First off, if we had 5 times as many people in our country, we'd graduate way more engineers and scientists than China. No mention of percentages, just raw totals.
Second, not every single engineer or scientist who graduates becomes an instant innovator. In developing countries, like China and India, most engineers work jobs that are not at all about innovation, like civil engineers building roads, or structural engineers designing buildings, or mechanical engineers designing railroad cars to haul coal out of the mountains. The article implies that because other countries are graduating engineers, it therefore follows that the amount of innovation they are performing is increasing (at a greater rate than the United States rate of innovation is increasing). This is not necessarily true.
Articles about America "slipping" from their proud post of #1 make me laugh. It's always the same old "watch out for China" scaremongering.
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Mental Health Break
21 minutes ago
1 comment:
If we're not careful, Russia will sneak ahead of us in acreage.
Totally right about the scaremongering stuff. China should have more engineers than we do (and the EU, which has a bigger population and economy). But it's true that our schools don't emphasize science as much as they could or maybe should and that we're having a harder time getting native-born Americans into scientific fields.
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