Brazil has made substantial economic progress over the past fifteen years, but Alexei Barrionuevo reports that its levels of educational attainment continue to lag:

Brazilian 15-year-olds tied for 49th out of 56 countries on the reading exam of the Program for International Student Assessment, with more than half scoring in the test’s bottom reading level in 2006, the most recent year available. In math and science, they fared even worse.

“We should be ashamed of ourselves,” said Ilona Becskeházy, executive director of the Lemann Foundation, an organization based in São Paulo devoted to improving Brazilian education. “This means that 15-year-olds in Brazil are mastering more or less the same skills as 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds in countries such as Denmark or Finland.”

Of course the Finns have the best-performing students in the world, so the no shame in a poor country lagging behind them. But Brazil does considerable worse than Chile or Mexico. Here’s the math stats:

These kind of things don’t turn around overnight. What you hope for is a mutually reinforcing pattern where growth makes more resources available and then if those resources are invested well educational attainment improves and lays the groundwork for more growth.

I don’t think that presidential “messaging” has much power to alter the outcome at the midterms, but that’s all the more reason the White House may as well propose ideas that make sense on the merits and then hope for the best:

President Barack Obama is asking Congress to approve at least $50 billion in long-term investments in the nation’s roads, railways and runways in a pre-election effort to show he’s trying to stimulate the sputtering economy.

The infrastructure investments are part of a package of targeted proposals the White House announced on Monday. With November’s elections for control of Congress approaching, Obama planned to discuss the proposal later Monday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee.

Given that congress almost certainly won’t agree to anything this sensible, monetary policy remains are best hope in practice. But it’s foolish for the White House to constrain itself to only proposing ideas congress is likely to approve. This new approach is the right way to go.

Paul Krugman on the current trajectory: “If you ask how long it will take us to return to, say, 5 percent unemployment on the current track, the answer is forever.”

Like him, I don’t think this point is sufficiently understood. Nor are people really wrestling with the long-term damage that’s going to be done as the youngest cohort of Americans continually fails to find labor market opportunities and thus the kind of on-the-job training that turns people into productive workers.

Dexter Filkins has an excellent piece in the NYT on changing attitudes toward corruption in the Karzai government, but I think this characterization of the CIA’s role doesn’t fully capture what’s been going on:

Since 2001, one of the unquestioned premises of American and NATO policy has been that ordinary Afghans don’t view public corruption in quite the same way that Americans and others do in the West. Diplomats, military officers and senior officials flying in from Washington often say privately that while public graft is pernicious, there is no point in trying to abolish it — and that trying to do so could destroy the very government the West has helped to build.

The Central Intelligence Agency has carried that line of argument even further, putting on its payroll some of the most disputable members of Mr. Karzai’s government. The explanation, offered by agency officials, is that Mother Theresa can’t be found in Afghanistan.

I think a more generous view of the pro-corruption position would be this. From 2002-2008, the war in Afghanistan was an “economy of force” mission. People were given a certain level of resources and told to do the best they could. And improving governance in poorly governed societies is difficult to do. So the calculation was made that given limited resources, simply taking advantage of Afghan officials’ proclivity for corruption by bribing them seemed like a cost-effective alternative to a more ambitious undertaking with higher costs and an uncertain outcome. The problem, as detailed by Filkins, is that this attitude has only exacerbated the underlying governance problems.