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The good news is that so far climate models have all been dramatically wrong in their predictions of global mean temperature, and that all of them have erred on the high side. It's striking how little knowledge climate activists have of relevant evidence.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2157446...

[2] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/16/lomborg-climate-models...


We live in a cognitively assorted economy and half of all people have an IQ below 100. 5% have an IQ below 70. If they have unusually pleasant personalities, they may find jobs in the service industry. But most won't.

We have a historically vestigial class of people that have nothing to offer a modern economy. And that class will grow as the economy gets more complex. An increase in complexity is indistinguishable from downward mobility.

Poor immigrants come from places where the cognitive sorting hasn't happened yet.


When you adjust American PISA scores for demographics, you see that Americans of all ethnic backgrounds do better than the countries of their ancestors[1]. The mystery of why American schools are so bad disappears when you control for demographics.

This might also explain the mystery of why Finland scores so much higher than Sweden and Norway. There are much higher levels of third world immigration in the latter countries. The school system is not the only difference.

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


Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise that people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are from because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen place in the world.


> Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise that people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are from because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen place in the world.

Because that says that Finnish-Americans do better than Finnish people in Finland?


This argument appears to be cribbed from a blog post by another author that same year. But this is factually incorrect.

1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. 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. All the authors who write on this issue, whether they grew up in the United States or grew up somewhere else, ignore the fact that educated persons in most other countries have acquired English as a working language for personal communication. It amazes me that commenters on international educational comparisons don'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 2012, 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 those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.

3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,

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

with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...

The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf

and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.

4. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "American ethnic groups" are causally related to comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.

Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf

Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,

Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...

so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf


I agree with the thrust of your comment. But as a member of the "privileged majority" who did not have a safe learning environment for most of my school years, I'm tired of getting dumped on online and being told my experience is not valuable or valid in these discussions.

School sucks for nerdy white boys, too. Yes, I'd like to see a safe and healthy learning environment for everyone.


I don't think you'd actually get in trouble for an "I hate White People" t-shirt. It would probably be seen as a political statement. We have whole college majors devoted to elucidating the evils of white people. It's hip to hate them.


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