> HDI is a good metric for gauging living standards
A country with living standards at Bill Gates levels with perfect good health until 200 where everyone is illiterate has a lower HDI than South Sudan. Even if we fix it by setting the minimum education value at 0.1 billionaires with perfect health land would have a HDI lower than 180 countries. HDI has a 90%+ correlation with GDP. It’s not a worthwhile measure.
Not quite - that’s if you believe the moderates control the extremists. If they don’t, it’s more like “I’m the extremist and I am currently so unhappy I will do this. What will you do to make me less unhappy?”
> In 2011, Scotland destroyed its secondary school curriculum, once ranked among the best in the world. It was not the first country to do so.
> Between 1990 and 2010, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and England — among many others — radically reformed their school curricula to emphasize general skills over content knowledge. In Scotland and France, the reforms were orchestrated by left-wing progressives committed to social equity; in England and Sweden, by free-market devotees as a means to enhance economically valuable skills. In Germany and Japan, the impetus was simply to update the school curricula for modern economic conditions. All of the reforms had the same logic: Remove facts, content, and structure, and replace them with general analysis and synthesis tasks.
> These reformers discarded the traditions their predecessors had built over the previous century. Children in Scotland, France, and Sweden no longer study a humanities curriculum resembling that of their parents or grandparents; nor do they necessarily study anything resembling the curriculum of their peers in neighboring schools. Any sense of a collective tradition, going forward or backwards, unifying a country or a people, has vanished.
I cycle everywhere in Shanghai and I would not even buy a bike if I lived in the US. Motorcycles are for wannabe organ donors. Maybe I’d change my mind if robocars took over from human driven ones but I’d be hesitant about commuting by bike in Ireland, never mind anywhere in the US. Good bike infrastructure is rare.
Decline is used in the article only to refer to test scores and budgetary shortfalls are laid at the feet of a school board caving in to union demands. At no point is there any suggestion that money is a limiting factor in raising student academic performance.
> Fertility rates in higher and middle-income countries have reached record lows. Today, over 2 billion people – more than a quarter of the global population – live in countries with a total fertility rate below 1.3. This level would lead to rapidly shrinking populations in these countries in the absence of significant immigration. This article maps the global landscape of low fertility and the key drivers behind its recent declines. The current fertility ‘freefall’ is more widespread, deeper and more permanent than previously anticipated. It is driven by multiple factors, including structural conditions, unstable labour markets and anxiety about the future, but also changing intimate relations, better access to efficient contraception and changing views about parenthood and reproductive preferences. These conditions contribute to delayed parenthood, which increases the risk of infertility. Young adults express lower and more fluid fertility intentions than the previous generations, eroding the two-child family norm. The multifaceted nature of fertility decline implies that very low fertility is likely to persist and spread to many more countries. Due to lower fertility preferences and a limited scope to address the root causes of low fertility, policies aiming to increase fertility will probably fail in their aim to reverse fertility decline.
Degrowth is about reversing growth, not slowing it. A decrease is a reduction, not a slowing. It’s about reversing the sign, not changing the first derivative.
1000s of data points are evidence, even if they aren’t logged in a lab notebook. No one except ideologues needs a study to say men are stronger than women; the broad outline of the autistic manner of speaking is equally obvious. The details are worth study, but you have to have no exposure to the relevant populations to argue with the existence of the difference.
Oh, you mean like, I dunno, actually measuring them!?
You seem to have misheard "this is excessive extrapolation and theorized details from too little hard data" as "the most-general version of the phenomenon doesn't exist."
> 1000s of data points are evidence
Except they're the same kind my neighbor uses when he says that kids these days are different and don't respect their elders like they used-to.
A country with living standards at Bill Gates levels with perfect good health until 200 where everyone is illiterate has a lower HDI than South Sudan. Even if we fix it by setting the minimum education value at 0.1 billionaires with perfect health land would have a HDI lower than 180 countries. HDI has a 90%+ correlation with GDP. It’s not a worthwhile measure.
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