"Laura and John, get ready to take on Ravi and Xiao Ping"

Chidanand Rajghatta, the Washington DC. based Foreign Editor of The Times of India: scoffs at the idea that India and China are a threat to the U.S. - so long as the children of immigrants continue to pick up the slack:

The Axis of Praxis, by  Chidanand Rajghatta, Indiaspora, The Times of India: Laura and John, get ready to take on Ravi and Xiao Ping. On three consecutive days this past week, President Bush has invoked India and China as new economic competitors to the US. ... There is already a book called Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East by Clyde Prestowitz, a Reagan administration official, which clubs the three nations whose cachet now seems to be education, just about the time Americans appear to be signing off from school.

So there we are, three billion versus 300 million. The US population is now pegged at 297,900,000. With a baby born every eight seconds, someone dying every 12 seconds and the country gaining an immigrant every 31 seconds, American population is growing by one person every 14 seconds. Which means the 300 millionth American, perhaps just conceived, is due in October this year. ... When the 200 millionth American arrived in 1967, Life magazine positioned 23 photographers to record the moment. The milestone infant was deemed to be Robert Ken Woo, the son of Chinese immigrants who went on to graduate from Harvard, became a model citizen, and lives in Atlanta now with three US born children.

My money for the 300 millionth American is on a Patel or a Sanchez. Jokes aside, the threat of China and India as economic adversaries seems overblown. By every metric — PhDs, inventions, patents, research spending, you name it — the US remains the leader by far. Statistics about the growth of China and India are bandied around ignoring the low base they start from. For instance, someone breathlessly reported that the numbers of patents filed in the US from India is up by 2000% over the last decade. Yeah right, it went up from 70 to 1,300. Americans meanwhile file 200,000 patents annually.

Similarly, American scaremongers are crying hoarse over the number of engineers being graduated by China and India on the basis of some very dodgy numbers ... they are not even considering that the two countries contribute perhaps 100,000 engineers annually to the US pool. Come down sometime to the Bay Area or any engineering school in the US and take a look. Sure, it's true that fewer American students are taking to math and science. It's smart on the part of American leaders to blow the whistle on this. You don't remain No 1 by being complacent.

But Asians are picking up the slack, both children of new immigrants and second generation kids. You can see this in many annual school contests, my favourite being the Intel Science Talent Search. Of the 40 finalists this year, about a dozen are of Indian and Chinese origin. You can see the rise of Asian-Americans at many levels — from school competitions to college degrees to PhDs. Asians rock — academically. So as long as the US remains open to immigrant talent and nurtures its melting pot, there's little to fear. Given the growing interdependencies in the world, it's likely that India and China will be allies of the US rather than adversaries.

If not John and Laura, Usha and Li in the US will be collaborating with Ravi and Xiao Ping in Asia.

Comments

[Bruce Webb]

One of the ironies of the Social Security debate is the outlandish assumption that immigration will be tightly limited even in the face of worker shortages. I usually talk about shortages in field workers and night nurses, but as this piece points out we can also import all the PhDs we need.

One of the oddities about American higher education is that by time of Graduate School Americans have caught up. And I have a half baked theory as to why:

Once a child has mastered the basics, the traditional three R's: Reading, Riting and Rithmatic, it only takes four years to fully educate them. And it really matters not which four years you pick. I had a copy of my Great Grandfather's eighth grade American history book (he was born in the 1860s and named after Ulysses Grant) and I would have put it up against any college level Introduction to American History text today. There really was a time when an eighth grade education was all you needed to be a fully functioning literate adult. But in America we have shifted that level up over time. After WWII a High School education became the minimum, and in the last thirty years a College degree became the minimum. But I suggest that the key four years of learning have shifted as well.

In the Japanese and British systems all of the pressure comes in our equivalent of High School. Scores on exams determine which University you gain entry to and literally everything depends on that. But once in University much of the pressure is gone. Certainly top students have to work hard to advance to the next level, but if you read any account of Cambridge or Oxford life written over the hundred years prior to say 1980, you can see that college life could be very easy indeed.

In the American system we have in effect punted those four key years into college while dropping the easy years back into High School. I suspect this will come as a shock to High School kids who think they are being worked to the bone, but then again I suspect they are not missing that many episodes of their favorite TV show.

In Europe or Asia you really have to get serious at age 13 or 14, because the real decision point that will control your life comes at 17 or 18. In the United States there are still openings later on. Is it easy to get into Harvard Law if you only got serious about your studies when you started Junior College? Hell no. Is it possible to earn a Law Degree or a PhD from a respected Graduate program starting from the same point? Yes indeed.

I went to Cal Berkeley as an undergraduate, employee and graduate student over a near 20 year span from 1974 to 1993, and even in the 70's if wasn't easy to get in. By the late 80's if you were not 4.0 GPA or better (and how you get better than perfect is a rant for another day), it was almost impossible. Yet a lot of these kids could not think or write their way out of a paper bag. But by the time they left Cal they could compete with anybody in the world.

You had and have to be good to get into Cal, but if I had to take any random group of ten freshman and put them up in a knowledge contest with their Japanese or British counterparts, I suspect they would be truly and thoroughly spanked. Four years later? They hold their own.

It is just a question of where you stick that four years of learning in. At the end of the day the American system of starting intensive education at 17 or 18 instead of making it coincide with puberty seems to pay off dividends.

Back in the fifties the question was "Why Johnny can't read". By the very early sixties and post-Sputnik the questions transformed to "Why Johnny can't add". Yikes we were falling behind! No, we were only time shifting fundamental education up the age spectrum.

[Yartrebo]

"By every metric — PhDs, inventions, patents, research spending, you name it"

These are very lousy metrics. Inventions essentially reflect the patent count (if not, Europe would score much higher than they do, particularly for software innovation). Patents are more a reflection of culture and the legal climate than of innovation or research results. The US is well known for prolific patenting, so I find it as no surprise that we lead in the patent count.

Research spending can be counted in a whole load of ways. Is open source innovation counted as research spending? It might have only unpaid volunteer labor spent on it, but it does (or should) factor into the GDP deflator, as it is a good with value sold at no cost. Is patent or regulation related waste counted as research spending? This is particularly prevelant in the medical field.

We still lead in doctorate degrees, but the gap is closing rapidly, and many of the degrees are handed out to foreigners who return to their home country afterwards.

[calmo]

Must be a football game in the offing with this analysis of education.
Banalyis more like it.
My parody button provokes me and owing to my sagging, very discontinued (not like Bruce's) education, I am helpless.
So we better Nuke them before they give us the story about how those NuKlar energy plants are not about making weapons to do us in. We are not the soft-bellied, mush minded liberals they take us for. We are Men.
You think this is over the top? [Hey look at our graduate programs and get the surprise of your life about foreign participation.] (You want to stare at some other segment like the infamous ordinary Joe segment [much larger voting segment] who think weapons of WMD were found in Iraq?)
You think I need to rub everybody's nose in it with the sign: Parody Ahead You Dummies, just in case (the slow case)?
No. Just to get even, dammit.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/sports/playmagazine/05golfchina_rev_114_.html

February 5, 2006

How Do You Say Shank in Mandarin?
By CHARLES McGRATH

"Hao qiu!" your caddie is apt to murmur sweetly if you manage an even halfway decent drive after teeing off in China. Good shot! If you hit a "bu hao" — a stinker — there will be a moment of embarrassed silence.

As in the rest of Asia, caddies are mandatory everywhere in China — nobody would dream of carrying his own bag. And in China caddies are almost always women. They wear white gloves sometimes and long-billed hard hats, designed to protect them from both the sun and errant shots, and they bring to their profession a level of devotion undreamed of in the West. They tote your bag in a hand-pulled trolley, or else, like liveried footmen, they ride on a running board welded to the back of a golf cart and scurry from cart path to fairway bearing fistfuls of clubs. At the tee box, they present your driver as if it were a ceremonial sword, and after you're done, they carefully swaddle the head back in its cover.

Chinese caddies do everything, in fact, except hit your shot for you. They hand you your tee; give you your yardage; fill your divots; rake your traps; mark your ball, clean it and then replace it with the logo pointing along the proper line to the hole. They also emote with you, sharing your joy, feeling your pain. When I plopped my second shot into the water on the par-5 14th hole at Sheshan Golf Club in Shanghai last fall, my caddie gave me a look of such surprise and distress it was as if I had drowned our child.

Golf is now an international language, and people in China speak it everywhere, lining up their putts like Jack, following through like Freddie. You even spot them in airports, practicing their swings with invisible clubs. But the Chinese version of this language has a subtext. Golf and the imagery of golf, which you see all over, on TV commercials and highway billboards, are a kind of code for the new China, the one where the economy is growing at close to 10 percent a year and where, even though the average wage in the countryside is less than $100 a month, hordes of newly minted millionaires are not in the least embarrassed about flaunting their wealth. Much more than in America, golf in China stands for money, power and social exclusivity.

For all intents and purposes, golf in China is just 20 years old. The first modern course, an Arnold Palmer design, opened in 1984. Another dozen or so were added in the decade following. But in the last 10 years the total has soared to 230, making China second in Asia in terms of golf course acreage (behind Japan), and though there is supposed to be a moratorium on constructing courses, new ones seem to spring up every month. In some ways, the most significant thing to happen to Chinese golf was the SARS epidemic of 2003, when some offices were closed for as long as six weeks and Chinese businessmen, who place great stock in personal relationships and face-to-face meetings, began making their deals outside on the fairway. Golf has now replaced karaoke as the preferred way of entertaining business clients.

What all this means, though, is that golf hasn't evolved in China: it has arrived more or less full-blown, in its high-end and even slightly decadent form....