The data is all here: https://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2019/
Here is the report [big PDF].
Here is the PISA 2018 data for comparison.
No particular surprises, with adjustment for the usual TIMSS quirks (East Asia & ex-USSR do systemically better than on PISA, Western countries do worse).
Obligatory reminder to take this test FWIW (i.e., less than PISA):
An extension of Heiner Rindermann’s observation on the differences between the two major international standardized tests – namely, that PISA is more a test of general intelligence, while TIMSS loads more heavily on specific curricular knowledge (Rindermann 2015) – is that the difference between the two can be used as a rough proxy for the quality of school systems.
That said, they are useful in that they contain data for some countries that do not do PISA. For instance, it should be of no surprise to the HBD-pilled that Iran does better than the Arabs, or that Pakistan is close to the bottom of the table.
Math 8th grade
Science 8th grade
Math 4th grade
Science 8th grade
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If you look at the Annex tables for exlusion ratios, Israel is at a stratospheric 23%. Sweden is on the high side for OECD countries (6%). It’s the Haredim for Israel who don’t take regular classes and so Israel doesn’t feel compelled to test & track them.
I think I mentioned previously in my big Israel post that the Jew vs Arab conflict is vastly overstated as pertains to Israel’s prospect. The big issue is really the within-Jewish developments.
In the US, the data I’ve seen has suggested a fairly high conversion from ultra-Orthodox kids to more mainstream denominations. I don’t have the specific data for Israel but one can glance the trajectory by looking at historical trends. The explosion of the haredim share of overall Israeli jewish youth is not slowing down, which suggests that the identities in Israel is significantly “stickier” than the US. (Would like to see Dmitry’s opinion on this).
Other than that, the big surprise was Turkey, which saw a huge shot up the rankings compared to previous years. I looked at their coverage ratios and it doesn’t look particularly fishy. It seems a lot of “second world” countries saw a big jump, too, like Chile. Turkey’s score among 8th graders in math is now ahead of France and New Zealand and on par with Italy. Is that credible?
One last thing to ponder. Even if you look at PISA scores and you buy into the idea that it represents a more g-loaded measure of underlying human capital, it still ignores emigration. This is particularly the case in Eastern Europe and to a lesser extent Southern Europe. By contrast, relative underachievers (though not when disaggregated by race, as Sailer likes to remind us) like the US get their human capital systematically underestimated because they are huge recipients of world talent flows. Most emigration is between the ages 20-35, outside the scope of all these scholastic tests.
PIAAC is probably a better measurement, but the data there is quite old now. Besides, there are wide differentials in how well countries educated their boomers. Russia is a relative standout in the eastern bloc; their boomers are nearly on OECD parity but its youth are not much better than its peer in EE. This is overshadowed when you look at average scores, which blends all age groups. Korea is even more of a dramatic example of the inverse phenomenon. Their boomers are relatively primitive but their youth are doing exceptionally well.
Regardless, Russia’s scores in all these tests (TIMMS/PISA/PIAAC) suggests they are doing massive underachievement relative to inherent capability, a point I’ve driven home multiple times. Human capital is just one part of the story. Systems matter, too.
Russia does great on TIMMS; it’s scores are higher than those of all non-Asian countries (though I haven’t seen how old the kids are).
New Zealand results are quite surprising, their immigration policy is not really that dysgenic according to Richard Lynn so I wonder why they are scoring so low.
I’m talking about how human capital translates into real world performance. Hence my last line.
Ireland’s high performance continues to amaze me considering the shoddiness of our education system. It is poorly funded to the point that schools often have to rely on donations for things like hot water and soap, have large class sizes of ~30 students to a teacher, and a generally embarrassing curriculum — especially in the maths and sciences.
Maoris have highest fertility there
Pacific Islanders, Samoans, Tongans etc
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRpdO7LNUscaDoJt7Hv_3WgrXaYeAvJ_oNeFA&usqp.jpg
Look for the racial composition of the youngest cohort. Pacific Islanders for the win!
I agree with your conclusion, I just pointed out that Russia’s excellent performance on the TIMMS doesn’t point to underachievement. Other things do.
I thought the Irish had a reputation for being a stupid white trash type of people.
It’s hard to agree with my conclusion if you haven’t grasped the argument.
Any data released by Turkish goverment is fake unless you can prove otherwise (Look at corona numbers i.e.). At the elite level, Turkish 8th grade might be better than both (Even though current high school enterance exam is very easy wrt previous years, it’s still probably much more competitive than whatever they have in both countries. Competitiveness level is something similar to East Asia in Turkey although it’s not anywhere near that level.). I am also pretty sure they didn’t include Syrians and other new citizens of Turkey (constitute more than ~10 of population at total and much higher for underage) which would lower score by a lot.
Oh bull fucking shit.
As if there aren’t a dozen things a school would first choose to do without before doing without hot water.
I knew this lazy racist slur would inevitably come. But Iceland, whose school-age population is >95% white European, is doing extraordinarily poorly in PISA compared to the other Nordics. Are the Icelanders just dumber? What’s the racist cope there?
More likely explanation: why would they bother with a test when their life is on easymode? Iceland’s wealth basically comes from two sources: tourism and fishing. Neither is particularly human capital intensive, There are huge swathes of land for each inhabitant, so there’s plenty of space. Land is also cheap. In such a low-pressure environment, does schooling really matter that much beyond the basics?
What about New Zealand?
New Zealand’s exports is mostly meat, milk, wood, fruits etc. In other words, agriculture and commodities. They also have very low population density with lots of cheap land. Very similar conditions in life. If you’re a 15 year old in New Zealand, you’ll know that you can get on fine by a leisurely pace in life. Why strain yourself?
Countries like Russia also rely on commodities, but per capita exports are far lower. Russia cannot lazily rely on low human capital exports to get rich; it needs to do very high-end exports, too. That’s why it is poor: it has failed to do so sufficiently thus far in large quantities.
Iceland and New Zealand just doesn’t need to, given their low population base. They are already rich with much less effort. So there’s no pressure. Why wouldn’t that attitude filter down to their kids? Life isn’t always fair.
Wrong, at least according to our department of education. Children can do just fine with cold water. And there are a dozen things missing or underfunded. I’m not so long out of the education system that I don’t remember it. Usually what would happen is that the school’s budget would carry it through to spring and then the rest of the year would be funded by donations. The freezing prefab classrooms were always fun.
I can’t seem to find a good comparison on Finnish performance in 2015 versus now. I checked the earlier post but Finland doesn’t seem to be in the graph(though I think Finland did participate). Did Finland’s rankings rise, fall, or mostly stay the same in the last four years?
Turkey is a serious regional manufacturing mini-giant, including tons of licensed F-16s and their own version of Abrams-tier tanks. They’ve got a navy to rival Italy’s and France’s, and they are Europe’s 5th biggest car manufacturer. Overall manufacturing output like Spain
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/manufacturing-output
Back when Erdogan started building thousand of religious schools, people reacted with the typical “OMG he’s a fundamentalist”, whereas he was doing the opposite. Making Turkish Islam a faithful arm of the state, the way Orthodox Christianity is in EE. In his own way, the git has sown the seeds of Turkey as a serious player in the 21st century. By pre-Great Rest logic, of course.
Turkey’s average IQ levels are at Croatia, Serbia, and Lithuania levels. With a population the size of Germany’s, correctly managing this human potential can and does produce results.
To summarize: Turkey has achieved Russia’s and China’s manufacturing and military capabilities, scaled down to size and ambition. It became the “regional crappy Italy/Spain”–what the Ukraine should have in fact become, but instead wasted all conceivable potential. Yet Turkey showed that this can be reversed in a generation, should there be a willing elite. And a leader willing to purge. Also Mexico could in theory also becomes like this, but the purge will have to be much more massive.
So yes, I think it’s credible.
Regarding Turkish IQ
https://i.redd.it/oadjdc17nw201.png
Yea well there isn’t really such thing as “high-end exports” that matters much by itself. What matters is service, its universal but especially true for newcomers such as Russia. Take SuperJet. SSJ100 is a good plane (French engine problem was solved years ago), but it suffers from lack of service centers so it can’t be a successful export product.
When you buy a high end product, it is not uncommon for the manufacturer to lose money on the sale but make it up in service over the years. Think Gillette losing money on razors but making up on the blade sales, or console manufacturers losing money on gaming systems but making up profits on game licenses of whatever.
When you buy a Toyota, you don’t really buy a Toyota car, you buy a service of dealership in your neighborhood.
Why is Rosatom so successful? Nobody really cares that it makes nuclear reactors. What matters is that Rosatom is a full service provider. Which is why it is successful and SSJ100 is not.
The good news here is that setting up a service and sales network is not rocket science, anybody can do this, even Russians. And they are doing it already for various products (including SSJ, even though more domestic oriented now).
The bad news – international dealership networks will open you to sanctions blackmail by the usual suspects (US).
But generally speaking, all Russia needs to do is open up sales and marketing divisions internationally, and set up dealership networks. It is expensive and time consuming, but not really difficult. Also, a lot of developed markets are saturated (US car market for example), and are stagnating, so there is no point in attempting entry. All the growth will be in the developing world, so I see a lot of export opportunities there, if service networks are established. Why is why im rather bullish on Russian economy.
Well, in the case of TIMMS, Russia’s fairly high human capital has translated into performance. In other areas OTOH…
Ha! You should have seen what the bathroom arrangements were in my American high school.
There was hot water, but, for the most part, the rest of it was worse than those horror stories that one hears about slum-dwellers in America in the year 1900. Come to think of it, now that I am even more based than I was then, I wonder how responsible the urban blacks that were bused-in were for the conditions. There weren’t many, in relative terms, but I could believe that they might have had a big impact. That or maybe it was the people with Down Syndrome that are allowed to go to high school.
At any rate, it wasn’t civilized, or commensurate with America’s wealth level.
This is a good chart. We all know China is the world factory, and this chart clearly demonstrates this.
However, Chinese nominal GDP is around $16 trillion. And as chart shows, manufacturing value is only $4 trillion. In econometric sense, if you completely destroyed Chinese manufacturing to zero, they would lose only 25% GDP. At their growth rates, China 2020 without manufacturing = China 2015.
That doesn’t mean manufacturing is not important. Manufacturing matters for human capital, national power, and quality of life. But it doesn’t matter in econometric terms such as GDP. Just like air. Air is absolutely vital for life, but doesn’t matter for GDP.
Which is why in econometric terms and nominal GDP, counting factories is incorrect (national power is different story). Service is where all the action is and will be in the future. This also goes well with my comment that “high end exports” are actually more like local services for the importing country.
Well, let’s see the scores broken down for Maoris, then.
If we find that Maoris performed much worse than white New Zealanders, would it somehow still be a “lazy” or unjustified generalization that Maoris pulled down the national average score?
Ireland’s military is a joke, so if not schools, what the heck is your government spending money on? They sound like our rulers, real winners.
Why do you think that Kazakhs perform so well on TIMSS and yet so poorly on PISA? This question is for Anatoly, AP, and everyone else here, for the record.
https://youtu.be/W08syd4Dd5s?t=26
Not surprised. African “America” isn’t America and isn’t civilized, period.
As for children with Down Syndrome, there are no longer many in the usa, canada, and europe because their “parents” routinely pay “doctors” to kill them before they are born. So they won’t be troubling your old school much.
https://i.imgur.com/X50IpUU.png
For the same reason Russia gets East Asian scores, and Caucasoids and now Turks get West European scores. See post (and link to TIMSS 2015 post).
We have exceptionally low human capital in politics, yes. Mostly the budget goes to paying off debt, an immensely bloated bureaucracy, a horribly inefficient health service, and of course welfare.
Hey I ain’t ashamed to admit it. Canada wouldn’t even be that high if it wasn’t for its (good) immigrants and its white city folks. However Canada would in the top 5 if it wasn’t for Quebec and its infinite retardation.
Sadly Quebec is a shit hole that makes Somalia look like it has its shit together. So it’s no surprise they import all the rejects that France won’t accept from the ex French colonies which in turn significantly drains the country as it deals with inhuman levels of illiteracy (and in turn dropping us down to this weak titty position).
Fucking Quebec. Ruining everything. I wish they would separate already so we can all point and laugh as the UN has to divert food aid away from Africa to feed these “people”. Even proper born-in-France Frenchmen look down on the peasants of Quebec and rightfully so.
What’s the reason for different countries having different shapes of their income vs score graph? Why does some countries have students from the 90th percentile of household income perform worse than those from the 70th or 80th percentile?
Huh, and yet I believe even second-generation Turks in Europe average an IQ of about 90. One would imagine Turks in the Netherlands would outperform or at least equal Turks in Turkey.
Anglo education, extremely low passing standards. If it’s anything like that of Australia I wouldn’t be particularly surprised.
I’d say the opposite, the Irish are usually though of as highly cultured and as intellectuals even. If anything it’s the English who have the reputation as “white trash” these days.
The most common moniker I hear given to Ireland is “the Land of Saints and Scholars”, I’ve heard England called many things but nothing as flattering as that.
The general perception of the education system in England is that it is low quality and lacks rigour. Most English people tend to assume that just about any country has a better education system than England.
It’s very common for companies here to complain that new recruits are lacking in basic numerical and literacy skills due to the sub-par education system. I’ve heard some companies say they prefer immigrants like Eastern Europeans because their general standard of education is perceived to be higher than native English people.
It has always baffled me why a country like Russia with such a well educated, Intelligent and relatively young population isn’t on par with Western Eyrope per capita and why it has an economy dependent on natural resources.
Why aren’t Russian luxury brands, tech companies, universities, etc absolutely dominating the world? Why does a country with such a high “quality” population lag behind so much? Why is there so much corruption and lack of innovation?
The Russian middle class are well educated but the Gopnik class is worse than the worst English Brexit voting football supporter. The Soviet Union provided considerable cultural facilities for the middle class using state funds. Libraries, theatre, opera ballet, sports hall, university education, guaranteed employment all for almost nothing. All paid for by Gopniks who didn’t use the facilities. The cultural capital has passed on.
Russian businesses do not think about export. They will not pay for advice and assistance to do it themselves. Foreigners are government business. Luxury brands can’t develop because Russians won’t accept a Russian brand as top class. Pity.
It’s not exceptionally intelligent (read the post), it’s not “dependent” on natural resources, and the legacy of 60 years central planning isn’t overcome in a few years.
This raises our score a bit, no doubt, but the bigger story is that we score this highly even with a school system that has been systemically trashed for going on sixty years now. Should Sweden ever take to the idea of having elite schools with fast tracks for gifted kids, I’m sure our 95% percentile would give Singapore a run for its money.
These things are fleeting, though. In Sweden, it took only a decade or two from the socialist days for local products to gain enormously in status. These days, a “made in Sweden” mark is a reliable guide to world-class quality.
I wrote this once before but Russia’s human capital is such that it should become a huge, cold Italy loaded with natural resources, with the right system for it in place. Avtovaz isn’t going to be another Toyota or BMW, but it may become another Fiat.
Irish teachers will tell you its poorly funded because as always, they want their next pay rise, they even wanted to go on strike during the covid nonsense
This is true. Russians are very backward people when it comes to marketing. And I say that as a Russian.
For example, I bought Russian winter boots when in St Pete past January. Those are good boots. Label – Ralph Ringer. Previously known as Squirrel Trading Company. (Торговый Дом Белка). I mean, seriously? What is wrong with you people? Pretentious people who like pretentious labels like ‘Ralph Ringer’ will never buy Russian, but have you seen how many views crazy squirrel videos get on YouTube? Russians threw away a goldmine! With edgy marketing, Squirrel Trading House could make global hipster population eat from their hands. But no, they betrayed their authentic heritage and went pompous. Stupid.
Same with English language everywhere in St Pete. It’s just stupid. I get desire to be helpful, but if I’m a Western tourist and I go to Russia, I want enigma, dark beauty, mystique. If I wanted to take a selfie in front of the English language “Cofe Cafe”, I can do this in Albuquerque New Mexico. Russia needs tourist displays not just in Russian, but in old, pre-Revolutionary Imperial Russian language. Now that selfie would be cool and you could show it to your friends back home.
Seriously Russian marketing people, learn your customers.
You say it as if it was some bad thing.
If the Haredim were included, Israel’s scores would be considerably lower. Maybe 40 points.
I agree.
Maybe the Haredim communities in the USA should be considered hidden foreign aid.
Turkey caught my eye, too. They seem to do slightly better than Bulgaria. Maybe the larger Central Asian input helps.
They did conquer much of Europe, even though they were held back by inefficient Ottoman institutions, so I doubt that they’re stupid. Two Turks developed the vaccine for coronavirus, and two Turks founded Atlantic Records. Turkey might actually get somewhere if they get a better government.
The Kurdish areas score the lowest; but that might be due to the persecution they face.
Ireland used to have low test scores. Not anymore.
It correlates with my experiences, sure. Also as our resident crypto-pajeet, Thulean Perspective, says, there’s also a lack of incentive compared to places like Lithuania or Russia where poor results in school lead to truly crappy lifestyles, with little opportunity to make good on earlier laziness in school.
This is still the case today? Dodgy legal firms with names like “Гуд Эдвайс”, crappy barbers like “Топ Хэаркац”, I remember that garbage popping up everywhere, ach.
It’s not that it’s bad, the actual places and goods are really really good, but labeling is cringe.
Here is a non tourist example – apartment complex near my family apartment in St Pete (and no, my family wouldn’t be able to afford a place in that complex. LOL, even I wouldn’t be able to afford a top range apartment on there ($770k). So it’s nice.
https://spb.gdeetotdom.ru/zhk-tvin-piks-216/
But the name? Tvin Piks? Seriously? It’s not even for tourists, it’s a sleeper district. The fact that its not even touristy makes it so much worse.
I bet the apartments are amazing. But name is so cringe.
https://youtu.be/c1QcjsjjtRc
Natural resources offer the best return on investment, oil is a blessing.
Few more years and Turkey’s gdp (ppp) per capita will surpass Southern Europe. And this is without EU assistance.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ElWLDw7XgAEchfZ?format=jpg&name=medium
Maybe you are not Indian, but you know surprisingly little about the Scandinavian countries, 2/3 of Icelands population is living on area of about 1000km2, the land is not cheap in Reykjavik, and large areas of Iceland are quite inhospitable and/or without good services, most modern people are not comfortable living by sheep farming, far away from schools and hospitals, so people are constantly moving out from the countryside to Reykjavik. Also their aluminium industry is as important for their economy as the fishing. They got much cheap thermal energy, so it has helped quite a lot.
I dont know much about New Zealand, but it seems that they are a highly urbanised society, and that most people there dont want to live middle of nowhere, just like vast majority of Australians dont want to live in the outback.
So it seems Serbian 4th graders do better than Serbian 8th graders. Intriguing
Their pay is mostly fine, of course the unions will always want more for less work but that’s not the issue here. It’s the actual schools themselves and the educational resources that are underfunded.
You know that something like Amarillo or Odessa in Texas is basically considered a megacity in New Zealand outside of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch right? Basically New Zealand has only 3 cities, while the others are basically very large towns, especially in South Island.
I bet it won’t. Good luck with shit-coin tier currency, dsygenic patterns, illegal immigration, brain drainage and high inflation/high unemployment/high debt. Few more years, Turkey will explode, one way or another.
You are missing my point, even in countries that have lots of land, most people are packed in cities, and dont have any desire to move to countryside, in those cities land is quite expensive in comparison to the countryside. 86% of New Zealanders live in Urban areas, every third lives in Auckland, In a city which is quite densely populated in comparison to the big cities of Texas.
If I understand correctly, he is making comparisons to the subcontinent, and saying that there is lots of room for more subcons in those places. In other words, it is largely aspirational.
I don’t think Icelanders or New Zealanders would think in those terms, but rather in the sense of constrained geography, and wanting to remain food secure, and to not be inundated by sun peoples.
But, anyway, isn’t Iceland quite expensive to live in, because they need to import almost everything?
Here are the returns of a typical Energy mutual fund, current date. You must know something that I don’t:
DATE MAX
LOAD (%) SINCE
INCEPT. (%) YTD (%) 1Y (%) 3Y (%) 5Y (%) 10Y (%)
4.70 -35.74 -29.33 -19.48 -13.50 -8.81
My sister bought a really nice large home on a small lake about 20 miles outside of Mpls for over 600k about 3 years ago. She recently bought a very similar home about 40 miles further out on a much larger and nicer lake in an equally upscale neighborhood in a small town for just over 300k. Once you retire (and there a lot of retirees out there) you don’t need to live in a packed city and your desires can change. 🙂 Plenty of theaters, restaurants and shops are located in the suburbs – you don’t have to live in the city and get caught up in all of the SJW scams. Oh, and did I mention that property taxes are much smaller too?
Also, for what it’s worth, the Pfizer vaccine was developed by two Turks:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccine-team-couple-intl/index.html
Let’s see what they have in store for the infidels.
Turkey itself is I think buying the Chinese and Russian ones.
PISA disaggregates scores for “native pupils”. They have a very liberal definition: your dad was born in the country. We do pretty well. Probably wouldn’t give Singapore a run for its money, though, given that the average level will determine where your 95th percentile will be, but still highly respectable.
Another fact to keep in mind is that we are recepients of human capital across the world. Just a few days ago, researchers at Chalmers invented a new cooling method for electronics using graphene. The names were mostly foreign. This is something all these tests fail to capture. Flow of global talent matters greatly for innovative capacity.
Living in the capital region is a choice, not a compulsion. It’s also a mistake to only look at land when the sea for Iceland is a big revenue stream. Iceland isn’t cheap overall, but that is a function of very high incomes.
As for New Zealand, don’t confuse population density with economic activity. Most of their exports come from large but low density farmlands. That model would never work in a densely populated country or a country which has a huge population. You need both conditions for this to work, and both Iceland and New Zealand has that. In the case of Iceland, it’s the sea as much as the land which counts.
P.S. I’m fairly amused to be accused of not knowing much about Scandinavia by some hapa mutt who can’t even string together a proper sentence in any of our languages.
I had this debate with Dmitry when he compared Turkey to China and all I could do was laugh. Not even Russia is at China’s manufacturing capability (adjusted for size), Turkey is even further out. Their MIC is okay, but outside of drones they don’t really have any real competitive edge. And even most “turkish” drones are just imported components from various NATO countries put together. Turkish net wages are lower than Albania.
Well, well it seems that your progressiveness disappears right away when you are even slightly provoked. Sad that most Swedes are more composed.
Is that a challenge? But I challenged you first, so you must first answer to my questions of the last open threads comment 101# and then I will reveal if I can make a proper sentence in a Scandinavian language.
Where and when I had such confusion?
Did I claim that theres such compulsion in Iceland? Still to live in small village middle of nothing, or moving to small town with services like restaurants, shops, parks etc, is quite easy choice to make for most young people. Same stuff happens with many pensioners, they are old and sick and need services and care, and cant drive everywhere like they used to.
I certainly do. Commodities are cyclical, I will be loading up on oil in the next few months, Russian ones look good, none of the green carp. Meanwhile look at Eld.to, Pog.l, poly.l, pur.l etc.
Anyway I was not talking about equity returns, oil has a high ROC, most industries you can only make normal profits, natural resources can earn abnormal at the right point in the cycle. That is why no one leaves the stuff in the ground, whether Russia or Australia or Canada. Where would Saudi Arabia be without oil?
Services is nothing without a manufacturing base.
Doubt you have even met many Swedes IRL, which continues your pattern of guesswork of things you have little cognition of.
Ugh your world view is a nightmare. Cancel all tourism.
That’s what I like bout this blog, you meet so many interesting people who known so many things, from whom hopefully you might learn a thing or two…
WTH, please slow down, I don’t understand any of the jargon?…
So why wouldn’t the supposed rise in oil commodities soon translate over to related equities? I don’t think that we’ve really even begun to feel the real downturn in world economies related to the pandemic debacle. Why are you so optimistic that oil commodity prices will soon rise? A bad economy doesn’t bode well for energy prices. More and more people are working in their homes, and don’t need to travel to work.
Saudi Arabia has long ago learned that it’s too dependent on the only show in town, that is oil and gas, and has been trying to diversify away into other industries. Russia too has learned this lesson the hard way, and is now wisely diversifying away as much as it can, especially into the agricultural and food industries, although it still has a long way to go in order to reach its potential.
And of course, the good old USA will continue (I think, even under the new SJW ruling caste) to keep prices down with shale derived oil. Why all the optimism Mr. London Gold?
Not for purposes of GDP accounting or even modern business practices. You can manufacture anywhere (which is why West sent manufacturing to China, Malaysia, Vietnam), it doesn’t matter. But without service, your manufactured exports are worthless.
Imagine if Toyota didn’t have dealership service networks that would change oil filters and stuff. All those Toyota cars would be completely worthless, non functional, and nobody would care how many of them were manufactured.
I think that was the sort of problems Soviet Union production grappled with – lots of items not enough service.
What about Venezuela? There does seem to be a processing cost by which “leaving it in the ground” seems reasonable.
Lack of a manufacturing base leads to loss of knowledge and cross-competencies, so it also impedes service and value creation both internally and externally. This makes it a necessary but not sufficient explainer of GDP; Japanese manufacturing, for example, also ultimately serves to provide the knowledge base for the rest of the infrastructure for the lifetime of the product. There are examples – especially in the Gulf – where everything is purchased overseas, and the cross-competencies are also missing, and they end up having to import the necessary components for service as well.
Saudi Arabia is probably the most extreme example: can’t build the fighter jet(no manufacturing), can’t maintain the jet(have to hire outside maintenance), and can’t train the pilot(no service to operate it). So they end up burning capital on all ends.
There’s been rumors for decades that Arabs from that region lack the visuospacial capacity required to operate fighter jets with reasonable skill. I think it has something to do with their heads being shaped to minimize heat gain from the sun.
Some say that their strategy is to rely on Pakistanis, though I can’t vouch for that.
Singapore and Dubai are the biggest standouts. They are a triumph for diversity, for city-states, for good government.
Diverse Singapore, a quarter malay and tamil, outperforms all the homogenous east asian nations who in turn outperform the rest of the world. It also has the lowest crime rate of any major country on the planet. What does that tell you?
Arab-ruled Muslim Dubai, with its majority south asian population, ranked higher than every European nation…except Russia. It also has one of the very lowest crime rates, almost negligible.
Singapore:
https://d3ba08y2c5j5cf.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/09102636/14081106139_821425f7d1_o.jpg
Dubai:
https://imagevars.gulfnews.com/2019/09/29/Dubai-skyline_16d7de0fdce_large.jpg
What’s gone wrong in France? Germany is doing better than France but still surprisingly low in the rankings. This does not bode well for the future of the European Union.
Probably something funny going on there, doesn’t line up with Abu Dhabi.
Abu Dhabi accounts for 2/3 of the economy of the UAE, despite being a smaller city that Dubai. The reason is that Dubai’s oil wealth is waning and somewhat second-hand, but Abu Dhabi still controls substantial reserves. I imagine the pressure to BS academic results must be higher in Dubai.
But they have the visuospatial capacity to form the best light cavalry in the world during 7th century? Doing cavalry operations well seems to require a lot of spatial ability.
Quebec is a shit hole that makes Somalia look like it has its shit together.
I’ve lived in both French and English Canada, and I still go back and forth. On balance, I would say Quebec is more livable:
The difference between the rich and the poor is smaller. Non-union blue-collar jobs generally pay better in Quebec than in the rest of Canada.
The elites are more responsive to public opinion. In most cases, they are only one generation removed from the common people. In English Canada, they live in their own world and feel no connection to other Canadians.
There are crummy areas in Montreal. There are also crummy areas in Toronto. The difference is that the latter are more expensive.
So it’s no surprise they [Quebec] import all the rejects that France won’t accept …
I guess I’m the first person to tell you. Well, here goes: Canadian immigration policy is made primarily by the federal government in Ottawa. They’re the ones who design the procedures that allow people to immigrate to Canada from Africa or elsewhere. Yes, African immigrants go disproportionately to Quebec, but that’s because they are disproportionately French-speaking.
The Quebec government does have some power over the total number of immigrants allowed into the province each year, and it has used that power to reduce its annual intake. The other provinces don’t even bother (yes, they have that power too).
Japan doesn’t live off manufacturing though. They live off massive money printer in their Central Bank, like Arabs do with oil.
What you say is true for the development of human capital and national power. Those things matter in real life but not so much in economics and accounting. Which is why despite being quite advanced and powerful nation, Japan can’t live without a money printer. 🙂
The problem with things like this TIMSS of PISA, is that if you extrapolate this, then cities like Manila or Jakarta would basically be mad of mud huts or bungalows, since they have native engineers building those things. But then the most affluent parts of greater Manila or Jakarta, look like very miniature versions of Guangzhou or Shanghai, in terms of the number of tall buildings and skyscrapers. The Philippine Bar Exam is also reportedly as difficult as the New York bar exam, and has an OKish passing rate of 20 percent, Indonesia also produces a decent amount of CFA graduates.
Something related is to measure how large is the cognitive elite of these places are.
Well sure, China is more self-sufficient in the manufacturing sense, while Turkey is just an element within a larger chain. Russia and China make their own military jets, while Turkey makes F-16s and so on. But being part of a larger chain doesn’t mean you aren’t doing what you’re doing. Just that theoretically you depend on the whims of foreigners.
For example India today is being a geopolitical rival of China in Africa and Asia not because India itself rivals China’s progress, but because it is being propped up by the US, the UK, and Japan. Also it buys good military stuff from Russia. So while China has to develop its own tanks, and jets, and rockets, and satellite grids, and computer tech, India receives it on a platter just for “being a good ally” as in a counterbalance to China. Yet this doesn’t make India’s capacity less real here and now, just because they didn’t make it themselves.
Anyway. It’s likely that Dmitry compared Turkey to China due to Turkey playing the market role in EE of China in the whole world. Cheap clothes and shoes? Check. Cheap electric and tech supplies? Check. Factories for western car makers? Check. Cheap fast house building across the region? Check. Knock off hunting rifles? Check. And so on. A true “mini-China” in the older sense.
So let’s agree on a compromise, that Turkey has currently peaked on the level of China circa 2005.
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/china-exports.png?s=cnfrexpd&v=202012102300V20200908&d1=19951218
Also with the wages:
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/china-wages.png?s=chinawag&v=202012102300V20200908&d1=19951218
Which is what most people still think when you say “China” to them, since almost always far lands are imagined as a mix of media nonsense, and what they really were like a generation or two ago.
Likewise, militarily, let’s accept that Turkey is on the level of Russia as it was when it flattened Georgia in half an hour back in 2008. Had it really being Turkey vs Armenia a month ago, as opposed to working through the Azeris, we would likely have seen a repeat of 2008. Maybe not in 3 days, but in 3 weeks.
Turkey cannot do everything China can in 2020, but it certainly rivals China circa 2005. And maybe it can’t do militarily everything Russia can in 2020, but it certainly rivals Russia circa 2008.
Thank you for making me think this through with my covfefe!
What Turkey exports
https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/exports-by-category
Whom it exports it to
https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/exports-by-country
Also what Mexico exports
https://tradingeconomics.com/mexico/exports-by-category
Philippines
https://tradingeconomics.com/philippines/exports-by-category
Thailand
https://tradingeconomics.com/thailand/exports-by-category
The world has changed. Places that back in the day we expected to sell mainly fruits and textiles are now actually manufacturing hubs.
Now, Brazil and Indonesia still look the way they’re “supposed to”
https://tradingeconomics.com/indonesia/exports-by-category
https://tradingeconomics.com/brazil/exports-by-category
But then again so does Russia
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/exports-by-category
The Ukraine’s top export is apparently 1980s power metal
https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/exports-by-category
So you never know what’s under the surface, not without additional research
You know Indonesia makes cars, locomotives, and tanks right? Also, Filipinos have very high incomes in the US, and by Filipinos those are not Chinese Filipinos. Also they make up most of the marine technicians on board ships. Basically there seems to be a disconnect between those scores and real world achievements by third world countries. With the exception of black Africans and possibly Muslim Arabs. Also European and American airlines have their aircraft maintained by technicians in the Philippines due to low labor costs.
Great article. Should have emphasized the dramatic increase in Chinese rural wages, as a leading cause, but still very good analysis!
https://twitter.com/ArtyomLukin/status/1337021797724721153?s=20
Jakarta is literally falling into the sea by an accelerating pace. Even their major sea dam project is unlikely to prevent this by more than 20-30 years. Doesn’t speak well for their cognitive elites (contrast with the Netherlands).
And the performance of the Serbs in 1999 does not indicate sub 90 level IQ.
You see a lot of impressive skyscrapers and motorways in Indonesia. The Philippines has the same IQ and demographics as Indonesia and they are able to produce high quality pilots with a very good safety record. Basically aside from black Africans and possibly Muslim Arabs the third world countries really seem to be overperforming their test scores. Afghans and Houthis also overperform relative to IQ.
Export structure is insuffient in of itself. You need to look at quantum of change, too. Philippines’ export structure is impressive but they are also massively reliant on remittances as a way to cover their current account deficits in previous years. More so than most developing countries.
Turkey’s tourist receipt is a form of services exports which form a very important bulk of their balance of payments.
By contrast, Vietnam, which is becoming very popular with tourists, is a manufacturing giant. You can see this by looking at how the two countries have evolved in their total exports (goods and services).
https://i.imgur.com/g3dnpAt.png
Clearly, Vietnam is rapidly climbing the ladder of industrialisation in a way that Turkey does not. Turkey’s currency has collapsed by ~80% over the past decade, which should have given a much stronger export impetus, which it clearly has not. I’m of the opinion their GDP stats are overstated given their low wages and that Vietnamese GDP is probably understated. I don’t think the two countries are actually that far away from each other.
To sum up, export structure alone does not tell us the full story. How well can a country grow using it, without its currency crashing in value? That’s the test that Vietnam and other East Asian tigers before it passed. Turkey has failed.
I think the underlying capabilities of both countries are better than these tests tell us. Philippines in particular is a mystery to me. But their underperformance is not new. On the latest PISA they are dead last.
I know too little about the Philippines to make any definitive statements as to why that is, but 2nd-gen Filipinos in the US and elsewhere do very well for themselves, even controlling for SES. Some of that is likely due to selective migration. Nevertheless, I know that India’s low scores in these tests (PISA 2009 being the last example) is not representative of Indian capabilities. A point I’ve made multiple times by pointing at the Singaporean Indian diaspora pre-1990 which was mostly composed of middle and lower caste Tamils, yet rose to 90% of Chinese-Singaporean earnings.
But yes, the “mystery of the Philippines” deserves further scrutiny.
During his life, Lee Kuan Yew openly shared his thoughts about the world, nations, especially Singapore’s neighbors, including the Philippines.
In his book “From Third World to First,” Lee shared lessons on development, diplomacy, policy-making, history, culture and domestic affairs.
He also wrote about building Singapore’s ties with the Philippines.
Lee recounted an event following the assassination of Senator Ninoy Aquino in 1983 and international outrage that resulted in foreign banks blocking all loans to the Philippines:
[Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos] sent his minister for trade and industry, Bobby Ongpin, to ask me for a loan of US$300—500 million to meet the interest payments. I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Will never see that money back’.
On coup attempts during Corazon Aquino’s presidency that discouraged inflow of investments, Lee wrote:
This was a pity because they had so many able people, educated in the Philippines and the United States. Their workers were English-speaking, at least in Manila. There was no reason why the Philippines should not have been one of the more successful of the ASEAN countries.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the most developed, because America had been generous in rehabilitating the country after the war. Something was missing, a gel to hold society together.
The people at the top, the elite mestizos, had the same detached attitude to the native peasants as the mestizos in their haciendas in Latin America had toward their peons.
They were two different societies: Those at the top lived a life of extreme luxury and comfort while the peasants scraped a living, and in the Philippines it was a hard living. They had no land but worked on sugar and coconut plantations.
Lee hailed President Fidel Ramos for being “more practical” than his predecessor.
In November 1992, I visited [Ramos]. In a speech to the 18th Philippine Business Conference, I said, ‘I do not believe democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy.’ In private, President Ramos said he agreed with me that British parliamentary-type constitutions worked better because the majority party in the legislature was also the government. Publicly, Ramos had to differ.
Lee also criticized some factors that prevented the Philippines’ progress:
Ramos knew well the difficulties of trying to govern with strict American-style separation of powers. The senate had already defeated Mrs. Aquino’s proposal to retain the American bases. The Philippines had a rambunctious press but it did not check corruption. Individual press reporters could be bought, as could many judges.
The Singaporean leader also felt sorry for the Philippines’ apparent brain drain.
Something had gone seriously wrong. Millions of Filipino men and women had to leave their country for jobs abroad beneath their level of education.
Filipino professionals whom we recruited to work in Singapore are as good as our own. Indeed, their architects, artists, and musicians are more artistic and creative than ours.
This is also how Lee described the Filipino people:
It is a soft, forgiving culture. Only in the Philippines could a leader like Ferdinand Marcos, who pillaged his country for over 20 years, still be considered for a national burial. Insignificant amounts of the loot have been recovered, yet his wife and children were allowed to return and engage in politics.
Some Filipinos write and speak with passion. If they could get their elite to share their sentiments and act, what could they not have achieved?
In an interview with Foreign Affairs magazine in March 1994, Lee had foreseen a continuous growth in East Asia, partly due to countries’ lessons from wars.
One reason why growth is likely to last for many years in East Asia — and this is just a guess — is that the peoples and the governments of East Asia have learned some powerful lessons about the viciousness and destructiveness of wars. Not only full-scale wars like in Korea, but guerrilla wars as in Vietnam, in Cambodia and in the jungles of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. We all know that the more you engage in conflict, the poorer and the more desperate you become.
In an April 2014 issue of Forbes magazine, Lee also wrote about the South China Sea dispute between the China and its smaller neighbors, including the Philippines.
The disputes, which arise from claims based on different principles, are unlikely to be resolved.
Lee explained that China does not see itself becoming a global leader without control of virtually the entire South China Sea, where a third of the world’s trade passes through.
Much more is at stake than rocks and resources. China sees the South China Sea as one of its key interests. A rising China is asserting its position by claiming historical rights to these waters.
Lee said Philippine-initiated arbitration through the United Nations tribunal, meanwhile, is a juridical platform that major global powers such as China and the United States do not submit to.
A resurgent China isn’t going to allow its sea boundaries to once again be decided by external parties.
Well, native Filipinos are not a very serious people, and are always up for a party. Also note that high SES Chinese generally do not settle and migrate to South East Asia. Also, mainland Chinese see Malaysian Chinese as being quite soft and laid back. Indonesia is actually quite impressive (more so that the Philippines), and is quite self-dependent in industrial products, particularly arms manufactures. Basically they are the Turkey of South East Asia.
I mean self-sufficient. Like Indonesia makes its own tanks, AFVs/IFVSs, small arms, and maritime patrol aircraft
The Philippine manufacturing sector is basically decimated relative to where it was 20 years ago, due to China. Back in the 90s it used to have a very strong textile and electronics industry, as well as manufacture of sewing machines, and also auto assembly south of Manila. And considering its geographical location and almost nonexistent external defenses it does not have much choice but to court the US as its guarantor of external security also.
First of all, thanks for a good post.
Indeed, this would have been a true comparison perhaps 10-15 years ago. But China today is a much different beast, as I made clear to him. Yes, it still provides a base for low-cost manufacturing and assembly but it also has high-tech capabilities that Turkey simply lacks. Because of China’s huge size, these apparent contradictions can co-exist.
One point I made to Dmitry is that China’s scientific innovation is now quite considerable, even adjusting for a per capita basis. Turkey is far, far behind on any such metric. You mentioned the vaccine in a previous post, but several points need to be made. First, it is one of many candidates. Second, it needs to be stored at -70 celcius, which makes it next to useless for developing countries where such cold-chain storage infra is lacking to non-existing. Third, there are over 500 scientists in their firm. They are the business managers.
By contrast, both Sputnik V and Sinovac can be used in much more normal temperatures, which will mean they are both relevant for the developing world. So this nonsense narrative of “the world saved by turkish immigrants” amuses me no end.
Yes, this is a fair compromise. If anything I’d be a bit more generous and put the date to 2010. But this compromise also undercuts the argument that China and Turkey are somehow comparable today, which is what I originally pushed back on against Dmitry and now in this thread. I don’t think most people have internalised how much has changed in the past decade in terms of China’s innovative capabilities, which is something I run into a lot.
”And even most “turkish” drones are just imported components from various NATO countries put together. ”
This statement is factually incorrect.
On the other hand there is no reason to compare human capital levels of Turkey to China, Turkey will very likely stop at Western Med (Spain & Italy) levels. China on the other hand has the capacity to become a Singapore with 1,4 billion population. From the West, only Germany can be compared to China.
Although CRISPR will probably change all these calculations.
Like I said commodities are cyclical, you get abnormal profits for a period and then normal profits. Trying to diversify away is pointless, won’t happen for the low IQ Saudis, Canada is almost all natural resources plus a few cars, Australia is all natural resources plus agriculture (ever bought anything which said Made in Australia?). Russia could develop and has a decent tech sector (goes hand in hand with a strong defense sector), but never will they be a manufacturing powerhouse like China.
Oil will bounce back, timing it is always the issue. Money printing, Asian economies are doing well and there has been a complete collapse in investment for new oil production.
Sure there are uneconomic deposits and always will be, as well as marginal ones, but most have very healthy margins that allow for returns you just don’t get in other sectors. For a nation they also pay a lot in taxes, generate exports and have well paid jobs. The downside is they are capital intensive.
It tells you that scale matters. Therefore making generalizations from cities to whole countries is a foolish endeavor.
This covers goods. IIRC export of IT services was around $5 billion last year, which would have been 3rd place. But steel is a major source of hard currency.
Singapore is largely not Chinese and and outlying city-state. Extrapolating hypothetical Chinese performance from this center to all of China would be like assuming Russia’s eventual performance based in Moscow. A more realistic model for eventual China would be Taiwan.
Ssshhh, you’re not supposed to display such intelligence lest the trolls think that you’re not an Indian.
Because the Phillipines doesn’t depend on the Mekong river, China has weaponized its status as an upper Riparian Superpower and hasn’t signed on to any of the UN water sharing agreements Tibet is the Saudi Arabia of water with so many great rivers the lifeline of billions flowing out of that remote land. India had a chance to make it a buffer state before the communists conquered it but was too busy navel gazing and such historic doors only open once in Millenia.
About Mekong – Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam depend on it and the former two are client states of China the latter two do whatever little they can do to resist Chinese Hegemony but the combination of Economic/Military and upper riparian superpower is too much for these tough little states though Vietnam was the first to make the APEC officially complain about the Dragon a bold move
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong#Dams
There’s a lot of this water power of the Dragon on
https://chellaney.net/
https://asiatimes.com/?s=mekong
Oh and India is going to feel the love they’re going to Dam the Brahmaputra, Nehru ought to be resurrected and hanged.
Heh, yeah, but isn’t that more of a well-known issue with GDP? Thus the commentary, even in the college economics book I read that GDP is maximized by breaking windows and increasing divorces since it only measures number of transactions, rather than value added by transactions.
Though so far, it still seems generally tied to well being.
I’m not really sure this is true. I think it is the horse (or camel) that does the finer maneuvering, mostly moving with its fellows in a charge. Or in a harassment, not coming close enough where fine maneuvering would be needed.
A plane has to operate in three dimensions, which makes it a great deal harder, IMO.
Brahmaputra though massive isn’t very important economically to India 95% + of its water flows straight through on to Bangladesh and then to the Bay of Bengal.
The areas with hydro electric potential on the Indian side is very geologically active.
The states through which it passes like Assam get massive rains and have problems of excess water.
Even though the Ganges river theoretically originates in Tibet but the Alaknanda River which originates in Tibet accounts for at best 5-10% of Ganges water.
I actually support what China is doing because this gives us the pretext to tear up the Indus Water Treaty later this decade and divert Indus water as well as that of two more rivers gifted to Pakistan by that cross dressing pansy Nehru.
We are already busy building dams in anticipation of unilateral withdrawal from the IWT later this decade.
But like I’ve pointed out, any positive movement in oil commodities will shortly translate over to equites as well. As you can see, from the historic information, oil stocks have been a lousy investment for at least 10 years (probably closer to 15). The world is headed more towards economic downturns than any recoveries, oil reserves are filled up, so oil still looks like a bad play. As long as world economies are not humming along, who’ll need the excess oil? Sure, “timing is everything” but do you really want to ties up a lot of funds for 5-10 more years to possibly see a major rise in oil prices?
What do you mean by that? This site says it’s about 75% Chinese.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sn.html
I wrote largely, not mostly. In addition to being an international trade center and city-state, the place is 1/4 non-Chinese, the minorities being peoples not found in China. Singapore just isn’t representative of China.
The foolishness is entirely on your side. If “scale matters” why doesn’t Hong Kong, which is also a city like Singapore, rank above Japan, South Korea and Taiwan? Why does Russia, by far the most populous European nation, rank the highest in Europe?
Show us where in the data you found a negative correlation between ranking and population size.
Btw, that tall building in the center of Dubai’s skyline is the tallest skyscraper in the world, a rank it has held for a full decade. The second tallest (about 25% shorter than the 1st) is in Shanghai, China. The 3rd tallest skyscraper is in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. For a few years the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia were the tallest in the world, now they are #17.
Of the 74 tallest skyscrapers 61 are in Asia, Dubai alone has 9. All together muslim nations have 15 on that list (all in Asia). North America has 10, 7 in NYC, 3 in Chicago. Europe has 3, all in Russia.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings
The Burj Khalifa of Dubai, by far the tallest building on the planet:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/93/Burj_Khalifa.jpg/1200px-Burj_Khalifa.jpg
” I don’t think that we’ve really even begun to feel the real downturn in world economies related to the pandemic debacle.”
Yikes, why?
It is worth noting here that the Great Pyramid of Giza in Africa was the tallest man-made structure on the planet for an astounding 3800 years!
https://www.thehistoryhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Great-Pyramid-of-Giza-Photos.jpg
The early financial stop gap measures put into play, at least in the US, have been to some extent successful in stemming the fallout. There’s likely to be one more large stimulus package, and then what? A year from now, we’ll have a clearer picture of the extent of the world economic downturn.
Let me repeat what I said: “making generalizations from cities to whole countries is a foolish endeavor.” You have responded by suggesting I do that very thing. If Singapore were the worst performing country on this measure, my point would apply equally.
Note I said “scale matters.” I did not say scale is the single most important variable through which all generalizations about the data must be centered.
I responded by pointing out the utter foolishness of your assertion in the context we are talking about here which is ranking by TIMSS.
I challenged you to show us where you found scale mattering in TIMSS. Do it or admit you were wrong.
Lol at your dumb and dishonest weaseling. Defend what you said not what you didn’t say. Show us where “scale matters” in the data above.
Btw, Singapore is comparable to Hong Kong in scale and it significantly outperforms the latter. Hong Kong doesn’t have Singapore’s 25% minority of brown muslim malays and black hindu tamils. What does that tell you?
You responded rather idiotically with a strawman. You made a comparison between the TIMSS scores and crime rates of “diverse Singapore” and homogenous east Asian countries and asked what that tells you. I gave you an answer. An answer that explains why making large inferences from comparisons of city state Singapore to larger homogenous east Asian or to other large countries is a “foolish endeavor.” Somehow you took this to mean I think small places in general(or small places with TIMSS scores at least) should score better than large places. Just because you are willing to make far-reaching assumptions about things such as “diversity” or “good governance” based on rather thin evidence, doesn’t justify your assuming others behave the same way. I never claimed what you say I claimed, and therefore I can kick back and laugh every time you challenge me to prove something I never claimed and have no interest in proving.
🙂 🙂 🙂
“It tells you that scale matters. Therefore making generalizations from cities to whole countries is a foolish endeavor.”
Above is what I said. You instead want me to defend what you have said.
If I want to know how muslim Malays and black hindu Tamils perform, then I will look at how muslim Malays overall score or how black hindu Tamils perform. What I wouldn’t do, is find some small place which contains a tiny percentage of the world’s muslim Malays and black hindu Tamils, and take that places overall score and compare it to other places to bolster some poorly considered point about diversity or good governance. In the case of muslim Malays we can get a better idea of how they perform by looking at the scores of Malaysia, rather than Singapore.
The most comical thing about this is that you don’t even know what the test scores of muslim Malays and black hindu Tamils in Singapore are. It’s quite possible their scores are significantly lower than other groups in Singapore, and therefore Singapore would rank even higher without them. What relevance does any of this have to my point? None. It is crucial to your claims however. Making statements about the value of diversity when you don’t even know the scores of the “diverse” groups is quite foolish indeed.
All you have accomplished is to show that you can make dumb comparisons.
And your explanation for why that was a ‘foolish endeavor’ was: “scale matters”. Which proved your stupidity and ignorance as I showed. There is no correlation between scale and TIMMS ranking. But you don’t have the class to acknowledge your error.
On the other hand anyone with a clue knows that urban crime rates tend to be higher than rural rates which makes my point even better. Despite being entirely urban, racially and culturally diverse Singapore’s murder rate (the most egregious crime) is a fraction of the homogenous east asian nations’ murder rate.
What does that tell you?
Arent crime and murder rates in Honduras and El Salvador one of the worst in the whole world? I believe that both of those countries are very rural.
Those places absorb human capital from the entire country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Honduras
El Salvador is about as urban as Russia, Switzerland, Hungary…