> Perhaps the United States is already doing enough.
Long-term it's absolutely not enough. The fundamental socioeconomic feature of 21st century will be the competition between the US system and China's massive population for global economic dominance.
The US population is ~300 million, China's is ~1.2 billion, 4x our size. For every engineer, scientist, genius, etc in the US, there are ~4 in China. Over the long term the US has no hope whatsoever of competing against that without significant structural changes.
Those structural changes include fixing our educational system, fighting tooth and nail for skilled immigrants, offering them better incentives to stay rather than return home to fast growing developing economies to make their fortunes, fixing the broken financial and patent/IP systems, etc.
Judge Posner sums up our shortfalls well in a recent blog post [1]. The US system will need to be operating at an order of magnitude greater efficiency than it currently is to have any hope of overcoming China's massive numbers advantage. Immigration is one of the few crucial advantages the US can exploit in that competition, but right now we're shooting ourselves in the foot so hard there we're blowing our leg off.
The more fundamental point is that assuming equally sound governance (a big assumption of course), the natural size of the Chinese economy is around 4x the natural size of the US economy.
Does that matter? Not really. "US" and "China" are ultimately just arbitrary labels.
Yes, that too of course. Though I'd argue that population alone is nothing, as China's 20th Century history demonstrates quite clearly.
It's a country's government and legal system, combined with its human resources (both aptitude and education), that dictate whether its population will be an asset or liability. Hence my focus on their human resources' massive numbers advantage
Haha, I actually tried to find that scene on Youtube to reference in my post, but couldn't. All of The Social Network breakup scenes on Youtube start after it. That was like, the most important part for the movie, ffs.
You don't need lots of geniuses - you can always import an Einstein or Fermi. What you are facing is a country where the best students become semi-conductor designers rather than lawyers or MBA.
The USA is in trouble when the smart 'ethnic' students can all get into law school/MBA programs instead of being forced into STEM.
Long-term it's absolutely not enough. The fundamental socioeconomic feature of 21st century will be the competition between the US system and China's massive population for global economic dominance.
The US population is ~300 million, China's is ~1.2 billion, 4x our size. For every engineer, scientist, genius, etc in the US, there are ~4 in China. Over the long term the US has no hope whatsoever of competing against that without significant structural changes.
Those structural changes include fixing our educational system, fighting tooth and nail for skilled immigrants, offering them better incentives to stay rather than return home to fast growing developing economies to make their fortunes, fixing the broken financial and patent/IP systems, etc.
Judge Posner sums up our shortfalls well in a recent blog post [1]. The US system will need to be operating at an order of magnitude greater efficiency than it currently is to have any hope of overcoming China's massive numbers advantage. Immigration is one of the few crucial advantages the US can exploit in that competition, but right now we're shooting ourselves in the foot so hard there we're blowing our leg off.
1. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.h...