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Accidents, there was a relatively routine blockage in what is called the plant’s “polisher”—a kind of giant water filter. The blockage
caused moisture to leak into the plant’s air system, inadvertently tripping two valves and shutting down the flow of cold water into the
plant’s steam generator. Like all nuclear reactors, Three Mile Island had a backup cooling system for precisely this situation. But on that
particular day, for reasons that no one really understands, the valves for the backup system weren’t open. Someone had closed them, and
an indicator in the control room showing they were closed was blocked by a repair tag hanging from a switch above it. That left the
reactor dependent on another backup system, a special sort of relief valve. But, as luck would have it, the relief valve wasn’t working
properly that day either. It stuck open when it was supposed to close, and, to make matters even worse, a gauge in the control room that
should have told the operators that the relief valve wasn’t working was itself not working. By the time Three Mile Island’s engineers
realized what was happening, the reactor had come dangerously close to a meltdown.
No single big thing went wrong at Three Mile Island. Rather, five completely unrelated events occurred in sequence, each of which,
had it happened in isolation, would have caused no more than a hiccup in the plant’s ordinary operation.
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We know this because the flight attendant survived the crash and testified at the inquest.
*
Hofstede, similarly, references a study done a few years ago that compared German and French manufacturing plants that were in the
same industry and were roughly the same size. The French plants had, on average, 26 percent of their employees in management and
specialist positions; the Germans, 16 percent. The French, furthermore, paid their top management substantially more than the Germans
did. What we are seeing in that comparison, Hofstede argued, is a difference in cultural attitudes toward hierarchy. The French have a
power distance index twice that of the Germans. They require and support hierarchy in a way the Germans simply don’t.
*
Here are the top five pilot PDIs by country. If you compare this list to the ranking of plane crashes by country, they match up very
closely.
1. Brazil
2. South Korea
3. Morocco
4. Mexico
5. Philippines
The five lowest pilot PDIs by country are:
15. United States
16. Ireland
17. South Africa
18. Australia
19. New Zealand
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On international comparison tests, students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all score roughly the same in
math, around the ninety-eighth percentile. The United States, France, England, Germany, and the other Western industrialized nations
cluster at somewhere between the twenty-six and thirty-sixth percentile. That’s a big difference.
†
Lynn’s claim that Asians have higher IQs has been refuted, convincingly, by a number of other experts, who showed that he based his
argument on IQ samples drawn disproportionately from urban, upper-income homes. James Flynn, perhaps the world’s leading expert on
IQ, has subsequently made a fascinating counterclaim. Asians’ IQs, he says, have historically been slightly lower than whites’ IQs,
meaning that their dominance in math has been in spite of their IQ, not because of it. Flynn’s argument was outlined in his book Asian
Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ (1991).
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Two small points. Mainland China isn’t on this list because China doesn’t yet take part in the TIMSS study. But the fact that Taiwan
and Hong Kong rank so highly suggests that the mainland would probably also do really well.
Second, and perhaps more important, what happens in the north of China, which isn’t a wet-rice agriculture society but historically a
wheat-growing culture, much like Western Europe? Are they good at math too? The short answer is that we don’t know. The
psychologist James Flynn points out, though, that the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants to the West—the people who have
done so well in math here—are from South China. The Chinese students graduating at the top of their class at MIT are the descendants,
chiefly, of people from the Pearl River Delta. He also points out that the lowest-achieving Chinese Americans are the so-called Sze Yap
people, who come from the edges of the Delta, “where soil was less fertile and agriculture less intense.”
†
There is actually a significant scientific literature measuring Asian “persistence.” In a typical study, Priscilla Blinco gave large groups
of Japanese and American first graders a very difficult puzzle and measured how long they worked at it before they gave up. The
American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes, roughly 40 percent longer.
*
KIPP stands for “Knowledge Is Power Program.”
*
The modern world record for slinging a stone was set in 1981 by Larry Bray: 437 meters. Obviously, at that distance, accuracy
suffers.
*
The Israeli minister of defense Moshe Dayan—the architect of Israel’s astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War—also wrote
an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, “David fought Goliath not with inferior but (on the contrary) with
superior weaponry; and his greatness consisted not in his being willing to go out into battle against someone far stronger than he was. But
in his knowing how to exploit a weapon by which a feeble person could seize the advantage and become stronger.”
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