
PISA : Diligent Asia, indolent West  - ekm2
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/12/daily-chart-1?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/tr/diligentasiaindolentwest
======
newnewnew
Steve Sailer's PISA analysis is indispensable in any discussion of PISA
scores[1][2]

[1] [http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-which-countries-
not-...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-which-countries-not-to-
trust.html)

[2] [http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-
is...](http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-
in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k)

~~~
yapcguy
The second link [2] is very interesting - it breaks down some past USA results
by ethnicity.

It also seems the underlying PISA data is a closely guarded secret. No doubt a
political tinderbox.

> Why does my second graph have to compare reading scores from 2009 to science
> scores from 2006 and math scores from 2003?

~~~
subsystem
You can't really compare different data sets like that.

------
joyeuse6701
Hmph, It seems that there are only two countries on that list for Mathematics
with the same degree of cardinality to the U.S... Russia and Japan. These I
would find to be more appropriate a comparison than say, a city to a country.
It seems disingenuous to label Shanghai as China, as if it was representative
of the whole, and then compare it to the U.S... They are supposedly comparing
states, but I think there are more appropriate comparisons that could be made.

------
rollo_tommasi
I would take this measure of comparison with a large grain of salt; the
Chinese scores especially are almost meaningless:

[http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-
chalkboard/posts...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-
chalkboard/posts/2013/10/09-pisa-china-problem-loveless)

------
robotys
If we apply the "D people will be boss to A people" rules, then US can be
relieve as they will still be the leader to asians.

I believe that the "not so good in exam" type is excellent in another thing
aside academic, and that thing usually make them leader.

------
chrischen
My teachers have been telling me this since 2000.

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tokenadult
The degree to which the United States continues to be successful even though
people here, on average, don't work as hard as people in east Asia, on
average, is a puzzlement to east Asians. My take on the situation is that the
founders of the United States were largely people who worked very hard indeed,
and they were probably in the top rank in the world of that time in how hard
they worked. Thus the United States still has accumulated resources (not just
capital resources, but a society structured on the basis of sounder rule by
law) that gives it a long-term advantage, allowing many Americans now to
become complacent. It is a fact that most east Asian countries have been
growing economically and improving socially at a faster rate than the United
States has during my adult lifetime, so they could catch up[1] (and then,
perhaps, have many inhabitants decide to take it easy).

I shared this link, after reading it, with my Facebook friends as I waited to
see if it would bubble up to the front page of Hacker News. Sure enough,
several of my American-born, American-raised friends thought that the article
describes a situation of east Asian toil that they don't desire to emulate. A
south Asian friend of mine gave the post a thumbs up, and went back to work
without commenting further. The stored-up wealth of the United States also
prompted a comment from another Facebook friend, also brought up and born in
the United States:

"I believe the following: 1\. America enjoys success today largely because of
immigrant labor, not American labor. 2\. American universities are still far
and away the best in the world, but they are getting worse rapidly. 3\.
American universities increasingly serve foreign students, not American
students. 4\. Investing in America is far safer than anywhere else in the
world because of such organizations as the SEC. 5\. People hate the SEC rules
and are looking for ways around them with increasing success, in large part
because the investors are foreign and not used to such rules.

"I am reminded of the fall of Sparta."

One observation of this phenomenon I heard around the most recent turn of the
century was from Christians in Taiwan: "It looks like God is blessing
Americans for observing the Sabbath, as they surely don't work as hard as we
do here." People grasp for all kinds of easy explanations for the difference
in recent outcomes between the United States and east Asia (I refute another
too frequently heard, too simple and just plain flat wrong explanation below
another comment in this thread), but surely the explanation for this
phenomenon, as for plenty of other phenomena of differences between countries,
is multifactorial and subject to change over time.

[1] [http://www.globalpost.com/globalpost-blogs/southeast-
asia/si...](http://www.globalpost.com/globalpost-blogs/southeast-
asia/singapore-richest-country)

~~~
cafard
The fall of Sparta? Sparta relied neither on Spartan nor immigrant labor, but
on helot labor.

