William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth - Chapter 4

Easterly writes that education without incentives is useless. If education causes people to miss out on more profitable outcomes, they will skip the education and do what is necessary to be most profitable.
He mentions that there is no correlation between education and output growth. If education spurs growth he argues that young workers should have relatively higher wages than the older population because they are the more educated demographic. However, that trend is not occurring in reality. Instead, he argues that growth causes education.
Gregory Mankiw argues that growth is dependent upon a combination of physical capital and human capital. Thus, growth cannot be forced by only one variable change.
Easterly makes the case that skills are definitely needed for growth, but that there must be proper incentives to obtain these skills.
I consistently agree with Easterly’s arguments because I too believe that aligning incentives properly is essential to development. Thus, it would be beneficial for governments to reassess what the terminal incentives are for their citizens under the current policy. Governments in LDCs should ultimately care most about growth and not about trendy fixes to growth.