Flutterby™! : Chinese Mathematics

Last year the New York Times startled the nation with a claim that China was graduating nearly 600,000 engineers every year, and India some 300,000, against only about 70,000 for the US. These figures have been used by many people as a call to action to do something, anything to keep up our end of the innovation process.

Unfortunately, the figures are bogus. According to NPR (audio only), researchers at Duke began calling engineering schools in all three nations, and got a very different answer. First, the US graduates 137,000 engineers each year, and India about 100,000. China probably gets about 300,000, from a population more than thrice that of the US. The figures are pretty fluid, though. Beijing announced that they wanted 600,000 engineers a year, and the provinces found them, even if they had to include refrigerator repairmen and moterbike mechanics. US students also get a much better education than their Chinese counterparts. I think this is a bit like the terrible time when Japan was going to leave us in the dust and take over the world, just beofre their real-estate bubble burst.

Also noted: the researchers had a very hard time getting accurate figures from India. If wasn't from government paranoia like in China, but rather that the Indian schools just didn't know. It's intriguing that such innovative people can exist in a state of such administrative chaos. I sometimes think that India won't take over the world until they get organized, which means we're safe.