse correlation between spending on education and incarceration that favors Europe. If all US prisoners were moved to a city they would overflow Madrid. Maybe spending less in the military and more in free education would have a more beneficial effect on society.”
To substantiate such a broad statement and to show causation, there would definitely need to be more research into things such as crime rates by country, arrest rates, arrest release rates, number of police on the streets per capita, types of crime people are incarcerated for, among other crime stats. You would also need a sample from a cross-section of countries, and then look into causal factors and see how dependent the output is on the lack of spending on different types of education, and more importantly the literacy rates, education “reach”, level of education for those in prison and the general populace. I can understand the author’s trying to link the two seemingly related factors, but it is an extremely weak link and one that would need additional investigation.
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