Cultural Amnesia: We Must Invest in STEM or We Will Lose the Future!

[E]ven in the lower grades I found evidence of a much stronger emphasis on science than we give in the US. It is quite probable that within a generation Russia may have twice as many well-trained scientist as we. Russian resources are separated by vast distances. Her climate is exceedingly difficult. Transportation problems will always be most serious. But much of her soil is rich in the elements which when combined with a severe climate produce a most vital type of human being.

This could have be said by almost any politician in the US today, with the possible substitution of China for Russia. But, via Brad DeLong, it was actually said by Henry Wallace in 1952. There was a lot of threat inflation concerning the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s, and much of it was related to the knowledge economy and how that translated into national security ("missile gap", etc) combined with a sense that the US had underestimated the USSR in the 1940s. Not all of this was unreasonable, as Tony Judt recounted in a wonderful 1997 essay in The New Republic on the Chambers/Hiss affair (it's collected in Reappraisals but I can't find it online), but it got blown out of all proportion: without Hiss (and Chambers' special pumpkin) there wouldn't have been McCarthyism, and in the end McCarthyism mostly served McCarthy. In a similar, now we know that many of the principles that dominated US foreign policy from 1960-1990 -- brinksmanship, domino theory, MAD -- were simply unnecessary dangers, as the Soviet Union was not nearly as capable as the US leadership imagined it was.

Is there a lesson to be learnt? Towards the end of the Cold War we heard a lot about institutional superiority -- "end of history" and all that. Some of it was hyperbole, but there is some shred of truth in it as well. We genuinely believe that some form of democratic capitalism produces better outcomes than other systems, and we genuinely believe that societies which have norms of liberté, égalité, et fraternité, even if they are imperfectly applied, fare better than those which do not. Maybe we should take our own rhetoric seriously, for once: maybe we should worry a lot less about scores on science exams of 13 year old Chinese, and focus instead on translating the principles of liberté, égalité, et fraternité into practice.

P.S. the whole speech by Henry Wallace linked above is well worth reading, and could possibly be useful in an Introduction to International Relations course. There's a lot packed into a short document: commitment problems, asymmetric information, perception/misperception, etc.

UPDATE: Thanks to Noah Smith for driving traffic here. For new readers I should note that, contrary to what Smith wrote, as a quantitative social scientist I have nothing against math and science education. To say the least. I do have an issue with politicizing math and science education as a national security imperative, however, particular when done in a zero-sum "either we win the future or the Russians Chinese win the future" way. I thought I'd made that clear, but perhaps not.

Democracy and Development

Xavier Marquez has a very interesting series of posts on the relationship between democracy and economic growth since the end of WWII:

The basics of this relationship in the post-WWII era seem pretty well understood: basically, the richer the country, the more “democratic” it appears to be (in the sense I’ve discussed here and here, where democracy is conceived as a system of normatively regulated competition for control of states including the usual paraphernalia of elections, freedoms of speech and assembly, etc.), though the reasons for why this is the case remain disputed, and there are obvious and significant exceptions to this pattern. Conversely, the academic literature suggests that democratic regimes have a slight and indirect long-term development advantage, though the evidence for this claim is much more controversial, and there is no consensus on how this particular advantage operates, if it exists at all

There are links to literature describing all of these assertions in the original post. Marquez then runs down some simple data (and presents it very well) and notes:

The median income of democratic regimes has been higher than the median income of both hybrid and fully authoritarian regimes since at least the 1950s, and the gap has in general widened, not narrowed, even as the number of democratic countries has increased. (From this graph we cannot tell, however, whether the gap has widened because democratic countries have grown faster, or because non-democratic countries that grew fast turned into democracies; from the graphs below, we may infer that it was a mixture of both). The gap was highest during “peak authoritarianism” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when most poor and newly independent countries were either hybrid regimes or dictatorships, but it stopped growing after the end of the cold war, when a number of relatively poor countries became democratic. ...

What about growth? Is any particular regime type consistently associated with economic growth? ...

The answer is "not really" or at least "not very much". Dictatorships and hybrid regimes have more variability -- some grow very quickly, at least for awhile, but also go bust more frequently -- but averaging across regime types shows very little difference in central tendency:

To the extent that we can ignore these confidence intervals and focus only on the trend performance, democracies have not always done better than these other regimes. In the early post-war era it seems that dictatorships did better (though most did about as well as democracies), but then decolonization came along and the growth performance of dictatorships basically cratered. Indeed, the 80s, when the so-called “third wave” of democratization began, was also (not coincidentally perhaps?) the time when the “growth gap” between democracies and hybrid and dictatorial regimes was at its widest. Ominously, the last decade has seen a reversal of this pattern, which explains much of the (not very well thought out) commentary about the rise of the “Chinese model.”

He has a very cool motion chart at his blog (that I can't find the embed code for) that maps out the null effect, so click through to watch it.