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Comment by somewhereoutth | Hacker News Reader

To be honest it is all about population. Industrial/technological first mover advantage has now gone really. You need the concentration of talent that only drawing from a very large pool can achieve. US, EU, China are the 3 poles at the moment - with Africa and South America as potential for the future if they can get their governance sorted out.

The UK stopped being a global power after Suez - not for nothing is Brexit known as 'Suez for slow learners'

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One counter-argument to this would be:

A nation with a 10x higher per capita of truly productive scientists and engineers (with a well functioning R&D system that wasn't just publish-or-perish or other friction that reduces efficiency) would perform roughly as well as a nation with 10x the population. Somewhat but not perfectly analogous to how some countries invest more, or more wisely in their military budget, and have equivalent military power as much larger countries.

So if the UK invested such that it had 10x the per capita scientists and engineers, let's say 10% of the population vs 1%, then it could compete with a nation of 680 million.

If it also invested more wisely in capital equipment, business efficiency, legal efficiency, and so on, it might be able to get further multipliers and compete with the biggest economies in the world.

> So if the UK invested such that it had 10x the per capita scientists and engineers, let's say 10% of the population vs 1%, then it could compete with a nation of 680 million

With the equal outcome approach taking over universities and sciences being considered the unfashionable stream unlike East Asia, how would you do this?

Even if you are able to, why won't these trained people just leave for US when they realise they are compensated more and taxed less there?

> With the equal outcome approach taking over universities and sciences being considered the unfashionable stream unlike East Asia, how would you do this?

Clearly that approach is harmful and is preventing the economic development of nations, which in turn harms those who need assistance because there’s a smaller tax base.

But as other nations 'catch up' and turn out productive scientists and engineers in similar ratios, the disparity in the denominator becomes overwhelming. E.g. China.

This sounds like a win-win. No need to imply it is a zero sum competition.

To add an example. Israel with 9.3 million population has more productive scientists and engineers than whole continent of Africa with 1.2 billion population.

you could try raising the level of education. breeding a whole bunch of people and hoping some of them teach themselves to be useful isn't really a great way of maximizing intellectual output

certainly education is vital to a modern economy (and society), but I suspect that you hit diminishing returns at our current levels - not many more can really benefit from e.g. post graduate studies. Sending ~50% of school leavers to uni in the UK has arguably been counter productive, as instead of a path for the talented to rise, uni has become more a rubber stamp for entry into the middle class and course content has become diluted (and then loans on top to pay for it all)

> but I suspect that you hit diminishing returns at our current levels

I think there are plenty of uses for another million bioengineering grads. Combine the grads with R&D funding and we’d see a regular cadence of medical miracles.

Similar for materials scientists, robotics engineers, etc.

Also on a low tech side, a million more teachers, teaching much smaller classrooms, might pay for itself many times over.

Depends whether there are another million that have the natural ability/inclination to become these bioengineering/etc grads.

Absolutely agree on more teachers though.

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