Patience and educational achievement

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Economists have once again entered the fray, this time with a study that tries to determine how patience is correlated with better educational outcomes. The results are impressive, albeit unsettling. In Italy, differing degrees of patience account for two-thirds of the achievement variation across the country’s regions. In the US, differing degrees of patience account for one-third of the variation in educational outcomes across states, a smaller amount but still notable.

Before I go any further, you might be wondering which are the most patient states. They are (in alphabetical order) Maine, Montana, Vermont and Wyoming. The least patient state? California. In Italy, patience is highest in the northern region bordering Austria, which has a relatively Germanic culture and history. Patience is the lowest by far in Sicily. In both Italy and the US, patience is generally greater in the North than in the South.

These results do not necessarily mean that lower patience results in lower grades. It could be that doing well in school makes you more patient, because you learn that working hard has its own rewards, and that may lengthen your time horizon. Or there may be some underlying factor, say conscientiousness, that is key to both patience and academic achievement.

Still, it is hard to avoid the overall impression that there is a tight connection between certain “bourgeois virtues” and academic achievement. If you are a parent, you might want to be rooting for your child to be more patient rather than less, no matter how complex all the interrelationships among the various personal and cultural attributes may turn out to be.

The researchers estimated patience by an ingenious method. There is already a widely accepted global preference survey that measures patience across nations. They then used Facebook data on interests, clicks and likes to see which interests were most popular in the more patient nations. Then they examined that data to see how popular those interests were in the various regions of those countries.

Here is the underyling research by Eric A. Hanushek, Lavinia Kinne, Pietro Sancassani, and Ludger Woessmann.  I do consider whether “patience” is exactly the right word for what is going on here.  Hat tip also to The Wisdom of Garett Jones.