NewGeography.com blogs

China Expressway System to Exceed US Interstates

This should be the year that China's intercity expressway system exceeds the length of the US interstate highway system. China's expressways are fully grade separated, freeway standard roadways, but unlike most interstate highways, have tolls.

The China Ministry of Transport indicates that, as of the end of 2010, China had 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometers) of expressways. Currently, the expressways of China have a total length about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) less than that of the US interstate highway system. In the last year, 5,500 miles (9,000 kilometers) of new expressways were completed. If that construction rate continues, China's expressway system would exceed the interstate system length late in the first quarter of 2011.

By 2020, China expects to have 53,000 miles (85,000 kilometers) of expressways. This compares to the US total of approximately 57,000 miles (92,000 kilometers), including non-interstate freeways. However, the China expressway mileage does not include the expressways administered by provincial level governments, such as in Beijing (with its five expressway ring roads), the extensive system of Shanghai and the expressways of Hong Kong. No data is readily available for the lengths of these roads.

Now it is possible to travel, uninterrupted (except for traffic jams in the vicinity of the largest urban areas), from north to south from near the Russian border, north of Harbin (in Heilongjiang or Manchuria) to near the resort island of Hainan, well south of Guangzhou, Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta and not far from the border with Viet Nam. This is a total distance of 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers).

East to west travel without signals is now possible from Shanghai to near the Myanmar (Burma) border, beyond Kunming, a distance of 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers). In the longer run, it will be possible to travel from the Russian border in Manchuria to the border of Kazakhstan in Xinjiang, a distance of 3,500 miles (5,700 kilometers).

The expressway system is indicated in the map below. The blue the routes have been opened and the red routes are yet to be completed.

US House Gives Small Business the Huggem-Muggem

“In public Congress hugs them, in private they mug them!” So said the late Milt Stewart, one of the architects of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program in the 1980s and a renowned advocate for America’s small businesses.

I first met Milt in 1992 and eagerly joined forces with him and others from business and government to generate more research opportunities for America’s small businesses – then and now, the most potent force for innovation and job creation on the planet.

Unfortunately, small business continues to get what Fred Patterson, echoing Milt Stewart, calls the "Huggem-Muggem": lots of lip service but very little productive legislative action that facilitates their creation of jobs.

Case in point is the current plight of the SBIR program, which has received considerable bi-partisan support in the Congress for more than 25 years. The Senate of the 111th Congress wanted to reauthorize the SBIR but their counterparts in the House leadership played the old "Huggem-Muggem" game.

The outgoing Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), blocked all efforts to openly debate many Small Business Administration (SBA) initiatives, including the SBIR Program, before her committee. The incoming committee chair, Sam Graves (R-MO), has previously aligned with her to thwart SBIR reauthorization. Their opposition to reauthorization appears to center on the fact that companies which are majority-owned by venture capital firms are now ineligible to apply for SBIR funds.

The National Small Business Association puts the facts on the line. “Despite the remarkable achievements of SBIR, federal R&D funding is still skewed against small businesses. Today, small R&D companies employ 38 percent of all scientists and engineers in America. This is more than all U.S. universities and more than all large businesses. Furthermore, these small companies produce five times as many patents per dollar as large companies and 20 times as many as universities—and more small-business innovations are commercialized. Yet small companies receive only 4.3 percent of the federal government’s R&D dollars. The SBIR program provides more than half of this amount.”

If our country is serious about innovation, competitiveness and job creation it makes sense that we put our resources where they have the most impact. Instead, we are served up the same old tired "Huggem-Muggem" game by those who profess to be advocates for small business.

I've said it before, and will say it again- instead of weakening the SBIR program we should be doubling, if not tripling, our country’s investment in the program. At a minimum a $5 billion SBIR program should be put in place. It will give us much more job growth than the Treasury bailouts of domestic banks and, as we now know, foreign banks too. The SBIR program represents both what America wants and needs in these times of economic stress: job growth driven by small business innovation.

Delore Zimmerman is President of Praxis Strategy Group and publisher of newgeography.com

A Train to Nowhere: Not A Train Through Nowhere

In expressing its opposition to the California High Speed Rail line, Washington Post editorialists noted that critics of the now approved Borden to Corcoran segment have called the line a "train to nowhere" ("Hitting the breaks on California's high speed rail experiment"). The Post call this:

...a bit unfair, since some of the towns along the way have expensively redeveloped downtowns that may now suffer from the frequent noise and vibration of trains roaring through them.

What the Post missed, however, is that a "train to nowhere" is not a "train through nowhere." There is no doubt that the high viaducts and the noisy trains have potential to do great harm to the livability of the communities through which it passes. This is one of the reasons that the French have largely avoided operating their high speed rail trains through urban areas, except at relatively low speeds. Stations, except for in the largest urban areas, are generally beyond the urban fringe and towns are bypassed. Yet, one of the decisions not yet made in California, for example, is whether the town of Corcoran will be cut in half by the intrusive, noisy line.

There would be nothing but grief for the towns through which the California high speed rail lines would pass, but not stop (this is not to discount the disruption the line will cause even where it would stop, such as in Fresno). It may be a train to nowhere, but it is a train through places that people care about.

Skepticism About High-Speed Rail Is Growing

"Spend first, answer questions later." So concludes a critical editorial in the January 12 edition of the Washington Post, commenting on California's proposed $43 billion High-Speed Rail program. The Post editorial, along with a January 11 article in the New York Times (both of which we reprint below), are emblematic of the increasingly skeptical press and public opinion concerning the fiscal and economic soudness of the Obama Administration's high-speed rail initiative. "It's unclear that the public benefits attributed to high-speed rail...would outweigh the inevitable operating subsidies," observes the Washington Post, confirming the conclusions already reached by the states of Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa.

Other states and their freight railroad partners seemingly are having similar second thoughts, judging from the parties' lack of progress in reaching cooperative track-sharing agreements. Conspicuous among them is the state of Florida which has been promised a $2.4 billion federal grant to build an 84-mile "high-speed" line from Tampa to Orlando. That line, by all evidence, is too short to produce any meaningful time savings over car trips along a parallel interstate freeway. Moreover, as the New York Times article points out, the proposed line has scored among the lowest in terms of projected ridership in a study of the nation's high-speed rail corridors recently published by America 2050, a national urban planning initiative (www.America2050.org). Its authors cited the low population and employment density of the cities at either end of the line (and a lack of internal transit distribution systems, we might add) as the reason for low ridership estimates and the line's low score. The article notes that "the report represents another blow to the Florida high-speed rail network after a report from the Reason Foundation found the project could cost Florida taxpayers $3 billion."

As the Washington Post editorial observed, "The president has a vision of a national high-speed rail network almost as grand as the interstate highway system. We have our doubts about the ultimate feasibility of this vision, in part because in much of the country passenger rail can't compete with car travel by interstate highways." The editorial could also have noted one other fundamental difference. Pres. Eisenhower's ambitious plan for the interstate highway system was placed on a sound fiscal basis by being backed by a user fee (aka the gas tax). Mr. Obama's high-speed rail vision, on the other hand is funded by a one-time $8 billion federal stimulus grant with no visible source of continued support. Indeed, the high-speed rail initiative faces little prospect of sustained congressional funding, it has yet to show evidence of attracting private capital, and it exposes the taxpayers to continued operating subsidies,as Amtrak experience suggests.

No wonder Pres. Obama's vision is increasingly being questioned, even by the mainstream media.

Krugman's Muddled Argument Against Texas

Last week NYT columnist and economist Paul Krugman wrote a very popular column pointing to Texas' revenue shortfall and declaring it an example of the failure of conservative government.  I found the whole piece a muddled mess and dismissed it, but you can't believe the notes I've gotten from people requesting a response.

The thing is, I don't really get his point. The bad national economy was going to cut state revenues no matter what. Is he saying we'd be better off if we had a fat government with easy cuts, instead of a lean government with tough cuts?  How much sense does that make?

The nice thing about delaying my response is that others have already made great cases against the column (saving me the work).  Kevin Williams at the National Review is a bit sarcastic for my tastes, but makes several great points - the main ones being:

  • there's no such thing as a shortfall in Texas, since we use zero-based budgeting (i.e. we start from nothing building every budget with no assumptions from prior years), and
  • our unemployment rate, which is better than the national average, is even more impressive when you consider our huge population gains and the jobs we've had to provide just to keep up with it.

Bill Watkins here at New Geography also lays into Krugman's fuzzy thinking:

"People are not as stupid as many Nobel Prize winners might think; they move for opportunity, not just for cheap houses or low-paid work."

Then he comes up with a great new acronym:

"A business moves to or expands in a region based on a whole host of reasons. These include available infrastructure, resource availability, market size and location, labor supply and costs, worker productivity, facilities costs, transportation costs, and other costs. Those other costs include what I call DURT (Delay, Uncertainty, Regulation, and Taxes)."

Conveniently, the Wall Street Journal made the case for Texas' growth and opportunity the next day:

WSJ.com - Opinion: The Great Lone Star Migration

Today one out of 12 Americans lives in Texas—the same proportion that lived in New York City in 1930.

...Finally there is Texas. In 1930 there were (rounded off) six million people in the Lone Star State versus 13 million in New York. In 1970 there were 11 million in Texas and 18 million in New York: Each had grown by about five million. But in 2010 there were 25 million in Texas and 19 million in New York.

Back in the 1930-70 period, liberal political scientists hoped and expected that America would become less like Texas and more like New York, with bigger government, higher taxes and more unions. In one important respect—the abolition of legally enforced racial segregation—that has happened. But otherwise Americans have been voting with their feet for the Texas model, with its low tax rates, light regulation and openness to new businesses and enterprises.

Today one out of 12 Americans lives in Texas—the same proportion that lived in New York City in 1930. Metropolitan Dallas and metropolitan Houston, with about six million people each, threaten to overtake our fourth largest metro area, San Francisco Bay (population about seven million), in the next decade.

That doesn't seem to be much of an indictment of Texas' approach to governance...

That's not to say the next budget is going to be easy.  A lot of hard tradeoffs will have to be made.  But it's pretty clear Texas is a very far cry from being a failed state.

South Dakota’s Growth Is Noticeable in the Midwestern Arena

According to the 2010 Census population data for the United States, the Midwest region was the slowest growing of the four Census regions, at a 3.9% increase overall. South Dakota led the Midwest for population with an increase of 7.9%, while the lowest was the battered state of Michigan at -0.6%. These numbers seem to suggest a shift from the Rust Belt to the Great Plains.

This is more apparent when considering CNN Money’s list of the top 100 best cities to live in for 2010. Four cities represented the Dakotas on this list while only one city, Ann Arbor, stood for Michigan at number 46. The four cities from the Dakotas were Bismarck, ND at 74; Sioux Falls, SD at 77; Fargo, ND at 86; and finally Grand Forks, ND at 97.

The odds seem to be against the growing state of South Dakota when compared to the once-great Michigan. Michigan has 32 Fortune 500 companies (the largest being GM, Ford, and Dow), a notable IT strength, three well-known universities (University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University), and is one of the biggest leaders of industrial research and development. However, Michigan’s weaknesses lie in its disintegrating manufacturing industries whereas South Dakota has attained a more promising outlook.

South Dakota’s major city is Sioux Falls in Lincoln county, which has been named one of the “best counties to find a job” with a 67% increase in job growth in the last decade. Sioux Falls has been named one of the “best places to start a business” by CNN where operating a business costs an estimated 45% less there than it does in New York City. It also boasts a crime rate that is half the national average, is home to offices of many financial giants including Citibank and Wells Fargo that come to the state for its slackened usury laws and positive banking regulations, and has some of the region’s leading hospitals. A determined arts scene and a strong retail sector round out the package.

Can Sioux Falls be compared to the crumbling Detroit? When considering Sioux Falls to be the major hub of its region (the most proximate major cities are Omaha and Minneapolis, both over 150 miles away) it’s no wonder that many people are flocking there to be a part of its thriving economy that can’t be found for miles. Detroit, on the other hand, is a homogenous product in a competitive market. Other Rust Belt cities find themselves in a corresponding situation, offering a similar lifestyle while depending on declining industries.

One of Us

Could these awful events in Tucson really forge a national “cooling off period?”

Many would make the case that American tragedies are exploited by media and government elites to manipulate public sentiment.

But even if that’s true, I believe there is an American community that grieves, celebrates and grows together.

Despite my dedicated opposition to George Bush, for example, I was moved four years ago by his memorial speech after the Virginia Tech massacre.

Americans look to the president for comfort.

In November ’09 I watched President Obama’s reaction to the Fort Hood shootings and was appalled by his dispassionate affect.  I criticized him in my blog for sounding like a white house staffer reading a prepared statement.

I want and expect Obama to console Americans over the next several days and not just to gain political advantage. 

But to make us feel less confused.  (I was unsettled by the way cable and the internet went into overdrive seconds after the rampage: weekend tv anchors stumbling through worthless conversations with elected officials and over-the-top instant online analysis).

This is a time for the country to rise above political differences.

And this is an opportunity for Barack Obama to show all Americans that he is – after all – one of us.

This first appeared at laborlou.com

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Trying to Keep Hope Alive: High-Speed Rail in Illinois

Despite the rejection of high-speed rail in many states, Illinois is trying to revive it. The Illinois Department of Transportation recently made a cooperative agreement with Union Pacific and Amtrak to fund passenger rail improvements for its line from Chicago to St. Louis with a $1.1 billion federal high-speed rail grant. The project, to be completed in 2014, would make transit more efficient between the two cities, but as many other states have realized, the numbers indicate that this efficiency is not worth the cost or the trouble.

The high-speed trains set to carry passengers 284 miles from Chicago to St. Louis would do very little to drastically change the commute experience. When the Illinois Department of Transportation first applied for this grant one year ago, they claimed that the trains would cut travel time between the cities from 5 hours 20 minutes down to 4 hours 10 minutes. However, current estimates now put the trip time at around 4 hours 32 minutes. As with every high-speed rail proposal, it seems, planners set the bar too high and end up either spending more than the public bargained for or overestimating the benefits of these billion dollar projects. How efficient will high-speed rail be if it costs more than people can afford and does relatively little to enhance the commute?

Union Pacific’s terms in the agreement are not settling for riders either. According to CEO Jim Young, the company’s priority is “to protect Union Pacific’s ability to provide the exceptional freight service our customers need and expect,” and not necessarily passenger rail operations. Not only that, but there are no consequences stipulated in the agreement for if the railroad fails to meet on-time performance standards for passenger service, stipulations withdrawn from the initial agreement by the Federal Railroad Authority. High-speed rail was advertised to the public who would be paying for it with tax dollars and the divergence of their tax dollars from the state’s other pressing needs, but those developing the system do not seem as concerned with this large pool of customers.

Local governments all over the country are recognizing the flaws with high-speed rail projects and are starting to act. The incoming governors in Wisconsin and Ohio have cancelled plans for a high-speed rail line while Florida governor Rick Scott doubts the cost effectiveness of what Michael Grunwald of TIME magazine calls a “glorified Disney shuttle.” Many inside and outside of California have also vehemently voiced their opposition to the “railroad to nowhere,” a line that would connect Corcoran and Bakersfield and would be the first costly step in its overall plan to connect San Francisco and Anaheim. Since projects are stalling in many other states as well, it might be worth it to take a second look at the necessity of high-speed rail at the present time.

The influx of Republicans into Congress along with this local opposition may pressure the Obama administration to cut back funding for high-speed rail and work on fixing the deficit. However, this high-speed rail grant for Illinois shows that the federal government is not about to abandon the pipe dream yet.

A Bump in the Road to Chinese Urbanization?

China has been urbanizing at a break-neck pace. Between 1980 and 2010, nearly China's urban areas have added 450 million people, nearly 1.5 times the population of the United States. Nearly one-half (47%) of the nation's population now lives in urban areas and the figure is expected to exceed 60% by 2030, according to United Nations data.

According to The Asia Times, 230 million of these new residents are temporary migrants. They are people who have migrated from rural areas to take jobs in factories or other generally lower paid occupations. Under the nearly 60-year old Chinese residency permit system ("hukou") citizens have either rural or urban residency rights. A principal purpose of this system was to limit the flow of rural residents to the urban areas.

As Deng Xiaoping's reforms took effect in the early 1980s, industrial production and exports skyrocketed and this required rural labor to migrate to the urban areas. Migrants were granted temporary status, but not permanent. It is possible, but difficult to transfer one's hukou from rural to urban. Yet the demand for such transfers has been overwhelming.

Yet, an article in the national newspaper, China Daily could mean a slowdown in the trend. The issue is the cost of living. Reporter Wang Yan notes that, for the first time, there is now a growing demand for transferring hukou residential status from urban to rural. There are currently no routine national procedures for such transfers.

A survey of 120,000 temporary migrant workers in urban areas working by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences research center found that only 25 percent would be interested in trading their rural residency permits for urban residency permits. The survey covered working age adults in 106 prefectures with large urban areas.

The driving factor is economic. As in the United States, where differences in housing affordability are strongly associated with domestic migration trends, costly urban housing in China could be fueling a new attraction for rural areas. The cost of housing has risen substantially in China's urban areas. At the same time, the cost of housing is near-zero in the rural areas. Further, residents of rural areas within prefectures with large urban areas have the hope of selling their land for urban development in the longer run and making a substantial profit. However, this new-found affection for the countryside is likely to be limited to areas relatively close to urban centers, to which rural residents can commute for better paying jobs.

The government has announced plans to reform the hukou residency permit system. According to Zhang Yi, director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences research center is a system that "ensures freedom of migration."

The United Nations projections may be right. The stated preferences identified in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences survey may not ultimately reveal themselves in actual behavior. But predictions are no more than predictions.

Picture: Shenzhen: Luxury Housing (foreground) and Migrant Housing (background)

The Amazing Truth About PISA Scores: USA Beats Western Europe, Ties with Asia

Once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, (PISA is the Program for International Student Assessment) American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students. Jump to the graphs if you don't want to read my boring set-up and methodology.

The main theme in my blog is that we shouldn’t confuse policy with culture, and with demographic factors.

For instance, education scholars have known for decades that the home environment of the kids and the education levels of the parents are very important for student outcomes. We also know that immigrant kids have a more difficult time at school, in part because they don’t know the language.

Take me as an example. The school me and my brother attended was in a basement in Tehran, had no modern resources, and largely focused on religious indoctrination. But we had a good home background. Our father attended a college in the west a few years (our mother didn’t, despite stratospheric scores test scores, because at the time you didn’t send a good Kurdish girl to another city to study). So we did well in school. Conversely, the first few years in Sweden I had bad grades, in part because I didn’t master the language.

The point I am trying to make is that the school in Sweden was objectively superior to the school in Iran. But I scored lower in Sweden, because of factors outside the control of the education system. If you want to compare the effect of the school, you have to isolate those external factors and make an apples-to-apples comparison.

However, this is not at all how the media is presenting the recent PISA scores. For example there is a lot of attention of the score of the kids in Shanghai, the according to the NYT is supposed to “stun” us or something.

It's dumb to compare one of the most elite cities in a country with entire nations, and to draw policy-inference from such a comparison. Shanghai has 3 times the average income of China! It is also naive to trust the Chinese government when they tell us the data is representative of the entire nation. Either you compare Shanghai to New York City, or you compare the entire country of China, including the rural part, with other large nations. Most of the news and policy conclusions we read about PISA-scores in the New York Times is thus pure nonsense.

1. Correcting for the demography:


In almost all European countries, immigrants from third world countries score lower than native born kids.

Why? No knows exactly why. Language, culture, home environment, income of parents, the education level of the parents and social problems in the neighborhood and peer groups norms are among likely explanations. But it is generally not true that the schools themselves are worse for immigrants than natives. In welfare states, immigrants often (thought not always) go to the same or similar schools and have as much or likely more resources per student.

So the fact that immigrant students in mixed schools do worse than Swedish kids used to a few decades ago in homogeneous schools does not it out of itself prove that Swedish public schools have become worse.

Of course, the biggest myth that the media reporting of PISA scores propagates is that the American public school system is horrible.

The liberal left in U.S and in Europe loves this myth, because they get to demand more government spending, and at the same time get to gloat about how much smarter Europeans are than Americans. The right also kind of likes the myth, because they get to blame social problems on the government, and scare the public about Chinese competitiveness.

We all know that Asian students beat Americans students, which "proves" that they must have a better education system. This inference is considered common sense among public intellectuals. Well, expect for the fact that Asian kids in the American school system actually score slightly better than Asian kids in North-East-Asia!

So maybe it’s not that there is something magical about Asian schools, and has more to do with the extraordinary focus on education in Asian culture, with their self-discipline and with their favorable home environment.

There are 3 parts to the PISA test, Reading, Math, and Science. I will just make it simple and use the average score of the 3 tests. This is not strictly correct, but in practice it doesn’t influence the results, while making it much easier for the reader. (the reason it doesn't influence the results is that countries that are good at one part tend to be good at other parts of the test.)

The simplest thing to do in order to get an apples-to-apples comparison is to at least correct for demography and cultural background. For instance, Finland scores the best of any European country. However first and second generation immigrant students in Finland do not outperform native Swedish, and score 50 points below native Finns (more on this later).

On PISA, 50 points is a lot. To give you a comparison, 50 points is larger than the difference between Sweden and Turkey. A crude rule of thumb here is that 50 points is 0.5 standard deviations.

The problem is that different countries have different share of immigrants. Sweden in 2009 PISA data had 17%, and Finland 4%. It’s just not fair to the Swedish public school system to demand that they must produce the same outcome, when Sweden has many more disadvantaged students. Similarly schools with African-American students who are plagued by racism, discrimination, crime, broken homes, poverty and other social problems are not necessarily worse just because their students don’t achieve the same results as affluent suburbs of Chicago. In fact, the most reliable data I have seen suggests that American minority schools on average have slightly more money than white schools. It’s just that the social problems they face are too much to overcome for the schools. It is illogical to blame the public school system for things out of its hands.

So let’s start by removing those with foreign background immigrants from the sample when comparing European countries with each other. I define immigrants here as those with a parent born outside the country, so it includes second generation immigrants. This is fairly easy for Europe.

In the case of America, 99% of the population originates from other countries, be they England, Italy, Sweden, India, Africa, Hong-Kong or Mexico. If we want to isolate the effect of the United States public school system, we should compare the immigrant groups with their home country. For those majority of Americans whose ancestors originate from Europe, we obviously want to compare them with Europe. For some groups, such as Indians, this is inappropriate. The reason is that mainly the most gifted Indians get to migrate to America to work or study.

However, as I have argued previously, there is strong reason to believe that this problem of so called biased selection does not apply to historic European migration to the United States at the aggregate level. The people who left Europe were not better educated than those who stayed. Immigrants were perhaps more motivated, but often poorer than average.

So similar to my comparison of GDP levels, let us compare Americans with European ancestry (about 65% of the U.S population, and not some sort of elite) with Europeans in Europe. We remove Asians, Mexicans, African-Americans and other countries that are best compared to their home nations. In Europe, we remove immigrants.

The results are astonishing at least to me. Rather than being at the bottom of the class, United States students are 7th best out of 28, and far better than the average of Western European nations where they largely originate from.




The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded. So much for the bigoted notions that Americans are dumb and Europeans are smart. This is also opposed to everything I have been taught about the American public school system.

For Asian-American students (remember this includes Vietnam, Thailand and other less developed countries outside Northeast Asia), the mean PISA score is 534, same as 533 for the average of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Here we have two biases going in opposite directions: Asians in the U.S are selected. On the other hand we are comparing the richest and best scoring Asian countries with all Americans with origin in South and East Asia.


2. Policy-Implications


Libertarians in the United States have often claimed that the public school system (which has more than 90% of the students) is a disaster. They blame this on government control and on teachers unions. However, it is completely unfair to demand that a public school in southern California where most of the students are recent immigrants from Mexico whose parents have no experience in higher education (only 4% of all Mexican immigrates have a college degree, compared to over 50% of Indian immigrants) should perform as well as a private school in Silicon Valley.

The libertarians have no answer why European and Asian countries that also have public school systems score higher than the United States (unadjusted for demography). Top scoring Finland has strong teacher unions, just as California.

Similarly, the left claims that the American education system is horrible, because Americans don’t invest enough in education. The left has no answer when you point out that the United States spends insanely more than Europe and East Asia on education. According to the OECD, the United States spends about 50% more per pupil than the average for Western Europe, and 40% more than Japan.



Another policy implication is that Europe can learn from American public schools, which appear to be better than most European countries. I can only compare Sweden with the U.S, but I can tell you that from my experience, the American system is superior. I always thought this was just anecdotal evidence, but I am beginning to realize that American schools are indeed better.

For example, we don’t have any real equivalent to Advanced Placements classes. We have cheaper and worse textbooks. The teachers on average have far less education. I could go on.

Nor is it any longer a mystery to me why Americans spend so much more on education and (falsely appear) to get out less in output.

But of course the biggest implication is that most Europeans and all American liberals have lost the bragging right about their side being smarter than Americans.

3. Immigrant PISA scores compared to natives


This is again the mean difference of the 3 parts of PISA.


Australia is the only country with a negative gap, which means Australian immigrants actually score better than natives. Canada is similar. The Australian-Canadian skill based migration system is at work here, generating less inequality (even short term).

The other pattern appears to be that the gap is almost constant in the remaining Western European countries. This may be important to keep in mind, whenever people claim that uniquely Swedish policies are causing poor immigrant educational outcomes.

Tino Sanandaji is of Kurdish origins, and was born in Iran in 1980. In 1989 he moved together with his mother and brother to Sweden. He has a degree from the Stockholm School of Economics, his M.A in Economics from the University of Chicago and is expected to receive his PhD in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 2011. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, and numerous Swedish newspapers. Tino has been a resident of Hyde Park Chicago, since 2004.

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