someonewrongonthenet

Indian-American here.

Our success does not come from Indian culture. If you take the average Indian in India and the average American in America, the American would probably be at an advantage.

The Indian kids you see in your country are the descendants of people who were 1) wealthy enough 2) educated enough 3) driven enough to leave their home and start a new life somewhere else. Even if the parents aren't wealthy by American standards, they have an education, usually an MD, PhD, or engineering degree. In fact, if you aren't well educated, you probably won't be granted a visa.

Did you know African immigrants actually do better than Asian immigrants on measures of education? It's probably because they faced more challenges in getting here, creating a very filtered demographic.

On the other hand, take a look at asian groups who were refugees from war (cambodians, laotians, etc). They perform even worse than African Americans.

With the privilege of educated parents, it really shouldn't be surprising that immigrants outperform natives on most measures. Sure, it's "cultural" - but only in the sense that education and wealth give people the cognitive tools to succeed.

My point is, creating that culture that is essentially the product of wealth and education will cost money.

Is that culture the product of wealth? Or is the wealth the product of that culture?

Both.

In the US, black students consistently report having more positive attitudes towards education, and black people value education more than white people. This is a consistent finding which has baffled sociologists - here is a discussion on the topic, with citations.

Why does a group which values education more underperform? Because it's not about your attitude.

So what are the ingredients to success? Here is a brief list of some of the privileges you need to be born with -

1) feeling safe (physically, emotionally, financially) at home and living a stress free lifestyle. Emotionally troubled kids won't succeed in school.

2) Eating a healthy diet, especially before puberty, and a mild amount of exercise. Getting enough sleep is a big one as well.

3) Pre-natal factors: Unhealthy mothers give birth to low IQ kids. Not much you can do about this once the kid is born, but as a society we can fix this.

4) Growing up in a stimulating environment, especially one which involves you hearing lots of words. If a child doesn't get exposed to a rich vocab early on, verbal IQ takes a heavy hit.

5) General knowledge. Every kid innocently asks "why is the sky blue". Only some kids have parents which can tell them about photons and light scattering. Both my parents are scientists, so for nearly every science related subject I came in with a powerful body of general knowledge that my peers simply lacked. Every kid has that natural curiosity, but my parents could actually satisfy it.

6) One-on-one "tutoring". For example, one summer my grandfather visited from India and taught me algebra, linear equations, etc. As a consequence, I breezed through an entire year of 8th grade math without studying much. Underprivileged kids often don't even have a dad at home, let alone a grandpa who stays at home and teaches them math.

7) Advocacy. Make sure your kid takes the highest level classes. Don't let them slip through the cracks of the school bureaucracy.

All of this is cultural. It technically doesn't cost a dime - in fact, my family probably had less money than yours in the early years...but does your grandfather know how to solve simultaneous linear differential equations? Just growing up in that sort of family causes one to pick up so much knowledge via osmosis. And even though the knowledge was freely given to me, it did cost money to put that knowledge into my parent's and grandparent's heads. All I had to do was express curiosity, and the knowledge would be mine - no trip to the library required!

Poor parents are able to instill in their children the value and the confidence to thrive.

The important thing is not culturally transmitted values and confidence. The important thing is culturally transmitted knowledge and skills.

I don't mean to disregard the importance of values and hard work. My point is that it takes time and money to build a "smart" culture. The first generation must earn enough surplus wealth to send a stable and healthy second generation to college. The second generation must raise the third generation in an enriched environment. Only the third generation will be born with the educational privileges of someone like me (and most likely you as well, if you are reading this comment).

TL:DR: Education itself is a type of wealth, and is handed down from parents to children in much the same way.

Edit: Don't get the wrong idea from what I wrote guys... I think that what Hunter Maats is doing with his book - teaching study skills, reshaping attitudes, etc - is absolutely helpful in the process of acquiring education, and I don't mean to detract from that.

I just disagree with the notion that attitudes and values towards education are the only thing holding our students back. Efforts to create "smart culture" need to be used in addition to public funding, rather than instead of public funding.

Wait what!? On the off chance that you aren't kidding, that explanation doesn't make any sense to me at all... Please elaborate?

The analogy is wrong.

The closest physical analogy to Bitcoins in history are Rai stones, a traditional currency once used by the indigenous people of Yap.

Rai stones are intrinsically useless, but extremely difficult and dangerous to get. To acquire Rai stones, you must take a canoe and journey to Palau, a neighboring island which contains aragonite / calcite crystals. You carve the crystal into a circle and transport it back to Yap. Upon arrival, it can be exchanged for goods and services - the bigger the stone, the more labor went into its creation and transportation - and therefore the more it is worth.

Like Rai stones, Bitcoins are 1) intrinsically useless and 2) difficult to acquire. To create a Bitcoin, you have to use a computer to do some rather complex calculations - a process which requires resources.

The work that goes into mining Bitcoins (and Rai stones) is what prevents people from just spontaneously creating them willy-nilly (like the government could do with dollars, if they chose). New Bitcoins / Rai stones are only created when deflation makes the cost of acquiring them worthwhile, allowing the free market to automatically control the amount of currency which is being created (unlike dollars, which get printed when the gov't says so)

Well, in theory the government only does it when it makes economic sense. Whether or not they carry out this responsibility is another debate.

Keep in mind, the difficulty in transporting Rai stones decreases with technological advancement - and unlike the government, this is a variable that doesn't care about what makes economic sense. With today's technology, the Rai stone economy would undergo so much inflation that there would be no more room for people among all the stones.

In theory, the difficult of mining Bitcoins keeps pace with technological advancement. I don't know how that works, though, so I don't know whether it is reliable. Maybe OP or someone else in the know can explain how the difficulty of mining is regulated? I'm assuming it's regulated by some clever algorithm and not by a group of people...

But the point is, you are basically transforming regulation of currency creation into regulation of difficulty of creation. It's not that different. In the case of Bitcoin, those of us who don't understand mining in detail simply have to trust that the algorithm is doing its job correctly.