[HN Gopher] The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Hu...
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The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Human Capital
Author : sriacha
Score : 12 points
Date : 2025-04-10 22:17 UTC (43 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (theamericanenterprise.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theamericanenterprise.com)
| aeblyve wrote:
| I am ethnically Russian, although spent virtually my entire life
| in the US. My father went to a special grade school for English
| in Russia when he was younger there. Presumably, there was some
| state-sponsored idea that its graduates would become diplomats
| and leaders and enrich Russia itself.
|
| He reports that some 80% of his class have left the country. I
| would say that his generation (i.e., some of the first to come of
| age in the post-communist period) especially were very eager to
| find lucrative work in the states and elsewhere. The capitalist
| structure of early capitalist Russia was quite unstable, not
| offering good pay, or in many cases even consistent pay, and
| that's if you could find a professional opportunity.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Coupled with the American paradox, does this suggest that human
| capital is not necessarily correlated with education?
|
| (considering the author's expertise maybe he's trying to point
| towards studying the correlation with hardwork-- a better proxy?
| Some say that is already factored into GDP calculations.)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I would imagine at least part of it is the fact that Russia is a
| resource exporting economy and thus suffers from "Dutch disease"
| where the consistent sale of commodities like oil pushes up the
| currency and makes other types of exports less compatible. If
| natural resources are super-profitable then they potentially
| become a crutch for the economy; and if other sectors are less
| competitive and profitable then there is not much reason to
| invest there.
|
| Coupled with the fact that these types of sectors don't actually
| employ very many people as a percentage of the population, it
| makes sense that it would have bad effects on the rest of the
| population.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| All the Middle Eastern oil rich countries seem to be actively
| avoiding this problem. All are heavily investing in all sorts
| of different initiatives to diversify their incomes beyond
| fossil fuels (whether they succeed or not is irrelevant). So,
| it is not given that a country will suffer from this problem.
| There has to be a better explanation.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| As someone who lives in Mississippi, I'm beyond tired of the
| generally insulting and dismissive way this entire region is
| treated, usually by people who have never even been here.
|
| The graph showing that Russia is neck and neck with Alabama for
| total US patents granted is absurd and stupid. It doesn't
| illustrate anything, it's purely there to get in a "Russia is as
| bad as Alabama!" graphic. They even include the following text
| which shows how intentional this was:
|
| > Alabama has creditable research centers, of course--the
| Hunstville aerospace complex and the University of Alabama
| network among them. But Russia's population was almost 30 times
| larger than Alabama's in 2020.
|
| Great, so Alabama has 30x the per capita patents in a patent
| system that is foreign to Russia? How many Russian patents does
| New York have each year? What is even the point of this graphic?
| Every other graphic is using the correct units (per capita,
| median, etc) except this one, it's just there to put Russia next
| to Alabama, because Alabama is "so terrible".
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