You must ask yourself why the government is able to retain word-class managers and jurists despite stiff competition from the private sector. James Comey was an executive at the world's largest hedge fund, why did he quit for a government job where he was making 100x less? Any federal judge could've made a fortune in corporate law, why didn't they choose to? Because there is a sense of prestige and national duty about their posts. Creating a similar status for technologists in government would go a long way towards recruiting and retaining top talent.
If we want to convince people that being a government engineer is worthwhile and respected, starting with students seems reasonable.
Where does the author get the idea that sustainable growth is no longer possible? Even setting aside how unfair it is to tell the global poor they've had enough growth when we've had 10x more, the claim isn't even true for developed countries. Rich countries are comfortably able to grow at rates higher than 1% a year (which, thinking long-term, is 2.7x in 100 years) and there is no reason to suspect that decarbonization will put a serious dent in that. The author seems to believe that growth is predicated solely on physical inputs, when in reality institutions and human capital are the real drivers.
You can check out our evaluation library (https://github.com/wellecks/lm-evaluation-harness) for the exact benchmark implementations we used, including prompting.
In particular, the prompt that starts at line 27 in this file (https://github.com/wellecks/lm-evaluation-harness/blob/maste...) is quite good for high school/olympiad problems. We took this prompt from Google's Minerva paper.