8 ms·

The Human Wealth of Nations

31 points by carlosgg 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago
Another article that misleadingly cites PISA scores without adjusting for demographics: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/how-poverty-affected-us-pisa-s.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/how-p..., http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou.... The U.S. has problems, but the problems are not schools, teachers, or funding. The problem is Chicago, Philly, L.A., Detroit, etc. Places that have levels of crime and social dysfunction that simply do not exist at that scale in other OECD countries. I live in Wilmington, DE. A city of 71,000 people. Last year, it had 26 murders. London, a city of 8 million people, had 99. That's a 30x higher murder rate (and 2x higher than Bogota, Colombia!).[1] These are mostly 20-somethings killed in gang wars. There's a pipeline from the schools here straight into these gangs. I'm not surprised that test scores aren't the first thing on the minds of kids here. Also, I'll note that the U.S. has one of the highest fertility rates in the OECD, just behind Mexico and Turkey. I don't think its unreasonable to assume that this has an impact on the demographic distribution of children in schools. That is to say, I'm willing to bet that children in schools in other OECD countries were more likely to be planned and born to parents who intended to take care and properly educate them than children in American schools. [1] Four major U.S. cities (five if you count Puerto Rico as part of the U.S.) make the list of the 50 most murderous cities in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate. The only countries with cities on that list that aren't in Latin America are Jamaica, South Africa, and Iraq.
- bluedino 13y ago
  Probably close to 90% of the murders on that chart are related to the drug trade. Notice how they are mostly in Central/South America.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Sure, and Wilmington is on I-95, a major drug trafficking corridor. Kids get caught up in gangs, and the gangs are minor or major players in that drug trade, and the gangs are a major presence in the schools. I'd bet that ending the drug war and destroying the drug trade would have a much larger impact on test scores in the U.S. than even drastic improvements in school funding or teacher quality.
bilbo0s 13y ago
I have listened to a great deal of hand wringing since the PISA reports dropped and I think it is easy to concentrate on the negative and overlook the positive news from these results. Three points I think we should keep in mind. One, the results were VERY uneven among the states. More importantly, if you look at the Northeast, (Massachusetts, NY, NJ etc), and the western Midwest, (Minnesota, Wisconsin), the scores were pretty competitive relative the top performing nations actually. For instance, in Massachusetts, even if you only counted the scores of black students, the Math and Science average was higher than Finland, which is continuously touted as a model of educational efficiency! Two, teens in Mississippi, Texas, California and Washington are pretty much the same as teens in Minnesota, New Jersey and Massachusetts. This is good news, as it indicates that there are models out there that can be employed to better the performance of students in other areas of the country. Lastly, something about the US creates an openness in its citizens that drives a good deal of activity beneficial to society. The article references, for instance, "... America's entrepreneurial energies, its openness to innovation and creative destruction ...". This "Creativity" has some value, which I would admittedly be challenged to quantify. It is the sort of thing tests will overlook. Which is curious, because in the future I think it will be one of the most important skills, (or, 'traits' perhaps), of the high value worker. My last point had only a tangential relevance to the PISA, I just thought it was an important point to make. That aside, I think the first two points are clearly cause for a cautious optimism here.
- smcl 13y ago
  "even if you only counted the scores of black students" This is the sort of thing I can never really swallow when reading stuff about education rankings in the states. There's a lot of what seems to be really casual\accidental racism along the lines of the quoted text above as well as things like "controlling for race" and excuses pinning the US's low scores on being "more multicultural". Perhaps this is not the intent but it's sort of painful to read.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's not "casual racism." It's simply a recognition of the fact that blacks in the U.S. face unique challenges that are not just economic, but social. Those challenges, while important, have effects that can obscure whatever it is that you're actually trying to study. If you're trying to evaluate school quality, it makes no sense not to control for race and socioeconomics. It wasn't the schools that enslaved blacks, segregated them into ghettos, then subjected them to disparate treatment in a violent drug war. And schools won't be the solution to those things either. This isn't an "excuse" it's a recognition of reality. Education by itself cannot be America's salvation for its past sins. Failing to control for race and sociology-economics leads you to the wrong conclusions. If you look at the test scores of students in Chicago, ignoring race, you might be tempted to conclude that Chicago has a problem with its schools. Maybe they need more funding or better teachers. That's the wrong conclusion. The reality is that 90% of kids in Chicago public schools are black or hispanic, and almost 90% are low-income. The schools are in areas of strong gang presence, and gang activity has infiltrated every one of the schools. The gangs have replaced parents and teachers as authority figures and the bedrock of social order has crumbled. Schools, no matter how well funded, and teachers, no matter how qualified, aren't going to fix those root causes. My wife taught in a school on Indian land in eastern Washington. She had an awful experience, because she realized that these kids didn't need teachers with degrees from good schools, but fathers who weren't alcoholics, or indeed fathers in the first place. Schools and education cannot replace these things.
danielharan 13y ago
"Economies grow by exploiting scarce resources, people most of all." No, they don't. Economies grow because of cheap inputs. Every economic revolution is the result of something becoming ridiculously cheap; the last one was oil, the current one is computation.
- Edmond 13y ago
  In the case of the US you could throw in centuries of free slave labor.
  - VLM 13y ago
    That would imply that immediately before the civil war the south was a boomtown and the slaveless north was a rustbelt.
    - DoctorZeus 13y ago
      Not necessarily. Slavery might have indirectly assisted the north's industrialization in at least a couple ways. (1) Accumulation of financial capital in the hands of an investment class (2) Cheap cotton gave northern factories a competitive advantage.
      - VLM 13y ago
        That is a good point although there should also be a way to compare and contrast with other countries that didn't have slavery as an "advantage". Then you could try to back-apply the model to other countries, like if the English outright owned the Irish then economic growth would have increased ... or would it have?
        DoctorZeus 13y ago
        Good question. It would take some serious time studying history to have even a decent guess.
- DoctorZeus 13y ago
ajuc 13y ago
The results (png): http://i.imgur.com/mZ8Tj0kh.png http://i.imgur.com/mZ8Tj0kh.png Report (pdf): http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overv...
michaelochurch 13y ago
Here's a terrifying thought (which I believe to be correct). I don't think US schools are that bad on fundamentals. They're probably quite good on average. Of course, a large percentage of what makes a school good or bad is the other students, not the teachers or material. I'll get to that... These indifferent, underachieving students (disproportionately, but not entirely, in poor areas) aren't stupid or bad people. I think they're just rational. They see what society has to offer them even if they do succeed and conclude that it's not worth the effort for them. If middle-class, college-educated people are applying for jobs in fast food, then what should a low-income student, who might be able to scrape together enough scholarships to get through undergrad with merely moderately crippling debt, expect? They see people far ahead of them in the socioeconomic queue ending up miserable and disappointed, and conclude that there's no chance of success for them. Most of them are probably right. This country has a deep-seated morale problem, expressed at the top through corruption and dishonesty and nepotism, and at the bottom through indifference and underperformance-- which is most measurable and upsetting in the schools because that's before society has formally given up on people. It stems from fundamentals that will take a long time to fix.
- bananacurve 13y ago
  > expressed at the top through corruption and dishonesty and nepotism So how do you explain Obama becoming President or the large number of immigrants who are wildly successful?
  - johnohara 13y ago
    I take it you're not from Illinois.
    - bananacurve 13y ago
      Maybe you could some arguments that Obama became President through dishonesty, but corruption and nepotism, nonsense.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Anecdotes in a macro level discussion?
bicknergseng 13y ago
"""Some 7% of U.S. students reached the top two scientific performance levels, compared with 17% in Finland and an amazing 27% in Shanghai.""" I'm not normally a stickler for this kind of statistical bullshit, but this is particularly bad. They compared a country of 300mil with a country of 5mil with a city of 14mil. I think the percentages are interesting, but this is ACTUALLY comparing apples and oranges. I'd be interested to see how Boston (or whatever US city with the highest "scientific performance level") does in that mix though.
- VLM 13y ago
  It would be interesting to discuss the target percentage. Yes I'm sure 100% would be nice in an abstract sense, but there are a lot of things that would be nice. I can assure you that my favorite waitress having a bachelors degree in early childhood education doesn't make my food arrive at the table any quicker, or her recitation of scripts sound any better. Or my favorite coffee barista who has some liberal arts degree or another doesn't make coffee any better than the illegal who can't read or write. Perhaps if all lunchroom ladies were competent FPGA programmers then they would shovel canned peaches onto trays better, or something. So I'm not seeing how the hotel desk clerk in Shanghai having memorized the periodic table is going to improve anything in any way.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    You're rather nastily assuming that people who currently hold low-level jobs should hold those jobs, for their entire careers, and that therefore, any education unnecessary for their menial jobs is unnecessary for them as human beings. That's one small step for illogic, one giant leap for inhumanity to other people.
    - VLM 13y ago
      One fundamental problem is massive underemployment. Another is a failing educational system in bubble mode means no one on the planet pays more while getting less. Another problem (related to #2) is the monetary costs of the failing educational system are financially crippling our youth and the guaranteed loans that will never be paid back will financially cripple everyone else. So your solution is individuals who are headed for a cliff, should step on the gas and to fling over it faster. After all, if it doesn't work, keep trying it over and over until it does. And I'm the inhumane one LOL. I will say if a system is inevitably crashing, then its best to accelerate the process so as to reach the recovery quicker. The sooner we have a big crash, the sooner we can pick up the pieces and start living again. So in that way you are correct, the best thing kids can do "for everyone" is financially immolate themselves, because in the long run that'll bring on the crash (and hopefully, recovery) quicker. If that is your analysis then by its conditions, I admit you are correct, under those specific conditions, although I'd hate to be one of the individuals being crushed for the betterment of everyone else.
KStout 13y ago
I love the smell of a Rupert Murdoch propaganda piece in the morning.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
VLM 13y ago
"Since 1998, the Program for International Student Assessment, or Pisa, has ranked 15-year-old kids around the world" Every American 15 year old kid? Probably darn close. Every Vietnamese 15 year old kid? LOL. For a heavily class based country, the USA has quite a blind spot to how other countries organize more heavily by class starting at a rather young age.
carlosgg 13y ago
Weird that India did not participate.

31 points by carlosgg 13y ago

Another article that misleadingly cites PISA scores without adjusting for demographics: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/how-poverty-affected-us-pisa-s.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/how-p..., http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou.... The U.S. has problems, but the problems are not schools, teachers, or funding. The problem is Chicago, Philly, L.A., Detroit, etc. Places that have levels of crime and social dysfunction that simply do not exist at that scale in other OECD countries. I live in Wilmington, DE. A city of 71,000 people. Last year, it had 26 murders. London, a city of 8 million people, had 99. That's a 30x higher murder rate (and 2x higher than Bogota, Colombia!).[1] These are mostly 20-somethings killed in gang wars. There's a pipeline from the schools here straight into these gangs. I'm not surprised that test scores aren't the first thing on the minds of kids here. Also, I'll note that the U.S. has one of the highest fertility rates in the OECD, just behind Mexico and Turkey. I don't think its unreasonable to assume that this has an impact on the demographic distribution of children in schools. That is to say, I'm willing to bet that children in schools in other OECD countries were more likely to be planned and born to parents who intended to take care and properly educate them than children in American schools. [1] Four major U.S. cities (five if you count Puerto Rico as part of the U.S.) make the list of the 50 most murderous cities in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate. The only countries with cities on that list that aren't in Latin America are Jamaica, South Africa, and Iraq.

bluedino 13y ago
Probably close to 90% of the murders on that chart are related to the drug trade. Notice how they are mostly in Central/South America.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Sure, and Wilmington is on I-95, a major drug trafficking corridor. Kids get caught up in gangs, and the gangs are minor or major players in that drug trade, and the gangs are a major presence in the schools. I'd bet that ending the drug war and destroying the drug trade would have a much larger impact on test scores in the U.S. than even drastic improvements in school funding or teacher quality.

bilbo0s 13y ago

I have listened to a great deal of hand wringing since the PISA reports dropped and I think it is easy to concentrate on the negative and overlook the positive news from these results. Three points I think we should keep in mind. One, the results were VERY uneven among the states. More importantly, if you look at the Northeast, (Massachusetts, NY, NJ etc), and the western Midwest, (Minnesota, Wisconsin), the scores were pretty competitive relative the top performing nations actually. For instance, in Massachusetts, even if you only counted the scores of black students, the Math and Science average was higher than Finland, which is continuously touted as a model of educational efficiency! Two, teens in Mississippi, Texas, California and Washington are pretty much the same as teens in Minnesota, New Jersey and Massachusetts. This is good news, as it indicates that there are models out there that can be employed to better the performance of students in other areas of the country. Lastly, something about the US creates an openness in its citizens that drives a good deal of activity beneficial to society. The article references, for instance, "... America's entrepreneurial energies, its openness to innovation and creative destruction ...". This "Creativity" has some value, which I would admittedly be challenged to quantify. It is the sort of thing tests will overlook. Which is curious, because in the future I think it will be one of the most important skills, (or, 'traits' perhaps), of the high value worker. My last point had only a tangential relevance to the PISA, I just thought it was an important point to make. That aside, I think the first two points are clearly cause for a cautious optimism here.

smcl 13y ago
"even if you only counted the scores of black students" This is the sort of thing I can never really swallow when reading stuff about education rankings in the states. There's a lot of what seems to be really casual\accidental racism along the lines of the quoted text above as well as things like "controlling for race" and excuses pinning the US's low scores on being "more multicultural". Perhaps this is not the intent but it's sort of painful to read.
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's not "casual racism." It's simply a recognition of the fact that blacks in the U.S. face unique challenges that are not just economic, but social. Those challenges, while important, have effects that can obscure whatever it is that you're actually trying to study. If you're trying to evaluate school quality, it makes no sense not to control for race and socioeconomics. It wasn't the schools that enslaved blacks, segregated them into ghettos, then subjected them to disparate treatment in a violent drug war. And schools won't be the solution to those things either. This isn't an "excuse" it's a recognition of reality. Education by itself cannot be America's salvation for its past sins. Failing to control for race and sociology-economics leads you to the wrong conclusions. If you look at the test scores of students in Chicago, ignoring race, you might be tempted to conclude that Chicago has a problem with its schools. Maybe they need more funding or better teachers. That's the wrong conclusion. The reality is that 90% of kids in Chicago public schools are black or hispanic, and almost 90% are low-income. The schools are in areas of strong gang presence, and gang activity has infiltrated every one of the schools. The gangs have replaced parents and teachers as authority figures and the bedrock of social order has crumbled. Schools, no matter how well funded, and teachers, no matter how qualified, aren't going to fix those root causes. My wife taught in a school on Indian land in eastern Washington. She had an awful experience, because she realized that these kids didn't need teachers with degrees from good schools, but fathers who weren't alcoholics, or indeed fathers in the first place. Schools and education cannot replace these things.

danielharan 13y ago

"Economies grow by exploiting scarce resources, people most of all." No, they don't. Economies grow because of cheap inputs. Every economic revolution is the result of something becoming ridiculously cheap; the last one was oil, the current one is computation.

Edmond 13y ago
In the case of the US you could throw in centuries of free slave labor.
- VLM 13y ago
  That would imply that immediately before the civil war the south was a boomtown and the slaveless north was a rustbelt.
  - DoctorZeus 13y ago
    Not necessarily. Slavery might have indirectly assisted the north's industrialization in at least a couple ways. (1) Accumulation of financial capital in the hands of an investment class (2) Cheap cotton gave northern factories a competitive advantage.
    - VLM 13y ago
      That is a good point although there should also be a way to compare and contrast with other countries that didn't have slavery as an "advantage". Then you could try to back-apply the model to other countries, like if the English outright owned the Irish then economic growth would have increased ... or would it have?
      - DoctorZeus 13y ago
        Good question. It would take some serious time studying history to have even a decent guess.
DoctorZeus 13y ago

ajuc 13y ago

The results (png): http://i.imgur.com/mZ8Tj0kh.png http://i.imgur.com/mZ8Tj0kh.png Report (pdf): http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overv...

michaelochurch 13y ago

Here's a terrifying thought (which I believe to be correct). I don't think US schools are that bad on fundamentals. They're probably quite good on average. Of course, a large percentage of what makes a school good or bad is the other students, not the teachers or material. I'll get to that... These indifferent, underachieving students (disproportionately, but not entirely, in poor areas) aren't stupid or bad people. I think they're just rational. They see what society has to offer them even if they do succeed and conclude that it's not worth the effort for them. If middle-class, college-educated people are applying for jobs in fast food, then what should a low-income student, who might be able to scrape together enough scholarships to get through undergrad with merely moderately crippling debt, expect? They see people far ahead of them in the socioeconomic queue ending up miserable and disappointed, and conclude that there's no chance of success for them. Most of them are probably right. This country has a deep-seated morale problem, expressed at the top through corruption and dishonesty and nepotism, and at the bottom through indifference and underperformance-- which is most measurable and upsetting in the schools because that's before society has formally given up on people. It stems from fundamentals that will take a long time to fix.

bananacurve 13y ago
> expressed at the top through corruption and dishonesty and nepotism So how do you explain Obama becoming President or the large number of immigrants who are wildly successful?
- johnohara 13y ago
  I take it you're not from Illinois.
  - bananacurve 13y ago
    Maybe you could some arguments that Obama became President through dishonesty, but corruption and nepotism, nonsense.
- VLM 13y ago
  Anecdotes in a macro level discussion?

bicknergseng 13y ago

"""Some 7% of U.S. students reached the top two scientific performance levels, compared with 17% in Finland and an amazing 27% in Shanghai.""" I'm not normally a stickler for this kind of statistical bullshit, but this is particularly bad. They compared a country of 300mil with a country of 5mil with a city of 14mil. I think the percentages are interesting, but this is ACTUALLY comparing apples and oranges. I'd be interested to see how Boston (or whatever US city with the highest "scientific performance level") does in that mix though.

VLM 13y ago
It would be interesting to discuss the target percentage. Yes I'm sure 100% would be nice in an abstract sense, but there are a lot of things that would be nice. I can assure you that my favorite waitress having a bachelors degree in early childhood education doesn't make my food arrive at the table any quicker, or her recitation of scripts sound any better. Or my favorite coffee barista who has some liberal arts degree or another doesn't make coffee any better than the illegal who can't read or write. Perhaps if all lunchroom ladies were competent FPGA programmers then they would shovel canned peaches onto trays better, or something. So I'm not seeing how the hotel desk clerk in Shanghai having memorized the periodic table is going to improve anything in any way.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  You're rather nastily assuming that people who currently hold low-level jobs should hold those jobs, for their entire careers, and that therefore, any education unnecessary for their menial jobs is unnecessary for them as human beings. That's one small step for illogic, one giant leap for inhumanity to other people.
  - VLM 13y ago
    One fundamental problem is massive underemployment. Another is a failing educational system in bubble mode means no one on the planet pays more while getting less. Another problem (related to #2) is the monetary costs of the failing educational system are financially crippling our youth and the guaranteed loans that will never be paid back will financially cripple everyone else. So your solution is individuals who are headed for a cliff, should step on the gas and to fling over it faster. After all, if it doesn't work, keep trying it over and over until it does. And I'm the inhumane one LOL. I will say if a system is inevitably crashing, then its best to accelerate the process so as to reach the recovery quicker. The sooner we have a big crash, the sooner we can pick up the pieces and start living again. So in that way you are correct, the best thing kids can do "for everyone" is financially immolate themselves, because in the long run that'll bring on the crash (and hopefully, recovery) quicker. If that is your analysis then by its conditions, I admit you are correct, under those specific conditions, although I'd hate to be one of the individuals being crushed for the betterment of everyone else.

KStout 13y ago

I love the smell of a Rupert Murdoch propaganda piece in the morning.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

VLM 13y ago

"Since 1998, the Program for International Student Assessment, or Pisa, has ranked 15-year-old kids around the world" Every American 15 year old kid? Probably darn close. Every Vietnamese 15 year old kid? LOL. For a heavily class based country, the USA has quite a blind spot to how other countries organize more heavily by class starting at a rather young age.

carlosgg 13y ago

Weird that India did not participate.