Saturday, 9 November 2024

Nitin Kumar Bharti & Li Yang on China vs India in education

Why are Chinese Universities fit for purpose while most Indian universities are not? The answer is that students who create a ruckus will be shot in the back of the head. Education is only good if students aren't allowed to run amok because of Gaza or the fact that some White peeps have dicks while trillions of disabled Lesbians of color are having to sit down to pee. 

 Education does not necessarily correlate to economic growth. China expanded education between 1950 and 1980 but because its policies were more Socialist than India, its per capita income was lower. By getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories, it overtook India in just the way other countries which industrialized had done. China's 'one child' policy had the effect of turning kids into high Income elasticity consumption goods. For India, demographic transition remained dependent on female participation in the manufacturing sector though, no doubt, the more affluent had already embraced family planning. 

In a recent paper titled 'Human Capital Accumulation in China and India in 20th Century' Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang don't make the obvious point- viz. a lot of Chinese education was useless when it was focused on writing 8 legged Confucian essays to get into the Civil Service. The Brits, at the urging of the comprador Indian class, encouraged a more rational type of education for Indian Provinces administered by them though some groups- e.g. rural Muslims- preferred traditional, utterly useless, theological education. Both independent India and China did have a useless type of political education focused on deifying the Dynasty or the Great Helmsman. The Chinese had a saying 'Science students look down on Arts students. Arts students look down on Politics students. Politics students look down on their teachers.' Once the Chinese economy was liberated people invested in good education. Local authorities brought in actual White peeps to teach English whereas in India guys with PhD in Gramscian Grammatology could not speak, let alone teach, English in engineering colleges. Still, private schools took off which is why educational outcomes improved. But the return to education remains low for large sections of the population because the quality of education is low. Also young people waste ten years of their lives sitting exams to get Public sector jobs. China, by contrast, can ban coaching centers of the Indian sort. 

 The education system of a country is instrumental in its long-run development.

No. Some Princely states in India achieved high literacy but there was little development. A theocratic country may have universal literacy and lots and lots of beggars able to discuss the finer points of theology. 

The educational system is merely a reflection on the country's long-run path of development. If the country wants to be rich, it will try to make that system utilitarian rather than theological or ideological. If it doesn't give a fuck about economic outcomes, you will have a shitty education system. Large swathes of the American education system have turned to shit because the country is no longer concerned with being the best. Anyway, it can always import smart people.  

This paper compares the historical evolution of the education systems in the two largest emerging economies- China and India, between 1900 and 2018.

India was British ruled till about 1930 and thus had a British staffed Education Service which raised standards (and ensured that people like Ramanujan could get to Cambridge to flourish there). But the Indians weren't interested in education more particularly if they had to pay for it out of taxes.. Gandhi had a crackpot 'Basic Education' scheme whereby kids would learn to spin cotton thus destroying the value of that cotton. Later on, government schools weren't about teaching. They were about getting jobs for illiterate people of your own caste. There were exceptions. Princes in Kerala had gone in for universal education by paying poor families to send kids to school. But there was precious little development. The place turned into a remittance economy. This also meant that people used money sent from relatives abroad to send their kids to private schools. The problem was that the second or third generation of non residents preferred to settle abroad. So, the economy lacked dynamism.  

We create a novel time-series data of educational statistics related to enrolment, graduates, teachers and expenditure based on historical statistical reports.

Such statistics are pure fantasy in certain areas and certain periods. 

China adopted a bottom-up approach in expanding its education system,

No. The Republic had a 'top-down' policy which, however, it lacked the resources to implement. By contrast, Education in India was always a subject for the Province or Princedom. True there was an all India Education Service but the Indians weren't keen on it. Thus, as the authors say

Primary education is defined as the first 5/6 years of education.  At the start of century (in 1907), benefiting from the head-start of modern education, India had 4.3 M enrolment compared to 0.87 M in China.

Thanks to the Brits. But after about 1921, the Brits lost power first under Dyarchy and then Provincial Autonomy.  

This lead of India is lost by 1930’s due to rapid expansion of primary level enrolment in China.

Because the Chinese didn't have crazy religion-based populist politics. They had to fight War-lords and then the Japanese. Britain was so cruel to India that it prevented it becoming a province of the Japanese Empire. Bengalis are still very angry with Churchill because of this. Later, Mao refused to conquer Assam and Bengal even though the Naxals kept saying 'China's chairman is our chairman'. 

The continuation of higher rate of expansion resulted into China having 10M more enrolment at primary level, by the time both countries gained freedom from colonial subjugation.

Because stupid Indian politicians had been in charge of the Provinces. Education was a State subject.  

One extra year of schooling in China at Primary stage is not enough to make up this huge gap. The net effect of partition of India in 1947,

brought about by stupid Indian politicians 

was reduction of 3 M in enrolment in 1947 

In India, Education was a State subject though the Center can set up some 'Central' Schools and National Universities and Institutes.  Thus, there was no significant top-down approach as far as the vast majority was concerned. By contrast Nationalist, and then Communist China, did have a top-down approach which was implemented by local party cadres. 

in terms of enrolment.

No. It had a more top-down approach but the local Party cadres had more power and authority. In India the local government lacked coercive power- i.e. could not shoot lots of people.  

While India had a head-start in modern education, it has gradually been overtaken by China - at Primary education in the 1930’s

Why? Indian politicians could not force parents to go to school. Even after 1937, when Provincial Autonomy was achieved, there were major political problems- e.g. Muslims alleging that the Schools were doing Hindu propaganda, anger that the State language was being imposed on minorities, and suspicion that boys who went to school would refuse to work on the land.  

Middle/Secondary level in the 1970s

If your kid can't work so as to bring profit to you, the fellow might as well go to school.  

and Higher/Tertiary level in the 2010s.

They probably expanded this too rapidly.  

It resulted in the lower cohort-wise average education and higher education inequality in India since 1907.

India is heterogeneous. The comparator for Han Chinese is 'Forward Caste' Indians because both had a tradition of some of their number rising in the Civil Service.  

Vocational education is a central component of the Chinese education system, absorbing half of the students in higher education.

Because manufacturing hasn't been strangled by paternalistic laws. Still, Indian people pay for vocational education so as to emigrate.  

In India, the majority of the students pursue traditional degree courses (Bachelors, Masters etc.), with 60% in Humanities courses.

Lawrence Bishnoi and Goldy Brar got their start as crime king-pins thanks to student politics- i.e. beating and killing. That's pretty 'vocational'- right?  

Though India is known as the "land of engineers",

land of unemployable engineers- sure.  

China produces a higher share of engineers.

Because it has a much much bigger manufacturing sector.  

We conjecture that the type of human capital in China through engineering and vocational education helped develop its manufacturing sector.

The reverse was the case. The demand for education is 'derived' from the demand for manpower with particular skills or knowledge. True, for historical or cultural reasons, a particular region may have high educational levels without much in the way of economic development. It may turn into a remittance economy or it may be a place where the beggars like to gossip about the latest developments in Quantum Physics. 

Why do so few Indians study Chinese whereas almost all Chinese people study Chinese? The answer is that there is little demand for Chinese speaking skills in India whereas in China, it is an essential work skill.  

Utilizing micro-survey data since the 1980s, we show that education expansion has been an inequality enhancer in India.

This is stupid. What enhances inequality is increasing disparities in productivity regardless of educational attainment. Adani quit school at 16. He worked as a diamond sorter before taking charge of a small plastics unit set up by his brother. He has very high productivity. Lots of Indians with Ivy League PhDs in Gramscian Grammatology have zero or negative productivity.  

This is due to both the unequal distribution of educational attainment and higher individual returns to education in India.

I suppose they mean higher returns to education for smart peeps. Cows which get PhDs tend not to do well in Algebraic topology. On the other hand, their dung is greatly prized by Subaltern Savants.

Assuming you are a chief economist of a low- or middle-income country.

In that case, you have shit for brains and have only been hired for some cosmetic or gesture political reason. 

To help your country to achieve long term economic growth and social development, you are asked to make a detailed plan to distribute limited resources among different educational agents.

You have no such power. You can raise the allocation for scholarships to study the Political Philosophy of the founder of the Dynasty and stipulate that these be given only to the poorest and stupidest. But all the money will be stolen one way or another.  Meanwhile, smart peeps will get their kids into the one or two good schools before sending them abroad for higher studies and a Green Card. 

You will find, among vast literature discussing how education is important for economic and social development, there are surprisingly limited studies guiding how to do so.

There are obvious success stories- e.g. Singapore. The problem is that other countries don't have Singaporeans. They have an undisciplined rabble. Still, Indian educational policy needn't have been so entirely shit. But India doesn't just have shit politicians. It also has shit economists like Amartya Sen.  

When coming to the detailed but often most essential questions, such as whether or not locate more resources to primary education or higher education,

the only consideration is whether teachers actually show up to those primary schools. If they don't, there is no point allocating shit to them. 

how to distribute resources and students between vocational education

i.e. showing young people a picture of a spanner and saying 'if we had a spanner, I could show you how to use it. According to my theory, you hit screws with it till they screw themselves.; 

and general education, which disciplines in higher education should be expanded or not,

There is no point expanding higher education in smart stuff. You'd have to bring in professors and students from smart countries. Just settle for training kids in sycophancy and stupidity. Smart kids will take the hint and drop out.  

we are still ignorant basing on the existing empirical and theoretical studies.

done by morons.  

This paper aims to lay the first cornerstone to study the long-term impact of education development policy by comparing the education development path of two most populous emerging nations, China and India, in the last 150 years.

There is no point comparing China and India because the former country is tightly controlled by a very powerful and ruthless political party.  

China and India, with a combined 36% of the global population and 20% of the world’s GDP, are the two prominent economies of the world today1 . Both the countries were almost equalsized economy until 1980

both were Socialist shitholes with closed economies. India, strangely, was slightly less shit.  

when China started growing faster and today it is a double-sized economy than India. The development of China came from the manufacturing sector, while the Indian economy benefited from service sector growth .

India could have been part of the 'hardware revolution' in the late fifties and sixties. This was nixed by the Planning Commission. In the late Sixties, the Tatas did a deal with Burroughs but Government red tape meant it took six years and double the cost to get a mainframe. Fortunately, TCS got a cheap computer from the publicly owned LIC because its Luddite staff went on strike. Still, TCS only started to grow after establishing a New York office. 

This economic divergence has attracted much more attention than the divergence in their literacy rate which started thirty years before the beginning of their GDP divergence. Both countries had about 20% literacy rate in 1950. In 1990, China had a higher literacy rate, 25 percentage points above India.

There is low return on literacy if you speak a dialect in which nothing useful has been written. China's script is independent of dialect.  

The interplay of the growth of economic and educational components has also led to a higher level of economic inequality in India compared to China .

If you were one of the 30 million who starved to death under Mao, the inequality you experienced was greater than the inequality experienced by the Bihari who was saved from starvation by American PL 480 shipments. Gulags are a type of inequality. I'd rather be spared a concentration camp even if I am very envious of Elon Musk.  

We focus on the role of human capital accumulation, generated in the process of expanding modern education, towards the observed pattern of economic growth and inequality .

The big problem with 'Capital' is that the thing is intensional or epistemic. Nobody knows its true extension. Apu, from the Simpsons, got a PhD in Computer Science from an American university. Then he discovered it was completely useless. The technology he had studied was obsolete. That's why he ended up working at the Kwikimart.  

The association between human capital and national income is accepted widely in the endogenous growth models or development accounting literature (for detailed discussion see John, 2018; Caselli and Ciccone 2019) 5 .

This is like saying the population of invisible pixies is correlated with economic development properly so called. Did you know China has had no genuine development because all its pixies have been eaten by dragons? True, those dragons have used magic to create the illusion that China is developed. Don't be fooled. Incidentally, my wife is a pixie. It isn't true that I'm a lonely virgin who has nothing better to do than blog. 

 First, China followed a bottom-up mode of expansion,

China wasn't politically united from about 1905 to 1949. There wasn't a lot that could be done 'top-down', thought there were some first rate elite institutions. What changed was the Chinese literati embracing Western knowledge and a trickle down effect into the Clan based village schools. China's civil wars and the war against the Japanese meant that the Chinese could not embrace Tagore//Gandhi type mystic shite. By the 1930s the Chinese had some first rate Mathematicians and Physicists though, at that point, the Indians were ahead. Sadly, nutters like Kosambi in independent India ensured that India fell behind. Still, the Cultural Revolution inflicted great harm on the Chinese academy. In India, Universities turned to shit all by themselves. 

initially expanding its Primary level mass education, followed by Middle level and finally Tertiary level elite education. China overtook India in enrollment in the 1930s in Primary education, 1970s in Middle education and 2010s in Higher education.

The Indians were over-investing in education. Don't forget a lot of people got a degree just as a marriage qualification.  I suppose the internal passport system meant that more affluent cities were able to maintain standards. India, for populist reasons, tried to go the other way. Thankfully, in India, obeying the law is optional. 

The evolution of Gross/Net Enrolment rate, expenditure share, and Pupil Teachers ratio - by education level show a similar pattern of catching-up by China. The adoption of different education development paths helped China in imparting higher human capital (Refer Fig 9) to its every birth-year cohort since the beginning of the 20th century than India.

Because Han Chinese are the vast majority and they have had a great veneration for literature for thousands of years. 

The underlying differential rate increased the gap between these two countries for the next 50 years. To illustrate, for the cohort born in 1962, the average years of schooling in China is 8.9 years compared to only 3.4 years in India

Because if the Indian kid worked on the farm his family got to eat more. Because of collectivization, this wasn't the case in China. As Adam Smith pointed out long ago, the opportunity cost of schooling determines outcomes. Smith was miffed that Scottish bairns had less opportunities to sweep chimneys or work in coal-mines and thus were prepared to go to school.  

Post-1995, greater emphasis on primary level mass education in India is narrowing the gap.

People have enough money for private schools.  

Hence, India’s education path can be termed top-down

Which Indian political party said kids should go to the private school not the Government school? Yet that's what happened. It seems about half of all students are in private schools. Even in Kerala which always had quite good government schools the figure is about forty percent.  There's no point being 'top down' if nobody takes a blind bit of notice of what guys at the top say. 

with relatively more focus towards its higher education. Second, vocational education is one of the major components at the Middle and Tertiary stage of education in China, compared to its limited development in India so far.

Learning on the job is vocational training. In a country with low productivity, that is the only way forward. If productivity is high, you need prior training so as to fit in rather than slow things down. This is not the case in most SMEs while big companies run their own training schemes. The trouble is they tend to go in for capital deepening and thus overall employment is hardly impacted. 

Educational attainment can be a proxy for desirable traits- e.g. diligence, capacity for hard work, determination etc. If productivity is rising unequally- which must be the case where it is technology driven- then educational attainment will correlate to increased wage inequality. The problem is that profit or rent inequality may increase because smart peeps drop out of Collidge to go into business. 

We find that the education expansion has contributed to the wage inequality observed in India. Using harmonized household wage surveys from the 1980s to 2010s from China and India, we decompose the wage inequality by education levels.

This is foolish. In China, there were political and socioeconomic barriers to Higher Education. In India, any cretin could attend some more or less shitty College.  

Results show that within-group wage inequality of the two countries are comparable, while the between-group inequality (capturing the "education effect") in India is much higher than in China.

The data isn't fine grained enough to show any such thing. The fact is, in some parts of the country, or for some classes of people, higher education correlates with lower, not higher, earnings.  In any 

We find that it is due to both a higher level of education inequality (either measured by standard deviation or Gini) and a higher rate of returns to education in India.

Much more of the Indian economy is unorganized and statisticians have little knowledge as to what is going on there. Anecdotally, there is low returns to education in rapidly growing state. On the other hand, there are high returns to gangsterism on some campuses.  Look at Lawrence Bishnoi. 

We find that the education expansion has contributed to the wage inequality observed in India.

But only about half of Indians receive any type of wage while full time workers in the organized sector may be about ten percent. In China the proportion of people getting a wage is probably 85 percent. Till recently, there was quite a good match between educational attainment and employment outcomes in China. What is currently happening may only be a blip. By contrast, the phenomenon of 'educated unemployment' was recognized in the India of the 1930s. Sadly, Indian politicians refused to embrace a high growth strategy so as to remove this problem. The Left may have thought that Universities would be a great place to recruit revolutionaries who were bound to be jobless. But gangsters too could do the same thing. 

One reason that stupid people go in for junk econometrics is because they uncritically accept obviously false 'Grievance Studies' theories.

Origin of Education: The circumstances under which the modern education system replaced the traditional education system were very different.

There was no such 'replacement' in India. You were welcome to send your kid to a madrasa or a patshala. What changed was that by the beginning of the twentieth century, parents wanted Government schools to teach more English and less Sanskrit, Persian, etc. Sadly, the Brits insisted on fluence in one Vernacular and one Classical language for promotion within the Civil Service. One reason Gandhi and Nehru became barristers in London was so as to gain 'right of audience' without having to learn any such shite.  

In India, the modern education started during British colonialism.

No. It started when European schools were set up for converts or the kids of Europeans. This happened before Britain began expanding its power.  

The main objective was to produce Western educated workforce to help run the administration of the country.

Nonsense! The Brits wanted Indians who knew Persian and the Vernacular language and the indigenous law codes and revenue system etc. Indians started hiring Whites- e.g. David Hare- to teach in English and then demanded that John Company stop financing Persian and Sanskrit teaching. They refused but did start spending a little money on 'modern education' for those Indians willing to pay for it. This was 'demand driven' not 'top down'. On the other hand, it is true that the Brits insisted that Indians learn to dance the hokey-kokey because that would be just as useful as knowing English when it comes to talking to the Punjabi peasant or the Haryanvi herdsman.  

In Bengal, the 'Occidentalists' prevailed because the local notables wanted English language instruction even though few would be able to pass the exams. One reason for this was that the rich could hire tutors while a few poor people, by dint of cramming, might get ahead. In Punjab, however, the 'Orientalists' prevailed and education was less elitist. I think popular religious movements played a role in promoting better outcomes for poorer students. 

This led to several policies unfavourable to the Primary level mass education.

What was un-favorable was being beaten or raped by the locals. There's a good reason why teachers and doctors run away from some rural areas.  

First, it meant more years of education. 4-5 years of education was not enough to equip someone for handling public administration.

Sure it was. V.P Menon studied up to the Eighth class. He rose to becoming the senior most Indian in the Viceroy's administration. The one thing you can't say about the Brits is that they set much stock by sheepskins.  

This led to the skewed nature of the allocation of resources with more emphasis on the Middle and Tertiary level.

This was 'demand driven'. The guys who paid the education cess got to decide how some of that money was spent.  

It also resulted into a general disinterest of the government towards major expansion of Primary level education,

the local landowners and usurers didn't want the peasants to learn to read and write. Also there were religious and caste based considerations which made this whole subject fraught with difficulty. China had got rid of caste a thousand years previously.  

which can be seen through lesser debates on Primary education, lesser reforms, transferring of responsibility to local level bodies (without resources).

Local bodies were supposed to raise local taxes to pay for schools, sewers and such like. But nobody wanted to pay taxes. Later, it turned out, nobody wanted to teach in shitty villages.  

Empirical analyses 37 have highlighted high (caste and religious) diversity in India combined with the decentralization of primary school management as one of the causes behind the poor provisioning of primary schools in the early 20th century.

So, these cretins now admit Indian education wasn't 'top down'.  

Second, the educated workforce required to be proficient in English (since the official language was English) which was a foreign language to Indians.

There was no such requirement. It is a different matter that Indian elites wanted English because, as Sir Sayyad Ahmed told the Hunter Commission in the 1880s- studying in vernacular medium rots your brain. Incidentally the Arya Samaj originally intended to focus on Sanskrit and the Vedas. Thankfully, its members demanded English and Science. However, it wasn't till after Indian independence that the Government dropped the requirement for Indian students to know at least one vernacular language. My sister studied French, not Hindi, at High School. Then the UPSC decided that aspiring civil servants had to pass an exam in basic Hindi. But some of her seniors in the Foreign Service could not speak a single Indian language. 

This was implemented by adopting native languages as medium of instruction at Primary level and English in later stages of education.

This is why orthodox Hindus and Muslims sent their kids to Christian Missionary schools.  What made India different from Japan and then China, Korea, etc. Is that it didn't start translating every and any important Western text into the vernacular. Also, it must be said, the Indian entrepreneurial class tended to prefer speculative profits to technological innovation. Basically, British protection meant Indians could be lazy and argumentative. Later American food-aid postponed the need for a Green Revolution which would create a prosperous peasantry. Still, if India had opened up the economy at the same time as China, it might not have fallen behind. 

In the final analysis, education does not matter. It is what you do with it which matters. A lot of Indians still don't want to do useful things with their education. Why? Everything is the fault of the Brits. Did you know that Viceroy extracted trillions of dollars worth of semen from sleeping Indians through surreptitious acts of fellatio? Wake up sheeple! White peeps have brain-washed you! Even now, Donald Trump may be hiding under your bed. The moment you go to sleep, he will drain you of your most precious bodily fluid. 


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