[johnnyanmac]

That exact bias:

>English proficiency remains a reasonable indicator of a nation's ability to produce goods and services that generate economic growth, and it correlates well to national investment in helping people achieve their full potential by providing education, healthcare and a decent standard of living.

Meanwhile China's boom in the mid 2010-s (China is 2nd to dead last on this chart, above Japan) still had westerners flock to them. In a few instances, disgustingly so. The language barrier at that level of economy is negligible. A few skilled translators are a rounding error for that gold mine.

I'm more than fine with data for data's sake. I have all sorts of useless trivia and statistics that simply put a smile on my face and have little practical use. But using "how good you are at English as a society" to predict economics seems a bit tonedeaf.

[travisjungroth]

That’s not a bias it’s just reality. Of course English proficiency isn’t perfectly correlated with economics. It’s one factor of many.

People aren’t usually trying to just predict GDP or something. A report like this is useful for a big company deciding where to expand. I’m writing this from Colombia, which has a big call center industry, much of it in English.

“English proficiency of a nation doesn’t matter, don’t talk about it much”, which is what you seem to be getting at, is so clearly wrong to me. Maybe it’s the bias of personal experience. Just because it’s not important to you doesn’t mean it’s unimportant in general.

[johnnyanmac]

You can talk about it all you want, but the correlation just seems too weak for a statement like the above to track. Nothing in statistics is perfect, but they should at least be reasonable (don't make me bring out the XKCD comic).

And sure. I have bias and didn't do any mass survey. But when you see more and more of your country falling in education ranks, and the people up top trying to appeal more to countries with very poor english skills as opposed to building those facilities domestically. , I'm going to be skeptical that the language of the country matter much in the grand scheme of things.