Cheating In The Unified State Exams

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for on July 1, 2013 .3 Comments

Izvestia writes: The Ministry of Education have evaluated the results of the Unified State Exam of 2013 and identified the regions with the highest numbers of graduates who got the full 100 points on the Unified State Exam. Contrary to popular prejudices, the recordholders aren’t the Caucasian republics, but Bryansk oblast, Kalmykia, and Chuvashia. I […]

Translation: Russia to Build 11 Centers of Tolerance

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for on May 25, 2013 .No Comments

Russia is to spend 1.5 billion rubles building “Centers of Tolerance” to improve inter-ethnic relations in the next few years. Is this a good use of resources? Pyotr Kozlov examines the issue. The Ministry of Regional Development to Build Centers of Tolerance for 1.5 Billion Rubles The Ministry of Regional Development plans to start constructing […]

Are Caucasians Stealing Russian University Places? The Data Says, “Probably Not.”

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on February 20, 2013 .4 Comments

In one of the recent posts on corruption, commentator AP wrote: Kids from Moscow are having trouble getting into universities now because entrance, based on exam results, skews the chances of acceptance in favor of those students from corrupt regions where they can buy better results. Moscow is less corrupt than, say, Dagestan so Dagestani […]

Minorities’ Cognitive Performance In The UK

This about HBD, tagged , , , , was written by for on August 22, 2012 .69 Comments

Here is data from the Cognitive Abilities Test for UK students in 2009/10 via Ambiguous. Some interesting things to take away here: (1) The sample is very large. Verbal IQ has the highest correlation with academic performance in most subjects, followed by Quantitative IQ, and then Non-Verbal Reasoning (recognizing patterns and such, I imagine). (2) Indians […]

Is The Ukrainian Children Learning?

This about Society, tagged , , was written by for on June 4, 2012 .58 Comments

According to a recent Vzglyad article by Olga Gritsenko titled Universal Stupefaction, no they are not. Here are the cold raw facts: Libraries stock 4% of books published in Ukraine, compared to 18% in Russia and 40% in the US and Canada. The average Ukrainian spends $2.5 on books in one year, compared to $22 in Russia. In 2010/11, […]

Kremlin Dreams Sometimes Come True

This about Economy, tagged , , , was written by for on May 31, 2009 .2 Comments

This April, Michael Bohm, editor at the Moscow Times, published the article New Kremlin Dreamers, which questioned Russia’s stated intention of becoming an advanced industrial nation by 2020. I wasn’t much impressed by its pessimistic assertions – for instance, regarding Russia’s hopes of becoming the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020, he falls into the […]

Translation: The Case of the “Stalinist” Textbook

This , about History, tagged , , , was written by for on May 28, 2009 .47 Comments

Ever since the publication of Filippov’s (in)famous textbook A History of Russia 1945-2006 in 2007, the state of Russian history teaching drew a fair degree of negative commentary in the West, some of it reasonably lucid, most of it superficial or hysterical. What the latter have in common is that they almost invariably haven’t read […]

Education as the Elixir of Growth II

This about HBD, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 18, 2008 .No Comments

A while ago I wrote Education as the Elixir of Growth on DR, in which I noted that in most countries the educational profile is closely correlated to their level of productivity. The major exceptions are nations with resource windfalls (inflated productivity) and socialist legacies (deflated productivity). Furthermore, the greater the gap between the ‘potential […]

Education as the Elixir of Growth

This about HBD, tagged , , , , , was written by for on March 10, 2008 .11 Comments

What are the reasons behind the wealth and poverty of nations? Since this question has exercised the minds of thinkers from Adam Smith to David Landes, Jared Diamond and Richard Lynn, I decided to take a look at it myself. I came to the conclusion that while geography, macroeconomic policies, resource windfalls and the microeconomic […]

Core Article: What We Believe

This about Politics, tagged , , , , was written by for on January 15, 2008 .9 Comments

In the first 5 days of its existence, this blog has been priveleged to receive more than more than 200 page views from more than 100 visitors from 18 different countries. We have also been linked to by the Winthrop88 blog and Marginalia (probably the leading English-language blog about Latvia) – of those that we’re […]