Maurice,
I agree that total numbers are not the thing. The US lead in the world depends a lot on the contribution of 1-2 million smart individuals. Due to the creativity and hardwork of these few, certain US teams/companies/militaries/agencies are world beaters. Ordinary man on the street is not much better than the ordinary man on the street in other countries. One big plus -the US domestic justice system works better than almost anywhere in the world - but sometimes I wonder whether that is the cause or the result of prosperity.
But let us look realistically at what sort of competition India and China have had to offer since the last 50 years. I have no first hand knowledge of the progress in China. However, I have lived in 10 different cities in India and am still closely involved with both US and India.
India has been independent since 60 years. The college enrollments in India in 1950, 1980, and 2000 were approximately 150,000, 2 million , and 6 million. The corresponding US numbers have been approximately 2 million, 13 million, and 15 million. These are all ball park numbers, but accurate numbers are available elsewhere on the internet. The point is that the gaps in the number of graduates is narrowing. And in another 10 years will definitely get narrower, if you look at the high school enrollments in the two countries. China's entry into higher education is even more recent, but accelerating even faster.
Let us look at the Indians who graduated from college in the 1950s and how much impact they have had in the western world. Remember that there were so few of them. The well known ones are also very few - economists like Amratya Sen (Nobel Prize winner)and Jagdish Bhagwathi, some musicians like Ravi Shankar and Zubin Mehta, and others.
In 1980s, India was starting to graduate only 15 percent the number of collge grads as USA. Many of the better graduates headed towards engineering fields, about 10 percent of them studying in US graduate schools. As a result, the premier research labs in US - Bell Labs, IBM Labs, NASA, Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm have significant percentage of Indians. Indian Americans wield a significant influence in Silicon Valley and provide a competitive edge to US high tech industry. Since the last 10 years another flood of IT specialists have arrived in the US from India and now comprise a majority in the IT departments of some Fortune 100 companies.
The fact is that such a small number of 1980s graduates from India are making such a big impact on the highest end of US economy drivers. Indian Americans are running about 10 years behind on Wall Street and in Corporate America.
So looking forward, the impact of the Indian graduates of 2000-2005 period will be larger both in USA and in India. For now thanks to outsourcing and internet, more are getting exposed to world class companies, processes, and knowledge.
Add in China, and the competition grows. US will have to work harder to co-opt the two countries and their work forces in order to stay ahead.
-Arun
>China has numbers, but as Bangladesh, Nigeria, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Switzerland show, there is much more to wealth per capita than numbers.
China has only 4 x as many people as the USA, so even in absolute terms, it's not vastly ahead.> |
