When I heard that, I thought: yup. That pretty much sums it up.

Not this hurricane.

That other hurricane.


OK, back to Samuelson on why 3 paragraphs of stats demonstrating radical decline in math & engineering graduates isn't the problem it seems to everyone else:

• The grim prognosis wrongly presumes that another country's gain must be our loss. Hardly. ... If Microsoft's research center in Beijing (to take one oft-cited example) develops stunning new software, the advances will soon be incorporated in Microsoft products worldwide.

• In 1981 American companies and laboratories accounted for 45 percent of research and development among the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which are generally the world's richest nations. In 2000 the U.S. share was still 44 percent -- despite the increase in other countries' scientists and engineers and a decline in U.S. defense research and development.

The U.S. share of the world's technology workforce has declined for decades and will continue to do so. By itself, this is not dangerous.

The dangers arise when other countries use new technologies to erode America's advantage in weaponry; that obviously is an issue with China. We are also threatened if other countries skew their economic policies to attract an unnatural share of strategic industries -- electronics, biotechnology and aerospace, among others. That is an issue with China, some other Asian countries and Europe (Airbus).

What's crucial is sustaining our technological vitality.

And that's pretty much it.

The answer is to sustain our technological vitality.


Well, maybe it is. I suspect he ran out of space here. I think what he means, generally, is that American business vitality, which depends upon technological vitality, is the factor to watch and to support. As long as we maintain this factor we can import foreign talent & foreign research and run with them. I've had similar thoughts myself, if only because, as he says, it's not the engineers themselves who are making the big bucks. It's the corporations that hire them.

That's not an anti-business sentiment, by the way. Bringing a good idea to market is hard, and most (or many) good ideas fail as far as I can tell.

In any case, assuming I'm interpreting his final paragraphs correctly, I don't disagree out of hand. I simply don't know enough about economics to have an opinion.

Nevertheless, I think it's nuts to create an entire generation of kids who don't have the option of majoring in math and math-related subjects when they reach college, because we stopped teaching them how to do long division in 5th grade.

My guiding principle with Christopher is to close no doors in grade school.

Maybe fewer and fewer American students will go into science and engineering because the pay is low relative to what they could earn if they went to law school.

However, I don't want to determine that outcome now because an entire generation of children spent 5th grade doing lattice multiplication.

At a bare minimum I want the next generation of managers & entrepreneurs to be able to understand the technology & engineers they're importing from India.





Whither American talent?
Congressional incentives for study of math

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