The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Human Capital (opens in new tab)

I feel like one very important factor in mortality is simply cultural.

The things that stand out more to me are:

- Russians tend to be much more prone to risky, dangerous or violent behavior. From reckless driving, silly behavior to unhealthy relationships with alcohol and drugs you really get lots of extremes. Those extremes further fuel tragedies and thus more of this behavior.

- at the same time, Russians are culturally less individualistic. In some sense we in the west care less for the state and more about ourselves. In Russia this balance is slightly different. This impacts the value and care people have for their own lives.

- Russians are a traumatized population imho. WW2 is still a major collective trauma. Another very major source of trauma is corruption. Most Russians I've met are borderline resigned that things can't get good. They can get better, happier for some time, but it's like there's always a huge cloud looming on their lives. I believe their culture of corruption and centuries of endless autocracies makes them negative further pushing violent, risky and unhealthy behaviors.

Coupled with the American paradox, does this suggest that human capital is not necessarily correlated with [formal] education, after all?

(Indeed the first chart looks like a scatterplot, so there is no need to invoke anecdata)

But considering the author's expertise maybe he's trying to point towards studying the correlation with hardwork-- a better proxy? Some say that is already factored into GDP calculations.

The old Marxists would say it's because Russia doesn't have an empire (outside the meager pickings of own immediate periphery) providing a trading network, access to cheap foreign labor and resources etc. as a buffer to its own domestic economy. Not sure how statistically verifiable that is, since the classical Marxian economic model doesn't seem to apply cleanly to the modern US or China.

Random anecdote, Russians arguably produce the world's best gaming mods. Their unpaid amateur programmers put out content that rivals or exceeds the quality of Western games, if you like doomer-y 90s vibes. An example would be Fonline 2236 (some Russian guy hacked Fallout 1 and 2 into a free, working MMO) or the Skyrim mod for DayZ, which I think is dead now and I needed a translator app to play before the current war started but was the best online RPG experience I've had since Ultima Online.

I would imagine at least part of it is the fact that Russia is a resource exporting economy and thus suffers from "Dutch disease" where the consistent sale of commodities like oil pushes up the currency and makes other types of exports less compatible. If natural resources are super-profitable then they potentially become a crutch for the economy; and if other sectors are less competitive and profitable then there is not much reason to invest there.

Coupled with the fact that these types of sectors don't actually employ very many people as a percentage of the population, it makes sense that it would have bad effects on the rest of the population.

This is known thing in economy science.

Most easy to use model of information inequality.

What I mean, usually professional know about his specialty magnitudes more than average person from other specialty.

On other side, market economy have extremely huge number of products on market. For example, USSR in best its years have about million part numbers nomenclature.

How free market economy solve these issues? - They just create infrastructure of entrepreneurs - intermediate actors, who help average person to find product best fit for him.

Unfortunately, in Russia entrepreneurs considered as enemy of society. So they have extremely low number of professional entrepreneurs and people just cannot find products in Russia, and shopping near entirely on global market, mostly from China, and Russian engineers just cannot sell their products.

Why internal market is important. Well, another model - micro-economy pf business. To make business, one need to make three things: 1st somewhere got knowledge, what to do (marketing); 2nd somewhere got investments (money) and invest them into make ready for market product (finance market, loans, credits, angels, vc funds); 3rd make sells (marketing). Unfortunately, only part of make product (without money) is really strong side of Russians, but they are really weak in marketing and their finance market is on very early stage of development. And as I already mentioned, in Russia entrepreneurs considered as enemy, but also they demonized all business, all things touching credits, investments and finances.

And when you trying to go abroad, you definitely will got harder access to finances or investments from other country, then yours. So, usually, exporters enter new country with powerful backup from their own country, and in Russia such backup is just not exist, or to be honest, it exist only for very limited circle of people close to top powers.

As said one American professor, Russians trying to get milk without a cow.

Its a feudal system rewarding feudal clans for doing feudal things. The education is a remnant of the competitiveness of the ussr, that wanted to overtake the west in that area.

The life expectancy at birth stats have to be reflective of the fall of the Soviet Union - to work out that males expected to live 50 years they have to be observed to die, which means the stats must be heavily influenced by events that happened in the last 50 years. It'd be a laggy indicator. While extremely interesting, I don't think there is a paradox there as much as hints that an empire collapsing because of economic incompetence might be bad for people in the imperial core.

And I've never been particularly impressed by comparisons of patents between countries either. I doubt the legal systems operate the same way and having a word that translates to "patent" doesn't imply to me that it actually means the same thing. Even if they do my impression is that patents are actually progress-retardant - places that make a habit of politely ignoring that part of IP law tend to do quite well (see: China and FOSS software are both interesting case studies).

Nonetheless this is an interesting area to focus on; Russia is an unimpressive country - it really should be in a similar league to China/the US/India and they just don't have the weight that those 3 names do.

The demographic time bomb that is the Russian population (human capital, to use an inhuman term) has been recognized since the late 80s. I am surprised how much that productivity along with health has plunged in the last decade. It is not as some suggested a lagging indicator of the aftermath of the Soviet empire but the continuing collapse of the Russian empire, of which the Soviet Union was just a phase. Despite the best intentions of would be autocrats in the West to pump it up, Russia is transitioning from a pretend developed nation to a much smaller developing country on a large land mass.

I am ethnically Russian, although spent virtually my entire life in the US. My father went to a special grade school for English in Russia when he was younger there. Presumably, there was some state-sponsored idea that its graduates would become diplomats and leaders and enrich Russia itself.

He reports that some 80% of his class have left the country. I would say that his generation (i.e., some of the first to come of age in the post-communist period) especially were very eager to find lucrative work in the states and elsewhere. The capitalist structure of early capitalist Russia was quite unstable, not offering good pay, or in many cases even consistent pay, and that's if you could find a professional opportunity.

As someone who lives in Mississippi, I'm beyond tired of the generally insulting and dismissive way this entire region is treated, usually by people who have never even been here.

The graph showing that Russia is neck and neck with Alabama for total US patents granted is absurd and stupid. It doesn't illustrate anything, it's purely there to get in a "Russia is as bad as Alabama!" graphic. They even include the following text which shows how intentional this was:

> Alabama has creditable research centers, of course—the Hunstville aerospace complex and the University of Alabama network among them. But Russia’s population was almost 30 times larger than Alabama’s in 2020.

Great, so Alabama has 30x the per capita patents in a patent system that is foreign to Russia? How many Russian patents does New York have each year? What is even the point of this graphic? Every other graphic is using the correct units (per capita, median, etc) except this one, it's just there to put Russia next to Alabama, because Alabama is "so terrible". The graphic is literally "how many foreign patents does arbitrary region A have compared to how many domestic patents these other arbitrary regions have, not normalizing for anything".

I would like to see how many rocket scientists there are per capita in in Alabama and Russia compared to other regions of the world, but that might not tell the story they want to tell.

Edit: I went to find the answer, and New Mexico and Alabama crush all statistics in terms of per-capita Aerospace Engineers. However, and this is just usual, when you go to https://cambridgedb.com/which-state-employs-the-most-people-... the answer to 'Where the most Aerospace Jobs are located" shows the wrong graphic to make California look good. The graphic was lifted from https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/oes172011.htm, where the correct graphics are the first two on the page, which apparently they scrolled past to steal the one that doesn't address the question they are using it to illustrate the answer to.

That's not the Russian Paradox; that's the Gorbachev + Yeltsin Paradox.

I've lived in Russia between 2003-2009. I am an engineer in the U.S. From the dozens of "engineers" in Russia I met, I found that the bulk of their college level teaching was basically babysitting. They had no real engineering knowledge, and to pass college exams was extraordinarily easy. It was an eye opener for me. They also severely compartmentalize their teaching and knowledge. A VERY intelligent IT engineer I met there accused me of trying to poison his family when I suggested using Sodium Hypochlorite to cleanse an obviously polluted well they used at their dacha. He had no clue about anything chemistry. Total zero. I subsequently found out that throughout the college levels, they basically are diploma mills, with a high level of 'degree inflation'. Not one college graduate I met there had any broad knowledge nor any knowledge or ability beyond an American high school.