Here is the download link: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa-2015-results-volume-i_9789264266490-en
First Impressions
(1) China B-S-J-G (Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong) has a PISA-equivalent national IQ of 102. This is actually worse than the IQ=103 leaked 2009 results based on 12 provinces, which I posted about a few years ago. Even more curiously, Beijing, Shanghai, and Jiangsu all constitute three of the top five Chinese provinces based on other IQ tests (original), with Guangdong in 7th place; the provinces China uses for PISA are still evidently selected for their likelihood of doing very well. Furthermore, coverage was an unimpressive 64% of the population.
UPDATE: A better source cited by commenter Bobbi based on Raven tests shows Guangdong getting 2 IQ points less than the Chinese average, so this would partially cancel out the inclusion of three otherwise cognitive elite provinces.
(2) Vietnam gets a national IQ of 100, although at 49% based on even smaller coverage than China’s. This, too, was a decline from PISA 2012, when they got around 102. Korea also dropped substantially from 106 in 2012 to 103 this round. All in all – a bad beat for “Team East Asia.”
(3) Russia improved significantly, which went from 96 in 2009 to 97 in 2012 and 99 this year – and this is with 95% coverage. This is likely because the generation that grew up in the 1990s was afflicted by the consequences of the Soviet collapse and shock therapy, which included a near halving of meat consumption and an alcoholism epidemic (education spending also fell, but performance on these tests seems to be pretty inelastic to this factor). But the 2015 PISA cohort was born around 2000, when living standards began to recover along with nutritional diversity and all kinds of other biodemographic indicators. Note that I did expect this to happen: “… in the next decade I expect the Flynn Effect to kick off in Russia’s favor, raising its average IQ levels to their theoretical peak of 100 by the 2020’s.”
(4) Poland does not repeat its anomalously good IQ=103 results from 2012, converging down to a still respectable 101.
(5) The US modestly improves to 98.
(6) A major improvement for Argentina, which raised its IQ to 95 by an amazing 10 IQ points. This improvement is so big that questions have to be asked as to how exactly they managed it. It wasn’t because they dropped their commendable habit, first noticed by Steve Sailer, of rounding up their dimmest 15 year olds to take the PISA tests (unlike Mexico, or Vietnam); to the contrary, they continued going well beyond the call of duty, achieving 104% coverage – the highest of any country.
UPDATE: From Sailer’s thread, Gaucho de la Pampa comments:
1) Argentina no longer means Argentina, it’s just the city of Buenos Aires (CABA – Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires) . The results for the rest of the country were invalidated because of cheating:
http://www.clarin.com/sociedad/Pruebas-PISA-Argentina-principal-educativa_0_1700229967.html
2) It’s not about rounding up missing schoolchildren, if that many went missing from taking the test the results would be annulled as they were in Argentina, rather in some countries vast numbers of 15 year olds don’t attend school and PISA is a test designed for those attending school.
3) The glass half full interpretation is that as Mexico’s share of 15 year olds that attend school has increased its scores have remained roughly static (though obviously crappy)
LOL, well that explains everything. Good job Argentina!
(7) At the very bottom of the list, the Dominican Republic has a PISA-equivalent IQ of 76, which is roughly equivalent to that of India (which, incidentally, dropped out of PISA 2015, possibly on account of doing so badly in the last assessment). Lynn estimates it at 82. According to an analysis by Jason Malloy, Cuba gets an average of 90 on Raven’s tests, and 105-109 (!) from a couple of UNESCO comparative regional tests. So it’s probably safe to say that Cuba is cognitively better off than the Dominican Republic, which makes its decline from double its income level in the 1950s to 2/3 of it today all the more attributable to central planning.
South Korea also disappoints.
I wonder why Isreal has always been below average… is there any explanation ?
I think Guangdong province is lagging behind.
There was an IQ test of 8-10 years old kids back in 2005. Guangdong’s average was several points lower than national average.
http://www.doc88.com/p-5803924483878.html
The standard explanation, so far as I’m aware, is taht Israeli Jews are duller than American/foreign Jews.
Off the top of my head, if US Ashkenazi Jews are around 110-115, Israeli Ashkenazi are 103, Israeli Sephardis are 95, and the Druze and Palestinians are of course much lower still.
This explains why Israeli Jews are far more conservative and nationalist than American Jews, and why Israel nonetheless – due to the Ashkenazi Jew (IQ=103) smart fraction – manages to have a pretty successful economy and society with the largest number of tech startups per capita.
It seems like the scale has been compressed. In 2012 there were 11 (6) scores over 540 (550) across the three categories (excluding Shanghai), while in 2015 there are 5 (2). Plus, I think some of the movement is essentially random; I doubt that Korea or Hong Kong have actually become stupider.
Very interesting source, thanks.
Ravens test, Guangdong gets 101.1 relative to 103.4 average – much better than the figures based on online test results that I cited.
Hi, Anatoly
I just found something interesting about China’s data in the report.
……………….Read, Math, Science
Large city: 570, 596, 588
City: 523, 556, 542
Town: 496, 536, 520
Small town:449, 489, 476
Village: 435, 486, 465
Such huge differences inside China!
It’s much more than a question of IQ.
Anatoly, what do you think the score would be if all of China were sampled?
Kindly indicate the source (or the lack of , lol ) of your data?
Guangdong has a huge arse population which is enough to cancel out the advantage that Jiangsu brings to the table.
Beijing and Shanghai usually score average.
So this B-S-J-G combi seems a fair representation of China’s current situation, assuming population weight and sample selection method of each don’t matter.
Being 2 biggest cities in China Beijing and Shanghai, contrary to conventional wisdom ( Panda has said it for YEARS!), have been consistently ranked average (sometimes below average) in China’s high stake Gaokao exams, falling well behind many big central and eastern Chinese poor provinces regardless real avg IQ levels of any of them. See, these is no 1:1 relationship between PISA and IQ, particularly dealing with China, where the stake so extremely high for all-matter Gaokao (for uni admission) and ZhongKao(for high school admission) that resource-poor province kids must weigh carefully where they put their energies in, given PISA has no-stake at all.
This explains why even though Beijing and Shanghai are the elite provinces in China, both economically and perhaps IQ-wise , they are NOT elite high-flyer provinces in China per se, but quite opposite. To suggest because they are elite provinces therefore must be elite in test scores is misleading (e.g. Are NYC and Washingtom D.C. the top high flyers in the US high school system?)
Panda’s first impression is that China’s results are humiliating, particularly in comparisum to the regional peers such as Singapore , HK, Taiwan.
Second thought, this B-S-J-G combi doesn’t represent China well, really. The whole China random selection could be more fair and better, since population and test-score heavy weight Han provinces could be more than enough to cancel out the burden of far Western and far Southern provinces. Wait several days , let’s see if there will be a leak from Chinese sources on the detail bearkout scores. last not the least, no matter what, Panda just can not believe that No 10 maths score at this stage…un—-f*&îng—believable!! Something is VERY wrong there… Panda must see the detail breakup and sample selection footnotes, if any, to make further comments on it.
As for China, I think the disappointment is only relative. It is ranked 6th in math (4th if you ignore Hong Kong and Macao), 10th (8th) in science and mid-20 in reading. The reading dip is also there for Taiwan. It finished above Korea for both math and science.
To add to my previous comment, here are the scores of the 3rd, 5th and 10th highest ranked country in 2012 and 2015 in each subject (minus Shanghai 2012 and China 2015) and the OECD average:
math 2012: 560 538 521 494 2015: 544 532 512 490
science 2012: 547 541 525 501 2015: 534 531 516 493
reading 2012: 538 524 516 496 2015: 527 521 509 493
So, the newer numbers are lower across the board, by more than the difference in averages. Furthermore, the decline is biggest at the top.
Unless you believe it represents an actual decline in intelligence in the relevant countries, the mean 500 = 100, st. dev. 100 = 15 method of converting to I.Q. might not be applicable; at least it would not be a direct comparison to 2012.
Actually this is not surprising at all. Even in the West, urban residents consistently score higher than rural ones (Ron Unz wrote a lot about that a few years ago).
But in China getting an urban registration under the hukou system is an intelligence test by itself! So the differences should be even bigger.
(This is also why Moscow ~2/3 S.D. above the rest of Russia. You needed to be particularly bright or cunning to get a Moscow propiska).
Probably lower by 1-2 IQ points, i.e. at instead of above the OECD average. Still very impressive of course.
I’m aware of this discrepancy but I have also heard arguments that there might be a big element of motivation here – namely, it being easier or even much easier for residents of the two big metropolises to get into their local elite universities.
Maybe the S.Koreans at least get more free time than before, even being such good students some people online used to complain they study too many hours … in cram schools and all that, they still did better than the country I actually reside lol (Mexico)
Estonians seem like an impressive bunch of people, to be honest. Someone on Steve Sailer’s article commented that the national science average for ethnic Estonians in Estonia is 544, and for math it is 526. It’s probably the richest and most advanced former communist country.
It used to be home to Baltic Germans as well, probably the most intelligent and accomplished German subgroup, mostly descended from successful German merchants. If Estonia was still very Estonian (instead of having a huge Russian population), and retained its Baltic German community then the country would be one of the most advanced in the world.
Guangdong province has large number of migrant workers ( 30-40% of the population). Big portion of that comes from the “lower IQ” provinces of China. Similarly Beijing has significant number of migrants from the lower IQ part of the country. Shanghai also has large number of migrants but they usually are from the neighboring “higher IQ” provinces. That should explain their depressed scores.
http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/world/148304d1429210862-china-iq-map-provinces-8-10-qq-20150417024936.jpg
By GDP PPP per capita, it’s not richer than the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Lithuania.
I doubt it. Finland is also an outlier in Europe on PISA and while a very nice place its pretty far from most advanced in the world. It has also produced considerably fewer eminent figures (or Great People as the Civilization games would call them) per capita than most of “core Europe,” even though literacy there was very high by the 19th century and it avoided turning Red in the 20th.
Well, certainly Estonian and Latvian Germans (the real Balts) have produced as many eminent figures as any similarly small geographical-linguistic group.
How about doing the calculations just for math. I am dubious that reading and science is not contaminated by culture.
Cuba cheats on its test results:
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/06/25/human-development/
(Ctr-f 99.9)
Partially agreed, however, the exam is the same for everyone in a region such as BJ or SH(namely if it’s equally easy/hard for everyone) that doesn’t have to be translated into less motivation for all per se, since there’ve still been a high stake fierce competition for the limited better unis and fav departments 1, 2 3, etc.
Panda’s point however, is that due to other major factors such as more people competing for less places, majority of disadvantaged major inland poorer Han provinces, contrary to the conventional wisdom, studied much harder and hence have almost always scored higher than BJ and SH (that doesn’t mean they have higher IQ though) in Gaokao/Zhongkao, and likely in any major exams such as PISA assuming the same level of motivation involved.
It is highly questionable to suggest that inland provinces of China have “lower IQ”. It should be interpretated that an average migrant worker, by definition, is most likely from the left side of the IQ bell curve of that province, which has barely anything to do with the average IQ of the said province.
Unlike the West where higher IQ people naturally tend to flock to major cities since industrialisation and during peace time after the war(some would argue otherwise now in many parts of post-Industrial sociesties though), China still have strict “Hukou”system which has been in place since 1950s. It means that you and your family have been freezed to live in the area right after the Chinese Civil War (ironically, where you run in an allout nationawide bloody civil war as a regular civilan? yes, from cities to remote countryside like most people in China did!) , regardless you’re high IQ or not.
One last thing: the “coverage” is the proportion of those represented in the test sample relative to the total population of 15-year-olds. For example, in China (B-S-J-G) there are 2.1 million people of the right age, of which 1.5 million are in school. For all the countries tested, the coverage of the enrolled population was over 90%.
See page 290: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/9816061e.pdf?expires=1481052723&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=8E0EDEE28A0A70F727D4AA33B0B549C0
My understanding is that the 2015 PISA test was mainly computer-based, whereas in earlier years it was to be mainly paper-based. This could partly explain the lower result for the Chinese provinces, although this is all very speculative. What we do know is that students in Shanghai who did the 2012 PISA test as a computer-based assessment scored significantly worse than those who didn’t (50 points lower on math!). In many Western countries, it was the reverse.
Results from 2012 computer-based assessment: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_7_1.asp
Insofar as intelligence is genetic, within a reasonable number of years we should know the alleles that can be linked to intelligence and the genes that can be linked to genius. The Chinese are working on this right now.
This is my prediction regarding the eventual results: there will be no genetic differentiation in intelligence or “genius” among Han that is truly regional, but there will be genetic variation in at least one that can be linked to economic status or occupation. Further, despite their relative achievement difference now, Japanese/Korean-Chinese differences in this regard will not be more significant than Chinese regional variation.
Within Europe, save perhaps in groups like Ashkenazi and Roma with their specific population histories and selective pressures, the situation will be the same. On average the difference between the “core” such as Germans and “periphery” such as Latvians or Estonians or Irish will turn out insignificant, and all the difference can be explained through historical or cultural factors.
Clear intercontinental differences on the other hand will be found.
Anyone here know why the USA modestly improved ? To be very blunt, this does not make sense, every year the USA gets ever more non white and the bulk of the non white population change is not Japanese immigrants.
hahaha, lets wait for leaks then. I am also curious.
why would paper vs computer create any kind of a difference. that is just bizarre to me.
Can you convert PISA score to IQ for Slovenia?
When you say that the halving of meat consumption caused a testing crisis, by ‘meat’ do you mean just the flesh of mammals or foods like fish and other seafood as well? I’m just curious because fish is often called ‘brain food.’
All “high quality food” consumption took a dive during the 1990s.
Here is another graph: http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/russian-food-consumption-historical.gif
Meat is dark blue; fish are pink; as you can see, both only recovered in the late 2000s.
Guangdong province: 4000+ students took part in PISA
http://www.wtoutiao.com/a/2392711.html
China-BSJG: 9841 students (PISA database)
I made some estimates:
Average IQs of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu are about 0.3~0.6 SD higher than national average IQ.
Guangdong’s average IQ is about 0.2 SD lower than national average.
So if PISA result is strongly correlated to IQ, China’s national average PISA score should be 0.2~0.3 SD lower than BSJG’s average.
Computer ownership is much lower in China than in developed countries. It helps being used to a computer.
Thank you. I know there are people who swear by vegan (i.e. no animal products at all) diets, but for the majority of people, meat and other animals products (fish, dairy, eggs, etc.) are the most efficient way to get nutrients like protein and iron. I also suspect that while veganism is a luxury in developed countries, in poorer countries it’s sort of a default diet.
I like your explanations (especially for Russia whose interesting improvement in 2012 and 2015 I had noticed too). What do you make of e.g. this:
Greece 461 – 466 – 464 – 473 – 466 – 459
Portugal 461 – 471 – 471 – 490 – 488 – 497
or this:
Iceland 506 – 501 – 494 – 501 – 485 – 481
or:
Slovakia n/a – 487 – 482 – 488 – 472 – 463
Czechia 500 – 509 – 502 – 490 – 500 – 491
There are other interesting trends (but I might be stretching that word a bit for some) too. Some seem easy to explain though, e.g.
Albania 369 – n/a – n/a – 384 – 395 – 415
Utter nonsense. The real Balts are the real Balts (ethnically Baltic and non-Germanic). There were never more than 3% of Germans within those populations and they hardly mixed. While there were some eminent persons, Germans have been gone from those lands for almost a 100 years now and they have no impact on the PISA scores or anything whatsoever in the Baltic countries. They just have relatively good education systems and a rather pragmatic approach, that’s all there is to it. And, yes, they have good food (if that has any impact at all).
At 1.3 million people, Estonia is hardly a country.
In terms of population it’s smaller than most major
cities in Europe. Moreover, its murder rate is very
high: 4-5 times higher than the rate in Germany
or Poland
The structural decline for Iceland makes no sense at all. It just goes to show that PISA isn’t as tightly linked to IQ as the worshippers of the test like to think. It can still be raised or lowered on how much effort is put in and how good the education system is.
First, this whole measuring of inherent national intellectual prowess based on flawed and culturally dependent metrics strikes me as being much akin to the Nazi skull-measuring.
Second, it strikes me as extremely weird to attribute Cuba’s economic decline only to central planning, minding that it has been under an economic blockade for near half a century.
So if we take the math scores, are they because of “culturally dependent metrics”? Nice meme, bro. Crawl back to whatever sewer you came from.
Yeah, Panda did dangerously sound like a sore loser refusing to accept the results, but those results just unbelievable in Panda’s experiences, particularly the Chinese maths score, it’s an obvious joke, isn’t it?
And take a look of some (there’re more) breakup mean scores:
White Americans: 519
Asian Americans: 517
B-S-J-G(China): 514
don’t you realise there’s something quite major and interesting going on with this time’s PISA? White-Black gap must be seemingly disappearing too, and why not?
Too many other variables ( some are unknown blackbox till now such as PISA’s sample selection criteria on China’s provinces) makes such an estimation meaningless.
Indeed, not used to using computer exam format could be a major issue, but Vietnam household obviously have even less computers than China. So how could you explain Vietnam average Science easily beats B-S-J-G, the 4 economically most properous regions in China?
Something else, and major, must also be going on here…
Yep, like getting about 200 different Middle Asian nationals a ‘propiska’ on a single 32 square meters apartment (that was in the news). I don’t know what is more in all that–IQ, cunning or pure greed;-) Getting Moscow propiska, actually, is not that difficult.
I mean under the Soviet Union, not today of course.
https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/645301814955388930
Replicability has nothing to do with being representative of supposed “national intellect”. For a simple example, imagine passing an intelligence test devised by an aboriginal hunter-gatherer. The results will be replicable, but how well will they represent your actual thinking power?
See my comment nearby, http://www.unz.com/akarlin/pisa-2015/#comment-1675231, for why even the results of supposedly “objective” tests like Math can be hugely culturally dependent, not to mention the more “soft” sciences.
From our contemporaries Arvo Pärt and the Järvi family come to mind. I’m not aware of earlier notable Estonians, though that might only be due to my ignorance.
it wasn’t sarcasm. I am genuinely curious. I think pisa changed when they received alot of flak with their leaked shanghai scores. but that is just what I think, have no bearing on whatever happened. hence my curiosity.
I’d suspect the huge Russian population there has a large impact on those murder rates.
anyone got cream for the burn? AER is gonna need a truckload.
Greg Cochran had the best and most concise response to this argument – IQ, as measured by IQ tests, is the only game in town.
While the aboriginal hunter-gatherer would be better at surviving in a Paleolithic-technology environment, in practice that is of basically zero relevance for the modern world (in which actual aborigines do exceedingly poorly despite the resources lavished on them by the Australian welfare state). In contrast, things like math skills and the general intelligence upon which it loads actually matter a great deal for economic prosperity, innovation, etc.
No child left behind at PISA
White Americans: 519
Asian Americans: 517
B-S-J-G(China): 514
My speculation is that 2015 math tests must be less difficult than 2012. Lower standard or ceiling has equalizing effect. If the test difficult is set at international math Olympiad level, the consistency should be back.
To sum up my point, without denying the usefulness of IQ as a metric per se, still, given the cultural and institutional differences that figure into such “intelligence” tests, I don’t think it wise to consider them a be-all and end-all metric to predict societal success, or judge national character, or what have you, especially not the single-digit-percent variations from year to year that can as well be caused by whatever noise factors in the test.
PS: oh, by the by, I find your statement that “communism is known to be IQ-shredding” quite puzzling, given that the Soviet Likbez education program alone brought the nation from some 30% to all but universal literacy, which any IQ test was bound to reflect immediately (not to mention long-term effect in the form of the multitude of world-class scientists, engineers and artists that would’ve never realized their full potential if not for the Soviet education and classless society).
Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians never called themselves Balts. Germans did.
“Only game in town” is an argument that could only impress a drunk under a streetlight.
You can take this to absurdum. For instance, humans and slime are pretty different. We can also probably agree that humans have far superior general intelligence to slime. On the other hand, slime is much better than any human at solving the shortest path probem. So I suppose one can say that you can’t evaluate slime culture by our standards. We would all starve as slime with our highly inferior shortest path finding capabilities. We should check our anthropic privilege.
And okay, I suppose that is true enough. But at the end of the day slime are pretty boring and inconsequential on almost all matters.
Sure I will probably fail at an abo-made IQ test. But doing so would be inconsequential to my life prospects (since I do not live in the environment of the outback 20ka).
Well, you actually… can. You can’t get much simpler than WORDSUM or a reaction test but they have good correlations with far more serious and comprehensive test batteries.
Certainly, but ability to exploit guanxi (blat, old boy’s network, etc) also loads on intelligence.
Significantly better, yes, though not vastly better (actually if you compare just White Americans to Russians on TIMSS 2015 I suspect the latter might actually be marginally ahead).
That Russia has far inferior cognitive filtering than the US is a failure of its institutions, and of the banal fact that it opened up its borders well before having converged with the US in living standards.
I don’t think I do.
(1) Likbez was a failure, especially relative to the impact the resources invested into it could have had had they been spent on children instead, who are much better at attaining literacy than illiterate adults. Krupskaya is on record complaining that the literacy rate of conscripts in 1927 was lower than those of 1917.
(2) 48% of 10-19 year olds were literate by the time of the 1897 Census. In 1913, illiteracy amongst conscripts was down to 23%. Yes, total literacy was not great due to widespread illiteracy amongst older people, but there’s not much you can actually do about that other than waiting for them to die off. Primary enrolment was at around 80% by the last years of the Russian Empire and projected to become universal by 1925, so the elimination of literacy within the next two generations was already long assured. All the Soviets managed to do was set it back by about a decade.
(3) Russia lost a huge amount of specialists and intellectuals to emigration in the 1920s, then to repression in the 1930s even as politically correct quacks of the time like Lysenko profited. Considering that late Tsarist Russia was churning out very influential composers, artists, and inventors at a very impressive rate its incredible to think it would have magically come to a halt without the Communists and their “innovations” like the philosophers’ ships and sharashkas.
(4) I do think Communism is IQ shredding on average. Perhaps the only exception to the pattern is East Germany, which promoted fertility amongst university students and closed its borders to emigration. It was definitely IQ shredding in the USSR – Stalinist repressions overwhelmingly targeted the best and brightest (kulaks, priests, former bourgeoisie, etc), though the absolute effect probably wasn’t too catastrophic because the number of victims was lower than Solzhenitsyn’s suppositions and Cold War propaganda (which of course doesn’t excuse them). At the extreme end I suspect Cambodia basically nuked the near entirety of its smart fraction under the Khmer Rouge.
You make some great points, and I’m learning from reading your comments.
But please let’s dispense with this “USSR was a class-less society” bullshit. You cannot deny that Party officials and their families lived a totally different life, materially far superior, to the great bulk of Soviet subjects.
There are apparently always such disparities among people, whether due to merit and hard work or due to less “just” factors and influences. Or, as in the USA, economic/social disparities due to BOTH just and unjust causes.
Israel is only 80% Jewish and the majority of Jews are Sephardi not Ashkenazi. A significant portion of Ashkenazi Jews in Israel are ultra-orthodox and their boys attend yeshivas which don’t meet the educational standards of a secular secondary school.
Parents of ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi girls were in the news a few years ago when they refused to send their daughters to school with ultra-orthodox Sephardi girls because they were bad influences.
http://www.haaretz.com/ashkenazi-parent-sephardi-girls-have-a-bad-influence-on-our-girls-1.1513
Of course the party elite lived a different life than most Soviet citizens, but that disparity grew as the Union chugged along, and I do not honestly think it was all that significant (for anyone but the very top, like the Narkoms or samesuch) before the late Brezhnev times, when the society largely fossilized and social lifts mostly stopped working.
That said, in what comes to access to education and thus to realizing their full potential, belonging to the party elite gave little benefit other than maybe in the universities that produced diplomats, government officials or similar specialists.
Compared to the Empire, where only the truly exceptional from the lower classes had a chance to get a half-decent education, the Union was without doubt a large step ahead in universal access to education.
Most migrants do not have permission to enroll their children in state schools nor can they afford private schools. Their children have to be educated in their home province.
Only in 2014 did China announce that Guangdong and other provinces would start letting migrant children enroll in public schools. However, the provinces require so much documentation that few qualify. On top of that, some cities have additional barriers, like limiting the number of non-residents to 10% of a school’s population.
https://thenanfang.com/migrant-kids-can-now-attend-local-guangdong-schools-sort-of/
The new documentation requirements are forcing migrant kids out of Beijing schools that would have looked the other way in the past.
http://english.caixin.com/2015-02-16/100784599.html
Nearly 10% of Iceland’s population is immigrant. About 45% of the immigrants are from Poland.
http://www.icenews.is/2016/12/07/pisa-global-education-survey-shows-icelandic-education-lacking/#axzz4SCWe9axh
http://icelandreview.com/news/2015/05/29/immigrant-proportion-icelandic-population-grew-2014
Hmmm, I can’t see my previous reply. Can you see it? Was it posted okay?
AK: The spam filter has been acting up of late. I approved it.
Most countries took the 2015 PISA exam on computer and that affected scores drastically for some. A shakeup in scores was expected.
In 2012, a sample PISA math exam was taken on computer in addition to the regular paper exam. Shanghai score 50 point lower on the computerized math exam compared to the paper version. Poland lost 28 points on computer, Hong Kong 12, Singapore 7, and Korea 1.
Some countries did better on the 2012 sample computer exam. Canada gained 5 points, Sweden 12, France 13, the USA 17, and Brazil 25.
http://theconversation.com/how-shift-to-computer-based-tests-could-shake-up-pisa-education-rankings-54869
Ashkenazi jews only make up 47.7 percent of the Israeli population.
To clarify, the scores you posted are a combination of reading, science, and math. On the 2015 PISA, white Americans scored 499 in math, Asian Americans 498.
This can only be the result of poor sampling. More than likely an abnormally large percentage of Southeast Asians were tested.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2015/index.asp
People who are vegans most likely have no idea how to diet or supplement micros correctly leading to nutritional deficits. If micros and macros are taken care of then it’s “OK”, but people have told me they wanted me to make them a vegan diet and I’ve told them that it’s thought to stick to. A substantial amount of my clients have stopped it and went right back to low carb high fat moderate protein. That diet is king.
Because PISA is garbage for inferring intelligence. It’s strongly predicated on school quality. In the case of Italians, that is.
Khruschev, Brezhnev and top government ministers lived roughly like successful American dentists of their time. At the bottom end there was no homelessness. In material terms it was the closest thing to a classless society that any large or medium-sized country ever achieved. Even Sweden of the 1980s had more inequality.
In cultural terms there were class differences in the USSR. The intelligentsia had a very different culture from regular city dwellers, who had a different culture from rustics.
According to 2015 PISA data, only 4.1% of Icelandic students tested have immigrant parents.
Table 1.7.1, printed page 421
http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/pisa-2015-results-volume-i_9789264266490-en#page423
You must mean 47.7 % of Israel’s Jewish population. You forgot the Arabs.
No arguments by now… 😉
I always think you always no have idea about most thing you are talking.
Tell me the cases of ”veganism” deaths… if you found.
Please, I do not want to see again your tight pants stressing your muscles.
Would be interesting to compare PISA results by other factors like social classes, sexual prefferences, autism, schizophrenia, adhd, religion, etc
What is this garbage? The fact that some people assign little value to math is their personal responsibility. Furthermore, you assume it is just about self-motivation. People’s motivation to learn something is often a function of how easy they find it to learn it. People with a natural talent for music tend to be interested in music. Someone who cannot sing well isn’t going to do much of that. Someone with ease of understanding numbers and the interaction between them is much more likely than not to have fun learning them.
I called your tabula rasa trash because that’s what it is.
P.S. We’re not comparing hunter-gatherer socities here. The vast majority of nations are above the world average in GDP per capita, most are well above it.
Don’t be so salty. I call someone making a culturalist argument for what they are. I couldn’t care less about someone’s bruised feelings.
Let me drill this a little further into your brain. There were plenty of smart, very smart even, people in the Soviet economic planning center. They were still operating from a stupid principle, no matter their individual IQs. Do you understand the difference or do you want me to explain it further?
You must have a very bizarre view of the history of Finland and the Baltics. Why even compare us to European peoples who had governments of their own while we were historically under Germanic regimes that were very interested in preventing any “Great People” from emerging among ethnic Finns?
If you were a smart ethnic Finn in the 19th century with the potential to become a scientist, lawyer, writer, politician, officer or whatever, what would you have done? You were more or less predetermined to a career as a socialist revolutionary since you’d be stuck with the frustration of being a high IQ ethnic Finn living in a Germanic colony where most smart ethnic Finns had zero chance at careers matching ability. Sure, the Grand Duchy of Finland had excellent schools…. for Swedes and Germans. Sure, the Grand Duchy of Finland had extensive political autonomy… for Swedish and German aristocrats. Sure, we had high literacy from Bible study… but we could only read the few selected books written by Swedes and Germans.
The Reds here were very much an ethnic Finnish rebellion and “avoiding going Red” meant that much of the better half of the ethnic Finnish bell curve was wiped out by the Whites while we had to wait for years for independent Finland to even give the Finnish language legal status. Avoiding the communist disaster was a good thing in most ways but certainly not when it comes to educational opportunities for ethnic Finns.
In fact, Germans and German-supported Swedes among “our” Whites took the opportunity to murder a lot of ethnic Finns (and Russians) who were simply prominent in some way to get rid of competitors to their power. When you step into hbd blogs you get to read lamenting about how “Northwest Europeans” are supposedly so universalist, altruistic and so lacking in will to act for group ethnic interests while Finns and Slavs are supposedly clannish but this is a totally ridiculous inversion of how different ethnic groups actually acted here for all of history.
Those gushing over Baltic German achievements are even more ridiculous. Most ethnic groups would achieve a lot if they got to keep another ethnic group as serfs for half a millennium so that their most promising sons don’t need to work and can spend all their time and energy on political connections, philosophy and the like.
[Most ethnic groups would achieve a lot if they got to keep another ethnic group as serfs for half a millennium so that their most promising sons don’t need to work and can spend all their time and energy on political connections, philosophy and the like.]
Didn’t seem to work for the Tutsi.
I think there will be clear regional differences on
1) rural vs urban where “rural” is defined not simply as living in a rural location but as part of a population who have lived and inter married in the same valley long enough for a deleterious mutation to be largely homozygous among them (so it gets lost if/when they move to the city and marry people from adjacent valleys instead of their own)
2) relative iodine deficiency
– away from the coasts
– up mountains
(so a double hit if both)
(if correct it would be an interesting experiment to see if religious people in such areas who still do the fish on friday thing are less effected)
#
For the above reasons I always assumed China’s score would be much lower in the interior away from the seafood filled coasts.
I think there will be clear regional differences on
1) rural vs urban where “rural” is defined not simply as living in a rural location but as part of a population who have lived and inter married in the same valley long enough for a deleterious mutation to be largely homozygous among them (so it gets lost if/when they move to the city and marry people from adjacent valleys instead of their own)
2) relative iodine deficiency
– away from the coasts
– up mountains
(so a double hit if both)
(if correct it would be an interesting experiment to see if religious people in such areas who still do the fish on friday thing are less effected)
#
For the above reasons I always assumed China’s score would be much lower in the interior away from the seafood filled coasts.
Brezhnev had a large collection of race cars and enjoyed racing them whenever he had a chance to do so, on a track in forest on the outskirts of Moscow. I don’t know of many successful dentists that can afford this.
Certainly, people such as Brezhnev were not as wealthy as modern or western oligarchs, society was much more equal then, but it wasn’t as equal as you present it to be.
Second-tier Soviet officials may have lived like successful American dentists or surgeons, however.
On the other hand a Soviet “middle-class” family lived, materially, probably worse than does a typical resident of the American ghetto projects. The housing wasn’t much different, and people in the projects generally have better TVs, cars, etc. Culturally it is of course an entirely different world.
You don’t think the U.S. embargo has anything to do with it?
There was greater equality in the USSR than today in Russia, and than there was in the West, although the standards were poorer for everyone. Nobody in the USSR lived like a billionaire, but there were a few people who lived like multi-millionaires. And the average person was much poorer than the average Westerner materially – rather like poor Americans who live in housing projects. They seemed not have noticed this so much, because everyone around them was similarly poor and peoples’ values were not focused on material acquisition and possession as they are in the West.
A lot has to do with family traditions and genetic inheritance (these two things are not unrelated). You might like this study about the same families being successful in Sweden over the centuries:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/23/gregory_clark_on_social_mobility_in_sweden.html
This phenomenon seems to be universal. The best of the Russians were culled during and after the Revolution (I highly recommend the book “Former People” by Douglas Smith for the tragic story of these people) and this had a negative effect on Russian society and culture. But it’s striking how many of the successful Soviet-era people either had “hidden” roots among formerly better people (kulaks, merchants, priests, even aristocrats) or were from achievement-oriented intelligent groups such as Jews, who filled the vacuum.
You need some basic building blocks, such as a written language and widespread literacy. The Tutsi did not come into these until the late 19th century. Before the Germanic tribes came into contact with Rome, it wasn’t as if they were doing much for literature or the sciences. In fact, it wasn’t until well over a thousand years after their initial encounter with Rome that much of anything of lasting intellectual substance came from the German states.
Where you get these data from, Bobbii? From OECD PISA 2015?
If these data are true, then Panda will protest against Anatoly’s title of this article: PISA 2015 Released: China disappoints
No, China doesn’t disappoint at all if those data are true, Anatoly! LOL Instead, Panda shall be satisfied with the results (as they are in line with Panda’s predictions)because they have just explained EVERYTHING!
AK: They are lower than China’s leaked (stellar) 2009 results, so they were a disappointment in a relative sense. Of course you can’t weigh results from one particular year too strongly.
I partially agree with you, Jaakko, but I think you are severely exaggerating. By the late 19th century there already was an ethnic Finnish educated middle class. First Finnish-language schools leading to university studies were founded in the middle of 19th century. First doctoral dissertations written entirely in Finnish date back more than 150 years. Even before that there were educated ethnic Finns – they only had their higher education in Swedish (or German or Latin). Finnish literature (Kivi, Canth, Aho…) was already flourishing by the beginning of the 20th century.
Finnish became a legal language gradually during the decades following 1863 (Kielireskripti by Alexander II). By the beginning of 20th century Finland was for all practical purposes officially Finnish and Swedish bilingual country.
Also, the majority of Anti-Bolshevik “Whites” were ethnic Finns – as the majority of Estonian “Whites” in 1919 were ethnic Estonians.
As for the relative lack of the “great men” among the ethnic Finns and Estonians, I am not completely convinced that this is true. There is of course this “lost in translation” phenomenon: e.g. most authors writing in Finnish or Estonian were never translated to other languages or at least they were not actively promoted. From the Estonian side, I would consider at least F. R. Kreutzwald, A. H. Tammsaare, Marie Under and Jaan Kross to be of international stature. From the Finnish side there were also many important names, that are not internationally well known (e.g. Juhani Aho was a perennial candidate for Nobel prize for literature, but remember SWEDISH Academy…). Same is generally true of the fine arts, a lot of good painters and sculptors that are not very well known internationally (J. Takanen, P. Halonen, J. Rissanen, W. Aaltonen). Some architects are rather well known (Alvar Aalto, Eliel and Eero Saarinen).
Thank you for correcting your lunatic countryman.
No, I don’t.
Not a great deal, anyway. The US had an embargo on Cuba but Europe and the rest of the world never did.
I would argue that even modern day Armenia is in a worse position than Cuba (they are blockaded by Turkey and Azerbaijan, border a sanctioned Iran to the south, and are separated from Russia to the north by hard mountainous terrain).
The heavy plow imo.
I think the heavy plow allowed intensive farming of the heavy soils of the north European plain which previously had been constrained to dairying.
And this allowed the population expansion and surplus that is required to reach lift-off.
If “barbarian” genes (but not too many) are a factor in innovation then north Europeans coming late to the intensive farming party would tie in to the scientific explosion that resulted.
(pet theory)
I have absolutely never claimed otherwise in the context of the body of my work taken as a whole.
In the past, factors such as literacy, agricultural systems, urbanization rates, family systems, etc. were very important aspects as well.
But here’s the thing: As the world globalizes, it also homogenizes. More and more countries escape the Malthusian trap. Best practices (e.g. in institutions) are adopted across the board; uncompetitive systems flounder, the last major obstacle having been Communism. As these processes continue, ironically, the influence of “HBD factors,” and most of all IQ, on societal success and national incomes should only increase further.
It actually will, assuming he wants to live in a well-functioning modern industrial society. (Which the vast majority of people, including from the most archaic cultures, demonstrably do).
Social intelligence is basically general intelligence + certain aspects of personality such as extraversion and conscientiousness.
And results from them are very strongly correlated – look at the math result, and the reading result will likely be very similar.
https://twitter.com/JamesPsychol/status/773255349256192000
What does any of that have to do with factor analysis and the g factor?
The point is that it would have happened anyway. Literacy by the end of the Russian Empire was actually around 40-45% and going up by 5% points every few years.
This is simply not true. The state continued functioning during the war years, including spending on education, so this is just logically implausible. This was not the case after 1918, with the result that the conscripts of 1927 were less literate than the conscripts of 1917 (as noted by Krupskaya at a party congress in 1927).
I agree that the Bolsheviks don’t bear full responsibility for that, because a destructive civil war is a destructive civil war, and I am not a propagandist. However it is legitimate to say that their role in increasing literacy has been (100%+) exaggerated, in the sense that the process would have gone just as fast and probably faster under the Russian Empire.
Unless you mean to imply that Russia would have lost to Nazi Germany in 1941 had the Bolsheviks not come to power.
Making the (wildly unrealistic) assumption that things would have turned out the exact same way on the international scene and for that matter in German domestic politics in the absence of the “red menace,” it assumes that the effects of:
(a) Moving some percentage of war factories beyond the Volga;
would have outweighed the effects of:
(b) An additional decade of uninterrupted industrial development;
(c) No paranoiac purges of the military that destroyed its war effectiveness a few years before WW2;
I just do not consider a to be bigger than b + c, but you are of course free to argue otherwise.
Again, university access, like literacy, was growing very fact in late Imperial Russia, though necessarily from a low base. There were 127,000 university students in Russia in 1913, which is actually 50% higher than in Germany (though a third less in per capita terms). You might even make the argument that higher education was over-emphasized in the Russian Empire.
Still, the Bolshevik influence here in this sphere was negative. In addition to simply removing a big chunk of the professoriate that had politically incorrect views, the early Bolsheviks’ populist measures like sending off factory workers to the universities and abolishing grades actually degraded the higher education system even further. It was only Stalin who put an end to all that populist egalitarian nonsense.
The Russian Empire was industrially less developed relative to Germany in WW1 than in WW2, that is true, though this is far more a product of historical contingency than of its political system. (The real question is, would the Russian Empire have been relatively stronger in 1941 than the USSR in 1941?).
This is an absolutely standard result and it would be very strange if Russia were an exception. Which, guess what, it isn’t.
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1016/j.intell.2009.05.005 (based on Сыркин М. (1929). Устойчивость социальных различий в показаниях тестов одаренности. Психотехника и психофизиология труда. 2, 1, 9–14.)
Test of 4th graders from six different social groups; different of 21.3 IQ points between lowest and highest socio-economic group, rising to 22.5 IQ points amongst 6th graders.
…
Okay, let’s take China.
China: About 25%-30% (2013)
Taiwan: 60% (2010)
Taiwan reached China’s figures around 1990.
So, even by your criteria, China has been far slower at increasing tertiary enrolment than the fragment of China that escaped Maoist idiocy. (Also 4x richer, freer, no mass repressions and famines in the 1950s-70s, etc).
(1) Those income disparities are unlikely to have been as big without Communism. (As evidenced by the fact that most post-Communist states have improved their relative standings since 1990, despite the shock of transition, the brain drain, and the demographic collapse).
(2) When Communism collapsed, the Soviet elites deciding that jeans were worth more than their own failed ideology (incidentally, even I am not that big of an anti-Communist!), a big percentage of those intellectuals fled anyway.
I wrote about Soviet inequality here. I think there were basically three periods:
(1) 1920s – Equality within the sphere of the state-owned economy concurrently with a small private class of “NEPist millionaires.”
(2) 1930s – Transition to fullbore command economy, but with steady upwards drift in inequality – income inequality becomes higher than in contemporary France. However, wealth inequality is of course an order of magnitude or two lower.
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/russia-income-inequality.gif
(3) Post-Stalin – Fall in income inequality to Swedish levels by 1970s-80s, and wealth inequality in state-owned, centrally planend economy remains far lower than in any free market society.
Do the people here who analyse PISA results they know are gamed also bet on WWE matches?
If you could reasonably guess how a particular WWE match was going to be gamed wouldn’t you bet on it?
It’s because PISA is used as a proxy for average IQ that countries try to game it so applying human nature to PISA you can guess a ton of different things:
– those countries that game it or don’t do it have something to hide
– China pushing the coastal cities (interior is different?)
– India has something to hide + you meet a lot of bright Indians (dramatic structure in India?)
– there’s something odd about Argentina (mtdna or flouride effect on iodine uptake?)
– there’s something odd about the Balkan countries (proportion of mountains?)
– there was something odd about Britain/Ireland (rural factor?)
etc
so yeah to taking it all at face value but knowing human nature why would you take it at face value?
You can add (d) – no mass deaths through famine, gulag, etc. resulting in several million more people and at least a million or so more soldiers.
A Russia without Bolsheviks would probably have been treated better by the West after the Central Powers’ capitulation (so, maybe no independent Finland, perhaps it would have been given Constantinople).
@notanon
If you do a caste vs name analysis of California 2017 – National Merit Scholarship,
you will find total 275 Indians vs 125 Jews vs 1050 Orientals
But zoom in further into the Indians on the list
125 Brahmins
75 North Indian , non-brahmin upper castes like merchants, nobles and scribes
55 South Indian, upper caste dravidian landlords
20 for the rest – of which mid level castes = 3 Jat Sikhs and 4 Patels and of the untouchables, just 1
–
Next, India has a 2 tier schooling system,
Central Govt Schools , CBSE, ICSE , these maintain a high standard and 70% of the IIT winners are from here – In general middle class and above and upper castes attend Central Govt Syllabus schools
vs
State Schools – run by each state – Social Justice warriors, who do grade inflation to the extent thousands of untouchables get 100% – Usually lower class and lower caste people attend state schools
PISA measures not just IQ, but also to some extant, schooling
Yes, the main problem of the USSR in 1941 was certainly lack of manpower.
A Russia without the February revolution would have forced itself to be treated better. A Russia with the February revolution and without Bolshevik or some similarly undemocratic rule would have completely collapsed, so no.
I don’t think the purges destroyed war effectiveness. We can judge how much use those high commanders who were shot would have been in 1941, by how much use those who survived were, and the answer is not much. Tukhachevsky and Yakir, as much as Voroshilov and Budenny, were not up to date with contemporary war and would not have been able to learn in time. There was no escaping the painful lessons of Barbarossa.
And once again, Dr. Johnson was wrong, it happens.
Another million soldiers (at least) would not have hurt.
Yes. And the Allies were obligated to it. It would have certainly gotten some spoils after the first world war.
Given Russia’s political culture some sort of authoritarian rule would have eventually been inevitable. The Bolshevik type was just the worst possible one.
Agreed but to some extent “schooling” correlates with IQ.
Most of the lessons of PISA (for people who already accept the genetic basis of IQ) are in the gaps.
Agreed but to some extent “schooling” correlates with IQ.
Most of the lessons of PISA (for people who already accept the genetic basis of IQ) are in the gaps.
Did the Russian children in Estonia take the test in Russian or Estonian?
@AK, it’s very likely you’re wrong on this one. Let Panda explain:
……………….Read, Math, Science
Large city: 570, 596, 588
City: 523, 556, 542
Town: 496, 536, 520
Small town:449, 489, 476
Village: 435, 486, 465
If these data are true, inferred or leaked from OECD, then China’s results are nothing short of spectacular compared to Singapore Panda would argue, more so compared to 2012’s Shanghai as it paints a much fuller picture.
Keep several points in mind before the analysis:
A. PISA doesn’t test IQ by design, even though it is correlated with IQ. More than IQ, PISA tests equality aka average, which is a direct function of education resources( i.e. quality of teachers , $$$ spending) per head. A developed country, therefore, has intrincit advantages on PISA over a developing country (with similar IQ) where eduction resources are hughly uneven and the $$$ spending/head is absolutely scarce and relatively much lower.
B. Out of 3 catagories of PISA, Maths, rather than Reading & Science, logically correlates with IQ more. The latter 2 catagories are affected more by i) country overall development statue (i.e. equality)and ii) hence education speaning/head.
C. Panda was against the claim that urban Chinese have higher average IQ than rural Chinese due to China’s strict Hukou system that has been in place since 1950’s. This remained as true more or less till the 1980’s. However, Panda overlooked that fact that the last 20 years of urbanisation in CHina (ongoing) had the fastest urbanisation developent rate in human history. Majority of China now is urban aka cities and mega cities, contrary to the conventional wisdom that it’s mainly rural – China just changes tooooo fast even Panda sometimes doesn’t realise.
This has a profound impact on IQ average as these data(particularly the Maths scores) have showed. It means as China quickly urbanises, more right hand of towns/villages IQ bell curve, rather than the left hand side, have flown into cities and have urbanised(logical for any society at this development stage), hence towns/villages have now lower average IQ than cities.
Simple analysis:
BTW, it more or less reconfirms
i) the conventional wisdom within China that Shanghai scores about avg in China whereever exams are concerned(regardless of avg IQ), as those Large City Mean Scores look suspicously like 2012’s Shanghai. lol. That is to say, SH and BJ are avg, Nanjing city is the top flyer which is more or less cancelled out by low flyer Guangzhou. – sounds logical to Panda.
ii) Panda’s precdiction years ago that if China is allowed to enter PISA with its Large cities on standalone basis, Singapore won’t get into top 15 (since China has over 2 dozens such Large cites).
It resolutely rejects some readers’ hypothesis (in Steve’s blog) that China’s low avg Reading scores are due to learning complexed Chinese charaters instead of English…LoL
Chinese Towns – already sub-urban areas. Now it becomes more interesting. Their Science avg are only lower than developed East Asia. Their Reading avg considerablely lower – about US level (which in itself is an achivement , rofl, considering it’s reading – affacted more by edu resources/head. As a fully developed country, US is at least 15-20 times higher). Yet their Maths – 536! World’s #5, just lower than other Han Chinese areas: Singapore, HK, Macao, and Taiwan, but high than Japan. Stunning, AK, isn’t it?! consider that Chinese Towns are already hugely at disadvantage when they suffer from right-hand IQ drain from cities.
Chinese Small Towns: that’s standard rural unbdeveloped areas. Their reading ans Science are much lower: Reading about Slovak/Malta level, Science about Hungary.Yet Math (more IQ item)– 489! the same as Italy/OECD average, higher than Iceland! Now take that.
Chinese villages: google some pictures. They are teh definition of disadvantaged rural lower IQ area. Reading: about Unted Arab Emirates level, Science about Isreal level (can you imagine that, AK?), Yet Maths (read : suffering from IQ drain into cities)- only slightly lower than OECD average, the same as Luxembourg and Spain.
Note that China is one of a few countries in the top 40 list that are not OECD countries, meaning that she has much lower GDP/head and education resource/head. Panda is aware that China’s education budget is VERY unfairly disstributed, with Beijing and Shanghai topping the list, both twice the level of Jiangsu province, for instance, whose education budge in turn sounds like heaven to Chinese rural area towns and villages. Yet the joke is that the resources available to above China’s Towns, Small Towns and Villages 3 catagories are as a little as meaningless compared to OECD countries – hugh score improvement room there.
China’s “fall” in PISA 2015 are likely due to the following major reasons:
likely computerised test format, instead of paper-based, affected a little.
OECD sampled China using 5 catagories as above with population-weighted avg smapleing, if Panda understand correctly. It is tricky and deflating scores. It seems to Panda that there is no fundamental diff btw Towns and Small Towns. Imagain if OECD had combined these 2 and sampled 4 catogories, the results would have had driven those on-line US educationers mad again.
As Panda mentioned in Steve’s blog, China’s percentage of low performers stood at oddly 10.9, considerablely higher than all similar ranking countries. And OECD doesn’t explain why. Some bad luck on sampling? or not very reasonable sampling? or it’s just developed vs developing sort of things – hugely uneven resources distributuion in essence? We’ll see.
~PISA 2015, China dissapoints?
In light of above data, unless AK you want to prove that China’s avg IQ is 130+, even with her most disadvantaged villagers being able to score top spots on Reading and Science without learning lessons or going to school properly( but take a look at these poor villagers’ Maths scores aka more IQ -related item within PISA BTW) , China didn’t dissapoint at all, instead it did quite spectacularly and as predicted , say business as usual.
rec1man, is there a resource or database that classifies Indian surnames by caste? I haven’t been able to find such but it would be highly useful. Or do you do your analysis based on personal knowledge. Thanks.
@Anatoly Karlin
Indians , for survival reasons, have culturally evolved to sort people by caste, based on partial clues – such as phenotype, name etc
You can figure out caste by following method
1) Often Last Name = Caste Name
Reddy = Reddy Caste
Nair = Nair Caste
Patel = Patel Caste
Yadav = Yadav caste ( shepherd, milkman, cow herd )
Jadhav = Jadhav caste ( untouchable leather worker )
Jain = Member of Jain religion ( merchant )
2) Next, many castes use a last name, from a list of surnames – this list can be as long as a dozen or hundreds or even thousands – Indians from early childhood, learn these lists to sort out people by caste
For example, Nair caste ( landlord from kerala ) also have surnames = Nambiar, Menon, Kurup, Pillai
Khatri merchant caste from Punjab, ( most bollywood stars are Khatri ) use a set of hundreds of surnames – Khosla, Kapoor, Khorana, Malhotra, Chopra ( Priyanka Chopra of Quantico TV series ) , Kohli, Anand, Khanna
Jat Sikhs use surnames like Bajwa, Virk, Dhillon, a list of hundreds – often these surnames tell of which specific tribe / sub-caste one belongs to
Brahmins have thousands of surnames and they vary by linguistic state –
Agnihotri ( fire priest ), purohit ( priest ), Sastry ( priest ), Acharya ( teacher ),
Joshi ( astrologer ), Chatterjee, Sharma
3) Next from first name, you can figure out linguistic state – Brahmins tend to have more Sanskritic first names
@anon
Each year, the IIT exams admit 15000 students
Of this about 11000 come from the central govt syllabus schools
Wheras just 10 come from Tamil Nadu State government syllabus schools
I have PISA data from Qatar for 2012 – where Indian students ( expats ) , mostly middle class,
attending Central Govt Syllabus schools, score from 500 to 570
UAE, Qatar etc, have scores in the low 400s, but if you zoom in, you will see natives around 360 and middle class expat Indians, attending central govt syllabus scores, scoring from 500 to 570
@anatoly Karlin
2011 PISA from Qatar
http://qatarskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/03/qatar-and-pisa-test.html
In first place was Al-Khur International School (Indian stream, they also have a British stream)
Reading 603.77, Mathematics 591.73, Science 565.98
( The british stream scored around 500 )
The Al-Khur natural gas company in qatar, hired from UK and India, and had Indian-CBSE Central gov Board and UK type schools for kids of Indian techs and UK techs
Qatar Average was 370
—
Qatar School Ranking, top 30 schools out of 153
Mean PISA = 500 = IQ 100
SD PISA = 100 = IQ 15
Science, Math, Reading scores
For comparison Shanghai = 575, 600, 566 = 112 IQ
Debakey High School for Health ( USA ) = 492, 467, 493 = 98 IQ
Qatar Canadian School = 451, 456, 491 = 95 IQ
Qatar, 153 school average = 379, 368, 372 = 81 IQ
Note – all these Indian schools had middle class students, mostly upper caste, attending Central Govt Syllabus schools , CBSE or ICSE
@Anatoly Karlin
2017 – California National merit, top 0.5% of high school students – 140 IQ ?
Chinese 850, Korean 100, Vietnamese 70, Japanese 30 ; Jews = 125 ; Muslim = 55 ;
Indians 275, ( 0 dalits )
—
Bengali speakers, 12 brahmins, 6 kayasth ( scribe ), Total 18 ;
Gujurati speakers, 3 brahmins, 14 Jain ( merchants ), 6 Hindu merchants, 1 low caste peasant, 4 Patels , Total 28 ;
Hindi speakers – 14 brahmins, 2 kayasth ( scribe ), 1 low caste peasant , 20 merchants, 9 Rajputs ( nobles ), Total 46 ;
Kannada speakers – 14 brahmins, 4 dravidian upper caste landlords , Total 18 ;
Malayalam speakers – 1 brahmin, 6 Nair ( upper caste dravidian landlords, matriarchy – women impregnated by brahmins for 1000 years ) total 7 ;
Marathi speakers – 18 brahmins, 2 kayasth (scribe ), 2 Maratha landlords, total 22 ;
Punjabi speakers – 3 Jat Sikhs, 17 merchants, total 20
Sindhi speakers – 6 merchants
Tamil speakers – 44 brahmins, 20 upper caste dravidian landlords, Total 64 ;
Telugu speakers – 16 brahmins, 38 upper caste dravidian landlords, Total 54
I watched a lot of figure skating in the 90s. Irina Slutskaya lived with her parents in a one-room apartment. Evgeny Plushenko lived in a 2-bedroom apartment. He and his mother lived in one bedroom and a family that they did not know lived in the other bedroom. They all shared the kitchen and the bathroom. Plushenko lost most of his savings from skating, perhaps $50,000, in the 1998 Russian financial crisis.
I’ve never seen PISA scores for individual schools before. For anyone confused as I was, those Qatar schools took the 2009 PISA. I was also confused seeing Debakey High, but it appears it is a school modeled after the Houston, TX high school with same name. Debakey High school in Texas took the 2009 PISA during the 2013-2014 school year and scored slightly better than Shanghai, 575 reading, 599 math, 580 science. (The pdf for the Houston school won’t link, but it can be downloaded by googling “Debakey PISA Executive Summary”.)
I guess Qatar paid quite a bit for the individual schools, including Houston, to be tested. Only 12% of Qatar’s population are citizens.
@ Triumph104
And each of those individual schools has a different ethnic profile – and a different school syllabus
Same situation applies in India, what is the caste – class – religion breakup and whether the school syllabus is Central Gov based , such as CBSE or ICSE or run by the State school syllabus
State school syllabus have another political motive – to artificially close the gap between higher castes and lower castes – This is done by grade inflation
Qatar, UAE etc, score is pushed up a lot by middle class, upper caste Hindu students, attending Central govt syllabus schools
==
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160313/jsp/frontpage/story_74286.jsp#.WE5BxeYrI2w
CBSE and ICSE ace state boards
( CBSE and ICSE are Central Govt Syllabus schools and have tough standards )
*Students from the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, which conducts the ICSE exam, and the Central Board of Secondary Education have come out tops while Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu hug the basement.
( Indian PISA was done in Tamil Nadu )
This article deals with Grade-10 students
Math score
ICSE = 61%
CBSE = 50%
All India Average = 40%
Tamil Nadu = 30%
—
English score
ICSE = 84%
CBSE = 68%
All India Average = 41%
Tamil Nadu = 30%
—
Science Score
ICSE = 68%
CBSE = 57%
All India Average = 43%
Tamil Nadu = 33%
—
Tamil Nadu state schools were deliberately grade inflated to artificially
close the IQ gap between the
2% Tamil Brahmins ( Math-Ramanujam, Chess- Vish Anand, 50% of Indian nuclear blast team of 1974, 3 /4 Indian science nobels ) and the 98% Tamil Dravidians
*Now 15% of Tamil Brahmins ( > + 1 SD _ IQ ) have migrated to USA
Israel’s state school pupils are at least 25% non-Jewish. This includes Arabs, Bedouin, Druze, Adaghys, Africans, and probably others.
The best part of the Slate article was its author, Matthew Yglesias, admitting that he was 75% Ashkenazi Jew. His affirmative action surname, Yglesias graduated from Harvard, came from his paternal grandfather. As for social mobility, Yglesias, his brother, both parents, and both paternal grandparents are/were all writers.
Here’s an interesting biography on Grandpa Yglesias: http://www.hillsborough.communityatlas.usf.edu/upload/documents/rememberingjoseyglesias.pdf
Back to Swedish social mobility, the world’s second black chess Grandmaster, Pontus Carlsson, was taught to play the game at four by his adoptive father, who was president of the Swedish chess federation. He speaks five languages fluently. Most Swedes are multilingual. Carlsson’s accomplishments would have been unlikely if he had remained in his native Colombia. Nuture over nature.
You are intelligent enough to know that outliers don’t disprove general trends. Also, it would be interesting to know the family background of Carlsson. Internet just says his family died under tragic circumstances when he was one year old but doesn’t give details.
I know a family of intelligent African-American physicians. In their native south, prior to the 1950s, their ancestors included some preachers and a very successful bootlegger. Given the circumstances they had been in, one couldn’t expect much better at that time and place, but clearly one could see the potential. Nurture matters, but nature is a necessary condition also.
To see how chinese would do in a non east Asian education system, you can check this:- https://humanvarietiesfiles.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2006-levels-immigrant-pisa.pdf
Page 17, 28, 29
Chinese Australians:- 569 maths, 541 reading.
Chinese Irish:- 475 maths, 430 reading.
Chinese New Zealand:- 555 maths, 506 reading.
Chinese Scotland:- 555 maths, 498 reading.
This is 2003 data. In 2012, Chinese Australians scored 615 maths
Malaysia scored 415 on PISA with 25 pc Chinese. 0.9pc reached level 5 and level 6 (max 2.5 pc Chinese), a number below most of the world. Any take ?
https://humanvarietiesfiles.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/2006-levels-immigrant-pisa.pdf
PISA scores of Indian immigrants in various countries
Reading scores of Indian immigrants
in Australia = 567
in Ireland = 496
in New Zealand = 530
in Scotland = 504
—
Math scores of Indian immigrants
in Australia = 577
in Ireland = 496
In New Zealand = 534
In Scotland = 525
The UN and World Bank had been warning about the brain drain from Malaysia.
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTMALAYSIA/Resources/324392-1303882224029/malaysia_ec_monitor_apr2011_ch3.pdf
https://www.aseantoday.com/2016/03/malaysias-brain-drain/
Children’s performance correlate with that of their parents.
You are trying way too hard to be right. The average Colombian tests below US blacks, but you want to believe that Carlsson came from an above-average black Colombian family where his relatively successful grandparents and extended relatives refused to raise him after his parents died.
A child’s achievement level is set by their parents and culture. The reason black Americans do so poorly is because the average black child is raised in a dysfunctional home and the educated in a chaotic or repressive school system that spends most of its resources on the least educable students. The economist James Heckman is suggesting black children be raised in high quality daycare from infancy to raise their IQs (to normal) and improve the lifetime outcomes. LINK
The black family you mentioned has strong social skills, functional parenting, and a network of family members who teach the next generation how to work the system and accomplish their goals. While they are obviously smarter than the average black, they only need average intelligence to accomplish what they have. It is easy for a black person to get into a US medical school if they have taken the proper courses in high school, have a long-term plan, and can delay gratification.
Or, they might have figured that he would be better off if he were adopted into a first world country. Maybe they even facilitated that process somehow. Who knows? It’s all speculation. But given what we know about the heritability of intelligence, it is likely that his parents were much smarter than others of their background.
It’s an interaction of genetics and environment, and genetics influence environment. I don’t know what constrains black Columbians, perhaps this orphan’s parents were farmers or shopkeepers more successful than their neighbors.
Completing medical school and passing the board exams (which do not factor in race, so no affirmative action bonuses) requires intelligence well above the national average. Race certainly helps getting into better schools but it is silly to think that a black physician is no smarter than an average white nurse or administrative assistant.
The 1st leak out of Beijing:
The results of Fangshan District of Beijing area (population: about 1m)are just leaked.
Fangshan District is at the outskirt pooer area of Beijing, generally recognised at the low end of Beijing area in education. It has all 46 schools taking part of PISA 2015. 40 of them are public schools, 6 of them are lower end vocational schools.
The avg of the entire Fangshan’s 46 schools:
Science: 546
Reading:529
Maths: 561
The avg of 40 public schools in Fangshan:
Science: 551
Reading: 534
Maths: 566
Singapore:
Science: 556
Reading:535
Maths: 564
So Beijing’s average must be (much) higher than Singapore, as predicted.
Shanghai’s average could be similar. Jiangsu could be higher.
So, kinda of as predicted, the low score of China in general could be primarily due to the large sample size from (poorer areas with many low end vocational schools in) Guangdong.