I was reading a post by Trevor Cox when I found an image that really caught my attention...
The image just shouts the global educational battle of our day. In one of my classes a few weeks ago my professor showed us a video that talked about how many people where in China and India and how many people were being born in both of those countries each day. It then went on to divide up the populations into different division and basically said that the population of the smartest 10 percentile of those two countries have a larger population than the entire USA. So basically we are not just competing against India. But we are competing against the top percentiles that out number us in the millions. Great. Such is life!
It seems that in our ever globalization world there are so many benefits of international trade, but at a harsh trade off. Overall the actual level of goods is delivered to customers and people in general get more of what they want. However the trade off is that through the advancement of communications we all realize what everyone else has. Countries that were once happy with where they were, realize that they are "poor" in some foreign worldly defined term. And thus we are no longer trying to just be the best in town, but the best in the world. And with our american drive for materialism, competitivism, and domination, we are left constantly thinking to our self like the poor dunce above.
Thinking to oneself ...
"I will be more economically productive"
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment that being economically productive is the albatross of today's global society. I do have just one little quibble. According to Wikipedia, approximately 42% of India's population lives below the poverty line of $1.25 a day. I am sure that many of India's brightest people live in this economic bracket. Therefore, we are not really competing against India's brightest, but rather its richest. India's highly intelligent people in positions of power still probably outnumber ours, however.
ReplyDeleteYup. When you have an overwhelmingly large majority, you can cut it up in many ways and still be larger.
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