Mr. Jeb Bush, the brother of the incumbent President of the United States and a former governor of the state of Florida, has given Jamaica a bit of advice, for which many people will probably shrug and say that there is nothing new there.

This newspaper, at least, has made the point often enough. Good advice, nonetheless, is worth repeating, notwithstanding from where it comes.

So, delivering the annual Scotiabank lecture on Wednesday, Mr. Bush said that ongoing educational transformation was critical to achieving the sustained economic and social development that Jamaica so desperately needs, and wants. The logic is apparent.

It is a fact that Jamaica has been a hemispheric laggard in economic growth, with annual expansion of GDP averaging no more than two per cent in the past decade and a half. Such anaemic growth will hardly create the surpluses for reinvestment in job-creating enterprises, or for the social and physical infrastructure that make people’s lives better.

But a large issue has been the one mentioned by Mr. Bush – our failures in education: that nearly half of the children in grade four perform below their level; that up to a third of children leave primary schools without the expected mastery of literacy and numeracy at that age level; that there is a high drop-out rate at high schools; and that less than half the number of the children who take the math exam at the C.X.C. secondary certificate level pass.

Surely, the situation has been improving and there are substantially more people, primarily women, who have university degrees or some form of tertiary education. That is good, but not good enough when others are also improving – which forms the crux of Mr. Bush’s argument.

The essential point is that comparative advantage these days is not so much proximity to markets or cheap labour. Rather, it rests on education and more particularly, mastery of technology and the capacity to manipulate information and data.

China, for example, has become manufacturer to the world. Few can compete with the Chinese on labour costs. There arefew niches, too, where Beijing and others are not players.

Intellect, by and large, becomes the market leveller, and this is best exploited with education and training, as others are already doing. In this new paradigm, to be competitive even at the entry level demands a trained and skilled workforce.

We note this in the context of a recent poll finding where 69 per cent of Jamaicans felt that they were better than qualified for the jobs they held, and 45 per cent who said they barely survived on their incomes. It is a fact that there are not sufficient jobs being created in Jamaica. But another question is whether there is the skill base to attract investment in the potential areas of growth.