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Finland has schools. So do we. Finland does all these things to make their schools better. So should we?

You ask about take-aways that might apply to other countries from the PISA findings about Finland. One way to get a reality check on how Finland's experience might guide policy in the United States is to look at countries with similarities to and differences from both. Seeing the flood of comments here that consist of people expressing their opinions (which is everyone's right on the Internet), I thought it might be helpful to go back to the PISA website to see how the PISA scholars themselves have been analyzing the data. One interesting brief write-up I found on the PISA site

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf

explores the issue of "resilient" students--students who do better than you would expect from their disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It is no surprise to me, because I have lived in more than one country, that countries vary in how well their school systems help even students from disadvantaged background succeed in school. The data chart about different countries at the link shows that Finland (and also Korea, Singapore, Canada, and Taiwan) overperform in raising the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. I can well believe this about Singapore, having studied a lot about the school system there

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf

and knowing people from there. By looking at multiple countries for meaningful commonalities like this, we in the diverse United States could learn a thing or two about how to improve schools here.

I think the crux of your argument is that there's a danger in isolating any part of one culture and trying to compare it to another. I completely agree. A culture is a highly complex set of interactions and taking one piece of it and trying to isolate it in a lab, as it were, is pretty difficult.

I think you're being unfair to "academics" though by accusing them "europhilia" (in fact, the author of this article is a Finnish journalist living in the US). I think Europe is an attractive place to look for comparisons because there are so many countries there that it's easy to find a lot of contrast. And the cultures there do have more in common with ours than those in other parts of the world.

But it's not like these sorts of comparison are made exclusively with Europe. In fact, it seems as if there have been a deluge of comparisons made in recent years between Asian (and especially Chinese) education and that in the US; with the conclusion being that US students aren't challenged or judged harshly enough and therefore are far behind their Chinese counterparts in STEM.

If anything this article seems to be written as a response to those people making comparisons with China: demonstrating a system that seems to be excelling with less rather than more standardization.

This is my point. Finland is a much more socialist country than just about anywhere else, as most Scandinavian countries are. They (as a society) have already agreed to much higher income taxes, plus completely nationalised healthcare, transport and many other industries.

I don't mention this to say whether Finland is right or wrong in these respects - it's a democracy so I support their decisions in any case. However, it would be foolish to say that a model of nationalised education in a country where a lot of other things are state-provided can necessarily be exported to a country where things are much-less state provided.

To me, there is too much focus on the school part of the education - education is clearly the output of parenting, societal attitudes as well as the school curriculum and teaching methods. Schools aren't an island - they live in a national culture, economy and even geography. You can't just import a different teaching style into a society that may value education differently (eg is being a truant a taboo thing to do, or something that is secretly valued in an anti-hero way) and expect to get the same results. Even the amount of time parents spend with their children will have a different result.

The best outcome to take from Finland is that there are many different ways to Educational outcomes - probably the most important is that the best fit between national culture and resources should be explored. Perhaps the national (or state?) culture needs to be slowly changed before the educational system can follow. Perhaps the idea that Federal input of education into 50 different states is a bad idea. There are many things to look at.

Not to mention demographics. Most of these studies pretty much overlook that dimension entirely, and it's usually the most critical.

In the case of Finland, we're looking at a country with a total population of 5.4 million people, 92% of which share the same native language and ethnic background. By comparison, the USA has 313 million people and a heck of a lot more diversity of income, class, race, ethnicity, linguistic background, country of origin, etc. It's also got a much higher variance in population density per city, state, region, etc.

If ever there were a case of comparing apples to oranges, this would be it. There are vanishingly few analogs between the two countries on almost any dimension, and most of the education statistics I've seen over the years have not been weighted accordingly.

I'd be much more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons. How does Finland perform against countries like Finland? How does the US perform against similar countries (of which there probably aren't many)? Even comparing the US to a country like China is problematic, given that only the top some-single-digit percent of Chinese children take these tests in the first place.

The article specifically describes a comparison of Finland with Norway, similiar in size and ethnic composition. Apples-to-apples, as you say. Norway's education policy is much more similar to the US, and Norway's PISA results are mediocre, also similar to the US.

Actually, after controlling for ethnic composition, the US and Norway are not similar. In fact the US outperforms Norway by roughly the same margin that Finland outperforms the US.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Your "authority" is crap. The original article explicitly compared Finland not only with Norway but with individual US states that had similar population and percentage of immigrants. That's about as apples to apples as you can get, considering that US schools are primarily subject to state rather than federal guidelines, and Finland still came out ahead.

By way of supposed refutation, you present a source that is full of strong claims substantiated by little more than the most blatant cherry-picking. The author's "correcting for demography" is no more than throwing out the data he doesn't like. Ignoring the fact that the immigrant factor has already been examined, he pulls tricks like comparing second- and third-generation immigrants in Finland to native Swedes. Notice how the obvious comparison between native Finns and native Swedes isn't made, because it wouldn't support his conclusions. Then he goes on to say "In the case of America, 99% of the population originates from other countries" and suggests that we compare such loosely-defined American immigrants to people in their home countries - without regard for such things as economic differences between the countries. After arbitrarily excluding Asians because they pull the results up, Hispanics because they pull the results down, and undeclareds for no methodologically sound (or even fully explained) reason, he comes up with a highly suspect graph purportedly showing how the US "beats" most of Europe.

Here's the kicker: even after cooking the data that much, Finland still comes out well ahead of the US. No matter how hard he tries, he still can't manage to reverse the original conclusion. In the end, citing that does more to discredit your position than to support it.

Um, I wasn't disputing the fact that Finland comes out way ahead of everyone else. I would have expected the phrase "...roughly the same margin that Finland outperforms the US..." to be a tipoff.

I was disputing the idea that the US and Norway are somehow equivalent. They aren't. The US does far better than Norway.

The exclusion of Asians, Hispanics and Blacks is not arbitrary - it is done because Finland, the UK, Sweden and the other nations discussed by Sanandaji have very few of those groups. Since there are strong correlations between ethnicity and school performance, this is necessary - otherwise we might confuse the effect of the school system with effects of the student body. He has another blog post where he compares the US to Asian nations and excludes non-Asian ethnicities for the same reason - Singapore and Japan don't have many Whites/Blacks/Hispanics.

The goal of Sanandaji's blog post is to compare educational systems, holding student body constant.

But student body is not held constant, not even ethnically. Even within the "white European" demographic bucket there's huge variation among ethnic groups - most relevantly regarding attitudes toward education itself, teachers, and relative levels of funding or social priority given to either. Treating US whites the same as European whites is wrong on a whole bunch of levels. For one thing, we're not all white. For another, the American population is drawn from specific subsets of the European population, and has experienced different patterns of population change since then (particularly evident wrt Jews with their known unique educational profile). Lastly there's the fact that even if non-whites aren't included in the sample their effects are still felt because many white students still share schools with non-whites, and not a few of those "white" students in fact have mixed heritage.

Of course, treating ethnicity - and particularly just white vs. non-white - as the only variable other than the educational system itself is itself offensive. One might also consider the effects that 300+ years of distinctly US culture and history have had on attitudes toward education, teachers, or the relative social/economic priority accorded to either. Or the effects that wealth distribution within the US or wealth differences between the US and other nations might have. The US student body is simply not the same as the Finnish one, so if Sanandaji really wanted to isolate the effect of the educational system then he'd have to adjust for more than one other variable.

Alternatively, he or you might take note of the fact that the current Finnish results are the result of change to the system while holding demographics relatively constant. What works in Finland might not work in the US for all sorts of reasons, but claiming that it won't work specifically because of ethnic makeup is both intellectually and morally dubious.

If you have a data set that distinguishes between different flavors of European, or somehow controls for attitudes towards education, I'd love to see it.

In the meantime, I'll control for the factors I have data on, while recognizing that even more of the variation than I can see might be caused by non-school system factors.

...you might take note of the fact that the current Finnish results are the result of change to the system while holding demographics relatively constant.

This is incorrect. Because the Finns don't do standardized tests (according to the article), and because PISA is relatively recent, we don't know how good or bad the Finns did before these changes.

"I'll control for the factors I have data on"

Of course you will, even though - or perhaps because - the intermediate result is far more inflammatory than informative.

"Because the Finns don't do standardized tests"

The fact that they don't do standardized tests doesn't mean it's impossible to know whether they're doing better. They embarked on these reforms because of a perceived problem, and seem quite satisfied with the results. If educators and researchers believe there has been improvement, based on other evidence, then I'm disinclined to second-guess them based on one semi-informed and heavily biased blogger's commentary.

So your suggestion is to disregard all data without perfect controls? In that case, we have no evidence whatsoever that any nation outperforms any other nation.

The fact that they don't do standardized tests doesn't mean it's impossible to know whether they're doing better.

How can one possibly know this, even in principle?

If you are being intellectually honest, your answer should agree with your principle of ignoring all data unless perfect controls are used.

"How can one possibly know this, even in principle?"

Are you seriously suggesting that standardized tests are the only way to measure school or student performance? What about non-standardized tests showing improvement within the same region or district? What about measuring achievement differences after leaving school? There are plenty of other options besides standardized tests.

In addition to cherry-picking and strawman, you've just added the the excluded middle to your list of fallacies. There are more than two options here, not just standardized tests or mere guesswork. Just because something can't be measured by one yardstick, even if it's the most accurate one (which itself is debatable in this case), doesn't mean other yardsticks won't suffice. Do you really want to turn this into a discussion about intellectual honesty? I'd relish the opportunity to cast your disreputable claims and tactics even further into oblivion.

Hmm. So you trust the results of non-standardized non-normed tests, even though no such tests have actually been cited.

You are unwilling to trust the results of an internationally normed and standardized test (PISA) after controlling for some but not all exogenous variables?

But nevertheless, you are willing to trust the results of the internationally normed and standardized test without controlling for any exogenous variables?

Heh, you had me going for a while. Now I realize you are trolling.

The US and Norway are not similar. Norway and Finland are similar.

Finland is similar to many US states, the level of government responsible for education.

> demographics

Canada scores in the top 10 in all PISA categories, not far off from Finland, and shares much more demographically and geographically with the United States than with Finland.

The provinces of Canada with higher ethnic diversity and immigration (the more prosperous ones) tend to score higher within Canada than the ethnically homogeneous provinces.

The US and Canada have vastly different demographics. In the US black and hispanic children perform far worse than white and asian children.

Wikipedia says that black and hispanic Canadians comprise less than 4% of the population.

It's not obvious that this statistic is an argument against the success of the Finnish system being translatable to America, though. Black and Hispanic children are disproportionately likely to be poor and subject to underfunded schooling, and may in fact be the demographics who would stand to improve the most under a system more interested in equalizing such disadvantages than the current one.

> "The provinces of Canada with higher ethnic diversity and immigration"

What kind of immigration? The USA has the unfortunate status of being home to a huge population of generally impoverished immigrants, thanks to its over-focus on family reunification and humanitarian immigration paths, the ease/prevalence of illegal immigration, and combined with a complete ignorance of skilled immigration.

This is the opposite of Canada, where the immigration policy has for decades strongly favored skilled immigrants - and have let them in in far greater numbers (and greater ease) than humanitarian immigrants. Similarly, Canada has for the past decade or so slowly shut the door and raised the bar on family reunification. It should also be no surprise that illegal immigration is a substantially smaller problem here than it is in the USA.

The somewhat inconvenient and blunt way to put it is: Canada has, for the most part, received a socially desirable demographic of immigrants, and the USA has not.

On top of this, America has to deal with the legacy of slavery - which has created a huge population that continues to be marginalized (despite advancements) to this day. You can't oppress and systematically destroy a population's chances of success for nearly 200 years in a row and then magically expect them to pick right back up a mere 4-5 decades later. This race dynamic drives a huge part of American demographics, and in Canada this issue may as well not exist.

The issue of race in the US is a labyrinthine beast that the vast majority of Canada could not even begin to imagine. And for that Canadians are lucky.

It's misleading to discuss matters of ethnic demographics in such terms as "diversity" and "immigration." The fact of the matter is, while immigrant and/or minority status can be a variable in its own right, it's usually just a proxy for effects that are specific to the minority and/or immigrant group in question.

An interesting TED talk on the more general effects of equality that talks about many of the issues you raise. It is titled "How economic inequality harms societies" [1] (link below). Looks at correlations between income inequality (defined as the average income of the top 20% / average income of the bottom 20%) versus measures such as homicide rate, mental illness, social mobility, high school dropout rates, prisoner counts, infant death, etc. All the data is both compared on a country level and on a US state level.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

Is public school teacher a desireable profession in the US? Is it anywhere near the level of prestige associated with lawyers or doctors? How is the pay? This is one of they key differences that's repeated in nearly every one of the numerous articles I've read about the Finnish school system, and it's the one single thing US really could do a lot about.

Teachers are government employees, unionized no less. That is to a great many Americans a double whammy. The relationship between Americans and their government has always been -- and will always be -- adversarial.

Teachers are held in high regard in China too.

US teachers get crap pay.

That is a myth. You may believe they should be paid more, but when you account for the amount of hours the work and benefits their total compensation is very competitive with private sector jobs that require similar levels of education.

"Account for"? The pay reflects the requirements. I never claimed crap pay was a cause. But it is clear it demonstrates that the American system does not prioritize quality in teaching positions.

>"Account for"?

Yes teachers work around 190 days per year and in my area (metro Atlanta), they start off at $40k+ and around $50k with a Masters degree.

They are guaranteed raises so that they can easily get up to $60k (in today's money--more if they have graduate degree) by the time they retire, and after 30 years they can retire with 60% pay (most of them can retire in their very early 50s instead of 60+ like the rest of us). They get more time off than nearly any other profession.

Based on salary alone the average teacher makes 57% more than the overall state average salary, and when you add in their benefits package it goes up even higher.

With cost of living in my area that is definitely not "crap" pay.

You misunderstood my quote marks. I don't care if you account for hours worked, the net pay in the end doesn't seem to attract the quality you need in teachers, nor give them the respect they deserve. Also, your numbers seem suspect. The median pay for teachers is around $40,000 in the US. Median, not starting.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary

Now, it's held in very low esteem and has very poor pay. It is assumed that if they were any good they would take private sector jobs where they can make a lot more.

More to the point, it isn't at all selective--the necessary academic certification to be a schoolteacher is way, way, way easier than the academic certification necessary to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or accountant.

> What is there that's here that we can take away and use today aside from a general admiration of how nice Finland is?

The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.

> The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.

That is bound to fail because it would be a wild goose chase, there are a thousand variables, and the temptation is strong to try to isolate the ones that lies close to one's own ideological prejudices and ignore the rest, Note for example the focus on equality here and not on the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe. If you dig up the statistics you can see how little Finland's pupils are enjoying school, more akin to Japan than the rest of Western Europe, but the results are better than the rest of Europe (which certainly doesn't lag Finland in equality).

By that argument, everything is bound to fail because there are a thousand variables in a society and a school system.

And yet another sidetrack not based on facts to add to my list:

* No, Finland's schools are not more disciplinarian than elsewhere. The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation: watching TV and hanging out with friends etc. is more fun than studying and everybody gets a good education for free anyway.

And no, the rest of Europe definitely doesn't match Finland in equality (income equality, gender equality, whatever you mean), let alone their schools doing that.

Interestingly, the German state of Saxonia does nearly as well as Finland in the PISA tests.

No-one is claiming the Finnish system is the only way to get high PISA scores. Although, the PISA scores aren't the thing to strive for anyway. How about a school system that is relatively cheap, comparatively equal, produces great learning results as measured by multiple studies, takes up relatively little of the students' time etc.?

I don't think Finland is trying to force it on anyone but it could give some people ideas about what's allegedly "just not possible" and what to possibly concentrate on. The success of Saxonia can be another interesting data point along Finland, Singapore, Japan etc.

Yes, indeed. Also comparison with a number of countries, instead of just Finland, can give you a better idea of what works and what is just an accidental feature.

For example, in Germany pupils who fail two (or so) classes, have to repeat the entire year. That ends up costing the economy way more than giving those weak students special attention, and extra teacher time, to get them up to speed again. Also the German school system segregates people into university-bound and not university-bound at age ten. Switching between tracks later is possible, but hard.

The reason Finnish pupils are not enjoying school is because they lack motivation

In fairness though, I'm sure the same applies to pupils in other European countries, yet the point you were replying to said that Finnish pupils are enjoying school less than pupils in other European countries. That is not explained away by your response.

That said, it's kind of obvious that a competitive environment, especially one that is stressfully though, is going to be problematic for intellectual achievement, and a focus on equity can help. There are plenty of studies that demonstrate that stress impairs lateral thinking etc.

Please don't confuse discipline with not enjoying school. The point I was replying to said:

the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe

This is not a fact. Instead, the opposite is the fact: I looked up an OECD study and Japan and Finland are on the opposite ends of the scale with Japan having the most school discipline.

Being from an European country myself I find it ever so amusing that all my life I've been hearing that "If we were only like the USA" in some regards. Ironic isn't it?

The grass is always greener.

But that's because they use more manure over there.

>The problem with Marxism is that whenever it doesn't work, people say it wasn't tried enough.

You see, that's funny, because a much more obvious example can be found in free-market austrian-school economic policies.

I'm not terribly familiar with free market Austrian-school economics, could you expound on what you mean?

It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek.

Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.

The book seems interesting. But Neoliberal economists, even though they talk a lot about free markets, have a very different world view than that of Austrian economists. One example: Neoliberals promote treaties like NAFTA that allow the free flow of goods and capital between countries, but don't allow the free flow of people between countries.On the other hand, Austrian economists would insist on the importance of also letting people choose were they want to live and work. Furthermore, despite its name, NAFTA is not really about free trade. NAFTA is a huge set of regulations.

Neoliberalism is Austrian-school thinking put into practice; it's the best that governments can do given the economic and social realities of the day. People like Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists drew heavily on the Austrians, and those Chicago school economists were directly advising developing nations from the '70s onward.

Responses like yours only reinforce my thesis: your philosophy can never be practiced successfully. Where it fails, the problem is only ever due to some sort of impurity or oversight in implementation. The market can never be "free enough".

If people actually saw what went on "free enough" would have been put to bed years ago. The Chicago boys were given free reign in Chile under Pinochet and nearly destroyed the country. They had to back off of their "free enough" goals to start the trend upwards again to be able to write their "The Chilean Miracle" propaganda piece [1].

[1] http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionC11 (sorry for a link that originates from the Anarchist FAQ but this is the best aggregated source on the subject I've found).

If you're equating the Chicago school and the Austrian school, you don't know the first thing about either and you're not qualified to start the moronic, off-topic flame war about the subject you've gotten everyone into.

I would ignore the inflammatory language and just educate yourself.

The wikipedia page is informative, if a little heavy going for the non-economist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School

As I posted above, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a simple, easy to read book that encapsulates most of the arguments put forth by the Austrian school.

Yeah I've noticed that too. Extreme types on both sides think this way. My favorites are the ones who swing from one to another. Lots of hard core right wingers started out as communists. David Horowitz comes to mind. PJ O'Rourke too, though he seems more sensible.

Some say the political spectrum is a circle.

Free-market austrian school is generally "hands-off, believe the price system".

I've generally seen the "not enough" argument in conjunction with Keynesian "government stimulus" (e.g., google "not enough stimulus" and the first half-dozen articles arguing that the recent $700B + stimulus was not big enough).

I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough. I think the chinese experiment opening up to capitalism is a great endorsement of additional freeing of markets "at the margin" increasing economic benefit.

>I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough.

Well, then I'm glad to find someone else who isn't under the impression that continuing and intensifying de-regulation and privatization will somehow solve our present economic crisis.

I should clarify: I think the "stimulus not big enough" argument is fallacious. I think that government spending substitutes for private spending, rather than stimulating it. (e.g., dollars the government spends on tanks are not spent on goods desired by consumers. It may stimulate economic activity, but it reduces aggregate well-being.)

East/West Germany is the clearest example around.

West Germanys post-war 'economic miracle' was largely guided by Austrian school economic thinking, while East Germany went the other way. This is the clearest A/B test ever devised of implementing two different economic strategies on a homogenous population. North/South Korea is also similar, but less so.

Most people don't even understand what the Austrian school actually says. That's not surprising, most people who comment on Marx have never opened his book, either.

For the record, it's based on the freedom to trade backed with strong rule of law using sound money. It also prescribes a lack of intervention by the government in the economy, mainly due to misallocation of productive resources and the likelihood of government intentionally or inadvertently creating monopolies that harm the consumer.

Probably the best introductory book on the subject is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson - Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Even if you oppose the idea, it's good to read and understand the theories and supporting arguments properly.

For the record, West Germany abandoned this model during the 1960s and moved towards a more social democratic model, and the USA hasn't tried it since before the 1930s. The current economies of the west are nothing like an economy under Austrian principles, in the same way the Chinese economy is nothing like an economy under Marxist/Maoist principles.

>West Germanys post-war 'economic miracle' was largely guided by Austrian school economic thinking, while East Germany went the other way.

One of the most predictable things about Austrian advocates is their inability to conceive of alternatives beyond some kind of cartoon-stereotype Soviet command-economy. You seem to be aware of social democracy, so you are knowingly assuming a false dichotomy to make your point. I'd say it's even more intellectually dishonest when one considers that no one ever argues for a centrally-planned economy. At the very best, such a comparison holds no value today in evaluating Austrian-school thinking.

It's not my fault the East Germans chose the Soviet model so I hardly think it's fair to suggest I came up with a false dichotomy to prove a point.

One half of the country chose the soviet command economy model, the other half chose to pursue an Austrian model. One half did immeasurably better than the other half. Those are the facts.

You can compare and contrast post-war West Germany and Great Britain if you like - the latter made great strides towards a more socialist governance probably as a direct result of the largely increased Government functions during the war, and the rise of those who thought that centrally planned economies would do better.

The point of bringing up West Germany is that the country prospered as a result of the liberal economic policies introduced in the immediate post-war period, both absolutely and relative against their East German counterparts, although the differences were small in the early years. It would be foolish to suggest that this is entirely down to the policy choices - all growth from zero looks impressive - however, it certainly did no harm and a lot of good.

>One half of the country chose the soviet command economy model, the other half chose to pursue an Austrian model. One half did immeasurably better than the other half. Those are the facts.

That fact doesn't validate Austrian-school-thinking — merely that it worked better than Soviet central-planning given the global political and economic environment at the time, which says almost nothing. And even if you're arguing merely in favor of increased economic liberalization, this comparison still holds no value because social democracy has nothing to do with central planning! The points don't even exist along a linear axis — they are apples and oranges. The debate all over the world right now is about how best to implement social democracy, and comparing those two extreme economic philosophies doesn't contribute anything at all. To pretend it does is disingenuous.

The worst thing about right-wing followers of Austrian school thinking is that they refuse to consider the social outcomes when "market freedom" is taken too far; they are bent on destroying society as it exists and recreating a weak image of it inside their economic framework. Even von Hayek himself acknowledged the need for a basic social support system. This type of thinking is highly simplified, almost always ideologically-applied, and extremely toxic to our social fabric.

It also helped that a lot of money was poured into Western Germany with the Marshall plan while the Soviet Union took large parts of the industrial production machinery of Eastern Germany in retribution for the war.

The preconditions were so different I think the example doesn't really show anything.

The Marshall plan was a tiny drop in the ocean of capital needed to reconstruct the West German economy. At most you could consider it a bit of pump-priming.

The Marshall plan was also equally applied to other war-torn Western European nations which didn't experience the same growth.

I agree that you can't isolate a specific economic philosophy from the general population and culture - the German people have always been very engineering minded and hard working - but something very interesting happened to post-war Germany, and it's always a good idea to look at this (same as the Finnish school example) and see what might have contributed.

Another thing usually missing in comparisons with European countries is that all of Europe benefits from America inventing/pioneering so much stuff that they can adopt.

Yeah. It's super ironic to read all the "these socialist solutions of small nations can't scale for big US". And then from the other side "this silly anarchistic free-trade capitalistic solution can't scale for mighty China."

I thought Europeans had the "not-invented-here" syndrome.

Two questions:

1. What has this to do with education? 2. Doesn't America benefits from European / (or Asian, etc) innovations?

1. Nothing much (you could bring up eLearning and multimedia learning aids, I guess), it was tangentially related to the meta-topic of articles which compare European successes and American failures (usually in the domain of 'social programs')

2. Yes, but America innovates far more. A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention. Put bluntly, we all get a free ride off America's investment in R&D. Just something to keep in mind when you think about 'changing the system' or even just measuring it.

A huge part of Finland's economy is Nokia, which manufactures an American invention

At least before February 11th that wasn't true. While the first-ever cell phone may have been built in the US, Nokia has contributed quite a bit to how modern phones work. You may remember Apple for instance paying patent royalties on 3G tech to them.

USA puts more money to R&D than anybody else, but it isn't like the rest of the world is just stealing innovation.

Which American invention did Nokia "get a free ride off"? The telephone? (invented by a Scot) Radio? (an Italian) The battery? (also Italian)

Or do you mean the next generation stuff, like the computer, specifically ARM chips these days? (both British ideas), touchscreens (also British), GSM (pan-European project pioneered in Finland).

Or is it the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of patents Apple licensed from Nokia last year?

To put it bluntly, American exceptionalists would have a lot less room for triumphalism if they hadn't got a free ride off European investment in R&D. Or we could decide that claiming part of the process of invention on behalf of a nation and claiming everyone else was just copying is a bit silly?

A cursory glance at Google search results gives an idea of how much American contributes to science (which is just the starting point, you've then got the whole process of industrialisation and market-making): http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/news/2007-06/8392239/ http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php

EDIT: for people who didn't click the links, it shows America has more scientific papers among the top 1% of most-cited papers... than all the other countries put together

Bell invented the telephone, but where did he go to get funding and start a company/industry? Where did Marconi and Daniell go ? To Britain, which occupied about the same spot as US as industrial/scientific leader once upon a time.

The point is that a country like Norway say could do nothing but sit on their oil income - and every year life would still get better as they buy new technology from America. But for America, of whoever the world leader is, this is not an option. It's got nothing to do with copying or taking credit or whatever - it's just recognising that the flow of benefit from innovation is not symmetrical.

If you'd take the population differences into account, the numbers would be a bit different. Given that Sweden has only 10 million habitants, it seems to push around twice the amount of US scientific output/capita. (Norway and Finland achieve similar efficiency with 5m people) Yeah, what US is doing is pretty impressive, but it's not like Europeans have been much of freeriding either.

And then there was the whole World War thing, snatching top scientists for cold war etc... The polarization of world during the recent history is a bit more complicated issue than the US just kicking ass in everything. And the future is kind of interesting too. (youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)

The per capita figures make the other countries look better (although ultimately that doesn't change the underlying point), although the fact that USA has more of the top 1% of papers than all the other countries put together tells a different story. And the other countries do get to free-ride on this... I mean you could set up a communist state with a religious dictatorship, and still it would get the benefit of what the American economy comes up with. You have to question how much of someone's quality of life is down to the chosen system of government, and how much is down to technology (and possibly other things like foreign investors and foreign buyers) they have access to.

What is the point of your pro-US trolling? You've already admitted that the falsehoods you've stated have nothing to do with the thread anyway.

>The per capita figures make the other countries look better

lol, classic.

A cursory glance at Google search results in... ENGLISH... ?

for people who didn't click the links, it shows... either A) ENGLISH speaking countries dominate the most-cited papers (tah dahhh). B) American papers cite American papers (parochialism versus merit).

Tycho: bias, correlations, and network effects...

I think you're clutching at straws. 90% of scientific papers are published in English anyway, plus the study never said it excluded non-English papers. And the figures show that America dominates the most cited papers - it shows England, Canada and Australia doing fairly well but not really better than non-English-speaking countries. Sure you could remove some bias if you really tried... But we could also look at other metrics such as, say, what investors put their money in: like how the iShares ETF based on the S&P Global Technology Index concentrates a massive 77% of its holdings on US companies http://us.ishares.com/product_info/fund/overview/IXN.htm . Or basically just pay attention to the breakthroughs that get reported by the press: top ten discoveries of the decade, http://news.discovery.com/human/discoveries-of-the-decade.ht..., almost all American researchers; best inventions of the decade, http://www.inventhelp.com/Newsletter/2009_12/time-magazine-b... , mostly american companies; or look at pharmaceutical companies by country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pharmaceutical_compani... ; I mean I'm just picking the first such articles that pop up. You'll probably say that these are biased to Americans... but really, if you just pay attention to what gets reported in something like New Scientist (British publication) you'll see how much America contributes.

Plus, the counter points that people cite tend to be lone inventors who either left their home nation to set up shop in the US (or UK when it was the leader), or whose inventions/discoveries were not capitalised upon. Whereas America is full of not just great research, but the rise of entire industries that other nations can then participate in.

Is this the part where people are supposed to start chanting "USA! USA! USA!"?

What part of calculus came out of US R&D? Or do they skip that and go directly to cell phone engineering in high school now?

America benefits from the innovations of other nations, but Americans are worried. Looking at history, America's rise to prominence in the 20th century seems to have been largely fueled by being the innovator, the inventor. The worry thus being, what will happen to them when they aren't anymore?