Hacker News Reader

[Disclosure- my best friend immigrated to Singapore after his PhD in Europe]

Natural factors play a role, but only so much. IMHO, you are rationalizing. There are many places in the world that are strategically located and resource rich, but they didn't grow as much as Singapore did.

In Asia, if I was a villain, I would put my lair in Timor (if I wanted an island) or New Guinea (if I wanted land) - just between India, Australia, Japan, etc.

Water and coal are abundant in many places. Argentina has great fertile plains and a lower population. Coal was first mined in China, and in the UK which also had IIRC more coal and water than Germany.

Hell, following your explanation about the new world, Portugal and Ireland are even more at the extreme of Europe- they should have discovered America! They didn't (I know the story about Vinland, the vikings an so on - but they didn't do as much as Spain did)

It we are talking about geographic distance, southern Morocco or Senegal would have been at an advantage - but they didn't do it.

It's too easy to rewrite history. Education and investment are clearly driving growth.

Show me a country that is betting big on education and pushing for investment (preferably local, from savings), even if it has not much politically stability it is a country with a bright future.

Besides India (who will certainly be the next big thing after the US - not China IMHO), I'd put my chips on countries like Estonia, Kenya, Uruguay.

Show me a country that is betting big on education and pushing for investment (preferably local, from savings), even if it has not much politically stability it is a country with a bright future.

Historically that is not true. Countries which increased their investment in education tended to have (slightly) slower economic growth, at least in the period 1960-2000.

Paper: http://econ399.atwiki.com/file/open/21/Where+has+all+the+edu...

Blog post with key graph: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha....

Thanks a lot for the link, it is a very interesting study (reading that ATM), however they only consider the increase in year of education - or, as written in the comments on the blog "There is proof that more people received more years of schooling, but there is no proof that more people became more educated"

It could be another Leontief-like paradox, ie discarding the education efficiency.

I would be curious to know if such results hold when only STEM education is included (no humanities), and if there appear difference between pre-university and university education (I would expect raising the population literacy to have less effects - ie starting from a lower education might require more investment in education) once corrected by emigration (brain drain- remittances will help, but we're looking at something else)

There are all sorts of possibilities. My only point is that the link between education and economic growth is far from clear.

Indeed, and I should have been more careful with my affirmations.

But at least I now have learn something interesting - it has been disproved that only increasing education length had any effect of growth.

Countries which increased their investment in education tended to have slower economic growth, at least in the period 1960-2000.

Education policy has long been a research topic for me, and it is the topic that drew me here to Hacker News.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

The quoted statement is where equating "spending taxpayer money on schools" to "investing in education" leads to some odd policy conclusions. A friend of mine (a man in my generation, a policy analyst for the United States federal government) showed me that blog post the day it was posted (I think he is a regular reader of that blog) and asked me to comment about it. If the factual question is, is spending-as-such strongly correlated with results from a country's school system? we already know from multiple lines of evidence that the answer is no.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf

But what is remarkable about Singapore is that even when it didn't have the economic development yet to spend much on schools it was already spending wisely and otherwise getting good results for all aspects of its national investment, financial and nonfinancial, in education.

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

I'm even more familiar with the situation in Taiwan than I am with the situation in Singapore, and EFFECTIVE spending and management (not lavish spending, and not school-favoring management) of the public education system there has to share part of the credit for the transformation of Taiwan in my lifetime from a wretchedly poor country to a prosperous country on track to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world in my old age.

http://www.globalpost.com/globalpost-blogs/southeast-asia/si...

I have seen the textbooks from both countries (especially from Taiwan). They are less expensive to produce, and thus less of a cost burden on the school system, than the textbooks used in the United States. But the textbooks are of much higher quality, especially in mathematics. In two generations, we have seen those countries transform into countries such that many foreign observers assume that people are "naturally" smart in those countries. I know enough people from enough strata of society and a broad enough age range from each country to know that today's appearance that east Asia and southeast Asia are full of smart people is because of smart policies that helped the two most recent generations in the top-performing countries gain exceptionally good educations at reasonable cost. Yes, some countries could spend less on their schools and do better than they do now, if only they would spend more wisely.

Education policy is interesting. What drove me to HN was that it had a better community that slashdot - but what drives me now is the quality of the content and the discussion, especially for economic ideas which challenge the theories I'm learning.

That's quite interesting - education efficiency (or effectiveness as you say) seem to matter a lot.

The Pritchett study reported by yummyfajitas (which is someone I highly regard, for his post are generally spot on and instructive) adds to this that increasing education duration has been disproven to have an efficiency on growth (which complements the Romer/Lucas models of growth I'm learning)

You further that by disproving the relation between spending and school system results.

The conclusion seems to be that while money and time might not be important, the educational content is more important, and country even with few resources or teachers could focus their effort on the right content to maximize their results.

Very interesting indeed.

If you go to an underdeveloped country and see people working really hard, that's not a rationalization. It's a counterexample to the implied thesis that economic development is a matter of hard work.

Are they working this hard all over the country? For how long have they done that? Are they working hard not smart?

>Besides India (who will certainly be the next big thing after the US ..

Curious, Can you expand on this?

Big country, with a large and growing population, a democracy (ie no transition liability unlike china), strongly investing in STEM education, previously a world leader before the british invasion, without too many concern about equality (ie no self restraints)

It only needs a manufacturing sector to be the next #1. Considering how manufacturing is spreading in SE asia (Thailand and HDD for ex) it might happen soon.

yes indeed, India is the country of the future, and the fact here is - "It always will be".

Nope - that quote is reserved for Brasil :-)

I would dispute that education is the key to all this success as well. Let us assume that educational outcomes (i.e., human capital as measured by test scores) are the driver of this success.

Even making this assumption, the bulk of the gap in educational outcomes between the US and Singapore is probably not due to education.

The US 8th grade PISA score is 495, whereas that of Singapore is 540. But Asian Americans have a score of 535. Several American states have Asian students who even exceed Singapore, specifically NY, TX and CT.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

If education were the primary driver of educational outcomes, that shouldn't happen. So we should reject education as the primary driver of educational outcomes.

However, the article also suggests a cultural explanation: "it's built into our [Singaporean] culture to study all the way through school". If Asian Americans share this trait but non-Asian Americans do not, this is certainly consistent with the data.

Your hypothesis that Singapore's done so well because of its location is certainly a common one and puts you in good company.

It doesn't strike me as very persuasive though. For instance, here's a map[1] of ports and harbors in Malaysia. There are a lot of them. How come Singapore has almost the GDP (239 billion) of all of Malaysia put together (278 billion)?

[1] http://www.worldportsource.com/ports/MYS.php

Lets ask a different question. Why does NYC have a GDP of $544B [1], which is nearly as large as that of the rest of NY State ($611B)?

Another comparison: the GDP of the NYC metro area is $1.28T [2]. The GDP of Texas is $1.3T, Florida is $0.754 and CA is $1.9T.

You are probably right that location doesn't explain Singapore's wealth. But education probably doesn't either - I don't see any reason to believe NYC has a better education system than NY - NYC, CA, TX or FL.

The simplest explanation is that when a city becomes a regional hub, it generates disproportionate amounts of wealth. In the case of Singapore, the city also just happened to be a country.

[1] http://www.housingnyc.com/downloads/research/pdf_reports/ia1...

[2] The metro area is NYC + commuter suburbs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City

[edit: B -> T for NYC metro GDP]

I think you mean trillion instead of billion for the NYC metro area GDP. We really need words that sound more different for the two concepts, because they're way too easy to confuse despite how different they are.

Good comparison between the SE Asia situation and New York. I think it paints an accurate picture of what's going on. My beef with the parent is this line, "Singapore is what it is because of their strategic placing in the wold today." Personally, I think a more accurate way to put that would be "because of their strategic place in the world and merit." Singaporeans had something to do with Singapore becoming a regional hub (the second time, at least) and they should get credit for it.

I definitely don't think education alone explains Singapore's wealth. Just because I disagreed with one of the parent's points doesn't mean I disagree with everything he said.

True, the article certainly leaves out a lot there. I would, however, attribute Singapore's success to their own good leadership. The Brits certainly were not the ones who developed it to what it is today.