in England, adults aged 55 to 65 perform better than 16- to 24-year-olds at foundation levels of literacy and numeracy.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Several of his commenters raise the issue that seemed obvious to me: how much of this reflects the higher number of immigrants in the younger cohort?
Remember that the null hypothesis is that schooling practices do not matter. That would imply that the problem of the younger generation is not that schools in England have gotten worse.
The fact that knowledge is usually cumulative might have something to do with it. I like to think that I’m smarter than now, at age 55, then I was at 19.