I had a tow truck driver who had a Ph.D in mechanical engineering. He worked for an engineering company for a few years before he decided to move back to the mountains. I learned so much about control theory riding with him in the cab of his truck.

People like that resemble modern day "wise men" or sages to me. Our middle school janitor was a math PhD who left academia, became a farmer for decades, and eventually our janitor.

He rarely told anyone his credentials. Most people thought he was just some old man. I watched parents and teachers be rude to him, but he'd always smile and be polite. Some of us used to help him from time to time. He was very kind and would always listen to our kid-sized problems while we worked.

In Finland, a suburban pizza entrepreneur was called a doctor, because he had a PhD in nuclear physics from Iran.

I looked through your link and apart from a handful of sources linking to random Guardian articles and Wikipedia it didn't actually cite the source it used as it's central claim and then proceeded with rather disjointed points each poorly supported and ended with some sort of vague platitude about how we need to look at data despute never actually making a conclusion.

The conclusion is that there might be a correlation between a country's culture, largely shaped by its majority religion, to its GDP over time. It is too complex to explain so the article is just an inquiry into an overlooked factor, often ignored by economists.

Did you ask these cab drivers why did they pursue a PhD with the associated cost in time and money if they knew in advance there is no opportunity to use it? Most people that I know with a PhD working outside universities did it for status or for spending some more years studying and not working, not because they needed it.

Completely anecdotal data, but in my experience in Argentina people just study what they want just because, in general there isn't an economic reason.

Argentina's public universities are tuition free, backed by the state, so you don't have to spend any money to study anything you may want, which leads to people choosing non economically viable careers (PHD in social sciences and other stuff), I think in part because they don't have any cost to recover from, as well as people not liking math.

The number of people going into STEM is super low, despite paying much better than other careers, and also allowing you to go to other countries to work. As an example, the School of Psychology in the University of Buenos Aires has around 16k students distributed across 4 degrees (Psychology, musical therapy, and 2 more), whereas the School of Exact and natural sciences had around 7k across ~10 degrees (comp sci, math, physics, geology, biology, chemistry, paleontology and some other I'm forgetting).

Comp sci alone probably has 1000 active students. The school of engineering has around 8.5k across several engineering degrees.

Data: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universidad_de_Buenos_Aires#Es...

The classic engineer of the 90s in Argentina

Don't forget that Argentina's economy was the brainchild of the right wing in the United States, and specifically the Chicago School of economics.

They overthrew a democractically elected government and installed a military dictatorship, in order to push their preferred economy

Did you mean Chile? Chile is doing well compared to other Latin American countries.

So well an overwhelming majority voted to replace their pro-capitalist constitution.

Chile was doing so well in their capitalist constitution that communists just had an unprecentended jump in support.

If you're going to make context less comparisons, Cuba is one of the most developped countries in Latin America.

Yup, that's ironic. Argentina was the brainchild of the populist economic left, Chile of the non-populist economic right. Neither of the two, to be fair, caring all that much about freedom for the populace. Finding out which is doing better at present is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

Argentina was always high on Peronist kool-aid, it has nothing to do with the Chicago School of economics.

> Don't forget that Argentina's economy was the brainchild of the right wing in the United States, and specifically the Chicago School of economics.

Does the Chicago school of economics promote increased public spending, money printing and giving money away? I mean, that's been Argentina's model since the 70s up to now, except for a brief period in the 90s

Don't you mean Chile? Argentina is a textbook about how not to implement populist left wing economic policy.