Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts | Hacker News Reader

Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts

newyorker.com

38 pointscoenhyde55 comments

Comparing a heterogeneous group to homogeneous groups, in three charts. Broken out, America doesn't look so bad:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is...

I'd like to add that the Shanghai numbers are highly skewed. Half the students in Shanghai live there illegally, and attend informal schools. The Shanghai numbers represent the performance of the wealthiest 50%.

And why is that a better way to examine the numbers than the one in the article, exactly?

Under the assumption that you're interested in knowing the cause of the problem, gaining insight into the factors that lead to or indicate the problem can aid in understanding.

To speak in specifics rather than generalities: in this case, we see that White and Asian children do not seem to be having problems compared to their peers in other countries. Thus, we can assign a lower probability estimate to the hypothesis that the problem is the American educational system writ large. It seems to be a problem localized in certain parts of the system and population.

Let's be honest, race isn't an independent factor - at least in USA, it's highly correlated with family income and education level.

If you're comparing white kids in USA with all kids in Germany, then you're comparing apples with oranges - if you're putting a filter that excludes a large portion of poor families in USA, then you should exclude the same portion of poor families from the German results.

And if some other system is handling all social groups decently well, but USA fails with "certain parts of the system and population" as you say; then it's definitely a problem with "American educational system writ large".

You could just as easily plot USA-RICH and USA-POOR and conclude that wealth/income "lead to or indicate the problem". Or USA-NORTH, USA-SOUTH, USA-EAST and USA-WEST and conclude that geography "lead to or indicate the problem". I'm not sure how you can draw a causal relationship here.

I would be happy to see that done. I'm not making a claim about the cause of the problem except to observe that it doesn't seem to be affecting everyone. What I'd really love to see is an application that allows you to tweak the various group-bys (I'd like to try grouping by cost-of-living-adjusted log income brackets, personally, because my current estimate of that being the most related metric is highest. Or I'd like to see what happens if you take groups of kids with the same ratial and income backgrounds from various countries. Hold some variables constant, basically.).

I am only saying exactly what I said: it doesn't seem that the US educational system, in its entirety, is significantly defective relative to other countries. Some combination of the attributes of certain American populations and/or the system's effect on them is causing those populations to perform much worse than kids in European and Asian countries. This in no way spells doom for our entire country as the article argues.

Sure, but does this give any insight? Examining one factor out of the thousands that could potentially affect this does not strike me as in any way useful, especially since it happens to be a factor that's certain to generate lots of emotion and very little rational discussion.

For example, it strikes me as unlikely that these factors are actually caused by race directly. I don't buy into the PC idea that everybody is exactly, precisely the same, but the differences simply aren't all that large.

What seems much more likely is that it's related to poverty. Poverty and race are highly correlated in the US for various historical reasons, and I'd wager that the charts would show just as much, if not more, link between poverty and scores as between race and scores.

But we can't say for certain without a proper analysis of all potential confounding factors. Picking a single one and pretending it's automatically important is the wrong way to do it.

> it strikes me as unlikely that these factors are actually caused by race directly ... but the differences simply aren't all that large.

These are things you want to believe, but they are not true. The reality is that race plays a huge role in intelligence. It's totally unfair, but it is what it is. Ignoring it, and believing otherwise does not make it go away, or make it better. It makes it worse.

> Poverty and race are highly correlated in the US for various historical reasons

Poverty is also highly correlated with intelligence. More correlated than it is to race.

> link between poverty and scores as between race and scores.

Of course, because poverty is a proxy to intelligence.

> Picking a single one and pretending it's automatically important is the wrong way to do it.

Pretending that the main one is automatically not-important because it's unfair, and/or huts your world view, is also the wrong way to do it.

The racial component is not a property of genetics except insofar as one's race is evident to a white onlooker. So your implied reasoning is exactly backwards. It's 100 years of slavery followed by 100 years of oppression, conditions imposed on a set of people because of skin pigment.

This is the hand the US citizenry has been dealt. Or rather I should say this is the hand the US has dealt itself. If we as a country are behind because we've left a non-trivial subset of our own citizens behind, that's as much an indictment as anything else.

"The reality is that race plays a huge role in intelligence."

I'm going to need some kind of cite for that before we go any further, you know.

I've never seen this claim convincingly supported in a way that partials out the effect of socioeconomic status, parental involvement, and geography. It's an easy claim to support if you just look at straight averages.

I'm sure there is information I'm not familiar with, but I'm unimpressed with the "citations" that have followed this claim in other conversations.

In the United States, low income whites perform better than high income blacks on the SAT - it's not a fact I suggest you go around citing at parties[1]

" Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000."

[1] http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

I should feel free to check my privilege, but this actually seems like an even-handed discussion. Scroll down to "Other Explanations for the Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT."

""" Clearly, one of the main factors in explaining the SAT racial gap is that black students almost across the board are not being adequately schooled to perform well on the SAT and similar tests. Public schools in many neighborhoods with large black populations are underfunded, inadequately staffed, and ill equipped to provide the same quality of secondary education that is offered in predominantly white suburban school districts. """

""" In many cases black schoolchildren are taught by white teachers who have low opinions of the abilities of black kids from the moment they enter the classroom. These teachers immediately write off black students as academic inferiors and do not challenge them sufficiently to achieve the skills necessary to perform well on standardized tests. """

The thing is, we're nerds. We ought to think more critically than "black people are disproportionately poor and perform less well academically, oh well, that's that." Pre-chewed explanations like that ought to be anathema, especially when they're deployed in the service of a cultural agenda.

But there's a disturbing tendency to ignore the US' complex and problematic history with racism. It's lazy. It's a cop-out.

There's a disturbing issue not to think seriously about the causes of educational inequalities at all, at least not to the point where people weigh more than one hypothesis.

I've found the writings of a high school teacher under the name "education realist" to be thought-provoking. That's where I got this link from. He may be a Voldemort[1], but he's an honest one.

[1] http://www.nas.org/articles/Achievement_Gap_Politics

Yes, I've noticed that as well. Yet no matter how much you try to convince them that this stuff is complicated and many different factors are at work, some people just keep coming back to race as if it was the only thing that matters.

Not sure how reliable this data is, but it seems to contradict at least some of the assertion that race alone has that implication: http://glpiggy.net/2013/03/19/a-sociologist-looks-at-race-di...

White in lowest income bracket are lower than black in top income bracket.

Unfortunately, this data (from 2003) seems to show a persistent handicap in all but the highest income brackets for black SAT test takers. I'm sure there are a million studies and a million opinions, but my personal view is that it's likely due to historic inequalities still manifesting in current generations, as opposed to anything else.

Many of my friends from the Russian immigrant community came from a very different economic background than I did. For me, my grandparents would never have understood if I did not pursue graduate work in some form. From my friend's parents point of view, college was optional. I'm willing to bet that from ethnic make up, all of us are virtually indistinguishable and may even be related on some level. Different families, different attitudes to education, different SAT scores...

Do you think historic inequalities also explain the Asian/White achievement gap?

Yes, it provides tremendous insight.

Namely that we need a lot more effort put toward educational success for black children. The unemployment rate among young black males is particularly astronomical, and it correlates directly to failures in education and a skyrocketing in poverty rates. There has been a total failure across all aspects for the black community: education, employment, crime, family formation, etc.

You've got a huge swath of political parasites that abuse the black community, counting on their votes, while having done absolutely nothing to help improve the worsening rate of black poverty.

You've got shyster scumbags like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton, that also act as parasites on the backs of black people. Always ready to prey on cheap opportunism, while under their supposed community leadership results have gotten dramatically worse.

It all has to change. Separating out the data, reveals where the real problems are, and having a dialogue about it is the first step. So far, very few want to talk about it.

Another glaring problem, is that America has lost its blue collar jobs. That was a core channel for upward mobility from poor > middle class, and a required staple to hold onto a large middle class. The vast erosion of quality manufacturing jobs over the last 40 years has particularly slammed people that were mostly poor to begin with - their ability to move up has been stopped (and all that destroys with it).

If the United States is becoming a Latin American country, why would you expect it to have macrostatistics comparable to Finland?

It would be interesting to see international test scores from 1960, when the US was ~90% people of European descent. I would bet the US would compare closer to Europe on those. The demographic changes in the US over the last 50 years have been huge, and you can't ignore them in international comparisons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime#Crimestop

  Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by   
  instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It 
  includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to 
  perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest 
  arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being 
  bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable 
  of leading in a heretical direction. 

  The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous 
  thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, 
  instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

  He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He 
  presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the 
  earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than 
  water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not 
  understanding the arguments that contradicted them.

I take it you're getting at people avoiding thinking about the thought that race might be correlated with intelligence, lest they become an awful person. And it's a fair criticism. At the same time however, it has been noted that people have a subjective bias against people not of their own race.

What is the relevance of this quote?

Race is absolutely a factor, but only insofar as white people enslaved black people, then legislated them into second class citizenship. Post-1960s, I guess we're on to blaming them (hence the stupid & lazy stereotype) because we think they should've gotten over it & recovered by now.

I wonder what terrible things Asians did to whites such that they earn higher income, commit fewer crimes, and do better in schools than whites while living in historically white countries.

This is a complete non-sequitur. It was only until very recently that whites have begun to approach anything less than a majority.

ETA: likewise, Asians have not been in charge of the US for the majority of its history. In fact, they have typically been subject to whites' dominance. The WWII Japanese internment camps are a case in point.

But I get the sense that you're not really interested in exploring the complexity of different race relations as you are discounting said complexity with a trivially false equivalence.

It's only decline if the US is doing worse than it did in the past. But this data seems to be a single snapshot. It would be good if someone could find past results and see if there has actually been a decline.

if someone could find past results

There are no past results. These are the results from the first OECD "Survey of Adult Skills"

http://skills.oecd.org/documents/OECD_Skills_Outlook_2013.pd...

If you interpret the title as referencing a general decline (as opposed to a specific decline in these metrics) and attempting to explain that decline with the charts presented, then perhaps you'd accept this as evidence of a decline: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+minus+China%2C+US+mi... ?

Edit: I realize this is a rather liberal reading of the title. I'd argue the title has been, not unexpectedly, sensationalized.

The "decline" is based on that in the US younger people do worse than older people when compared to other countries. Think of the study as a core sample.

"Some countries are making progress from generation to generation. But in the United States, as in Britain, the literacy and numeracy skills of young people coming into the labor market are no better than those who are about to retire. Americans who are 55 to 65 perform about average in literacy skills, but young Americans rank the lowest among their peers in the countries surveyed. The problem is not so much that the United States has gotten worse, but that it stood still on indicators like high school graduation rates while its foreign competitors rushed forward. Beginning in the 1970s, other developed nations recognized that the new economy would produce few jobs for workers with mediocre skills."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/opinion/the-united-states-...

That's not evidence of a decline, see http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+real+GDP+over+time. That would seem to indicate that other countries are catching up, not that the US is declining. Also, in real terms, it doesn't look like the narrowing of the gap is accelerating (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+minus+China%2C+US+mi...).

Yes, it shows that other countries are catching up, but every country in the world affects every other country through import/export. If every country in the world were at the economic level of the US, our products would cost much more and every American's purchasing power would go down.

If we put money aside and look at social aspects like education or corruption, I don't think the US has ever topped those charts recently. The Scandinavian countries seem to dominate those types of charts year after year.

The global economy isn't zero-sum.

A lot of this feels like measuring the results of education with standardized tests. Do they ultimately correlate to economic output/GDP? How does the US maintain it's current level of economic output if it's so stupid?

Maybe it doesn't hurt economically that larger chunks of the population are dumber in the US. Less intellectual competition might allow the best companies/players to rise to the top and multiply their effects.

Study but http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/10/study-argu...

Where did a large number of our brightest math and physics students end up? Wall St. Their contribution is well known. The US doesn't seem to have enough productive places to stick educated people.

The private sector has plenty of places to put PhD level people with technical skills, it's just in roles that in which their expertise tends to be directed toward more risk-averse ventures and their skills tend to be underutilized. The number of physics PhDs I see in low-level software development roles sometimes scares me.

A lot of this feels like measuring the results of education with standardized tests.

Funny you should say this. Finland (right at the top) does not use rote learning or standardized tests in its education system.

Things they actually tested (or at least, a sample): http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/Education%20and%20Skills_onli...

I was surprised by the quality. These seem like really good tests of general competence. This gives a lot of weight to the results.

To be fair, we've been getting our butts kicked in primary education for many decades, and it hasn't killed us yet. Betimes everyone was scared that Japan would take us over because their kids were so much "smarter" than ours, and look what happened to that. Which is not to say I wouldn't love for us to do better on these tests, but it's also hard for me to summon terror over them either.

I always wonder when I see charts like this:

How would, say, the top 1 or 2% of each of those countries fare against each other?

The author's literacy, numeracy and problem-solving ability seem questionable. Decline means descent: going from a higher level to a lower level, of which the article demonstrates exactly none.

There's an implicit assumption that we used to be on top, although it's not supported by data (and I'd hazard that the data would not support it).

It's another form of nostalgia, really. People think the US was so great and wonderful in the past and now it's crap. It was crap all along, really. Happened to be some good crap, and still is in many ways, but crap just the same.

If the USA wants to return to the global domination it had in the 1950s, the answer is clearly another devastating world war that leaves the USA is the sole advanced nation untouched, since that's how we got to that position previously. Not by education or technology or resources or innovation (although there was plenty of that too), but by having all the competitors tear each other to pieces for years. Now the world is enjoying relative peace, and that means we're not so special anymore!

I think you're right, but only partially. In addition to being the only industrialized nation in the world left mostly untouched by the war, it was also the prime destination for the world's best and brightest looking for someplace to escape to. Add to that the fact that the US was already in the mindset of trying to prove itself equal to the "traditional" superpowers (England, Germany) and that it found itself immediately after the war in competition with a genuinely scary foe, and the US really had nothing to loose by going all out.

Peace is not the US's only enemy. The US also suffers from that most damnable of afflictions: success. Physical isolation means that the US doesn't have to worry about aggressors on its borders, but it also means that the US feels less of a push from its friendly competitors. Why invest in science or education? Why not just enjoy having the world's largest military by a long-shot? Why not enjoy the land? the natural resources?

That the US will eventually loose its top spot is certain. The problem is, when the US finds itself no long top dog, will it have the means to kick itself back into gear. That, I think, is the real damning implication of these graphs.

Being better educated won't prevent the eventual decline of the US, but it will determine just how far down that decline goes...

The charts seems a bit strange. What does England/Northern Ireland mean? Is it a combination of the two countries scores? Did they both score equally? Why leave out Scotland and Wales and not plot the UK?

This is a good question. The source is the "Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) (2012)." On the report they have a list of "National entities" (UK is not there) and "sub-national entities", where they have Flanders (Belgium), England (UK), Northen Ireland (UK), and England/N. Ireland (UK). I guess they don't have data for Scotland and Wales.

It doesn't even list all the OECD countries. This gives the false impression that US is at the bottom. Yep, it's worse than everyone better than it!

It does clearly include the average value and the USA value - even if it cherrypicks a few examples from the huge list of countries, these two numbers are enough to see that the impression isn't false.

It looks like they're comparing averages from all those countries, when we all know that the population of the USA is largest. Even though the distribution might be different, the number of people that fit into the distribution are very different.

We have some really smart people in Canada, but we also have 1/3 of the population of the US. Even if our average proficiency with problem solving is 10% higher, we still only have a fraction of the people who are proficient as the US.

US population = 314M Canadian population = 35M

35M/314M = ~1/9 not 1/3

People have been lamenting America's decline for my entire 38 years -- and more.

At some point, we have to stop listening to the Chicken Littles.

> People have been lamenting America's decline for my entire 38 years -- and more.

Well, for most of that time, by a number of measures, America -- and particularly the conditions of the middle class -- has been declining.

> At some point, we have to stop listening to the Chicken Littles.

Repeatedly saying something is going to happen that doesn't is being a Chicken Little.

Repeatedly saying something is happening when it is objectively desmonstrable is not being a Chicken Little. Even when it keeps happening over an extended period of time.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

The school system has two purposes. One of them is to keep the teacher's union going. Union teaching jobs are unequivocally awful -- less than 50% of people who get teaching certificates can bear to work in the field, left with student debt and no income to repay it. (It's a good racket for the union teachers who teach the teacher thought.) They get rapidly discouraged and burned out but at least they get a defined benefit pension... For now.

The other one is to kneecap people... Specifically from Kindergarten all the way to college I was taught that I could be bullied with impunity and never see anybody held to the account.

This normalizes bullying in the workforce, which is exactly what they want because they want you to be weak and controllable.

I'm going through this crap with my son. I went to a meeting with the superintendent and he was gushing over how much he wanted feedback from the mother of a "special" kid and how she was a partner in her education but he didn't care what I thought because there was a new paradigm and don't you know homework is obsolete and spelling too and how my input is definitely not wanted and won't be listened to.

And they wonder why people vote Republican...

It seems ironic to me that this story has been submitted to Hacker News, a social news website at the center of Silicon Valley, an extraordinary fount of innovation unequalled worldwide. American "progress" or "success" will be determined much more by the pace of innovation than by the abilities of the general population.

We were ever that great, or is everyone else just finally catching up?

I'm not sure if it is possible to conclude that America is "declining" by looking at three simple charts.

Regardless of the fact that American students are lagging in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving, America has a huge landmass with a vast amount of (still) untapped resources. Not only that, it is also geographically isolated from the so-called "Old World," which gives it significant advantages in terms of physical safety and security.

Does this mean America will continue to remain the #1 world-power? Not necessarily. In fact, it probably won't, as all empires inevitably recede in power and collapse. But if it happens, it probably won't be due to simple differences on a few graphs.

Every set of graphs must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not in that order?

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