OK, so then why don't the situations given in the elaborate description then show up in the statistics, like the "fat right tail" that isn't there?
It's because the students sent to olympiads are statistical outliers, too few in number to skew statistics. The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
I guess there's another layer tho in 2025 where, assuming they are rational, you wouldn't necessarily expect their efforts to benefit Romania.
As another example, if cancer is cured tomorrow it won't necessarily be the country which found the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most competent doctors, able to use and apply the cure.
Second, I would caution against the trope that invention is some exclusive province of the "genius".
That out of the way, we can look to network effects. Consider that a populace with high literacy will permit more of the kind of collaboration that has literacy as a prerequisite, while one with low literacy and a few outliers won't. The outliers are constrained in how much they can collaborate, and collaboration is essential to scientific and economic development.
People with good STEM education, even with PhDs in that field aren’t necessarily competent voters and good decision makers outside of area of their interests. Understanding economic policies is still an effort that many aren’t willing to take.
Personally I suspect there's a floor (can read a chart, understands growth rates and compounding in general) which the public need to assess arguments constructed by specialists, while the rest is mostly understanding ideology.
The reason I believe that is, I think I can pretty much predict 100% of the conclusion of most articles written for the public by knowing the names & affiliations of the authors and the topic. The only uncertainty is what sources and statistics they will pick to reach the conclusion required by their ideology.
Where do you get that information from? According to the CIA, it's 100% (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2023/f...). North Korea Info (https://www.northkoreainfo.com/why-does-north-korea-have-a-h...) gives a slightly lower estimate of 97%-99%.
This is the usual argument against stratified education systems but is it proven in any way? My experience with stratified systems is that they increase both high quantiles and the average. Maybe (even if not established), maybe they reduce low quantiles like the 0.1th, but very unlikely they damage the average. Quite the opposite.
It's kind of like this idea that communism makes an average citizen richer which sounds logical, but in the end everyone's poorer. Remove the stratification and there's no incentive to do anything.
The figure in the article claims to show that this is indeed the case -- though as I noted in my other comments, the y axis is actually uninterpretable ("percentiles" can't be negative).