RICH LOWRY: Don’t malign the U.S. economy

By Rich Lowry King Features August 17, 2026 - 9:00 pm The United States of America may be the greatest place for functionally illiterate people to live in all of human history. An eye-popping column in the Financial Times the other day noted how people in the United States with very low literacy make about as much per hour as the average worker in the United Kingdom. Is this the result of brilliant public policy, carefully crafted to boost the prospects of those on the margins? No, it’s a byproduct of the vast, endlessly dynamic wealth-generating machine that is the American economy. The Financial Times also compared cohorts of low-literacy workers in the United States and the United Kingdom: “The same proportion of U.S. workers who score stunningly low on literacy earn an average of almos