Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/10/measuring-americas-decline-in-three-charts.html?mobify=0

by coenhyde • 13 years ago

38 55 13 years ago

Detrus• 13 years ago

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.

freyrs3• 13 years ago

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.

chongli• 13 years ago

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.

clavalle• 13 years ago

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?

mgirdley• 13 years ago

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.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

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.

vacri• 13 years ago

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

MaysonL• 13 years ago

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.

mikeash6• 13 years ago

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!

jballanc2• 13 years ago

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...

nerdo• 13 years ago

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...

mikeash6• 13 years ago

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

jamesaguilar3• 13 years ago

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.

temphn• 13 years ago

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.

thowawayanother5• 13 years ago

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.

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

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%.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

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?

kroger• 13 years ago

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.

itchitawa• 13 years ago

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!

PeterisP2• 13 years ago

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.

octaveguin• 13 years ago

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.

jamesaguilar3• 13 years ago

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.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

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.

bluedino• 13 years ago

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

pg• 13 years ago

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.

rgbrenner• 13 years ago

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...

jballanc2• 13 years ago

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.

jcnnghm2• 13 years ago

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...).

subsystem• 13 years ago

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-...

adamtait• 13 years ago

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.

refurb• 13 years ago

US population = 314M Canadian population = 35M

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

PaulHoule• 13 years ago

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...

lquist• 13 years ago

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.

Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts

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