"The smartest thing we can do to create high-wage jobs and grow our economy is to keep our focus on education"
About this Quote
Education gets billed here as the one policy lever that can satisfy everyone: moral uplift, economic growth, and political pragmatism in a single sentence. Bill Richardson frames schooling not as a civic good but as the “smartest” strategy for “high-wage jobs,” a choice that reveals the intended audience: voters anxious about stagnant pay, employers demanding skills, and moderates who prefer investment rhetoric to redistribution fights. The line is engineered to sound non-ideological. Who can argue with “focus on education”?
The subtext is that wage growth is primarily a skills problem, not a power problem. By tying prosperity to education, Richardson shifts attention away from messier debates over unions, corporate concentration, trade policy, immigration, minimum wage laws, and tax structure. “Keep our focus” functions like a gentle scold to a distracted public: stop chasing quick fixes; bet on human capital. It’s a classic politician’s move to convert a complicated economic diagnosis into a virtuous personal and national habit.
Context matters. Richardson came up in the late-20th/early-21st century consensus that globalization and technology were remaking work, and that the United States needed a better-credentialed workforce to compete. In that era, education talk became a safe proxy for industrial strategy: invest in people rather than pick winners, build community colleges instead of confronting offshoring directly.
The rhetoric works because it flatters the listener’s rationality (“smartest”), promises dignity (“high-wage”), and avoids naming winners and losers. It’s aspirational, but also strategically incomplete: education can expand opportunity, yet it doesn’t automatically guarantee an economy willing to pay for it.
The subtext is that wage growth is primarily a skills problem, not a power problem. By tying prosperity to education, Richardson shifts attention away from messier debates over unions, corporate concentration, trade policy, immigration, minimum wage laws, and tax structure. “Keep our focus” functions like a gentle scold to a distracted public: stop chasing quick fixes; bet on human capital. It’s a classic politician’s move to convert a complicated economic diagnosis into a virtuous personal and national habit.
Context matters. Richardson came up in the late-20th/early-21st century consensus that globalization and technology were remaking work, and that the United States needed a better-credentialed workforce to compete. In that era, education talk became a safe proxy for industrial strategy: invest in people rather than pick winners, build community colleges instead of confronting offshoring directly.
The rhetoric works because it flatters the listener’s rationality (“smartest”), promises dignity (“high-wage”), and avoids naming winners and losers. It’s aspirational, but also strategically incomplete: education can expand opportunity, yet it doesn’t automatically guarantee an economy willing to pay for it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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