Getting better at getting better

What striked me in the article is that it seems the international gap is opening. There are countries striving to improve their education decade by decade, and I have seen countries (e.g. in Eastern Europe) that formerly had an OK education system and it is getting worse and worse every decade, largely due to attracting the lowest dregs into teacher positions because the position is underpaid, spending is constantly cut, and underrespected, being the constant kicking dog of parents and uppity children.

Humankind, or even the West and its fairly close satellites are not all constantly improving. Perhaps on the average yes, but not overally.

It is not even just the old first vs. third world anymore. In the last 10 years or so e.g. Greece is becoming less and less "firstworldish". There are new and new gaps opening, not simply something along the lines of white man is rich brown man is poor, ex-colonizers rich ex-colonies poor, or even global north vs. global south. These heuristics worked in 1970, not anymore.

I keep a fairly close eye on Budapest, in Hungary, and I have no idea what ever could be done even not even to improve e.g. education but at least to stop its free-fall. Virtually anyone with half brains would rather wash dishes in London than to be a teacher there. Every time a decent old teacher retires, someone entirely useless fills their place. Meanwhile children becoming increasingly aggressive, bigger ones beating teachers, parents promising a beating if he does not give better grades, it's a war of all against all. Greece is not much better either. Or Romania.

Sometimes it looks like you should press a reset button on countries to start it all over, but not simply politically, like a revolution, but more like rearranging all human relationships. Like telling kids to respect teachers and telling teachers to behave respectably, spending enough money to give them educational resources which means taxes which means the rich will pretty please with sugar on top of it not keep cheating on the taxes by buying fake invoices from Tajikistan and the tax inspectors will pretty please yield to neither bribery nor death threats when they discover it and so on, and so on. Basically virtually everybody's behavior needs readjusting in some places before they can even think about improving as such. Where do you even find such a reset button?

Any community e.g. a nation can only improve itself if it has trust. If it has the kind of trust that I do not need to grab absolutely everything I can right now, because the community can supply me with what I need in the long run too. I mean for example in a low-trust society everybody takes bribes and is corruptible but not because they want to buy nice things, but rather they need savings as they have no idea if they will have an income next year or not. It may sounds strange, but if you accept that if you are hungry you would steal, then the corollary is that you will refrain from stealing only if you are fairly sure you will never go hungry because your community will reward your honest effort and it requires trust. If you do not trust it, you steal all you can and build a safety stockpile. And without this trust you cannot improve the community - at all.

Basically to kickstart improvement in a society - you need to inject fake trust.

My thought process is that sports and music are a bit different.

Music is simpler in that I think it can be explained by supply and demand. As worldwide wealth has grown, more children will have access to musical instruments at an early age, and will find it easier to get into top training programs to learn classical music. Meanwhile, people have more options for musical styles so demand in classical music has relatively decreased. I recall Jimmy Page in the documentary "It Might Get Loud" remarking on how boring music used to be before the 60s. Rock and Roll was a worldwide phenomenon because nobody had heard anything like it before. I think another major growth occurred at the turn of the century beginning with Napster when the internet gave people a lot more options for finding music.

I'm more inclined to believe the sports story because sports competition yields constant feedback. The teams that don't perform are spotted quite quickly and forced to reform. You can get a reasonable approximation of a player's ability by estimating points scored per minute vs. points given up per minute, and that information can be updated constantly. The best trainers will produce the best competitors, and so will indirectly also receive feedback on their performance.

I don't place much trust in most international comparisons on education because most of them don't make demographics adjustments. Finland and Japan both have fairly low immigrant populations. It's a lot easier to educate a population when they all start out speaking the same language. The article mentions Canada once, which does have a large immigrant population, but doesn't go into any detail about their system. Some important considerations:

Some studies have found the gains of the Flynn effect to be particularly concentrated at the lower end of the distribution. Teasdale and Owen (1989), for example, found the effect primarily reduced the number of low-end scores, resulting in an increased number of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

In the 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, and IQ and Global Inequality in 2006, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen created estimates of average IQs for 113 nations. They estimated IQs of 79 other nations based on neighboring nations or other via other manners. They also created an estimate of "quality of human conditions" for each nation based on gross national product per capita, adult literacy rate, fraction of the population to enroll in secondary education, life expectancy, and rate of democratization. Lynn and Vanhanen found a substantial correlation between the national IQ scores they created and these various socioeconomic factors. They conclude that national IQ influences these measures of well-being, and that national differences in IQ are heavily influenced by genetics, although they also allow for some environmental contributions to it. They regard nutrition as the most important environmental factor, and education a secondary factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_and_intelligence

My guess is a lot of undeveloped countries, especially the poor, aren't reaching a minimum education level; whatever that minimum might be although causality could run in a number of directions. I don't agree with Lynn and Vanhanen's proposed explanation. I'm not sure how effective better training actually would be without a feedback mechanism. How can you assess the quality of training without one? I've been meaning to read Elizabeth Green's book so may get around to that soon enough.