Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to Argentina?

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#41

Post by NathanKP »

bdotdub wrote: post #39
NathanKP wrote: post #38

From the article: Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy. That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucra…

While it's true that we can see how poorly the American system is run, how does it compare to the rest of the world? I don't know much about the subject, so I'm hoping to get a bit more insight into this. I suspect that even if our system isn't great and as good as it could be, it's still has a leg up on most education systems out there

Perhaps it is much better than the educational systems in third world countries, but compared with the European educational system Americans are definitely behind. Or course being an American myself it may just be a case of "The grass is green on the other side of the fence." However, from what I have read they definitely seem to run the colleges better in Europe.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#42

Post by bokonist »

As the next figure shows, no variable from 1900 better explains success in 2000 than investment in education.

How many other variables did Glasser analyze? And more importantly, how many variables from 1900 can we even quantify? Education is closely correlated with a number of other variables - quality of governance, IQ, culture, religion, level of development, etc. But there is no good way to quantify those variables for 1900 Argentina. Education may correlate well with growth, simply because its an excellent proxy for governance/culture/level of development.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#43

Post by Daishiman »

diego_moita wrote: post #40
diego wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina is (and has been) doing better than Brazil by pretty much any indicator of education, but Brazil has obviously done much better in terms of economic development. http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ar-argentina/edu-educati... http://www.nationmaster.com/country/br-brazil/edu-education Argentina's education was world-class for a significant part of the 20th century and is still pretty good. Unfortunately the…

> Argentina is (and has been) doing better than Brazil by pretty much any indicator of education, but Brazil has obviously done much better in terms of economic development Well, first I never claimed and don't think that we're doing much better than you guys. Honestly, I am not bragging on anything. Now, I agree that Argentinian education is better than Brazilian. Your stats show it and I know it. But put it just li…

I would argue that Peronism is in many ways an extension of fascism, since it's "democratic", but if you wanted to hold your job in the public sector you'd better show public support for Peronism. Likewise if you were a large industrialist and didn't want your factory shut down by the government-controlled unions.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#44

Post by potatolicious »

NathanKP wrote: post #41
bdotdub wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's true that we can see how poorly the American system is run, how does it compare to the rest of the world? I don't know much about the subject, so I'm hoping to get a bit more insight into this. I suspect that even if our system isn't great and as good as it could be, it's still has a leg up on most education systems out there

Perhaps it is much better than the educational systems in third world countries, but compared with the European educational system Americans are definitely behind. Or course being an American myself it may just be a case of "The grass is green on the other side of the fence." However, from what I have read they definitely seem to run the colleges better in Europe.

I have no first hand experience with this, but my brother is an evolutionary biologist in Canada. Many of his American peers complain of how politicized higher education is in the US; people in his field have a significant amount of trouble getting funding due to the "controversy" around their subject matter.

In fact, according to him, evolutionary biologists have been slowly draining out of the USA for years now (mostly into Europe).

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#45

Post by diego »

bokonist wrote: post #42

As the next figure shows, no variable from 1900 better explains success in 2000 than investment in education. How many other variables did Glasser analyze? And more importantly, how many variables from 1900 can we even quantify? Education is closely correlated with a number of other variables - quality of governance, IQ, culture, religion, level of development, etc. But there is no good way to quantify those variable…

More importantly Argentina's educational level is very good and has been for a long time. Argentina has five Nobel prize winners (three for science) and Brazil, for example, has none. The literacy rate in Argentina is 99% and has been for a long time, and so on. Picking 1900 as a random point to correlate with GDP in 2000 is arbitrary and meaningless.

It seems like the author picked an arbitrary variable to make a point without enough subject knowledge or citations to back it up. Just visiting Argentina would make it glaringly obvious that the education hypothesis doesn't explain anything.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#46

Post by foldr »

randallsquared wrote: post #32
foldr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the "economic divide" was broadened merely by making some people better off faster than others, as is usually the case in a freer market, then there's no problem. This seems a little optimistic. Having a large gap between the rich and the poor does in fact cause problems (e.g. social unrest).

It's unclear to me if this is human nature, or just cultural.

Either way, it still causes problems. And one can certainly point to historical examples of it causing unrest in culturally quite different societies.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#47

Post by vitaminj »

tokenadult wrote: post #2

This is an important issue to discuss, because the bad economic ideas that hobbled Argentina's growth (protectionism) are still current in many other countries. The graph about percentages of the population in primary schooling is quite interesting, and goes a long way to explain why Taiwan, poorer than Zambia within my lifetime, is now much wealthier than most other countries in the world.

The idea that protectionism is bad needs to be qualified. Whilst the successful Asian countries that are cited here (eg. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc) are export-oriented and encouraged trade, they were all quite protectionist early on. Big companies like Toyota, LG, Hyundai, Samsung were all heavily subsidised by their governments in the early years, and were aided by other protectionist measures (such as local content requirements, import tariffs, etc). In these cases, protectionism served a purpose - which is to protect local industry until it is globally competitive (ie. infant industry protection).

Notwithstanding, these protectionist policies don't always work out (eg. see Indonesia's airplane industry). Furthermore, Korea and Japan have had (and still have) an extremely difficult time reversing protectionist policies due to the lobby groups that represent the vested interests of the now successful companies.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#48

Post by kiddo »

There's a good book that covers this exact topic in much more depth. It's called "False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the Word" by Alan Beattie. If I remember correctly, he focuses on how Argentinian land was owned by wealthy elites, satisfied with their wealth. In the US, small parcels of land were handed out to poorer individuals. Thus, the US held a greater attraction for immigrants. In the US immigrants also migrated inland quickly, leaving room in the cities for more immigrants to arrive.

Some of the book is available online through google books.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#49

Post by miked »

NathanKP wrote: post #38

From the article: Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy. That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucra…

That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done.

I'm an American who's traveled in Europe a fair bit. I've had several conversations with Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian teachers. All were universally critical of teaching in their countries, the main thrust being that it was almost all driven completely by rote. Teaching in greece was so bad that a large number of families hire outside tutors just to teach things like English and classical greek and latin.

There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got.

Two other proxies would be number of Nobel prizes and number of patents issued. At least in absolute numbers, the US does quite well. Not sure about the more relevant per capita numbers, though I'm certain Israel would crush in the patent category.

While I largely agree with your statement in broad terms, it's too sweeping and doesn't control for things like ethnicity. We will never have great teaching anywhere until we get rid of the teachers' unions.

Re: What happened to Argentina?

#50

Post by bokonist »

miked wrote: post #49
NathanKP wrote: post #38

From the article: Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy. That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucra…

That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done. I'm an American who's traveled in Europe a fair bit. I've had several conversations with Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian teachers. All were universally critical of teac…

There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got.

Journal publishing and citations are heavily based on social networks and the intricacies of the modern grant system. I really wouldn't trust citations to be a good indicator of research or advancement. A better thing to look at would be the flow of real world improvements that come out of a universities research. Unfortunately, there is no systematic measurement of that flow.

Post reply on HN