Somin’ don’t smell right with Ed Lazear’s claim in Friday’s WSJ that “Germans with vocational apprenticeships are considerably better off than their American counterparts.” A graph in the NYT shows all but the lowest 30% of Americans earn more than their German counterparts. (People in the bottom 30% don’t work much, so differences in incomes are not simply a matter of wages.) America achieves these across-the-board results despite substantially less vocational training, lower academic test scores, and fewer top-scoring workers.
