If we want to know who is good at math, we may not need to ask any math questions at all. An educational researcher was going through the results of an international math and science assessment when he stumbled upon a remarkable discovery: if countries were ranked by how many questions students answered in a 120-question biodata survey that preceded the assessment, the ranking was identical to that of the assessment itself. Not almost the same – it was identical.

To know who is good at math, all we need is a way measure hard work and persistence.

People, it turns out, aren’t born with an innate ability for math. Those who are better have consistently worked through problems where others would have given up. They have accrued more hours of practice. The effects compound and people end up developing better mathematical ability than others.

Why would some consistently work harder than others? It may come down to how we are brought up, schooled or even the sort of work our ancestors did. E.g. Asians, generally considered better at math than western counterparts, descend from rice-farmers, a form of agriculture that is intensely more demanding than corn or wheat grown in the west. This attitude somehow is passed down through generations.

Singapore, South Korea, China, Hong Kong and Japan are the top five ranked countries in the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) survey we referred to earlier.

What do these five countries have in common?

They are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” — Outliers

This post is inspired by a chapter titled “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outliers”.