PISA TEST SCORES 2013
Posted on 12/15/2014 9:15:03 AM PST by SeekAndFind
We have heard over and over again that America is still the world’s fountain of innovation, the home of fracking and Facebook. The two “F’s” of American innovation are about to become one: The collapse of oil prices portends a collapse of the shale boom. High-yield energy bond yields have soared from 5% to 12% in the past few months, and investors are fighting to get to the door. Most unconventional oil and gas projects are unprofitable at $60 a barrel, and that’s where oil will trade for the next year or two.
Facebook is a clever gimmick, but it doesn’t do much for productivity.
It doesn’t help to crank up the theme from Rocky and chant, “We’re Number One!” We are in trouble, with a stagnating economy and falling incomes, and we are about to be in much, much worse trouble.
What’s left of the U.S. economy net of alternative hydrocarbons doesn’t look impressive. Here are a few facts about American capital investment:
Take out the energy sector, and capital investment by S&P companies remains 8% below the 2008 peak. We never had an investment recovery.
Take out the top six companies in the S&P technology sector (IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Micron), and S&P tech capital expenditures are down by a 40% since 2000 and down by 25% since 2013. The top six account for 75% of all capital expenditures among S&P tech companies (in 2000, it was less than 50%). All but the quasi-monopoly tech giants show an investment depression.
In deflated dollars, nondefense capital goods orders from American manufacturers are 20% below the 2000 peak and 5% below 2008.
It’s no surprise that productivity and wages are stagnating: investment in plant and equipment is falling. America is losing its edge. We had better fight to keep our lead before we have to play catch-up.
Meanwhile, R&D and engineering capabilities are burgeoning abroad. As a Dartmouth business school professor reports on the Harvard Business Review blog, U.S. multinationals are building R&D centers in China and India. The quality of engineering and scientific talent in the world’s two most populous countries is rising rapidly:
The remarkable reality is that many big American R&D spenders have undergone a quiet transformation of their product development capabilities during the last decade that includes embedding Asian capabilities much closer to the core of their operation. Offshore engineering centers have become central to businesses such as Microsoft, Abobe, and Synopsys.
As an investment banker active in Hong Kong, I see brilliant innovations popping up in China every day. Per capita, China may be less innovative than America, but with 1.4 billion people, a very small proportion of prospective innovators adds up to a very big number.
America still has the world’s best technology, but the gap is closing. If we don’t change course, we are going to go the way of Britain.
Reaganeconomics was founded on tax cuts and sound monetary policy, but it also included a massive high-tech R&D effort, the Strategic Defense Initiative, driven by federal R&D spending. As a young consultant for the National Security Council, I researched the issue for Norman Bailey, then special assistant to the president–and the president cited the economic benefits of SDI-related R&D in a subsequent speech.
What do we need? I offer 6 ways for America to regain its edge…
1) We need to jump from 30th place to 1st place in secondary-school math achievement. That means our kids have to stop playing video games and crack the calculus text.
2) We need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on frontier R&D on the old DARPA model. No more trillion-dollar budgets for an F-35 that won’t fly.
3) We need to aggressively recruit talented engineers, scientists and tech entrepreneurs from overseas. We are still training a lot of the rest of the world’s best talent, and we should strive to keep them in the U.S. That’s the urgent priority of immigration reform. Latin Americans are irrelevant to the U.S. economy (net immigration basically stopped when the construction boom collapsed). We’re arguing about the wrong things.
4) We need patent reform (cutting the duration of many classes of patents to perhaps 5 years from 20), as Prof. Reuven Brenner brilliantly argued last year in the Wall Street Journal.
5) We need reductions in corporate and capital gains tax rates and a regulatory rollback.
6) We need to rebuild basic infrastructure. Some of this can be done through private initiative but not all, or most.
We need all of the above. Any five of the above will fail without the sixth ingredient in the recipe. Can we do it? Of course. Will we? It’s not even on the political agenda.
“If we don’t change course, we are going to go the way of Britain., “
or Australia!
here come the copycats..
“... the home of fracking and Facebook...”
Facebook? Faceboook?
If that’s what we’ve got in our bag, we are so very screwed.
Fracking, on the other hand, is real science and technology, developed by folks who produce products that are usable by society.
This is a pretty stupid article.
This is what it ultimately comes down to: “We need to aggressively recruit talented engineers, scientists and tech entrepreneurs from overseas.”
Another pro-immigration screed.
Moving patent time to 5 years is ludicrous. The current 20 years starts at filing so that it is never 20 years exclusivity. It can be as low as five for something marketed. It often takes 5 years to get responses from the PO.
He selectively removes certain companies or sectors from economic considerations and then talks how bad things are without those data included.
But he does not do the same thing when talking about the US being 30th in math. Why does he not selectively removed data in that assessment! How does the US fare if black and Hispanic student data is not included?
"and crack the calculus text."
Sorry, but no. Our math curriculum puts far too much emphasis on the math of continuous functions for our modern, digital age.
We need to spend more time on discrete math and linear algebra, and not so much on calculus.
“How does the US fare if black and Hispanic student data is not included?”
Good luck ever getting your hands on that statistic.
RE: But he does not do the same thing when talking about the US being 30th in math. Why does he not selectively removed data in that assessment!
I was looking at the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) Test scores here in the USA compared to the countries that scored very highly (i.e., Hongkong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea ) and I notice one thing -— some of the schools in Long Island, NY ( Nassau County, population: 1.3 million ) actually are HIGHER than those countries. However, the rest of the other schools in many other districts, SUCK to say the least.
So, we do have schools that are excellent in this country. All we need to do is bring the other schools to their level.
We used to have billionaires single handedly standing up to the Soviets like Howard Hughes, now we got flabby Zuckerberg...
Wait for Common Core... stupid math busy work pausing as better than Euclidean proof making.
With the “new math” and the sort of pedagogical stupidity (particularly where math is concerned) that has infected teacher’s colleges (and is now part of the common core), it’s a miracle that any students manage to learn math anymore. Math education seems to be a steady downward trend. Whether these poor techniques for teaching math (and of course, your average elementary school teacher very likely barely scraped through math themselves) are just part of an well-meaning but ill-considered idea, or part of a plan to deliberately reduce the quality of math education (amongst other areas of education) is a matter for discussion.
Little known fact.
Children of Japanese descent in America outperform Japanese children in Japan.
Children of Swedish descent in America outperform Swedish children in Sweden.
And so on through every other identifiable group. Only exception is Finnish children, who do slightly better that American children of Finnish descent.
The difference is simply our mix of ethnic groups compared to those of the other countries.
Along this line, white, black and Hispanic students in Texas all outperform their ethnic counterparts in Wisconsin, but based on the average for each state, WI is better. The reason, of course, being the much smaller number of minority students in WI.
The great Iowahawk wrote one of the greatest smackdowns of all time on this issue. On Paul Krugman. A real delight.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
Great info and post. Thanks.
Why thanks.
Followed some links to a Harvard prof’s take on Iowahawks’s numbers. He was completely in agreement, BTW.
What was interesting was one of the comments below the perfesser’s blog entry.
The poster claimed that all such statistics should be rejected before being examined because they were racist, purporting that blacks and Hispanics are incapable of learning. Other commenters promptly took him to task, rightly pointing out that what the statistics showed was that schools in WI did a less effective job of teaching minority students than those in TX.
What blew me away was the notion that we should simply ignore the facts because they were racist. How can you solve racial problems if you can’t acknowledge their existence?
Mindless H1B rant bump for later...
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