The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Human Capital | Hacker News Reader

The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Human Capital

theamericanenterprise.com

41 pointssriacha29 comments

I feel like one very important factor in mortality is simply cultural.

The things that stand out more to me are:

- Russians tend to be much more prone to risky, dangerous or violent behavior. From reckless driving, silly behavior to unhealthy relationships with alcohol and drugs you really get lots of extremes. Those extremes further fuel tragedies and thus more of this behavior.

- at the same time, Russians are culturally less individualistic. In some sense we in the west care less for the state and more about ourselves. In Russia this balance is slightly different. This impacts the value and care people have for their own lives.

- Russians are a traumatized population imho. WW2 is still a major collective trauma. Another very major source of trauma is corruption. Most Russians I've met are borderline resigned that things can't get good. They can get better, happier for some time, but it's like there's always a huge cloud looming on their lives. I believe their culture of corruption and centuries of endless autocracies makes them negative further pushing violent, risky and unhealthy behaviors.

Coupled with the American paradox, does this suggest that human capital is not necessarily correlated with [formal] education, after all?

(Indeed the first chart looks like a scatterplot, so there is no need to invoke anecdata)

But considering the author's expertise maybe he's trying to point towards studying the correlation with hardwork-- a better proxy? Some say that is already factored into GDP calculations.

It's probably just massively affected by having state structures that support individual choice.

If people have trust that if they see a problem they can solve it and reap the rewards without the state stealing it from them, they do it. If not, they don't. And those individual actions spread out over millions of people reap compounding benefits

>and reap the rewards

Hmm. To chart the risk for individuals a bit better, maybe that "hardwork" ought to be replaced by "shlep-blindness"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521

(From top comment)

>one persons schlepp is another mans passion.

>You'd have to make deals with banks.

E.g. one can argue that Russia is full of passions (but not banks)

The old Marxists would say it's because Russia doesn't have an empire (outside the meager pickings of own immediate periphery) providing a trading network, access to cheap foreign labor and resources etc. as a buffer to its own domestic economy. Not sure how statistically verifiable that is, since the classical Marxian economic model doesn't seem to apply cleanly to the modern US or China.

Random anecdote, Russians arguably produce the world's best gaming mods. Their unpaid amateur programmers put out content that rivals or exceeds the quality of Western games, if you like doomer-y 90s vibes. An example would be Fonline 2236 (some Russian guy hacked Fallout 1 and 2 into a free, working MMO) or the Skyrim mod for DayZ, which I think is dead now and I needed a translator app to play before the current war started but was the best online RPG experience I've had since Ultima Online.

I would imagine at least part of it is the fact that Russia is a resource exporting economy and thus suffers from "Dutch disease" where the consistent sale of commodities like oil pushes up the currency and makes other types of exports less compatible. If natural resources are super-profitable then they potentially become a crutch for the economy; and if other sectors are less competitive and profitable then there is not much reason to invest there.

Coupled with the fact that these types of sectors don't actually employ very many people as a percentage of the population, it makes sense that it would have bad effects on the rest of the population.

All the Middle Eastern oil rich countries seem to be actively avoiding this problem. All are heavily investing in all sorts of different initiatives to diversify their incomes beyond fossil fuels (whether they succeed or not is irrelevant). So, it is not given that a country will suffer from this problem. There has to be a better explanation.

The Gulf countries at the very least employ millions of migrant workers who are generally not entitled to the same level of health and education services and, I would imagine, not counted in these statistics.

Plus if you look at the chart for patents per million tertiary students, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, are also all in the bottom third so it's not like they're that far ahead.

Russia also employed millions of migrant workers from Central Asia until 2022. Then, risks for them increased, economies in their home countries improved an important outflow if migrants started and continues until now.

The scale is quite different though; only 10% of people in UAE are citizens, Qatar is at 11%.

This is known thing in economy science.

Most easy to use model of information inequality.

What I mean, usually professional know about his specialty magnitudes more than average person from other specialty.

On other side, market economy have extremely huge number of products on market. For example, USSR in best its years have about million part numbers nomenclature.

How free market economy solve these issues? - They just create infrastructure of entrepreneurs - intermediate actors, who help average person to find product best fit for him.

Unfortunately, in Russia entrepreneurs considered as enemy of society. So they have extremely low number of professional entrepreneurs and people just cannot find products in Russia, and shopping near entirely on global market, mostly from China, and Russian engineers just cannot sell their products.

Why internal market is important. Well, another model - micro-economy pf business. To make business, one need to make three things: 1st somewhere got knowledge, what to do (marketing); 2nd somewhere got investments (money) and invest them into make ready for market product (finance market, loans, credits, angels, vc funds); 3rd make sells (marketing). Unfortunately, only part of make product (without money) is really strong side of Russians, but they are really weak in marketing and their finance market is on very early stage of development. And as I already mentioned, in Russia entrepreneurs considered as enemy, but also they demonized all business, all things touching credits, investments and finances.

And when you trying to go abroad, you definitely will got harder access to finances or investments from other country, then yours. So, usually, exporters enter new country with powerful backup from their own country, and in Russia such backup is just not exist, or to be honest, it exist only for very limited circle of people close to top powers.

As said one American professor, Russians trying to get milk without a cow.

Its a feudal system rewarding feudal clans for doing feudal things. The education is a remnant of the competitiveness of the ussr, that wanted to overtake the west in that area.

The life expectancy at birth stats have to be reflective of the fall of the Soviet Union - to work out that males expected to live 50 years they have to be observed to die, which means the stats must be heavily influenced by events that happened in the last 50 years. It'd be a laggy indicator. While extremely interesting, I don't think there is a paradox there as much as hints that an empire collapsing because of economic incompetence might be bad for people in the imperial core.

And I've never been particularly impressed by comparisons of patents between countries either. I doubt the legal systems operate the same way and having a word that translates to "patent" doesn't imply to me that it actually means the same thing. Even if they do my impression is that patents are actually progress-retardant - places that make a habit of politely ignoring that part of IP law tend to do quite well (see: China and FOSS software are both interesting case studies).

Nonetheless this is an interesting area to focus on; Russia is an unimpressive country - it really should be in a similar league to China/the US/India and they just don't have the weight that those 3 names do.

The demographic time bomb that is the Russian population (human capital, to use an inhuman term) has been recognized since the late 80s. I am surprised how much that productivity along with health has plunged in the last decade. It is not as some suggested a lagging indicator of the aftermath of the Soviet empire but the continuing collapse of the Russian empire, of which the Soviet Union was just a phase. Despite the best intentions of would be autocrats in the West to pump it up, Russia is transitioning from a pretend developed nation to a much smaller developing country on a large land mass.

I am ethnically Russian, although spent virtually my entire life in the US. My father went to a special grade school for English in Russia when he was younger there. Presumably, there was some state-sponsored idea that its graduates would become diplomats and leaders and enrich Russia itself.

He reports that some 80% of his class have left the country. I would say that his generation (i.e., some of the first to come of age in the post-communist period) especially were very eager to find lucrative work in the states and elsewhere. The capitalist structure of early capitalist Russia was quite unstable, not offering good pay, or in many cases even consistent pay, and that's if you could find a professional opportunity.

As someone who lives in Mississippi, I'm beyond tired of the generally insulting and dismissive way this entire region is treated, usually by people who have never even been here.

The graph showing that Russia is neck and neck with Alabama for total US patents granted is absurd and stupid. It doesn't illustrate anything, it's purely there to get in a "Russia is as bad as Alabama!" graphic. They even include the following text which shows how intentional this was:

> Alabama has creditable research centers, of course—the Hunstville aerospace complex and the University of Alabama network among them. But Russia’s population was almost 30 times larger than Alabama’s in 2020.

Great, so Alabama has 30x the per capita patents in a patent system that is foreign to Russia? How many Russian patents does New York have each year? What is even the point of this graphic? Every other graphic is using the correct units (per capita, median, etc) except this one, it's just there to put Russia next to Alabama, because Alabama is "so terrible". The graphic is literally "how many foreign patents does arbitrary region A have compared to how many domestic patents these other arbitrary regions have, not normalizing for anything".

I would like to see how many rocket scientists there are per capita in in Alabama and Russia compared to other regions of the world, but that might not tell the story they want to tell.

Edit: I went to find the answer, and New Mexico and Alabama crush all statistics in terms of per-capita Aerospace Engineers. However, and this is just usual, when you go to https://cambridgedb.com/which-state-employs-the-most-people-... the answer to 'Where the most Aerospace Jobs are located" shows the wrong graphic to make California look good. The graphic was lifted from https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/oes172011.htm, where the correct graphics are the first two on the page, which apparently they scrolled past to steal the one that doesn't address the question they are using it to illustrate the answer to.

I took this to be more about Alabama having 1/30th the population and a similar number of patents. The Soviet Union was 1/6th of the Earth and Alabama is less than 1/100th the size. If rural bias were to be involved in the choice here it would be to suggest that what those with the bias think of as underpopulated or backwater is more vibrant populus and intelligent than the largest part of the country formerly known as the country vilified as super scientists during the cold war.

To your point, Alabama was chosen to make that point because the numbers are contrary to that stereotype. The stereotype is not fair (they rarely are). But there's another way to look at this.

All of the American South was delt a hard blow in the Civil War and rebuilding afterwards as well as the subsequent industrialization and the fall of cotton, the dustbowl and then the fall of manufacturing has been hard on that region as well. Russia emerged from the end of the Cold War having faced a similar war of attrition but for them this started not long after the end of their own Civil War and a World War. In the same period of time those people met many more hardships but to come out into capitalism only to have oligarchs steal the country's wealth and resources puts them far behind even what Americans could see as an unfortunate part of our own country with similar hardships.

> All of the American South was delt a hard blow in the Civil War

I mean, that is one way to describe the end of slavery. Surely we can say rather large subset got better off despite repeated violent attempts to prevent improvement in their lives.

Of course it's better to be poor, uneducated, and free than it is to be poor, uneducated, and a slave. It's not even comparable. However, it's better still to have access to education and economic opportunity. Laughing at the south for being poor and uneducated is literally laughing at the descendants of slaves for being uneducated and poor.

Glib comments about 'the end of slavery' miss the point completely. The south isn't the great great grandchildren of plantation owners complaining about being poor and suffering the consequences of the Civil War. Those people are doing quite well, look at how good the schools are in the rich, almost entirely white suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi - a city where you can't drink the tap water.

That's not the Russian Paradox; that's the Gorbachev + Yeltsin Paradox.

That's a wishful thinking to pretend that Brezhnev's trajectory would lead to any significantly better future

To be fair, the stagnation is commonly said to have started with Brezhnev.

An interesting (but of course unverifiable) hypothesis is that Khrushchev's trajectory could have been different. Khrushchev supported OGAS (the Soviet would-be equivalent to ARPANET) and aimed to have cosmonauts on the moon by '67. Funding for the domestic intranet and space programs were later cut by Brezhnev. Khrushchev was also strongly anti-corruption and shook down the wasteful Soviet elite, which contributed to his ouster. A lot of the oil and gas fields that continue to power the Russian economy to this day were originally laid down under him as well. The "corn man" also greatly improved living standards, ended the gulags and purges, expanded the Soviet sphere of influence, loosened censorship etc.

Didn't a lot of economies slow down in the later 1960s, after the economic damage of WW II was repaired?

Yeah, I was referring to this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_of_Stagnation

Nah, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were good. The people who took it after them (the one guy) led the country to this state.

They were good for the West, not for Russia.

Were the poverty, unemployment, and disillusionment worse than dying in a nuclear holocaust? Gorbachev spared both hemispheres that fear.

He also made it possible for Russians to read what they wanted, travel where they wanted, emigrate.

So, from the outside looking in, it looks like a mixed bag.

Anyways, Russians were miserable under the czars, miserable under communism, miserable with perestroika, and are miserable under Putin. Has Russia ever been a happy place?

Well, you live in the west, so I guess you should be thankful.

I've lived in Russia between 2003-2009. I am an engineer in the U.S. From the dozens of "engineers" in Russia I met, I found that the bulk of their college level teaching was basically babysitting. They had no real engineering knowledge, and to pass college exams was extraordinarily easy. It was an eye opener for me. They also severely compartmentalize their teaching and knowledge. A VERY intelligent IT engineer I met there accused me of trying to poison his family when I suggested using Sodium Hypochlorite to cleanse an obviously polluted well they used at their dacha. He had no clue about anything chemistry. Total zero. I subsequently found out that throughout the college levels, they basically are diploma mills, with a high level of 'degree inflation'. Not one college graduate I met there had any broad knowledge nor any knowledge or ability beyond an American high school.

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