Joe Studwell: belief

Transcript context

…The comparison with South Asia — I think I see that differently. India has high variance, but at the upper end, the IITs are amazing, right? If you come out of a good IIT, your life is set. You’ll earn a lot of money. You’ll be highly productive. You could get employment in the UK or the US. Africa doesn’t seem to have anything like that, not sub-Saharan Africa. Or Sri Lanka, which is quite literate, well educated. It’s hard to find a sub-Saharan country that’s at all like Sri Lanka on educational indicators. Rural Pakistan, clearly, might be worse than much of Africa, but isn’t South Asia just making much bigger strides? I don’t think so in the sense that I wouldn’t point to the IITs in India as evidence of the strength of India’s education system. I agree the people who come out of the IITs are fantastic, but there are only 30,000 people in the IITs. They’re just numerically inconsequential. But how much output they produce is what matters, right? And it’s evidence that there’re feeder systems. If you can produce some number of very, very, very good people, your feeder systems must also be doing pretty well, at least some of them.…

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