40% of American adults can't do basic arithmetic[0], which seems like a disaster to me. 88% are apparently incapable of doing things like reading a simple table or comparing two documents and identifying sentences that express the same ideas between them[1][2]. Over 50% apparently can't scroll through a list of information about books and identify the author of a specific book they're told to find.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-basic-mathe...

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...