Amazingly, the first author is a high school student! https://nathanchen.me/public/About%20me.html
I don’t say this out of spite, it’s awesome he’s been able to get such opportunities and has been able to utilize them, but I think it’s important to be realistic about what these narratives imply without additional context and the answer is, sure, you can be successful with grit, brains and determination, but…the odds are very much not in your favor if you are in the wrong income bracket.
^ This is not doxxing. His LinkedIn profile states it plainly.
Sadly, same can't be said about India (infrastructure/food security lags China).
I'm not so sure about that: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2026/ suggests peak high school in china was years ago.
So at least in theory there's still lots of room to increase high school enrollment, though I doubt this would lead to noticeably more geniuses. The testing system is pretty good at sorting the best students into good schools, I think.
It's bad enough they passed some legislation a few years ago[1], but the damage has in many senses already been done. And it's unclear how effective the changes will be. So it's entirely possible those 3 million missing high schoolers never existed.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-top-legislative-b...
Some statistics reported in China are unreliable because the person doing the reporting also has their performance evaluated by the numbers they report and there are few external checks on validity, but I don't think that's the case for student numbers in particular.
Also, it seems like you're the same 'jldugger who cited Chinese population statistics upthread, but when somebody else does it, they're suddenly unreliable???
Reasonable. If I were more conspiratorial, I might suggest that it's precisely because people are watching college exam numbers that 9th grade -> high school is where the break is. Or could just be the result of compounding growth from two competing officials making different exaggerated claims decades ago.
But really, the high school enrollment gap is not super germane to my main point: we may have seen peak China population, stemming largely from a smaller incoming cohort. The sidebar about offsetting that decline with increased enrollment percentages is interesting, I'm just default skeptical.
> cited Chinese population statistics upthread, but when somebody else does it, they're suddenly unreliable???
My cite appears to use UN data, not the PRC's official stats (at least not directly). But I'm pretty sure the official stats are also showing the same trend, just at a slower rate of decline. I mean, it's the entire reason for loosening the one-child policy to two, then to three.
Even if food security holds back 10% of Indians (which would still be a huge tragedy), that would still leave the other 90% for the 'onslaught'. 10% is just a made up number. But even with 50% you'd get an 'onslaught'.
So if we are seeing less than that, it's probably down to other factors.
And quality of leadership.
They (barring a few exceptions) are happy to gloat in imagined past glories of vedic aeroplanes, inter-species head transplants apparent performed in Hindu golden age and loyalty based funding that produces institutions like Galgotia University.
In China since this class doesn't exist and forced busywork for class signaling is largely driven underground due to government policies driven young people just work on whatever the government policy says, which right now is tech. Hence you see smart young people getting into tech. While in the US they do Finance (if they built up the right portfolio to be allowed in the elite jobs club), speedrunning (if they didn't). Ironically the current US look a lot like imperial China, while China looks like the US of the late 1800s, but fully vertically integrated
So this is what really unsettles me. Not that China graduates more engineers every year than we have entirely employed in the US, but rather, that these individuals are not about delegating work, but actually doing it. Whereas the western credo is to get someone else to do the work (or in the words of PAtton, to get some one else to die for his country), I get the feeling that China will get robots and AI to do the work. I am reminded of the joke about Chinese factories having only 1 security guard and 1 dog. The guard is there to feed the dog.
This. One of the things that most shocked me when I moved to London was how bad English people were at hard skills, but also how easily giving orders and "projecting gravitas" came to them. Everyone wants to be a "leader", which sadly has become code for reaping benefits of other people's work.