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1/Today in @bopinion I bust the myth that U.S. schools suck, and that money spent on education is wasted.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/The latest PISA scores have some people claiming that U.S. education "just isn't working".

This is wrong.

nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/…
3/Americans score well in reading! We beat most other countries.
4/In science we're average.
5/It's only in math that we suck.
6/BUT, PISA isn't the only inter international test!!

There's also TIMSS, where our 8th graders do pretty average in math!
7/In fact there are a bunch of international tests. The World Bank tried to combine them all into one measure, called Harmonized Learning Outcomes.

They found that the U.S. is...pretty average.
8/OK what about the idea that American efforts to improve our scores aren't paying off?

Here are the overall PISA score changes between 2015 and 2018.

Does this look like failure to you?
9/OK what about the China panic? Are China's kids "the world's smartest"? Are we being out-educated by our main rival?

fortune.com/2019/12/03/chi…
10/Well, probably not. China games the PISA pretty hard.

11/The World Bank estimates that China's test scores are probably well below those of the U.S.

documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/390…
12/OK, but we DO do badly at math.

Why?

It might be a cultural problem.

nytimes.com/2014/07/27/mag…
13/Americans tend to believe that math is all about inborn ability. So instead of buckling down and working hard, we view math as an IQ test. So we do badly at it.

theatlantic.com/education/arch…
14/There are approaches that work for teaching math and we should use them.
15/But on top of that, what we really should do to improve our schools' performance is to SPEND MORE MONEY, especially on under-resourced schools in poor neighborhoods.
16/Many people claim this doesn't work. That U.S. students are uneducable, and school spending is wasted.

THEY ARE WRONG.

Read this literature review by @KiraboJackson. Evidence clearly shows that school spending works.

nber.org/papers/w25368
17/The U.S. education system isn't bad, it's average.

We can make it better by A) improving math education, and B) spending more money on schools in poor neighborhoods.

So let's do it.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
1/Today's @bopinion post is about how LBJ and his Great Society won the war on poverty in America.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Most of our modern welfare state was created not by FDR, but by LBJ.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Soc…
3/Conservatives believe - very devoutly and ardently! - that the War on Poverty was a failure.

heritage.org/marriage-and-f…

But they are wrong. Thoroughly, comprehensively, tragically wrong.

It was a success.
Read 14 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
All of the people claiming Volcker was responsible for killing unions and decreasing the labor share of income should think about this: the European countries raised interest rates at the exact same time, and their unions and labor shares are doing fine.
Maybe Volcker was right to raise interest rates and squash inflation at the expense of two recessions. And maybe he wasn't right. But he wasn't responsible for the long-term decline of unions or worker bargaining power in the U.S.
Also ask yourself why all the other rich countries raised interest rates at the same time Volcker did. The answer is either "they were trying to prop up their exchange rates against the dollar", or "inflation was spiraling out of control and everyone wanted to crush it".
Read 3 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Fun fact: The capital of Judaism is Passover. But the largest financial hub and commercial center is Hanukkah.
Thanks to the JewBu Free Trade Agreement, citizens of Judaism no longer need a passport to travel between Judaism and Buddhism.
The nation of Judaism forces all young men to do national service, helping Mom pick out a color for the new carpet.
Read 7 tweets

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Nathaniel Bullard
@NatBullard
My latest for @bopinion @BloombergNEF, on energy and oil&gas: what was once growth is now value, and vice versa bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Check out the dividend yield of the S&P500 Energy (mostly oil & gas) and Utility indexes. Energy now has a higher yield than utilities bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Part of that trend is due to utility bond yields being towed down along with the general bull market in bonds... bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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Marc Goldwein
@MarcGoldwein
People have asked what I think about #SocialSecurity2100, the most popular bill in Congress to save #SocialSecurity.

Short THREAD 1/

crfb.org/blogs/ways-and…
First, let me STRONGLY commend @RepJohnLarson for putting forward this bill and holding hearings on it. @JohnLarsonCT understands Social Security is only 16 years from insolvency, and he is fight to save it!

2/
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So what's in the bill? @BudgetHawks has a great summary below. The short version - payroll taxes go up 20 percent (2..4 point) on everyone and 14.8 points on the rich. The $$ is used to restore solvency and to expand benefits for everyone (especially at low incomes) 3/
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Claire Berlinski
@ClaireBerlinski
"One of the most striking facts of today’s world is that young people do not seem to worry very much about nuclear war. Climate change is by far the larger concern, while nuclear war is seen as a threat of the past." bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
This is true--for some reason people think it's a worry "of the past"--and utterly unjustified. It's an enormous threat, and terribly underestimated by the US public.
There is a small, but real, that climate change could prove catastrophic for humanity. There is no doubt that a nuclear war (save for a very limited exchange, which is unlikely) would be catastrophic, and while quantifying the risk is difficult,
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David Jensen
@RealDavidJensen
@Halsrethink @RemainSovereign @TFMetals @BullionStar @jameshenryand @michaellebowitz @dlacalle_IA @DA_Stockman @RonPaul @RonPaulInstitut @MarkTOByrne @MarkYusko @ErikSTownsend @AndrewBellBNN @realDonaldTrump @LouDobbs @Varneyco @MariaBartiromo @gatewaypundit @JeffSnider_AIP @TruthGundlach @epomboy @PaulCraigRobert @LanceRoberts @TheBubbleBubble @POTUS @TayTayLLP @ronanmanly @jimiuorio @MoneyMetals @stranahan BRICS nations for years openly discussing trade w/ "parallel" monetary system including gold trade settlement.
Saudi put in place RippleNet alt. to SWIFT that allows bank-to-bank real-time settlement in any medium of trade.
Italy signalling ready to go.
@Halsrethink @RemainSovereign @TFMetals @BullionStar @jameshenryand @michaellebowitz @dlacalle_IA @DA_Stockman @RonPaul @RonPaulInstitut @MarkTOByrne @MarkYusko @ErikSTownsend @AndrewBellBNN @realDonaldTrump @LouDobbs @Varneyco @MariaBartiromo @gatewaypundit @JeffSnider_AIP @TruthGundlach @epomboy @PaulCraigRobert @LanceRoberts @TheBubbleBubble @POTUS @TayTayLLP @ronanmanly @jimiuorio @MoneyMetals @stranahan More to the point - #gold seems to be the focal point of new trade settlement system.

“Fiat money, in extremis, is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted." Alan Greenspan.

realnoevremya.com/articles/2075-…
@Halsrethink @RemainSovereign @TFMetals @BullionStar @jameshenryand @michaellebowitz @dlacalle_IA @DA_Stockman @RonPaul @RonPaulInstitut @MarkTOByrne @MarkYusko @ErikSTownsend @AndrewBellBNN @realDonaldTrump @LouDobbs @Varneyco @MariaBartiromo @gatewaypundit @JeffSnider_AIP @TruthGundlach @epomboy @PaulCraigRobert @LanceRoberts @TheBubbleBubble @POTUS @TayTayLLP @ronanmanly @jimiuorio @MoneyMetals @stranahan When a central banker or economist mentions 'stimulus', they are talking about diluting the currency through debt currency issuance - to create REAL GROWTH.

This is the insanity & silly talk promoted by central bankers globally.

Nobody asks the question.

#centralbanking #gold
Read 55 tweets
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David Fickling
@davidfickling
People might have missed this among the excitement about Saudi Aramco's bond prospectus, but it's potentially a big deal:

Saudi Arabia has only about a third of the natural gas we thought it did. #oott

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Important preamble: Aramco's accounts are the biggest secret in the world energy industry, hence the excitement about this prospectus. Most figures out there were previously just very good guesswork.
The figure I knew of before this was the one in BP's Statistical Review, a sort of handbook/bible for the energy industry: 283 trillion cubic feet.

For comparison, Exxon Mobil has iirc the biggest gas reserves among independent oil companies, at about 51 trillion cu ft.
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