Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Well, China does have three times the population of the US.
And with the way parts of the US has been resolutely anti-science recently, are you really surprised?
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Actually, more than 4 times-- official numbers circa 2009 (according to Google) are
China: 1,324,655,000
US: 307,006,550
or 4.31x times the US population. India's population (in 2008, again via Google) is 1,139,964,932, or 3.71x that of the US. Put together, that's right at 8 times the population of the US. Assuming for the sake of calculations that the proportion of the population that is school-aged is the same for all three countries, that means that the top preforming 12.5 percent of India and China's children is equal to the
entire student population of the US. (I know that the ratios aren't equal-- but not far enough off to make that number not gigantic.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Salgueiros
Imagine instead of having x number of people researching a cure for cancer you have x times 10 or twenty!! And now imagine this in ALL fields of knowledge. That is what having millions of people with more available income, better education and better universities can provide to the world.
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Exactly-- the world isn't a zero-sum game. Imagine the possibility that the human population produces, on average, one person in
x number who has the right kind of mind to devise new idea or tools that are capable of changing the human condition in an important way. Pulling a number out of my nether regions, let's say it is one in a million. When the world's human population was a few tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand to a few million, the pace of change is slow-- it takes megalots of people to produce lots of transformative genuseses.
And, with China and India having several times more people than the US, given educational and economic opportunities, they are going to produce several times more of those extraordinary people than the US.