* The key phrase here is “correlate to performance,” as opposed to cause the performance. All of Jordet’s findings are correlations, the big difference (at least for economists) being that causations are what explain the reasons behind something. The most famous example is Franz H. Messerli’s graph which shows “Correlation Between Countries’ Annual Per Capita Chocolate Consumption and the Number of Nobel Laureates per 10 million Population,” in “Chocolate consumption, cognitive function and Nobel laureates” (New England Journal of Medicine). The graph depicts almost a straight line from bottom left to top right, despite the x and y axes having no obvious causal link. It is in fact another variable (maybe income) which causes both. In the same way, Jordet’s figures do not in isolation, or even together, provide certain or causal reasons for England’s failure, but they do provide correlations that are relevant and worthy of further investigation.