Steve Sailer doesn't practice "analysis" when he writes about ethnicity. On that subject, he practices demagoguery. I'll post here parts of a FAQ that was written for a related blog post (different author, but same lame analysis) from the same year with most of Sailer's points.
Sailer's main point seems to be found a few paragraphs down in a sentence serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "When broken down by ethnicity, American students did reasonably well compared to the countries from which their ancestors came."
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students with ancestors from Europe (like me) or with ancestors from Asia (plenty of other Americans I know) are not doing all that well by that metric. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. Sailer, a person who grew up in the United States, has the advantage of knowing English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up where English is the customary language. It doesn't surprise me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2013, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in thos...
The degree to which the United States continues to be successful even though people here, on average, don't work as hard as people in east Asia, on average, is a puzzlement to east Asians. My take on the situation is that the founders of the United States were largely people who worked very hard indeed, and they were probably in the top rank in the world of that time in how hard they worked. Thus the United States still has accumulated resources (not just capital resources, but a society structured on the basis of sounder rule by law) that gives it a long-term advantage, allowing many Americans now to become complacent. It is a fact that most east Asian countries have been growing economically and improving socially at a faster rate than the United States has during my adult lifetime, so they could catch up[1] (and then, perhaps, have many inhabitants decide to take it easy).
I shared this link, after reading it, with my Facebook friends as I waited to see if it would bubble up to the front page of Hacker News. Sure enough, several of my American-born, American-raised friends thought that the article describes a situation of east Asian toil that they don't desire to emulate. A south Asian friend of mine gave the post a thumbs up, and went back to work without commenting further. The stored-up wealth of the United States also prompted a comment from another Facebook friend, also brought up and born in the United States:
"I believe the following:
1. America enjoys success today largely because of immigrant labor, not American labor.
2. American universities are still far and away the best in the world, but they are getting worse rapidly.
3. American universities increasingly serve foreign students, not American students.
4. Investing in America is far safer than anywhere else in the world because of such organizations as the SEC.
5. People hate the SEC rules and are looking for ways around them with increasing success, in large part because the investors are foreign and not used to such rules.
"I am reminded of the fall of Sparta."
One observation of this phenomenon I heard around the most recent turn of the century was from Christians in Taiwan: "It looks like God is blessing Americans for observing the Sabbath, as they surely don't work as hard as we do here." People grasp for all kinds of easy explanations for the difference in recent outcomes between the United States and east Asia (I refute another too frequently heard, too simple and just plain flat wrong explanation below another comment in this thread), but surely the explanation for this phenomenon, as for plenty of other phenomena of differences between countries, is multifactorial and subject to change over time.
Hmph, It seems that there are only two countries on that list for Mathematics with the same degree of cardinality to the U.S... Russia and Japan. These I would find to be more appropriate a comparison than say, a city to a country. It seems disingenuous to label Shanghai as China, as if it was representative of the whole, and then compare it to the U.S... They are supposedly comparing states, but I think there are more appropriate comparisons that could be made.
9 comments
[ 21.3 ms ] story [ 487 ms ] thread[1] http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-which-countries-not-...
[2] http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is...
It also seems the underlying PISA data is a closely guarded secret. No doubt a political tinderbox.
> Why does my second graph have to compare reading scores from 2009 to science scores from 2006 and math scores from 2003?
Sailer's main point seems to be found a few paragraphs down in a sentence serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "When broken down by ethnicity, American students did reasonably well compared to the countries from which their ancestors came."
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students with ancestors from Europe (like me) or with ancestors from Asia (plenty of other Americans I know) are not doing all that well by that metric. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. Sailer, a person who grew up in the United States, has the advantage of knowing English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up where English is the customary language. It doesn't surprise me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2013, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in thos...
I shared this link, after reading it, with my Facebook friends as I waited to see if it would bubble up to the front page of Hacker News. Sure enough, several of my American-born, American-raised friends thought that the article describes a situation of east Asian toil that they don't desire to emulate. A south Asian friend of mine gave the post a thumbs up, and went back to work without commenting further. The stored-up wealth of the United States also prompted a comment from another Facebook friend, also brought up and born in the United States:
"I believe the following: 1. America enjoys success today largely because of immigrant labor, not American labor. 2. American universities are still far and away the best in the world, but they are getting worse rapidly. 3. American universities increasingly serve foreign students, not American students. 4. Investing in America is far safer than anywhere else in the world because of such organizations as the SEC. 5. People hate the SEC rules and are looking for ways around them with increasing success, in large part because the investors are foreign and not used to such rules.
"I am reminded of the fall of Sparta."
One observation of this phenomenon I heard around the most recent turn of the century was from Christians in Taiwan: "It looks like God is blessing Americans for observing the Sabbath, as they surely don't work as hard as we do here." People grasp for all kinds of easy explanations for the difference in recent outcomes between the United States and east Asia (I refute another too frequently heard, too simple and just plain flat wrong explanation below another comment in this thread), but surely the explanation for this phenomenon, as for plenty of other phenomena of differences between countries, is multifactorial and subject to change over time.
[1] http://www.globalpost.com/globalpost-blogs/southeast-asia/si...
I believe that the "not so good in exam" type is excellent in another thing aside academic, and that thing usually make them leader.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts...