Are Teenagers Getting Dumber?

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1:45David McWilliams: Just before we start, as part of this year's Kilcanomics, we have a new musical offering called the Marble Sessions. Headlining this are Cardinals, one of the most talked about young bands. And you remember the other day I was talking about the experience that I had seeing U2 when they were one of the most talked about young bands in Ireland. And that experience changing the way I thought about music. Well, now's your chance to see Cardinals at Kilkenomics. They're in the set theatre in Kilkenny on Saturday nights. Have a gander at kilkenomics.com for your tickets for Cardinals, the headliners of the Marvel sessions.

2:26David McWilliams: We'll see you in Kilkenny. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? Time for the podcast. It is a week where I am putting together my monetary economics course, which I teach at Trinity College Dublin every single year. And of course, this is the time where all universities and to a degree secondary schools, although they're back, but all universities are revving up to take in the new intake of students, to take in obviously students going from first to second year, second to third, etc. But of course, what's the most exciting, I think, is the people who are coming into school for the first time.

3:25David McWilliams: And it's all new and it's university and it's college life and it's different. And it's promising all sorts of things. Relationships, ideas, knowledge, work, hard work, fun, crack, mysteries, all those things. All the great panoply of things that make us grow up and that transition from school to university. And of course, if you're an alpha on the far side of that, you're teaching the university. So you've got to come up with ideas. You've got to come up with new stories. You've got to come up with new reading lists. But also you've got to come up, John, and this is what we're going to talk about, is with the weaponry or armory that you're going to deploy to find a little bit of purchase in the heads of the students, to find that place of focus where a focused student can appreciate, can learn, can digest, can analyze, can absorb, and then can have that most beautiful moment for any lecturer, professor, what have you, is when you look down at the class, you look at the lecture hall and you see the light bulb going off in the top of the student's head.

4:40David McWilliams: And it's like, whoa, I get this now. Are you sure that's not their screen in their hand going off? Well, now it's very funny you say that, John, right? The very, very first thing, the very first requirement that I demand when I go into college is that laptop is off and closed and everybody's phone is in their bag. That's very unusual. Most people don't do that. I just say, you're going to take notes, you're going to take them note with a pen and paper. And the students look at me as if I've got 10 heads, right? Because they've never been told that before. They've forgotten how to write. They've forgotten how to write.

5:15David McWilliams: So basically what I've said, look, I am not going to stand up here for an hour and compete with TikTok. I am not going to do that. this is an hour of focused concentration on the job at hand, which is to learn monetary economics, which is not really that difficult. But if you don't apply yourself, it's like anything, it is difficult. So it's quite funny when I walk in and they're all saying, oh, they're all saying, hello, and how are you? And they're asking questions. And, you know, they're very, very attentive bunch. And they're, you know, they're keen to go, but I always say, laptops away. And then they say, but that's how we take notes.

5:51David McWilliams: I said, no, you're going to take notes in the old-fashioned way with a pen and paper. You're going to write them down, and then you can transcribe. And I say, phones away. And literally, John, it is like asking people to cut off their right arm. I swear to God. Do you allow them to record, though, on their phone if they hit record and just leave it on the desk? Nope. No, I give them notes. I give them notes, and I say, and then we record it and give it to them. Right, okay. And do you send them to the back of the class and then give them 100 lines back and forth? Exactly, and say, I must not. use my phone.

6:23David McWilliams: No, but the point is, the point is, John, I am actually a very nice teacher, John. I am not a nice teacher. I'm sure you are, Mike. I'm very, very nice. I'm very soft. But what I, what my point is that if students are constantly online and distracted, as a result, they can't be focused, right? And this all came to me about 10 years ago, I was asked to give a series of lectures in Spain's most decorated business school. And I went in and every single one of the students was either on their phone, typing away, like emailing people or WhatsAppping people are on their laptops. And as a teacher, as an educator, it was the worst experience I ever had because you can't teach without focus.

7:13David McWilliams: and, you know, teaching is that the subject is tricky, it's technical, sometimes economics is counterintuitive, sometimes it's intellectually difficult. It has to have focus. It just doesn't work without focus. And either students are in class, attentive or alert, or there's absolutely no point, Chuck. But it's like going to a gig. I mean, it never ceases to amaze me going to a gig and all you see are people holding their phones up. And it must be so off-putting to anyone on stage who is, you know, giving it their all, giving it soul and giving it sucks and, you know, have people's divided attention.

7:53It's almost like I'm going to record this and maybe watch it later. And they're missing the experience of the whole thing.

7:59David McWilliams: It is dreadful. You know what I find amazing about going to gigs now? Remember the silence of the lambs, John? It's the silence of the gigs. Because they're on their bleeding phones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. more interested in getting, you know, telling the world where they are. It's appalling. But I mean, there are those things, John. I mean, we're going to, sorry, sorry, listeners. We're going off on a little bit of a tangent, but come back to the issue here is I want to talk about the gradual progressive reduction in what we call PISA scores, which are scores that are taken every three years of 15-year-olds across the OECD to see are we getting cleverer or are we getting dumber?

8:38David McWilliams: and the evidence in the last piece of results is we are collectively getting more stupid and the podcast is all going to be about why is this happening? What are the consequences? What can be done about it? We're just riffing at the top here because a lot of it's going to do with undivided attention. So just that's where we're at. But you're right, just lastly on the gigs, you're right. But there's those little pouches, you know those little pouches you can get where the artist demands that you hand in your phone. Yeah. It's a great idea. It's a really good idea. I've got to see one or two one-man shows.

9:14David McWilliams: Those are the things where the performer's really, really on their tot and they have required everybody to hand in their phones in those pouches. And you know what? Nobody minds. It's like everything. You take people's phones away from them. Nobody throws a tantrum. Everyone's like, okay, fair enough. But, you know, what people do find is the bizarreness of having to spend an hour and a half without looking down at this bloody thing. Or without taking the opportunity where conversation dries up or where conversation is difficult or in between, you know, of looking at your phone. That is, I think, the most disconcerting thing.

9:49David McWilliams: But in actuality, the gigs are, as you would say, they're far better off for it. Far better off for it. You're either at it or you're not. So that's what we're going to be talking about, John. We're going to be talking about the economics of educational relative underachievement, the sense that we might be getting dumber, and why is that? And I think a lot of us have to do with focus, but we'll talk about that in a minute. Okay, so you mentioned this PISA, the Programme of International Student Assessment. Yeah. And you said that, in general, we are dropping off. Is that we in Ireland, we across Europe, we across the...

10:23David McWilliams: Everywhere. Everywhere. So just to establish something at the top, right? Learning, before we talk about PISA, learning takes time. Patience... It takes a lifetime. It takes a lifetime. Patience is essential. And so too is some form of relentless repetition. Now that is regularly dismissed by people as, oh, that's just rote learning. But in fact, repetition is the process of figuring something out. You go back, you go back again, it's trial and error. You think, will this work? Will that work? You're repeating basic performative tasks in order to figure something out. So rote learning is not something that you can dismiss.

11:11David McWilliams: Rote learning is part of a process of, in a way, exercising your brain. And once you start focusing once you have patience, once you begin the process of trial and error, then eventually things come together. But constant distraction rarely allows that penny to drop. And that's the point. So now let's talk about PISA. Okay, so Mac, give us some numbers, put all of this into perspective for us. Okay, so the key findings are that in the last year or two, across the board, 15-year-olds are now getting more stupid. That's the key thing. Is stupid the right word? Yeah, they're becoming dumb, right?

11:57David McWilliams: Seems a bit harsh. So every three years, the OECD tests 15-year-olds across dozens of countries in maths, reading and science, right? And the results are then published. And what you find in last year, across the OECD, Scores peaked in 2012 for PISA and have been falling steadily since. And 15-year-olds in general are now testing at levels that were achieved by 14-year-olds a decade ago. That's an amazing thing because it means that we have lost a year in cognitive ability in the last 10 years. That's significant at that age, actually. It's amazing, right? in Germany, France, Canada, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, and the United States reported last month their lowest ever PISA scores.

12:51David McWilliams: That is what we're talking about. Yeah. And we're on a trajectory downwards. On a trajectory downwards. And worse still, at the bottom, the low performers are growing. So 20 % of all 15-year-olds across all of the OECD are now described as low performers in reading, in maths, and in science. And that's up from 16 % four years ago. Or to put this into a different context, Jan, it means that roughly one in five teenagers across the rich world would struggle to make sense of their telephone bill. Now that is really extraordinary. Because they can't read, they can't count, They can't analyze. So they're looking at even their telephone bills or utility bills, right?

13:44David McWilliams: Which require a certain amount of reading and analyzing and numbers. They can't do this. And that's problematic. And then one last thing is, in general, there's a thing called the Flynn effect, which Flynn was obviously a fellow of Irish extract from New Zealand. He was an educational researcher. And he established this idea, John, that in the 20th century, increases in IQ were almost a given. So every single country experienced increases in kind of PISA test results across the board constantly during the 20th century. The question is now whether or not that Flynn effect has stopped. And if it has stopped, why is that?

14:32David McWilliams: And that's before we talk about Ireland, that's across the board for all countries, that what you're seeing is a reversal of an assumption, which was that children across the world, as countries get richer, as they throw more money at education, as the education system gets better, those children will become cleverer and more intellectually curious, and their IQ rates will go up. That seems to have stopped. And I suppose that is what most people are now worried about. Okay, Mike, before we get into the whys or the possible whys for this, just fast forward from kind of the 15-year-olds by, what, three years, and you get to the leaving cert.

15:17And just looking at Ireland now, the leaving cert points across the board are up in general. So is 15-year-olds the wrong age to test this at? And should it not be 18-year-olds and based on the leaving cert?

15:34David McWilliams: Well, the leaving cert, and again, for non-Irish listeners, the leaving cert is like the ALS in the UK or the baccalaureate in France. My suspicion, John, on that issue is that the marking, there is great inflation. There's been great inflation in the leaving cert for many, many years. And that is one of the problems. So the point system is only reflecting. It's not reflecting the kids are getting brighter. PISA is telling us the kids are not getting brighter. The Leaving Cert is saying the kids are getting more points. The consequence, I would say, or the analytical, obvious, logical conclusion is that the grade inflation is taking over.

16:13David McWilliams: So what you're seeing is Leaving Cert points are going up, but ultimately the children themselves are actually, on the PISA level, their intelligence is going down. That, I think, is a huge, huge... I mean, the first thing, the very narrow gauge economics is that we know that school performance and future economic growth go together. So differences in cognitive skill levels lead to significant differences in economic growth. An extra 100 points in PISA is associated with approximately two percentage points annual higher GDP growth per capita. Oh, right. Yes. And that makes some sense. You know, a good example of that is Poland, where the PISA score is increased by about 25 points between 2002 and 2012.

17:03David McWilliams: And what you find is about 10 years later, the Polish economy is growing very, very strongly as those students entered into the workforce. And of course, the exemplar across the world of this is Ireland, where during the 90s and into the 2000s, people became much better educated. at the PISA score starting in the 2000s. Ireland is very, very high in the PISA score as we talk about this. But of course, this has contributed enormously to driving the economy in the subsequent decades. But I think the economic argument is the least important one, John. Because that kind of reduces everything to productivity and output per head and all those sort of things.

17:42David McWilliams: But I just think more education creates better societies. We know that the better educated people, there's less crime, better behave towards their neighbours, their less casual violence, there's a commitment to the pursuit of art and culture, generally a higher quality of life. All these things are allied to higher standards of living and they are all underpinned by the foundational achievement of higher levels of education. So that I think is why education is important, not necessarily just from the economic perspective, but from the actual holistic or cultural perspective because it makes societies, in a way, education smooths a lot of the rough edges in society.

18:23David McWilliams: And that, I suppose, is what you should be hoping for. So is the why element of this discussion, I mean, you mentioned the peak of PISA was 2012. So that's only a few years after the introduction of the iPhone and everything that came with that, social media and all the One thing I've noticed in the last while is, apart from people and their faces stuck in screens, is that we seem to have forgotten how to discuss and debate and to argue without it descending into aggressive behavior and, you know, accusations of fake news and all that kind of bullshit. Yeah, so I think that if you look at it, so we started the podcast talking about focus.

19:09Yes.

19:10David McWilliams: Being able to focus. I think a huge factor is we are getting dumber. And we have to use this language because that's the language. Because screen hostages cannot concentrate. Teenagers, but not just teenagers, adults are screen hostages. I was on a flight the other day and I was looking around. Nobody's reading. Nobody's reading novels. Nobody's reading nonfiction. They're on their phones. I know there's a guy beside me. I just find adult men playing games on their phones really sad. Like Candy Crush or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're allowed to switch off now and then and just kind of have bubblegum kind of entertainment for a little bit.

19:55David McWilliams: Yeah, we are. But we do know that, for example, reading... Let's go back to the point, right? Teenagers, in many cases, and adults, have lost the ability to actually switch off and knuckle down. Knuckling down is the key thing, right? It sounds so much like a teacher. Knuckle down. No, but it is. I know you're right. You're right. There's a great personal satisfaction in cracking the code of something, whether it's a language or whether it's a problem or just whether it's reading something and you say, wow, that was interesting, right? Yeah. You don't get the same. What you call is bubble gum.

20:30David McWilliams: It's like fast food. It's an instant kick. For example, it's been reported now that some kids under 18 don't use keyboards on their phone anymore. They just text to speech, right? They just speak into their phone. And it's not just because it's far quicker, but it's because they find reading a hassle. It's paining the arse for them, right? So phone, screen, scrolling, these all have an impact on concentration and reading ability. And then patient reading has been replaced with a concept called hurried reading, John. Because of time-saving skim reading in which the reader digests only a fraction of the message.

21:05David McWilliams: Now, you know, a couple of years ago, when I was working on the book Money. Remember when we were chatting one day and somebody said to us, oh, don't worry, I'm going to read it on Blink List. Is that it called? Blinkist. Blinkist. I couldn't believe what this was doing. This is a thing that digests a book and churns you out like three pages to say, this is what's in the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It kind of gives you a summary of each chapter in audio form, actually. I mean, this is like listening to a song speed it up. It's ridiculous. idea, right? Yes, it is. It really is, John. You know, I mean, there is joy in slowing down.

21:43David McWilliams: There is joy. It's even well documented that things like high blood pressure and those things can actually react to solitude, to concentration, to that sense of invigorating sense that you get of slowing right down. But of course, Blinkist and all these things are having the opposite. And you see this in children's data in Ireland, John. Children's Books Ireland, which put out a report on young children's reading habits, found that 24 % of 13 to 18-year-olds don't read at all for pleasure. And the average book ownership per child fell from 30 books in 2023 to just 20 books in 2025, John. That's two years.

22:30Yeah.

22:30David McWilliams: That's a drop of one third. And so what we're seeing is a complete cultural shift because in the attention economy, everybody's vying for your attention and everybody wants to acquire your attention via the quickest way possible, which are the dopamine hits that you get from being on your screen. That little zap, that little weird sort of dopamine hit. Of course, books and... learning cannot replace that because it's harder. So could you say that we're kind of in an era of outsourcing or shortcutting or whatever? You spoke before about, in economic terms, how Europe has outsourced its manufacturing and its defence and its this, that and all the rest.

23:27But on a student level that we're talking about, you know, people are also outsourcing our memory because everything is stored on Google. You don't know the answer to something? I'll just Google it. Or we've outsourced our kind of listening. We record everything like lectures and gigs, as we were talking about, nights out, you know, anything that moves, you record it. And now with AI, we're outsourcing our creativity. We just throw in a half-arsed idea into ChatGPT and out comes a book or God knows what comes out. So it's this kind of outsourcing era that we're living in.

24:06David McWilliams: I think it's a combination. I think shortcutting is a very good expression. And outsourcing obviously describes as well what's going on. But the notion that everything has to be quick and there has to be an easy shortcut to acquiring knowledge seems to me to run the risk of profoundly changing the way our brains operate. That's the first thing. The second thing is with respect to AI, the champions of AI, and I'm prepared to go along with some of this, will say that this is going to be exactly like the printing press. A huge dissemination of knowledge that used to be held by the elites will be held by the average person.

24:50David McWilliams: And it will have the same effect of the effect that YouTube had on universities. And I think this is an interesting idea. So YouTube is, as you know, one of, or is the most brilliant university in the world. If you want to find out how to do anything, you can find out on YouTube. It can be as weird as how do you figure out how to fix an electric kettle to how do you figure out highfalutin mathematics and economics. And you will find somebody on YouTube who has given their time to explain stuff to you. So I think YouTube is the most amazing educational tool of the last 20 years. And I would actually suggest that one of the reasons that elite universities have got all upset about it is because it actually has taken away the concentration and the monopoly that elite universities had on education.

25:47David McWilliams: And if AI goes down the same sort of route, that it's an amplified version of YouTube, where you can learn anything easily, well, I think that would be a great thing. And it will collectively inspire and will change the way in which people think and learn. A lot of AI people say, oh, it will therefore be a little bit like the printing press. But the foundational shift in the printing press was reading, not information. Yeah. So the reading was the process by which people began to acquire that information. And the printing press made reading easier, because it made reading cheaper, because it made books cheaper.

26:30David McWilliams: And there's a lot of people argue that the printing press, by making reading easier, actually changed the way humans thought because it encouraged people to be on their own. It encouraged people to be contemplative. It encouraged people to think in a solitudinous way in a higher level. And from it come the enlightenment, come philosophical breakthroughs, and then, of course, come scientific breakthroughs. And that wonderful journey of humanity from the Renaissance times, the Reformation, the Renaissance, all the way through to Einstein and on. Now, that is the sort of evangelical AI position, which is this can only be good for us.

27:17David McWilliams: Of course, the opposite is what you're saying, is that it changes the way our brains are wired because it takes away the necessity for that hard work. And it's the hard work. So basically, it's like everything. If you don't have the foundational knowledge, all the AI is just going to be a cacophony because you can't analyze, you can't think what's right and wrong. This is back to your point about fake news, et cetera. So the hard work, which in a way hardwires your brain to be analytical, and that is the result of the patience and the result of the concentration, it is that what enables the AI to be fantastically useful.

28:01David McWilliams: But if you give people who don't have or have refused to have or who choose not to have because it's easier not to have done those hard yards, then the AI becomes a cacophony of information where we've loads of information, but we've no ability to parse that information into an analytical structure. And that, I think, is maybe the most worrying aspect of the PISA results, because what they're showing to you is that we've lost one year of education and cognitive ability in a decade. Yeah. Now, if you subscribe to Moore's Law and the rapid acceleration of proceeds on the internet and in science data, that process might accelerate.

28:50David McWilliams: so we've lost a year per decade at the opening we might end up losing a year every half decade or every two years so what you're saying is this is like a reverse moore's law this could be this is i'm not saying it is but it could be but i agree with you mike because education is not just simply about facts it's about being able to interrogate those facts exactly and be able to think critically about those facts. Thinking critically. So, you know, in general, just to come back to Ireland, the results are kind of a mixed bag. Ireland has a very, very high standard in this. We have a good standard of education, you know, but the class of 2015 was smarter than the class of 2025.

29:35David McWilliams: Our reading has declined. Our maths has declined. Our sciences stayed the same. So that is very important. Now, Irish declines are smaller than other countries, but they're going in the same direction. That's the key thing. And a big problem for Ireland is our share of top-performing math students is falling. And again, it's only by 1%, but you don't want this to become a trend because that means we've got fewer of these high flyers. So the middle is holding up reasonably well in Ireland, but we have fewer high flyers. And of course, what is worrying is at the lower end, 17 % of Irish 15-year-olds now struggle with reading.

30:17David McWilliams: And that's up from only 11 % in 2022. And 24 % struggle in maths. And boys, again, are behind girls in reading and girls are behind boys in maths. So the issue is the education system, despite getting more money than ever, is not producing the same results. Now, there's lots of reasons. There's some reasons of these technical reasons, for example, like screens and AI and everything. There's other reasons which are just afflicting and are always afflicted, which is poor kids do worse than rich kids, right? Mitching. What we know is Mitching. 22 % of primary school children lost more than 20 days.

31:06They didn't turn up in 2023.

31:08David McWilliams: And poor kids miss school more than rich or middle-class kids, right? But COVID has had a big impact on those. COVID has had a massive impact. Of late, anyway. Yeah, and the snowflake-ization of children. Yeah. Which is, you know, don't force them to do hard stuff. let's change the syllabus, let's change the way we, you know, so for example, the reforms in teaching in the last couple of years have all migrated testing towards continual assessment. And the idea is that continual assessment gives a more holistic sense of the child. But what we know is that unless you test hard and you give people the rigor so that they don't genuflect always to softer methods, unless you test them, they lose that base of knowledge.

32:00David McWilliams: Very interesting, and English listeners or British listeners will be aware of this, England's PISA tests have held up extremely well over the last three years. Really? Whereas Wales and Scotland have fallen. Why is that? It is because, or at least certain people, it is because England has reverted notions of softer teaching methods by continual assessment. And then it was doubled down in the last decade on hard, hard exams. And what you're seeing is their kids are more focused as a result, whereas Scotland and Wales and Ireland have gone down the route of more continual assessment, less concentration in exams.

32:46David McWilliams: And of course, what that leads to also, not by definition, but by implication, is grade inflation. Because once you begin to kind of pussyfoot around delivering bad news to children, like not everybody can win. There has to be a third place. There has to be a kid who doesn't get a medal at the community games. That's how it works, right? What you do is if you treat students like snowflakes, constantly protecting them, re-rendering them unable to deal with failures and setbacks. We talked about it off-screen job, a coping mechanisms. this might also be having a deleterious impact on education. I suppose the idea is that grit is a virtue.

33:25David McWilliams: You know that idea of being able to dust yourself down, get up and deal with rejection. If our schooling system is being driven by the be kind mob, be kind to everybody, what you might be finding, and this is why the PISA might be now going in the wrong direction, is that be kind is actually not being kind. It is actually being deluded as the way in which people respond. So again, this is all speculative stuff, John. That's the Nick Lowe song, You Gotta Be Cruel to Be Kind. Sing it there for me, John. You gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure. Well, I think Nick Lowe, John, and I really like that rendition.

34:09David McWilliams: Yeah, thanks very much. I almost had my phone up to the screen to capture that moment of musical brilliance and then upload it onto our Insta account and onto TikTok, right? But I think Nick was talking about love. Oh, is that it? I missed it. I think Nick was talking about you can't just hang out and not break it off with somebody. You've got to actually say, you know what? It's not me. It's you. No, it's not you. It's me. Sorry. That's the way I was broken up. It's not me. It's never me.

34:43But these are important issues. But is it all bad news, actually, Mac?

34:48David McWilliams: I think if you're singing Nick Lowe, John, in the middle of the afternoon, I think it's not bad news. It's all good. No, but let's come back and just see one final explanation of all of this, which might not be as catastrophic or worrying as we might be suggesting.

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37:13So like we're talking about education in general and the PISA scores are on a downward trend, which is kind of worrying. But is it all bad news, though? All right. Well, I suppose this is all, dear listeners, just to recap,

37:28David McWilliams: this is all triggered by myself thinking about the Trinity course and then thinking about the students and then this idea of focusing in class and yada, yada, yada, right? Now, there is one bit, John, there's one caveat which should be worth considering. Maybe we're all getting more stupid and less intelligent, okay? Yeah. This is an interesting, right? Yeah. Many researchers have argued that there is a natural ceiling to intelligence in the way there's a natural ceiling to athletic achievement. Okay. So imagine this. Our physical kind of limits. Our physical ability. So for years and years in Ireland, the key alchemy for economic growth and for culture and societal elevation was that people who didn't have the chance of education in the 1930s and 40s, experienced huge increases in IQ in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s because of better nutrition, better food, they were healthier, better housing, and of course, free and better schooling.

38:34David McWilliams: So it's no surprise that when you take people and you give them opportunity that their parents and grandparents never had, they show extraordinary increases in IQ. but once we become rich maybe that upward momentum begins to plateau off particularly amongst the middle classes so for example there is a ceiling on how fast a human can run and what we've seen is that over the last 20 years records for running have been beaten but they're beaten very slowly and just marginally as well so Usain Bolt's record may be beaten but it's not going to be beaten by much, right? Yeah. So the big, big increases in athletic ability have plateaued out as nutrition has equalized, as training schedules have equalized, as the human body has achieved its capacity, as health regimes have basically, in effect, pushed everybody together, particularly at the high end and those supreme athletes.

39:42David McWilliams: Could it be the same in education that actually we're all getting to a level where we are saturated and our ability to grow is now limited. Now, that, I think, could also be happening. And so constantly increasing PISA scores from here might actually be impossible or certainly improbable. In effect, the bourgeoisie have hit a bourgeois ceiling, the middle classes. And the interesting thing then is that growth in IQ and subsequently then in education and then in economic achievement, as we stated at the top, there is a link, will only come from, in the places like Ireland, from poor people. Those poor kids who aren't going to school, those poor kids who are mitching, and they're not actively mitching in some cases, just their parents aren't sending them to school, there's no culture.

40:39They may well in the future, John, be the key.

40:44David McWilliams: It may well be that the only way in which we're going to achieve increased PISA scores and make major gains in the future can only come from not so much breaking the ceiling, but raising the floor and improving the chance of poorer kids. And that's why you need to expand education amongst poorer kids. But you need to expand education not per school, but per head. Money has to be spent per child rather than per area or per initiative. It has to be spent per child. But maybe that's the key, John. More equity and less equality. In fact, maybe the poor are the only way we're going to get rich in the future.

41:28That might be a nice way of ending, John, isn't it? Yes, it is. Actually, and there's one other thing I'd say, which is a bit of good news in all of this as well. But, you know, part of education is not only for the soul and developing your intellect, but also ultimately is to get a job at the end of the day. You're absolutely right. Which can be really daunting actually trying to get a job, you know, especially now with AI and the competition of others, because everyone has a degree now and everyone has a master's now and all the rest. But a friend of ours, Rocky O 'Carroll, has just published a booklet, guidance for graduates and post-graduates, called Building Your Professional Identity.

42:11And the whole idea, it's actually brilliant. He sent it to me today. It's actually brilliant. And it's just a really simple step-by-step guide on how to navigate and approach your career. How to network. How to talk to senior management. What questions to ask. All that kind of stuff. And it's just a really useful tool to help you plan out your future, the next steps, and how to actually sell yourself, I suppose. If you want it, it's free. And it is on his website, blueoceanedge.ie. Scroll to the bottom of the page. It's there. You can download it for free. It's really useful. Do you know what your last vocation was?

42:54David McWilliams: What's that? You would have made a great career guidance. teacher. Yes, I would. Can I just tell you what the career guidance, now that you know me as a person and my undiplomatic ways, John, I remember the career guidance teacher. Oh, man. They were awesome. I was decent at languages. And he said, everything could become a diplomat. And I burst out laughing. All right. Enough. We'll talk to you next time. Thank you.

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