I have at least 5 times mentioned the fact that Burma's literacy rates are disputed as Burmese Military Junta blatantly manipulates the stats to suit their agenda but subhuman Bamars like you will always fall short of getting this right. Burma's actual literacy rate is less than 20%.
Education standard is not judged by literacy rates rather by the system through which you are educated as well as the contents you are taught. As suggested by the article, Burma has a ramshackle education system with outdated contents which shows that Burma has one of lowest education standard in the world, and perhaps will remain so since the country is filled with the low IQ dickhead vermins known as Bamars.
I'm not interested on how many grandfathers or fathers you have, surely there must be many to sustain the ecosystem in your habitat. I was confused if you were mixing up your nationality with ethnicity.
Sorry buddy, next time I will make sure to not waste my time by arguing with bunch of ugly Bamar apes from the jungles beyond the Arakans.
All you have shown me is conjecture. Here is an excerpt of an anecdotal report from UNESCO:
http://www.unesco.org/education/uie/pdf/country/Myanmar.pdf
"Education has always been given high
priority in Myanmar society since ancient times
with the monasteries acting as the main centres of
education. Because of its strong tradition of
monastic education, the literacy rate has been high
all along the history of Myanmar. The literacy rate
in the country dropped drastically as education was
given scant attention during the British colonial
period. However, sustained efforts after
Independence in 1948 have steadily increased the
literate population and today the literacy rate has
climbed to 91.8 percent in 2002."
Surely they would have raised concerns about results tampering?
Here is the World Bank's Data (both 2012):
Bangladesh 59
Myanmar 93
Literacy rate, adult total (% of people ages 15 and above) | Data | Table
Do you honestly think our literacy rate is 20%? Come on, fella. Our education system is in disrepair but it is still above yours as attested by data. And I would say that there is a strong correlation between education system and literacy. Anyway, the system is back on track now so I can safely laugh off the monkeys next door.
Here is an article on our low Burmese IQ's (written in the junta days, obviously):
HVGIQ: Burma
Posted by
Jason Malloy
20
Burma, also known as Myanmar, has a population of over 60 million, and is the world’s 24th most populous nation. With an authoritarian, military-controlled government, it is also one of the poorest and most dysfunctional places on earth—you will find it nestled together with mostly African countries at the back of most human development rankings.
Richard Lynn’s international dataset does not yet have a study for Burma.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002, p. 74) makes an estimate of 86 by averaging together IQ from neighboring India (81) and Thailand (91).
IQ and Global Inequality (2006, p. 59) bumps up India’s IQ to 82, which changes the Burma estimate to 87. The latest version of the dataset (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012, p. 26) assigns a lower IQ to Thailand (88), which means that Lynn’s most recent estimate for Burma is 85.
I was able to locate one published intelligence study for Burma. The results are surprising, but the research contains no obvious flaws. Intellectual potential in Southeast Asia is an issue filled with contradiction and uncertainty.
⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻ HᏤ ⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻⎻
It is first worth mentioning that some time before the military coup in 1962, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices were standardized for the local population by
Dr. Kathleen Chen of Rangoon University. Dr. Chen does not know what happened to these unpublished norms and my attempt to contact the University for information was futile. But it is possible that this data still exists. When I asked her over email if she could give me a few details about this incredibly old project, Dr. Chen said:
“I remember the results are similar to American norms …”.
Fortunately, a published study by Helen H. Schuster (1971
) reports an IQ score for Burma on one version of the Goodenough Draw-a-Man intelligence test.
The children’s drawings were collected by anthropologist Melford E. Spiro in the course of his field work. Not many details about Spiro’s research are given by Schuster, but Spiro’s own academic publications helpfully clarify that his field work occurred during 1961-62 in a village of about 500 people right outside of Mandalay in Upper Burma (Spiro, 1996, p. 8).
Spiro administered a Draw-a-Person test, with the aid of an interpreter, at a local consolidated school attended by children from 10 surrounding villages. Schuster generates a standard score for the drawings using the norms and scoring criteria of the “Goodenough-Harris Quality Scale” (Harris, 1963).
The average IQ of the children was 108.3!
Schuster herself accepts this number, noting that many of her colleagues were impressed by the precocity of the drawings.
The Flynn Effect cannot account for this score. The Goodenough-Harris norms used here were ostensibly collected in Minnesota in the late 1950s by R.V. Frankiel (1957), so this indicates only about 5 years of norm inflation (~1.5 points). [1]
As far as the representivity of the sample, the kind of children who attended school were somewhat elite in a population where many remained uneducated … but this is an issue in so many of the world studies. Student populations are still one of the best sources of data. Spiro noted that the sample was “a good cross-section of Burma, except for children living in large urban areas” (p. 137).
Table I: IQ test scores in Burma
Admin Sample Age N Test IQ Reference
1962 A 6-13 93 DAM 106.8 Schuster, 1971
Even though Burma is similar to sub-Saharan African countries on most international development rankings, this kind of intelligence test performance would be very unusual for an African sample. None of the 12 African samples tested with the Draw-a-Man cited by
Wicherts et al (2010) have an IQ of 100 or higher. The average IQ of sub-Saharan African samples on this test was 77.7. (And this is likewise for schoolchildren who are somewhat more elite than schoolchildren from nations where school attendance is more universal.)
__________________________________________
A starting point in the re-evaluation of Southeast Asian IQ
In my
detailed 2006 review of Lynn’s
Race Differences in Intelligence, I noted some problems with his treatment of the Asian data:
As with the other chapters, Lynn justifies his racial division of East and Southeast Asia by reference of L.L. Cavalli-Sforza’s
History and Geography of Human Genes, but Lynn does not order his countries how they should be arranged according to this reference. This book tells us that South China lumps closer genetically with Southeast Asia than North China:
”Northern and southern Chinese are substantially different genetically” (p 100);
”. . . the South Chinese . . . are more closely related to Southeast Asia than to Northeast Asia” (p 229). This is significant because many of the high IQ scores Lynn places in the ‘East Asian’ chapter are from various South Chinese populations, such as the Hong Kong studies, as well as much of the over-seas Chinese scores from America and Southeast Asia. This creates a potential problem for a genetic theory of either East Asian high ability or Southeast Asian low ability …
In a related criticism, one of the adoption studies that Lynn uses to support a higher genetic East Asian IQ, (Clark & Hanisee 1982) is actually mostly comprised of Southeast Asians, about half the sample being Vietnamese. Lynn resolves this by asserting that most of the Vietnamese in this sample were actually Chinese-Vietnamese, but I see nothing in the original paper to indicate this, and since most of the higher achieving overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia are from the Southeast Asia genetic cluster anyways, I hardly see how this resolves anything. While one might posit a cline in IQ scores (and scores do seem to drop off from Thailand into Malaysia), the South Chinese show absolutely no deficit in ability or differentiated profile from East Asians. This makes an interesting contrast between Southeast Europe and the Middle-East where we see a cline in ability follow a genetic cline across a stark cultural boundary, suggesting genetics. Instead here we have another cline in genetics, but a stark difference in ability following a stark cultural boundary, suggesting environment. This might mean that underperforming Southeast Asian-American groups, such as the Hmong, have hidden potential after all. Then again, selection could have occurred in China independently for this trait, long after the formation of the races, but modern selection and subracial populations are at odds with the theoretical structure of this book. Likely much more data is required before simplified assumptions and approaches can relax.
Since that time, Chuck has
questioned whether Thailand’s IQ has risen to 98 and Heiner Rindermann
found an IQ of 99 in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, in their latest IQ dataset, Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) give China an IQ of 105.5, Hong Kong an IQ of 108, and Singapore an IQ of 108.5. Even assuming that Thailand’s IQ is 88, as it is reported in the latest update,
Burma shares a longer border with China than it does with India, which should put its regionally estimated IQ at 97.
My suspicion is that this number veers a lot closer to the truth of the matter, but only future research will give us a more reliable picture. I don’t give too much weight to a single small study, but one study is still more informative than no study. I trust that Lynn will add this reference to future updates of his dataset, and not ignore it simply because it will lower the correlation between national IQ and developmental indices.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Here is the data for the Bangladesh (actual testing):
Bangladesh 82
National IQ Scores - Country Rankings
Fair play to Bangladesh, though. Your kind seemed to have raised yourselves up out of the sewers and into the gutter. Now you need to step up on to the street where we've fallen down to. Take your people back and I wish you good luck on the path to development, Mr. Handsome Bingali Man.
Oh and I stumbled upon this amusing take on things (written in 2008 by a Bangladeshi, no less):
Why Burma will beat Bangaldesh: human capital matters
Posted by
Razib Khan on April 10, 2008
(9)
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When I was a little kid I would check out countries whose vital economic and social statistics were not as good as Bangladesh’s. I basically was curious as to what could have happened,
how can you be more miserable than Bangladesh??? How??? During the 1980s Vietnam was one of those nations. Torn by war for decade & saddled by a anti-productive Communist economic system this was a nation where I noted that indices like caloric intake and GDP
PPP actually had Bangladesh on top!
No more.
Vietnam’s economy has grown a great deal from its extremely low base over the last 20 years, and it has now surpassed Bangaldesh. South Asians often like to complain that the reason East Asian nations like South Korea and Japan did so well, while their nations languished, was that the United States injected capital inputs after World War II. That model doesn’t work for Vietnam for obvious reasons.
So what is going on? Vietnam’s literacy rate is
90%, while Bangladesh’s is
43%. I am well aware that terms such as “literacy rate” are subject to a great deal of fudging, and aren’t always comparable, but I think such a wide variance in this case reflects a real qualitative difference. And this gap in literacy is a good proxy for a an enormous difference in endogenous human capital, the natural implication is that Vietnam was always poised to enter the global economy and transition toward higher value sectors and surpass Bangaldesh.
Which brings me to Burma, whose GDP PPP is
$1,691 vs.
$2,270 for Bangladesh. Burma’s literacy rate though happens to be around 90%. Like Vietnam, when Burma opens up to the rest of the world I assume it will quickly leap-frog over Bangladesh and leverage its bank of human capital to shift into industries where South Asian workforces simply do not have the requisite skill levels (think about the handicaps which might result from having a substantially illiterate labor force on the factory floor!).
I use Bangladesh as a comparison because Burma is right next door, and I would not be surprised if two decades from now Bangladeshi workers stream into its eastern neighbor to take advantage of economic opportunies at the bottom of the skill ladder. But the human capital surfeit is endemic to all of South Asia.
Take a look at these two maps….
I don’t want to minimize the suffering in Sub-Saharan African; but do note that this region has a population of
770 million vs. a population of nearly 1.4 billion in South Asia. Also, note that in very densely population nations such as Nigeria nutrition is better than in most of South Asia. In vast swaths of the continent such as the Congo Basin one can chalk up malnutrition to exogenous shocks such as war; in contrast, South Asia is characterized by a basal rate of poor nutrition.
When reading articles about the Indian economic revolution, keeps these data in mind.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Here in 2014, here are the GDP PPP per capita figures from the IMF (via wiki):
137
Burma 4,345
144
Bangladesh 3,167
Neither of us has much to shout about but you boys should definitely keep your big mouths shut.
The only thing that changed was Akyab was renamed Sittway. Probably to honour the battle that took place there.
