Jay P. Greene's Blog

We are beginning to be envious of all things Chinese.  For some indication of this trend see the book on the superiority of Chinese mothers described (and mocked) in yesterday’s post.

I’ve seen this movie before when it was called Gung Ho.  And that movie sucked.  Is anybody else old enough to remember the late 1980s and early 1990s when media and policy elites were convinced that the Japanese had figured out better ways of doing everything and we needed to imitate them before we were crushed?  I specifically remember a bunch of education experts (and you know who you are) telling us that we had to imitate Japanese schools.  How did all of that work out?

I expect we are about to hear all of the same stuff, but this time it will be about the Chinese.  We need to parent like they do, eat like they do, run the economy like they do, etc… to imitate their success and prevent from being crushed by their superiority.

I don’t even believe the accuracy of the stereotypes we are supposed to emulate.  The Japanese were not all working together as if they were the same team.  Chinese parents do not all raise their children in the same way (nor do “Western” parents all do something different).  This is the worst kind of “pop” social science — incorrectly attributing the success or failure of a society to inaccurate stereotypes.

If you want a more accurate picture of China, see the photo at the top of this post.  And over the long run I cannot imagine that a centrally planned economy, like China’s, will be the one we need to emulate to prosper.  We have plenty of good social science to tell us that liberty, relatively free markets, and the fair rule of law are much better predictors of economic success.

Yes, China is gaining rapidly, but so did the Soviet Union when it fully mobilized its agrarian workforce into the industrial sector.  That type of growth levels off without markets to properly allocate capital, property rights to ensure that entrepreneurs can keep the fruits of their innovation, and liberty to critique the favoritism and corruption that undermine the fair rule of law.  China has been making some strides toward market allocations of capital, but remember that most of the banks are government controlled.  And property rights in China remain murky, which will hinder innovation.  And there isn’t much freedom to critique the government.  Without much more progress on these fronts I see little prospect of the Chinese overtaking us economically.

If you want to keep an eye on a rapidly growing developing country, I would look at India.  Yes, India is messy, complicated, and often inefficient, but that’s how freedom looks.  If they keep liberalizing their economy and politics, I see India growing much more rapidly over the long run.

(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)

Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor have a new CALDER Center/NBER working paper looking at how home computers and broadband access help students. (Interestingly, an earlier version of the same paper listed Charles Clotfelter as a third author.)

Turns out that home computers harm students:

Do students’ basic academic skills improve when they have access to a computer at home? Has the introduction of high‐speed internet access, which expands the set of productive tasks for which home computers might be used, caused further improvements? This paper addresses these questions by studying administrative data covering the population of North Carolina public school students between 2000 and 2005, a period when home computer access expanded noticeably, and the availability of home high‐speed internet rose dramatically.

. . .

Models with student fixed effects, which restrict identification to within‐student variation, by contrast, show modest but statistically significant negative impacts. In these models, we can trace the impact of home computer introduction for periods of up to three years; there is no indication that the negative effect of access diminishes over this time period. . . .

Similarly, the introduction of high‐speed internet service is associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades. Moreover, student fixed‐effect specifications reveal that increased availability of high speed internet is associated with less frequent self‐reported computer use for homework. On the margin, then, access to broadband internet appears to crowd out studying effort, presumably by introducing new options for recreational use by students and other family members. In addition, we find that the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

Gee, I wonder why giving kids computers would drag down academic achievement. Aren’t they all using computers to do math problems, read classics on the Gutenberg Project, watch science videos, etc.?