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Comment by erosenbe0 | Hacker News Reader

Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:

If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.

Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.

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That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...

I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.

I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?

I am on my phone but you can Google and find lots of data that shows dual parent/intact families correlate positively with a bunch of other factors like income, college graduation, etc. More parents=more resources. More resources is generally better than less. Having kids myself, I can barely imagine being able to do it by myself... and even if I could it would certainly be to a lesser quality.

Sweden has the highest proportion of single-parent households at 34% whereas Poland is near the bottom at 9% [1].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

One possible synthesis is that the high incomes in Sweden make up for the high number of single-parent households.

I almost noted in my prior comment that income is the second biggest factor but left that out. Totally agree that income is a big part of the equation. I also bet because it's Sweden it also has to do with public services like childcare being available.

"Single-parent households" in Scandinavia doesn't mean the same thing as it does in most of the world. There is usually still a high degree of coparenting.

This isn't a culture argument or even a sound/good argument for anything. Americans are just wealthier and you can't compare like that.

When you compare groups of students within the same country and adjust for both household income and intelligence you find that (again, even within the same intelligence brackets and income levels) some ethnic groups simply study more while others spend more time on things like unprovoked violence.

Id ask you for a citation, but I know it doesn’t exist.

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