There is no point. Krugman has some interesting blog posts recently saying economic output has gotten more and more capital based (assuming output is a product of capital and labour). He implies lots and lots of people are not going to have "meaningful" employment let alone employment. No one really knows how to solve this. And I doubt anyone including Eric Schmidt will openly say so. And just because its a politically sensitive thing to say, a pointless amount of money will be spent on education instead of building/reinforcing basic social safety nets.
Countries developed or not, with large populations of poor people are going to have a tough time ahead. Good time to move to Singapore or Scandinavia
We assumed that jobs would be automated from "menial" to "advanced". First would go lots of farm labor, then manual servants, then eventually factory workers, and by the time it reached educated, white-collar middle-class folks, the world would hit post-scarcity and we'd all become artists and writers and scientists.
Instead, it has ended up proceeding: farm labor, a minority of manual servants, some but not all factory workers, and finally most white-collar middle class jobs. The white-collar middle-class jobs were the brain jobs, were always based on the manipulation of data, and therefore turned out more amenable to encoding in software than almost anything else.
So the future is looking more and more like this: a sizable but weakly employed class of menial factory/physical laborers for the physical things too customized to automate, a smaller "middle class" to actually run specialized machinery (machinery whose operation requires knowledge of what it does rather than knowledge of "how to use Windows XP"), a small elite of upper-middle class innovators with hyper-advanced knowledge and hyper-competitive lifestyles (Hacker News, this is your future), and the capitalist class itself.
What replaces the standard-issue job for common people? Nothing. In its place, we have a mass of unemployed people where the old class of mid-skilled blue and white collar workers used to be. Any time a piece of work would require employing massive numbers of manual workers, it becomes amenable to specialized, programmatic automation. Unemployment will become a fact of life as common as we currently consider, say, not owning land.
Is there actual evidence that (public spending on) education leads to productivity? Because it doesn't seem that way[1], or at least it doesn't scale beyond some (relatively low) point.
[1] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha....
So the chart essentially says that adding education is more valuable in developed economies. Which is good to demonstrate empirically, but is hardly shocking.
The other major flaw in this study is that the timeframe is short. Again, consider the x-axis. Adding 8 years of schooling on average to even the least developed nation takes the first cohort out to ~15 years of age. By the time that first cohort hits age 47, the study period is over. This is measuring improvement without capturing the a full decade or more of the first cohort (and even less for subsequent cohorts). And obviously the first highly educated cohort wouldn't have had time to mentor a productive generation yet (or completely infiltrate the political infrastructure, etc.). Perhaps there's more useful data in the linked papers, but the data in TFA is unconvincing.
Finally, on the larger point of the correlation between education and productivity/wealth creation, there are ample empirical correlations. Obviously these do not imply causation, but the onus is certainly to show why this is not the case given that the correlation of education and wealth exists in roughly 100% of developed economies. If a country could become developed without spending on education, why has nobody done it?
The subject is a bit personal for me, and I agree that simply education isn't a 100% correct answer, but I'd wager that it must be part of the answer. The worrisome question is what is the whole complete answer?
Selling labor at a profit is becoming a problem, since it has those irritating built-in costs of food, shelter and health-care.
When automation starts destroying the value of that capital, I don't think it really makes sense to say that they are the ones paying for everything.
(To be clear, I do think that automation sufficient to build a factory factory leads to a situation where existing capital isn't worth very much. If anyone with a modest level of technical ability can bootstrap a manufacturing empire, people won't stand for a social arrangement that prioritizes the material wealth of the few.)
I don't think Eric Schmidt would be so happy realizing that he is right and that's the only sensible course of action but he is the one who has to pay for it all.