I assume the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.
The US has pushed a shit ton of money into education. I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.
Would you rather live equally in poverty or live comfortably with others who are way more wealthy than you? Surprisingly people do seem to prefer the former, though I'd prefer the latter
In the US at least, progress in life expectancy and real wages has really stagnated in recent decades.
I don't see your point.
Those rules does not apply to the upper class and middle class workers have way more leeway regarding that than the lower class.
If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.
As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.
Not sure how this is a relevant example of a culture that don't value punctuality.
No, the comment you're replying to pretty clearly put the responsibility on the party that "rushed the land reform with no preparation".
And also accurately noted that a nation seizing capital and redistributing it to people who don't know how to use it is rather different from what had been the thread topic of personal skills / useful habits being purportedly unattainable by the lower classes without explicit instruction.
Government can’t really do much to help with that.
This is wrong.
The increase in administrator pay began well after the crises cited in OP.
You could cite spending on the sciences (and thus Silicon Valley), but the spending by the US did not accrue to administrators; and further, federal money primarily goes to grants and loans, but GP is citing a time over which there were relatively low increases in tuition.
Edit: Not at home, but even a cursory serious search will turn up reports like this one that indicate the lack of clarity in the popular uprising against money "[going] to administrators"
https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/who-to-believe-on-u...
First, where is your data?
Second, this discussion is clearly about post-secondary education ("the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.")