Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are Scientists
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
...we gotta keep saber rattling that our way is better than theirs. Boo China, boo.
Edit: To the downvoter - okay, I'm joking around. But which of these premises do you disagree with?
1. The United States has more electoral politics in choosing its leaders than China.
2. The last 20 years of leadership in China show a much more nuanced understanding of policy and statesmanship than American leadership, where charisma and mass appeal tends to be more important than "hard credentials."
3. There might be a cause-and-effect relationship between point 1 and point 2.
Disagree with any of those? Yeah I'm joking around, but it's worth thinking about, no? Or maybe it's upsetting to think about... that I sympathize with...
Now it's interesting, countries can catch up a lot faster than they can lead. If a country is a bit backwards, with the right set of leadership, they can very quickly modernize, becoming extremely important economically and geopolitically in ~30 years when starting almost from scratch. But many of those rapid modernizations peter out once a lot of the proven methods are implemented.
Sometimes that means flat growth, like Japan. Sometimes collapse, like Nazi Germany. Sometimes gradual decline, like the USSR. Singapore has done a pretty outstanding job of keeping their upwards trends going and they're about 50 years into their building phase - I think that's the longest rapid sustained modernization in history?
So anyways, yes, I'll take the USA's system over China's today. And tomorrow. And probably 5 years from now. But maybe not 20 years from now if all else stays equal, and China can adapt after they've caught most of the low hanging fruit.
It's not only leadership. If there is a long track record of commerce and admiration of scholarship, a culture can enable rapid modernization. I think this is why Japan, Korea, and China have done very well for themselves.
Yes, but look at them now. The territories of the former USSR do not constitute the best climate for business. Cultural antecedents are not a necessary pre-condition, but they seem to help.
In population, wealth, etc. sure. But in terms of corruption? Having people who do no harm in power is often better than having people who do great good. If a great leader is just that - great. Not good, but great. Greatness has the capacity for evil and good. The advantage of a less skilled leadership is that they're only really able to do middling things, whether middlingly evil or middlingly good.
We're already seeing work being outsourced from China to even cheaper countries as China's supply of labour becomes fully engaged.
The attitude that I get from a lot of Chinese is that they feel the present government is a necessary evil - i.e., in exchange for many political and religious freedoms, they get progress, and an immense improvement to the quality of life of hundreds of millions... where before there was only starvation and misery. And progress they have gotten, which is more than I can say for us in the last decade or so.
This is exactly what is meant by the Chinese "Civilization State."
http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/u-s-needs-to-deepen-its-unde...
I've had Chinese coworkers openly feel sorry for me because I have asian features and I don't know how to read/write Chinese characters, and I'm not even Chinese!
And China is recently tending towards more sophisticated repression, rather than less of it in general. Perhaps the US and China will end up in the same place!
I'm not against business, but it shouldn't be our singular goal as a society.
Honestly, the business/commerce in the USA is one of the best things about it. As for Chomsky - well, he's completely discredited to me after comparing his writings about Southeast Asia to spending significant amounts of time in SE Asia. Also the ex-Communist countries. He's a relic from a dead age, who played for the wrong team, and hasn't woken up from it. I've gone into depth on this before, but long story short - North Korea is much worse than South Korea, Taiwan drastically outperformed pre-Deng Xiaoping China, West Germany is still much more developed than East Germany... and it's really obvious that South Vietnam is much worse because it was conquered by North Vietnam.
Also, the Khmer Rouge genocide started the same year after American forces withdrew - the Khmer Rouge were emboldened by the American withdrawal. Little known fact - the last recognized battle of the Vietnam War was USA vs. Khmer Rouge, the only military engagement between the two parties before South Asia went from "bad" to "much much worse."
Anyway - I know this kind of not an easy to do overnight, but I'd really suggest comparing Chomsky's writings on SE Asia to what happened in SE Asia firsthand if you get the chance. Also, try to engage with a full-time entrepreneur while he's building the early stage of a company. Guaranteed perspective-changer.
Ad Hominem circumstantial.
>Guaranteed perspective-changer.
If I was a BP CEO I would have a different perspective on the oil spill, and If I was a Goldman&Sachs CEO I would have a different perspective on the economic crash. Perspectives are not arguments.
Hey, welcome to Hacker News. This is your second comment, your first was, "Meanwhile, red necks scream in anger, teir took uor jobs!!"
So, let me clue you in to the vibe here. First, we aim for a really high level of civility here. Second, standard throwing out of cliche is frowned upon - yeah, we get it. Nobody liked the bailouts and the BP oil spill was bad.
But most importantly - here, we try to engage in thoughtful discussion instead of just throwing out words like "ad hominem" when an argument isn't ad hominem. I wrote a fairly long comment that Chomsky's writings about what the world was like were wrong, with specific examples of comparable Communist/non-Communist countries. And I outlined that I had a personal background in the matter.
Anyways, my above comment said -
1. Chomsky advocated strongly for many communist regimes and against the USA plenty of times.
2. I believe that was a mistake, as evidenced by comparisons between Communism/non-Communism. Also, clearly, his predictions on South Vietnam and Cambodia were mistaken.
Anyways, welcome to Hacker News. Please try to up the discussion level a little bit, this isn't like the rest of the internet.
Chomsky is wrong on a lot of things. That in no way makes him wrong about everything.
Your second point is just mush.
However... I do feel the quote above accurately reflects the sentiments of your first comment, which is why I posted it. It wasn't meant to reflect the entirety of Chomsky's work.
His "fortune"? You know he's a college professor right?
But trusts can't be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of US$2-million, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in "income-tax planning," set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.
Chomsky favours massive income redistribution -- just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.
When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren," he wrote in one e-mail. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. (However, Chomsky did say that his tax shelter is OK because he and his family are "trying to help suffering people.")
Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite his anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist Chomsky has turned himself into a brand name. As John Lloyd recently put it in the lefty New Statesman, Chomsky is among those "open to being "commodified" -- that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be."
Chomsky's business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at US$12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.
I have some strong Anarchistic beliefs (i.e. the immorality of one man ruling another, not the smash-things-up kind) but I do literally nothing (outside of talking) for it because it's not practical. I could only ruin my own quality of life and who would see that kind of example and say "wow, count me in!". I'm in a capitalist system so I may as well learn it and use it to the best of my abilities. It's almost certain to be the only system I ever live under no matter what actions I take.
Likewise, very few people listen to Chomsky so he may as well use the system he will live his whole life in to the best of his ability.
And finally, the messenger is different than the message. It is perfectly valid for a smoker to preach about the evils of smoking. He can even call people who smoke stupid. Him smoking doesn't make his message invalid.
My point is this: smoking while convincing others that smoking is bad makes you worse off but others better off. That's a failure of will.
But piling up millions in a trust while arguing that other rich people should be punitively taxed makes Chomsky better off but others worse off. That's hypocrisy.
He's in the same situation as Warren Buffet: both condemn/ridicule the current system and both do what ever is available to them within the current system.
I don't think that a comparison of the US system vs. China is going to produce a clear "winner", only a list of pros/cons whose weighting will be shaped by your perceptions and bias.
The explosive growth of China hides most of the warts of the system. When you have economic growth so fast that new, uninhabited cities get built, there's obviously some excess and policy issues at play.
The US is an imperial power, and the conduct of policy and statesmanship changes in that role. While the President is the front-man and sets the agenda, the work is done and policy is made by anonymous officials in the sprawling bureaucracy. And I betcha if you analyzed a Chinese and American bureaucrat, you would find that they look, act and think alike.
1. I'd say Communist movements attract intellectuals. Communist governments usually do not employ those intellectuals for very long after taking power.
2. Despite the name and symbols, I don't think China is actually Communist any more. I don't know what to call them. If they remain a world power and continue to thrive, I'd bet quite a lot that a new word will be coined for their precise political/economic/geographical/military mix - there's quite literally no comps in history for what they're doing right now.
While they may not be ideologically communist, China does continue to practice the governance style of communist governments. Think about the Soviet Union's model -- a major part of the Soviet story was purging the old in favor of the new, "scientific" way. China is doing a similar thing, but through different means. The "science" may have been quakery (witness the Aral Sea), but the central planners saw themselves as guided by logic and science, not petty feelings or popularity.
According to Marx, a Communist state should disassemble itself after organizing society in such a way that it can sustain egalitarianism in a classless manner. Because dictatorial power is necessary to reorganize society from the top down, this power will be acquired by a Communist state. Unfortunately, every institution is self-serving and self-preserving, so ostensibly-Communist states are inevitably unable to complete the self-destructive process. When have you ever known a state to give up power? It just doesn't happen unless the state feels threatened in some way, and the state is unable to destroy the threat.
A Communist state will relentlessly attack any non-hierarchical movement attempting to organize a classless egalitarian society, because such movements are a threat to the state's power. Examples of this are present in both the Spanish Revolution and the Russian Revolution.
Bakunin was totally right. http://i.imgur.com/ijQEp.jpg
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need(s)."
A leaders best ability is to lead. Hence, you would end up with intellectuals, scientists, economists and others who have a strong grasp of complex theories and systems. Opposed to having actors and political pretty boys leading.
Marx's saying goes even further with the corporate metaphor. The lower the 'worker' in the 'corporation' the less they get 'paid'/'need'. How is there any real difference with how Walmart views its minimum wage workers to how China views its farmers or sweatshop workers? From the top they're all just pawns to make a profit.
10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.
> I don't think that a comparison of the US system vs. China is going to produce a clear "winner"
It's likely that one of these two countries is going to end up dominating the world. Of course, it's not so much about countries as social systems: both have their strengths and weaknesses.
> And I betcha if you analyzed a Chinese and American bureaucrat, you would find that they look, act and think alike.
I'm sure you're right.
The answer is "all of the above". Of course many Brits got rich at the expense of the others.
They are catching up to status quo. Mostly because they squandered the previous decades scientifically hunting down sparrows and enemies of the state.
Still, I'm not sure killing around 3% of Iraqis is something that can be dismissed as "foolish and wrong-headed" either.
Yes they are catching up. Three quarters of the countries in the world are catching up -- or trying to -- the most advanced countries, and that's been roughly the situation since the industrial revolution. The difference is that China has been more successful than anyone else at catching up; to the best of my knowledge no other country has ever managed as good a performance (except for poor countries that discover oil, which doesn't really count).
It's not that impressive when you're chasing tail-lights and the folks ahead are (mostly) helping.
I'll tell you, the Chinese hard even harder to govern than the French. (I'm French, I know both.)
You've identified the problem, but it's not the problem that you think that it is.
Why do you assume that "holding together" and "govern" is a good idea? More to the point, what would happen if the Chinese govt stopped trying to do so?
It's not like China is going to be invaded.
I was going to write something about keeping the gangsters in check, but then I remembered that official corruption is a huge problem in China, and most of that stems from this "govern" thing that you value so highly.
> They never stop inventing ways to break the rules,
Which is another reason why 10% is no big deal.
China had the prior example of Taiwan to imitate. And Taiwan had China scared witless by the end of the Cultural Revolution, when it looked like the total size of Taiwan's economy, with only about one-SIXTIETH the population, might exceed the size of China's economy soon.
No they don't. The Chinese cultural revolution has almost extinguished the intellectual class before ending. I don't recall a single scientist in The Soviet Union Politburo. Do you have any examples for your "usually", beyond this particular incarnation of the Chinese government?
The reason why democracy is a good thing is it forces the people in power to care about the effects their decisions have on the general public.
"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
This is even more true in Westminster style Democracies where Members of Parliament can defect on decisions, or defect entirely to another party or go independent. Potentially at any time. Why? Because your local MP is supposed to act on your behalf, and you elect the one that stands for what you do. I know our present conservative government, and Prime Minister, would love to do nothing more than open the election debate and with their majority get some legislation passed. However, they're so afraid of fracturing their government that the PM has out and out said he will not reopen it.
Sadly this isn't always so, as here in Canada the NDP has a dozen or so MP's who were essentially placed as seat fillers (in Quebec), but because of a bizarre turn around those padded seats became their entire election campaign.
First, America has dominated the world for the last 30 years. We've got a lot of public fingers in a lot of public pies as the world's policeman. China takes no such stance. It wants oil, so it supports Sudan genocide. It wants a buffer zone between it and the West, so it supports North Korea. Just like the honey badger, China doesn't give a shit. It's relatively quiet and has tons of cash and (directly)stays out of other people's foreign affairs, so everybody more or less ignores it. I wouldn't call this a particularly nuanced understanding or implementation of foreign affairs policy.
Turning to domestic affairs, I wouldn't call China's policies nuanced either. Maybe draconian? Their one-child-per-family policy, their restrictions on speech and travel, their widespread confiscation and displacement, (I could go on) I would call evil, not nuanced.
They are booming, and a 10% growth rate will cover up a lot of poor decisions. Their growth is certainly a function of a few smart guys taking the reins and dragging them into the future, but that had a lot to do with last cadre of "smart" guys shackling them to a failed system for 50 years. And it doesn't mean that's the best way forward, either.
I used to feel the same way until I visited China last year. Their social restrictions really are nuanced! They allow a lot of freedom to the rich/intelligentsia of appropriate ethnic groups and restrict the "restive" segments of their population. A lot of care has gone into the system by which their government maintains control while simultaneously trying to maximize growth and material comfort. It's not just naked oppression.
-- the vast majority of bureaucrats with power over the average man are not elected or even subject to firing
-- we do not truly have a system of one man/one vote. the guy who writes the new york times headlines on election day literally controls at least a million votes.
-- the candidates who are dubbed "serious" by the media are not chosen at random. By any quantitative theory of political voice, that up front winnowing from 300 million to ten or so is more substantive than the election itself.
-- in the business sector, power is wielded with far more responsibility. there is a CEO and an identifiable company behind a product, which can go out of business if it displeases its customers, and which is subject to feedback on an instantaneous basis through purchases. by contrast most govt projects are products of committees, with permanent funding and diluted accountability only in the form of the 2-4 year election cycle.
in short, voting with your wallet or voting with your feet means far greater efficacy and voice than going through the ceremony of voting with a ballot.
-- Rule by an elite is inevitable. The process by which that elite is selected is everything. The US used to be much more aware of this, referring to itself as a "republic" rather than a "democracy".
-- The Chinese model is a lot easier to understand when comparing it to Apple. Should Steve Jobs choose his successor through a plebiscite in which he ostensibly has the same voice as a retail store employee hired yesterday? Or should he choose a leader who he thinks will follow his path? In the latter case legitimacy among Apple employees ultimately rests on the bottom line success of Apple, with the necessary safety valves being exit (freedom to quit) and market (revenue growth) rather than voice (noisily protesting Jobs' successor).
In the same way, most Chinese believe that Deng was the best qualified person in China to choose his successor. And legitimacy comes from continually posting solid bottom line numbers, something the US has not done for a while.
This means that if China's existing leadership is heavily engineering based, the power structures will form in such way that aspiring politicos study engineering.
After all, we are all having this debate because we, being engineers, want to see more engineers in high office.
Better than 90% of a council making decisions for the whole country being of the same persuasion is prone to severe group think. Scientists (or rather, engineers, if you RTFA) aren't immune to this any more than any of us are.
If you look at the best run businesses, they are often composed of people with variable backgrounds - people that approach problems from different perspectives. This has two major benefits: First, it allows you to gain from solutions that come from as many types of thought processes as possible and more importantly, it prevents you from blindly following dogma - if you can't convince somebody that doesn't follow your thought patterns of the viability or necessity of a particular idea, it probably shouldn't be perused.
One child policies that have resulted in a generation of males without females is pretty much exactly the type of policy I'd expect from a group of engineers.
...
One child policies that have resulted in a generation of males without females is pretty much exactly the type of policy I'd expect from a group of engineers.
Let us hope that they will do a better job with global politics and economics than they did with domestic policy.
Has there ever been a culture/major world power besotted with its own engineering prowess? Or is this just a way to describe western civilization in the 19th and 20th centuries? (In particular, Britain, United States, the USSR, and Germany.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sex_ratio_below_15_per_cou...
Also: (order the chart descending by either at birth or <15)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
The numbers are actually much stronger than I thought they would be.
The only brackets that properly account for impact of the policy are the more recent ones.
My take is that both cultures have very prominent views on the preference for male children. You can see this even in the large Chinese and Indian communities here in North America. What has most likely happened is that the one child policy has simply enabled those cultural preferences in China much more than the exist in India.
It's also interesting that India itself has at several times flirted with restrictive population polices, including forced sterilization at right around the same time as China introduced their family planning program.
While that doesn't suggest that the one child policies are the only cause, I think there is enough evidence there to suggest they are a factor.
Nonetheless, all of this wasn't actually a real focus of my original point at all.
Do you have cited studies to back this up?
There is a relatively established method though of creating boards of directors and/or leadership "teams" to achieve better decision making patterns; for this exact reason.
The group is more often than not a better performer than the individual.
At first I thought this was satire. You'll excuse me if I take this in a more interesting direction.
Cited studies are not the first and last word on anything, especially when the question is "are scientists better than everyone else?"
Cited studies promote all kinds of false or questionable beliefs, particularly on political issues. As far as finding a study that answers the specific question "are diverse businesses better run?", I promise you won't have to look very far or very hard.
A common sense, thoughtful argument, backed up by information, trumps studies every time. And, surprisingly, an error-prone poll of a population of average intelligence trumps an intellectual's well-thought-out argument---this is why we have polling stations instead of a politburo.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
I think it's critical to make science and engineering a desirable career path for young americans, but simply "making it cool" isn't the way to go - and could (as the article points out) actually be destructive in that it would cause harm to students who responded to the pr campaign only to find long training times and poor career prospects relative to their friends who did law, dentistry, medicine, mba, etc.
The serious question is whether we should launch a PR campaign to encourage young people to make decisions that may lead (at least according to RAND) to long training times with poor pay and career prospects relative to other paths typically available to the "best and brightest".
It's very possible that the best and brightest could live in greater comfort as criminals than scientists, but even if that were the case, any rational government would encourage them to be scientists since that would be better for the country.
Edit: Seriously? Care to explain your reasoning, downmodders? Why would a government encourage decisions that are destructive to society?
Still, I recommend you read the rand study. They discuss ways to make sci/eng more appealing rather than launching a pr campaign to merely make it appear more appealing. The second could end up creating an even greater aversion to this career path.
I want to point out that I'm extremely enthusiastic about majoring in science or engineering, and I think an MS program (especially an employer sponsored one) can be a great way to dig a little deeper into a field or get a background in a new discipline (ie., get an MS in CS if your undergrad was in math or physics). In fact, someone with this background who gets a jd or mba almost has a superpower in those fields. Hard Sci/Eng/Math is also just a great background to get out there and start a company or start doing high value work the moment you hit the workforce.
PhDs are a different beast. Incredibly long training, often highly specialized, generally directed toward an academic career, even if alternatives are available, and kind of scary low pay considering the intelligence level and barriers to entry. I'm not saying CS PhDs aren't employable in Industry at fine salaries, but are they more employable than someone with a BS who rocked it in the workforce for 10 years instead? Are their salaries much higher than people who got professional degrees with shorter completion times and vastly lower attrition rates? No way.
Anyway, I should acknowledge a distinction here - the RAND study is more about PhDs, whereas this article is more about general background. Engineers may not populate government, but it's the most common background among fortune 500 CEOs, way out of proportion to the general degree population.
It's like trying to predict the behavior of a Model-T buyer based on their color preference.
Looking at the executive branch, the United States has:
State, Hillary Clinton, Lawyer
Treasury, Timothy Geithner, International Economics
Defense, Robert Gates, PhD History
Justice, Eric Holder, Lawyer
Interior, Ken Salazar, Lawyer
Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, Lawyer
Commerce, Gary Locke, Lawyer
Labor, Hilda Solis, MPA
Health Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, MPA
Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, MPA, Masters in Architecture
Transportation, Ray Lahood, B.S. Education and Sociology.
Department of Energy, Stephen Chu, Ph.D. Physics
Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, Masters in English
Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, Lawyer
Vice President, Joe Biden, Lawyer
Chief of Staff, William Daley, Lawyer
Director OMB, Jacob Lew, Lawyer
Administrator EPA, Lisa Jackson, Chemical Engineering
Trade Rep, Ron Kirk, Lawyer
UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, Doctorate in Philosophy
Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Austan Goolsbee, Ph. D Economics
Better to draw your comparisons with this, than with congress.
It is interesting that not only are there cultural differences in the ways Chinese and western leaders approach problems, but also there's the "engineering" approach vs. the "legal" or "social sciences" approach more often seen in western nations.
The problem with the "engineering" approach is that it treats stability as an axiomatic good. It's quite hard to incorporate the rights of weird religious groups, troublesome journalists and out-and-out revolutionaries into such a world-view.
But in general I agree, it looks that China and Korea are much more in science than in humanities.
Why not come at it from a different angle - what good would it be to be a philosopher in China? How far would you get? Or what about lawyers, in a country that has a pretty unhealthy disregard for legal process?
No, the reason scientists and engineers form that majority is because it's how you get ahead in Chinese society. China doesn't want (or tolerate) artistic and liberal sensitivities - it wants economic development and industry.
Unfortunately most of them come from the first category :/
Just as a matter of interest - the current Czech prime minister, who, at least in theory, has more power than the president, has graduated in physics, and has actually worked in research for some time. Angela Merkel (coming from Eastern Germany) has also a scientific background (in physics and chemistry).
But otherwise, it seems you are right about the fact that there is no such rule about post-totalitarian leaders being educated in engineering or sciences in general.
Btw, the rest of the Eastern European countries can learn a lot of things from the Czechs.
If you give voting power to the people they'll just choose someone with a nice face and smooth voice, telling its all gonna be ok.
My guess is that scientists believe that people like themselves -- people whose ability in one field they imagine transfers to many others -- should control the world, and those that they consider their intellectual inferiors should shut up and surrender control to cognitive ubermenschen.
Unfortunately, that idea hasn't worked out too well in the past.
If China is ruled by engineers, then it is ruled by groups that understand the economic implications of the rocket equation and how this can be overcome using existing technology. Moving off-world is going to be the next huge watershed in human history and economic growth, much as the age of exploration and colonization of North America by Europeans was the last one.
Making the leap past Type I on the Kardashev scale won't necessarily involve Nobel Prize winning breakthroughs in science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Instead, it will involve massive brute engineering and the political will to devote the resources to bootstrap it. The Chinese "Civilization State", ruled by engineers, is in a unique position to marshall those resources and be in the vanguard of what will be an economic and historic explosion of development.
http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/u-s-needs-to-deepen-its-unde...
I've seen this coming for almost a decade. If trends continue, China will not only be the next dominant power, but Chinese Civilization in the inner solar system will be to the last half of the 21st century what North America was to the 20th.
The article it references states "...eight of the top nine political posts are held by _engineers_." but unfortunately does not name them.
http://www.claymath.org/millennium/
was solved by a mathematician who was educated in Russia. But also to this day, the United States and Britain enjoy an astonishing degree of political and economic freedom and rule of law
http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=594
and gain many of their best mathematicians and mathematics educators as immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. It is too early to say whether a lot of engineering-trained persons in government is mostly a feature or mostly a bug. I wish China well in going the direction of Taiwan (another place long ruled by technocrats) in developing the rule of law and an open political system with many guarantees of personal liberty. But it is by no means an invariant characteristic of human societies that those with the best math and science minds thrive best over the long term.
P.S. You did see below the fold on the submitted article, didn't you, what the blog author thinks China can count on just from the fact of the educational background of its leaders? Not much, just from that fact.
P.P.S. to respond to first reply: It's my understanding that the government of the Federal Republic of Germany consciously DE-emphasized technical education after World War II in favor of more emphasis on humanities and social science in the primary and secondary school curriculum. I thought it would trigger a mention of Godwin's Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
if I brought this up at first, but I've read that many observers of prewar Germany under the Third Reich looked at the quality of the scientists there (very high indeed) and thought that Germany would be hard to beat in the war. It is well known to people who read interesting histories of World War II, such as mathematician T.W. Körner's book The Pleasures of Counting,
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Counting-T-W-K%C3%B6rner/dp/...
that there was a battle of scientists versus scientists in the war to find smart methods for fighting the other side. Ultimately, despite the great advantage that German's prewar primary and secondary schools and universities and civil service system gave Germany in building up a supply of smart technocrats, the Nazis' disregard of personal liberty drove away many of Germany's best scientists (notably, many Jewish scientists) and added talent to the Allied side.
EDIT: There were also many instances of higher-ups impeding technical advances that could have been decisive, like stealth bombers.
When entering a room, look for elephants first :)
Economic growth is not the only measure of success. In fact, it is one of many.
I wouldn't be surprised if a study that compared the best 5% of students worldwide showed the US in a very different place, much higher in the rankings.
The Chinese economy is one giant mess. Too many imbalances, over-investments and bubbles. The spectacular 10% GDP growth rate was possible mainly because of bullying i.e., artificial depreciation of yuan giving unfair advantage to Chinese exporters.
Also, being a scientist does not mean that you will be a good administrator or politician. Politics is better left to politicians.
how many layers do you have to unpeel from our government before you find anybody that isn't a lawyer.
The Chinese should build a Space Pier, in the form of a massive ramp with a huge accelerator on it.
In China, the political elite also choose those who are similar in outlook. If the original ones were engineers, so to will the new rising stars be engineers.