Null hypothesis watch

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James J. Heckman and Rasmus Landerso write,

family influence on many child outcomes in Denmark is comparable to that in the U.S. Common forces are at work in both countries that are not easily mitigated by welfare state policies. Denmark achieves lower income inequality and greater intergenerational income mobility primarily through its tax and transfer programs and not by building the skills of children across generations and promoting their human potential more effectively.

10 thoughts on “Null hypothesis watch”

  1. That might work in a country consisting of five million largely homogeneous people.

    • Per Wikipedia:

      “ There are no official statistics on ethnic groups, but according to 2020 figures from Statistics Denmark, 86.11% of the population in Denmark was of Danish descent (including Faroese and Greenlandic), defined as having at least one parent who was born in the Kingdom of Denmark and holds Danish Nationality.[17][N 6] The remaining 13.89% were of foreign background, defined as immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. With the same definition, the most common countries of origin were Turkey, Poland, Syria, Germany, Iraq, Romania, Lebanon, Pakistan, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Somalia.”

    • The raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. Acculturation tactics in Denmark would never gain traction in the U.S. And the change in attitude toward immigrants over the past decade in the Scandinavian countries is already impacting immigration. See here

      “Cultural homogeneity on the one hand, and the universalistic structures and ideological presumptions of the Danish welfare state on the other, are central to understanding immigration and integration in Denmark.

      The emphasis has been on both trying to acculturate immigrants as speedily as possible by means of public control and regulation, and on extending egalitarian universalism to cover “old” citizens as well as newcomers. In this sense, the welfare state was viewed in the 1970s and 1980s as an instrument for efficient integration.

      At the same time, the benchmark of successful integration has always been one of successful individual inclusion and acculturation to the mores of Danish life, since the Danish political system — unlike the systems of other Nordic countries — does not base itself on the recognition of minorities and only in exceptional cases makes juridical or political allowance for minority rights and cultural claims based on minority status. In this sense, Denmark is similar to France: egalitarian, secular, and assimilationist.

      Over time, however, the two historical staples of homogeneity and equality have come to be seen as obstacles to integration. Immigrants are now seen as an unwelcome presence because cultural assimilation has been more difficult than originally expected.

      At the same time, both citizens and political actors have started to focus on (and often ideologically exaggerate) the financial burden newcomers place on the welfare system. A balanced estimate indicates that current net costs, including the costs of caring for asylum seekers, are in the range of 10 to 15 billion Danish kroners (US$1.5 to 2 billion), a figure generally considered high. By comparison, the annual fiscal budget is some 500 billion kroner (US$90 billion), out of which about one-third is spent on welfare programs.

      Consequently, negative stereotypes of immigrants have become common: refugees are routinely branded as “welfare scroungers” or “refugees of convenience” who unfairly take advantage of a system that was never intended for their benefit. Immigrants from the non-Western world, Muslims in particular, have become singled out as objects of disparagement, whereas Danes are far more open and welcoming toward immigrants from the EU and other Western countries.”

    • If the government just adds a couple zeros to an excel spreadsheet somewhere does this still apply? Where does anyone get the idea that taxation pays for anything? Maybe it covers Social Security. Maybe.

  3. It’s almost as if intelligence was likely to give rise to better outcomes, and that intelligence was significantly heritable

    • Don’t forgot personality, like conscientiousness, and things like mental illness as well.

  4. The OECD, on the other hand, offers a more optimistic outlook, finding that schooling related social mobility occurs in Denmark and that it is particularly correlated with reading skills:

    – In Denmark, about 10% of the variation in students’ science performance in PISA 2015 was accounted for by differences in students’ socio-economic status (OECD average: 13%; among OECD countries with above-average performance the relationship is weakest in Estonia and Norway [8%]). Between 2006 and 2015, equity in science performance improved in Denmark (on average across OECD countries, equity in science performance improved at a lower rate than in Denmark during this period; Figure 1.1).

    – The mean science score in PISA 2015 among socio-economically disadvantaged students in Denmark was 467 points, while among advantaged students it was 543 points. This gap of 76 points represents the equivalent of approximately two-and-a-half years of schooling (OECD average gap: 88 points; the gap is only 69 points in Estonia; Table 3.1).

    – Some 46% of disadvantaged students in Denmark attend disadvantaged schools, i.e. schools where other students tend to be disadvantaged as well (OECD: 48%; in Finland, only 40% of disadvantaged students attend such schools). However, where disadvantaged students attend advantaged schools, they score 45 points higher, or the equivalent of one-and-a-half years of schooling, than those attending disadvantaged schools (OECD average: 78 points higher; among OECD countries with above-average performance no performance difference is observed between the two groups of students in Finland, Norway and Poland; Figure 1.1)

    – In Denmark, 12% of disadvantaged students are “nationally resilient”, meaning that they score in the top quarter of science performance in Denmark (OECD average: 11%; 14% in Estonia and Finland). Some 31% of disadvantaged students in Denmark are “core-skills resilient”, meaning that they score at PISA proficiency Level 3 or above in science, reading and mathematics (OECD average: 25%; 42% in Estonia, 41% in Japan, and 40% in Canada and Finland; Figure 1.1).

    … …

    – Longitudinal data in Denmark show that 15-year-old students who scored in the top quarter in reading were 44 percentage points more likely to complete university by the age of 25 than students who scored in the bottom quarter (Figure 1.4). Differences in student performance at age 15 explain about 43% of the difference in university completion rates between students with and those without tertiary-educated parents.

    – In Denmark, students who scored in the top quarter of reading performance at age 15 were 47 percentage points more likely than students in the bottom quarter of performance to be working in a skilled job (i.e. a job that requires tertiary education) by the age of 25 (Figure 1.5). Differences in 15-year-olds’ reading performance explain 46% of the difference in skilled employment rates between students with and those without tertiary-educated parents.

    https://www.oecd.org/pisa/Equity-in-Education-country-note-Denmark.pdf

    The hypothesis that the awful reading instruction that takes place in the USA is an impediment to social mobility has yet to be rejected.

  5. Sounds like support for Gregory Clark’s work on growth and inequality.

    Did the Heckman study separate out immigrants from native Danes?

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