Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are Scientists

http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine-government-officials-are-scientists/

by kkleiner • 15 years ago

166 129 15 years ago

bendmorris• 15 years ago

Not to nitpick, but they're engineers. The previous President, Jiang Zemin, was also an electrical engineer - before that generation, most leaders were educated by their experiences (i.e. the Long March) and not formally schooled.

It is interesting that not only are there cultural differences in the ways Chinese and western leaders approach problems, but also there's the "engineering" approach vs. the "legal" or "social sciences" approach more often seen in western nations.

moomin• 15 years ago

The distinction between a scientist and an engineer is important here. In the dark days of modern China, mathematicians and scientists were regarded with as much suspicion as poets and philosophers. Engineering was one of the most intellectual professions you could have without being regarded as the enemy. (As for lawyers: there's not a lot of point in being a legal expert anywhere rule by fiat is common.)

The problem with the "engineering" approach is that it treats stability as an axiomatic good. It's quite hard to incorporate the rights of weird religious groups, troublesome journalists and out-and-out revolutionaries into such a world-view.

Unseelie3• 15 years ago

A lot of that stability approach can be traced back through much of the history of the Han, to the point that I'd argue the engineering background isn't the source of the stabilizing pressure, but rather a facet of the Han culture.

gaius• 15 years ago

Also Yulia Tymoshenko, rightful heir to the throne of Ukraine, is a cyberneticist. It seems to be a regular trend in former Communist countries, that political leaders have a technical background.

llcoolv2• 15 years ago

Not really. For one, China is still a totalitarian (communist is really wrongly used here) country. And also my impression is that Tymoshenko is more of an isolated case - my guess would be that most of the current post-totalitarian leaders are either former officers (Putin, Borissov, Basescu), humanitarian/law majors (Komorowski, Parvanov, Orban, Gasparovic) or economists (Havel).

Unfortunately most of them come from the first category :/

Wuzzy• 15 years ago

I don't know much about the other ones, but Havel most assuredly is not an economist. He has a cultural background and is an author of a number of theater pieces. His successor at the post of Czech president (Klaus) is an economist, so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.

Just as a matter of interest - the current Czech prime minister, who, at least in theory, has more power than the president, has graduated in physics, and has actually worked in research for some time. Angela Merkel (coming from Eastern Germany) has also a scientific background (in physics and chemistry).

But otherwise, it seems you are right about the fact that there is no such rule about post-totalitarian leaders being educated in engineering or sciences in general.

gacek• 15 years ago

I think it is a trend for current communist countries/dictatorships. Of course there will be corruption and nepotism, but why would you decide on someone without an engineering background to run a country?

If you give voting power to the people they'll just choose someone with a nice face and smooth voice, telling its all gonna be ok.

flipbrad• 15 years ago

Is this really surprising? Technocracy and the associated belief that you can sit down and design or direct societies seem to be prerequisites for what has passed as most "communist" governments to date, right - so why not expect them to embrace and promote engineers, through higher education and indeed through politics and the civil service?

geebee4• 15 years ago

This is a good article, but it does miss one incredibly important piece of the puzzle - the possibility that US citizens have an economically rational aversion to PhDs in science and engineering. A recent RAND study supports this point of view:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

I think it's critical to make science and engineering a desirable career path for young americans, but simply "making it cool" isn't the way to go - and could (as the article points out) actually be destructive in that it would cause harm to students who responded to the pr campaign only to find long training times and poor career prospects relative to their friends who did law, dentistry, medicine, mba, etc.

baguasquirrel• 15 years ago

That's funny... Americans don't have an economically rational aversion to becoming movie stars in much the same way.

pyre2• 15 years ago

There is a point-of-view that movie stars/rock stars/etc don't really work that hard and get a ton of money and fame, but that seems to actually deviate from reality.

geebee4• 15 years ago

yeah, that is an amusing observation. of course, President Obama and various talking heads don't fret about the shortage of Americans in film school.

The serious question is whether we should launch a PR campaign to encourage young people to make decisions that may lead (at least according to RAND) to long training times with poor pay and career prospects relative to other paths typically available to the "best and brightest".

geebee4• 15 years ago

Sorry to respond to my own comment, too late for edits...

I want to point out that I'm extremely enthusiastic about majoring in science or engineering, and I think an MS program (especially an employer sponsored one) can be a great way to dig a little deeper into a field or get a background in a new discipline (ie., get an MS in CS if your undergrad was in math or physics). In fact, someone with this background who gets a jd or mba almost has a superpower in those fields. Hard Sci/Eng/Math is also just a great background to get out there and start a company or start doing high value work the moment you hit the workforce.

PhDs are a different beast. Incredibly long training, often highly specialized, generally directed toward an academic career, even if alternatives are available, and kind of scary low pay considering the intelligence level and barriers to entry. I'm not saying CS PhDs aren't employable in Industry at fine salaries, but are they more employable than someone with a BS who rocked it in the workforce for 10 years instead? Are their salaries much higher than people who got professional degrees with shorter completion times and vastly lower attrition rates? No way.

Anyway, I should acknowledge a distinction here - the RAND study is more about PhDs, whereas this article is more about general background. Engineers may not populate government, but it's the most common background among fortune 500 CEOs, way out of proportion to the general degree population.

igorlev• 15 years ago

If you were educated in a communist country at any time from 50s to 80s you would pretty much by default be either a scientist, an engineer, an architect or a doctor. Most likely an engineer.

It's like trying to predict the behavior of a Model-T buyer based on their color preference.

lionhearted5• 15 years ago

But, but, but... they're not democratic! If only they'd put more power in the hands of the common man, they too could enjoy such luminous choices for statesmen as McCain vs. Obama, Bush II vs. Kerry, Bush II vs Gore, Dole vs. Clinton, Bush I vs. Clinton...

...we gotta keep saber rattling that our way is better than theirs. Boo China, boo.

Edit: To the downvoter - okay, I'm joking around. But which of these premises do you disagree with?

1. The United States has more electoral politics in choosing its leaders than China.

2. The last 20 years of leadership in China show a much more nuanced understanding of policy and statesmanship than American leadership, where charisma and mass appeal tends to be more important than "hard credentials."

3. There might be a cause-and-effect relationship between point 1 and point 2.

Disagree with any of those? Yeah I'm joking around, but it's worth thinking about, no? Or maybe it's upsetting to think about... that I sympathize with...

pyre2• 15 years ago

It's maybe a trade-off? Sure we have bozos for politicians in the US, but in the US government corruption usually doesn't lead to people 'disappearing.' Though we're definitely making great strides in that direction.

lionhearted5• 15 years ago

The United States still has, overall, a much better set of governance, courts, regulation, etc. than China. But the USA is trending gradually downwards and China is trending quickly upwards.

Now it's interesting, countries can catch up a lot faster than they can lead. If a country is a bit backwards, with the right set of leadership, they can very quickly modernize, becoming extremely important economically and geopolitically in ~30 years when starting almost from scratch. But many of those rapid modernizations peter out once a lot of the proven methods are implemented.

Sometimes that means flat growth, like Japan. Sometimes collapse, like Nazi Germany. Sometimes gradual decline, like the USSR. Singapore has done a pretty outstanding job of keeping their upwards trends going and they're about 50 years into their building phase - I think that's the longest rapid sustained modernization in history?

So anyways, yes, I'll take the USA's system over China's today. And tomorrow. And probably 5 years from now. But maybe not 20 years from now if all else stays equal, and China can adapt after they've caught most of the low hanging fruit.

potatolicious• 15 years ago

You're right, but the trend in the US is towards more repression, while the trend in China is towards less. We are destroying our middle class, they are creating and growing theirs at an incredible rate.

The attitude that I get from a lot of Chinese is that they feel the present government is a necessary evil - i.e., in exchange for many political and religious freedoms, they get progress, and an immense improvement to the quality of life of hundreds of millions... where before there was only starvation and misery. And progress they have gotten, which is more than I can say for us in the last decade or so.

jstevens85• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imam_Rapito_affair

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_El-Masri

lotusleaf19872• 15 years ago

Chomsky has a great quote about this: In the U.S. there is basically one party - The Business Party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations of the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies, as is most of the population.

I'm not against business, but it shouldn't be our singular goal as a society.

lionhearted5• 15 years ago

You know, I think I get where you're coming from because I felt the same way until I (1) opened up a business, and (2) spent significant time outside the USA.

Honestly, the business/commerce in the USA is one of the best things about it. As for Chomsky - well, he's completely discredited to me after comparing his writings about Southeast Asia to spending significant amounts of time in SE Asia. Also the ex-Communist countries. He's a relic from a dead age, who played for the wrong team, and hasn't woken up from it. I've gone into depth on this before, but long story short - North Korea is much worse than South Korea, Taiwan drastically outperformed pre-Deng Xiaoping China, West Germany is still much more developed than East Germany... and it's really obvious that South Vietnam is much worse because it was conquered by North Vietnam.

Also, the Khmer Rouge genocide started the same year after American forces withdrew - the Khmer Rouge were emboldened by the American withdrawal. Little known fact - the last recognized battle of the Vietnam War was USA vs. Khmer Rouge, the only military engagement between the two parties before South Asia went from "bad" to "much much worse."

Anyway - I know this kind of not an easy to do overnight, but I'd really suggest comparing Chomsky's writings on SE Asia to what happened in SE Asia firsthand if you get the chance. Also, try to engage with a full-time entrepreneur while he's building the early stage of a company. Guaranteed perspective-changer.

ramanujan4• 15 years ago

Chomsky denied the Cambodian Holocaust while it was occurring and has never apologized or really publicly reckoned with this. He also keeps his fortune in tax shelters while inveighing against others who do the same. I would thus take his comments about the manifold evils of business with a wee grain of salt; the regimes he has unapologetically flacked for have killed many more people than Google has.

Duff4• 15 years ago

Communist governments have usually attracted intellectuals to higher levels of power -- the results so far haven't been uplifting.

I don't think that a comparison of the US system vs. China is going to produce a clear "winner", only a list of pros/cons whose weighting will be shaped by your perceptions and bias.

The explosive growth of China hides most of the warts of the system. When you have economic growth so fast that new, uninhabited cities get built, there's obviously some excess and policy issues at play.

The US is an imperial power, and the conduct of policy and statesmanship changes in that role. While the President is the front-man and sets the agenda, the work is done and policy is made by anonymous officials in the sprawling bureaucracy. And I betcha if you analyzed a Chinese and American bureaucrat, you would find that they look, act and think alike.

lionhearted5• 15 years ago

Nuanced comment here, good analysis. I agree with a lot, but two nitpicks about the first point -

1. I'd say Communist movements attract intellectuals. Communist governments usually do not employ those intellectuals for very long after taking power.

2. Despite the name and symbols, I don't think China is actually Communist any more. I don't know what to call them. If they remain a world power and continue to thrive, I'd bet quite a lot that a new word will be coined for their precise political/economic/geographical/military mix - there's quite literally no comps in history for what they're doing right now.

cabalamat2• 15 years ago

> the results so far haven't been uplifting

10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.

> I don't think that a comparison of the US system vs. China is going to produce a clear "winner"

It's likely that one of these two countries is going to end up dominating the world. Of course, it's not so much about countries as social systems: both have their strengths and weaknesses.

> And I betcha if you analyzed a Chinese and American bureaucrat, you would find that they look, act and think alike.

I'm sure you're right.

DenisM• 15 years ago

Communist governments have usually attracted intellectuals to higher levels of power -- the results so far haven't been uplifting.

No they don't. The Chinese cultural revolution has almost extinguished the intellectual class before ending. I don't recall a single scientist in The Soviet Union Politburo. Do you have any examples for your "usually", beyond this particular incarnation of the Chinese government?

Zaak• 15 years ago

The reason why democracy is a good thing is not because the general public is good at running a country, or even good at selecting people who are good at running a country.

The reason why democracy is a good thing is it forces the people in power to care about the effects their decisions have on the general public.

podperson• 15 years ago

Or to put it another way, it's the system that is most likely to throw complete and utter incompetents out of office in a reasonable period of time.

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill

electromagnetic2• 15 years ago

I think democracy is a good thing because it is generally good at keeping the government in line. Even though 90% of what Republicans and Democrats do are the same, it is that they're eternally afraid of the public reaction that they do keep themselves in line.

This is even more true in Westminster style Democracies where Members of Parliament can defect on decisions, or defect entirely to another party or go independent. Potentially at any time. Why? Because your local MP is supposed to act on your behalf, and you elect the one that stands for what you do. I know our present conservative government, and Prime Minister, would love to do nothing more than open the election debate and with their majority get some legislation passed. However, they're so afraid of fracturing their government that the PM has out and out said he will not reopen it.

Sadly this isn't always so, as here in Canada the NDP has a dozen or so MP's who were essentially placed as seat fillers (in Quebec), but because of a bizarre turn around those padded seats became their entire election campaign.

anonymoushn2• 15 years ago

It prevents the people in power from deciding to enslave all right-handed people, but enslaving all left-handed people is still acceptable.

ajkessler• 15 years ago

I'm not sure China's leadership has shown a more nuanced understanding of policy and statesmanship than America's leadership.

First, America has dominated the world for the last 30 years. We've got a lot of public fingers in a lot of public pies as the world's policeman. China takes no such stance. It wants oil, so it supports Sudan genocide. It wants a buffer zone between it and the West, so it supports North Korea. Just like the honey badger, China doesn't give a shit. It's relatively quiet and has tons of cash and (directly)stays out of other people's foreign affairs, so everybody more or less ignores it. I wouldn't call this a particularly nuanced understanding or implementation of foreign affairs policy.

Turning to domestic affairs, I wouldn't call China's policies nuanced either. Maybe draconian? Their one-child-per-family policy, their restrictions on speech and travel, their widespread confiscation and displacement, (I could go on) I would call evil, not nuanced.

They are booming, and a 10% growth rate will cover up a lot of poor decisions. Their growth is certainly a function of a few smart guys taking the reins and dragging them into the future, but that had a lot to do with last cadre of "smart" guys shackling them to a failed system for 50 years. And it doesn't mean that's the best way forward, either.

iskander• 15 years ago

>Turning to domestic affairs, I wouldn't call China's policies nuanced either. Maybe draconian? Their one-child-per-family policy, their restrictions on speech and travel, their widespread confiscation and displacement, (I could go on) I would call evil, not nuanced.

I used to feel the same way until I visited China last year. Their social restrictions really are nuanced! They allow a lot of freedom to the rich/intelligentsia of appropriate ethnic groups and restrict the "restive" segments of their population. A lot of care has gone into the system by which their government maintains control while simultaneously trying to maximize growth and material comfort. It's not just naked oppression.

jxcole• 15 years ago

http://www.freekorea.us/2011/05/16/un-report-implicates-chin...

ramanujan4• 15 years ago

Right. To add to this, in the US system:

-- the vast majority of bureaucrats with power over the average man are not elected or even subject to firing

-- we do not truly have a system of one man/one vote. the guy who writes the new york times headlines on election day literally controls at least a million votes.

-- the candidates who are dubbed "serious" by the media are not chosen at random. By any quantitative theory of political voice, that up front winnowing from 300 million to ten or so is more substantive than the election itself.

-- in the business sector, power is wielded with far more responsibility. there is a CEO and an identifiable company behind a product, which can go out of business if it displeases its customers, and which is subject to feedback on an instantaneous basis through purchases. by contrast most govt projects are products of committees, with permanent funding and diluted accountability only in the form of the 2-4 year election cycle.

in short, voting with your wallet or voting with your feet means far greater efficacy and voice than going through the ceremony of voting with a ballot.

-- Rule by an elite is inevitable. The process by which that elite is selected is everything. The US used to be much more aware of this, referring to itself as a "republic" rather than a "democracy".

-- The Chinese model is a lot easier to understand when comparing it to Apple. Should Steve Jobs choose his successor through a plebiscite in which he ostensibly has the same voice as a retail store employee hired yesterday? Or should he choose a leader who he thinks will follow his path? In the latter case legitimacy among Apple employees ultimately rests on the bottom line success of Apple, with the necessary safety valves being exit (freedom to quit) and market (revenue growth) rather than voice (noisily protesting Jobs' successor).

In the same way, most Chinese believe that Deng was the best qualified person in China to choose his successor. And legitimacy comes from continually posting solid bottom line numbers, something the US has not done for a while.

teyc2• 15 years ago

I think you also should add to the list that given a choice, people will chose leaders who they are able to like the most.

This means that if China's existing leadership is heavily engineering based, the power structures will form in such way that aspiring politicos study engineering.

After all, we are all having this debate because we, being engineers, want to see more engineers in high office.

przemelek• 15 years ago

One thing ;-) Author of this text wrote: "You have to be pretty popular to get elected, so should we conclude that Chinese people in general look up to and admire their scientists?" But those in China's government wasn't elected in popular vote and for sure not in election like those in US or other western countries. So it isn't in this way that Chines people in general look up to and admire scientists, but Communists Party of China look up to and admire scientists.

But in general I agree, it looks that China and Korea are much more in science than in humanities.

westiseast3• 15 years ago

totally - I was wondering how the author could write something so obviously wrong like that?

huherto• 15 years ago

interesting observation. It seems to me that the previous generation of leaders had an aspiration that the new leaders were better prepared than them. I imagine the old leaders had an admiration for science and engineering even though they were not really knowledgeable about it; they probably selected and groomed the new leaders with this in mind.

giardini• 15 years ago

The linked article is titled "Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are _Scientists_" but...

The article it references states "...eight of the top nine political posts are held by _engineers_." but unfortunately does not name them.

orenmazor• 15 years ago

well that's just great.

how many layers do you have to unpeel from our government before you find anybody that isn't a lawyer.

Apocryphon3• 15 years ago

Different national political cultures, apparently.

http://www.economist.com/node/13496638?story_id=13496638

stcredzero9• 15 years ago

WHEN Barack Obama met Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, at the G20 summit in London, it was an encounter not just between two presidents, but also between two professions and mindsets. A lawyer, trained to argue from first principles and haggle over words, was speaking to an engineer, who knew how to build physical structures and keep them intact.

The Chinese should build a Space Pier, in the form of a massive ramp with a huge accelerator on it.

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

About a decade ago, when I was studying the history of mathematics, I noticed that in 1776, the world's greatest mathematician (Leonhard Euler) was in St. Petersburg, Russia, just when many of the world's greatest political scientists were either in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (the signers of the Declaration of Independence) or in various parts of Britain (e.g, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith). To this day, the Russian-speaking world exceeds the English-speaking world in the quality of its primary and secondary mathematics instruction, and it is perhaps no accident that the first of the Clay Millennium Prize problems

http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

was solved by a mathematician who was educated in Russia. But also to this day, the United States and Britain enjoy an astonishing degree of political and economic freedom and rule of law

http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=594

and gain many of their best mathematicians and mathematics educators as immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. It is too early to say whether a lot of engineering-trained persons in government is mostly a feature or mostly a bug. I wish China well in going the direction of Taiwan (another place long ruled by technocrats) in developing the rule of law and an open political system with many guarantees of personal liberty. But it is by no means an invariant characteristic of human societies that those with the best math and science minds thrive best over the long term.

P.S. You did see below the fold on the submitted article, didn't you, what the blog author thinks China can count on just from the fact of the educational background of its leaders? Not much, just from that fact.

P.P.S. to respond to first reply: It's my understanding that the government of the Federal Republic of Germany consciously DE-emphasized technical education after World War II in favor of more emphasis on humanities and social science in the primary and secondary school curriculum. I thought it would trigger a mention of Godwin's Law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

if I brought this up at first, but I've read that many observers of prewar Germany under the Third Reich looked at the quality of the scientists there (very high indeed) and thought that Germany would be hard to beat in the war. It is well known to people who read interesting histories of World War II, such as mathematician T.W. Körner's book The Pleasures of Counting,

http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Counting-T-W-K%C3%B6rner/dp/...

that there was a battle of scientists versus scientists in the war to find smart methods for fighting the other side. Ultimately, despite the great advantage that German's prewar primary and secondary schools and universities and civil service system gave Germany in building up a supply of smart technocrats, the Nazis' disregard of personal liberty drove away many of Germany's best scientists (notably, many Jewish scientists) and added talent to the Allied side.

Maro• 15 years ago

Interesting. Where do you put Germans in all this?

sedachv• 15 years ago

It's not often mentioned today, but in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries the Germanic states were a massive source of high-skilled emigrants. In the 18th and somewhat the 19th centuries as professors and colonists to Russia and the USA, after WWI a large number of German engineers were employed in the USSR (most of them were expelled in 1937), and many more emigrated to the USA. The next large wave took place after WWII.

stcredzero9• 15 years ago

In World War II, German military tactics nerds were able to find an initial advantage. Fortunately, the rulers (Nazis) were fuzzy-headed populists who believed in mysticism and half-baked distortions of economic and scientific theories, so it wasn't the engineers who ruled -- it was still the jocks and popular kids. By the end of the war, it was the allies who had significant technical advantages in military hardware, sensing equipment, and cryptography.

EDIT: There were also many instances of higher-ups impeding technical advances that could have been decisive, like stealth bombers.

gritzko• 15 years ago

Heh. During WWII, SU made 100,000 tanks, US made 100,000, Germany made 50,000. Guess who won. Germans did not even had their own iron; they pulled their supplies from Sweden.

When entering a room, look for elephants first :)

run4yourlives6• 15 years ago

While this is no doubt going to be unpopular here on HackerNews, I'm going to posit the following: This is almost as bad as have 8 of 9 people being Creationists.

Better than 90% of a council making decisions for the whole country being of the same persuasion is prone to severe group think. Scientists (or rather, engineers, if you RTFA) aren't immune to this any more than any of us are.

If you look at the best run businesses, they are often composed of people with variable backgrounds - people that approach problems from different perspectives. This has two major benefits: First, it allows you to gain from solutions that come from as many types of thought processes as possible and more importantly, it prevents you from blindly following dogma - if you can't convince somebody that doesn't follow your thought patterns of the viability or necessity of a particular idea, it probably shouldn't be perused.

One child policies that have resulted in a generation of males without females is pretty much exactly the type of policy I'd expect from a group of engineers.

Unseelie3• 15 years ago

As an aside, I'm slightly more concerned with the generation of Only Children as opposed to the generation of 114 men to 100 girls...just to toss another layer of complexity into the mix.

stcredzero9• 15 years ago

While this is no doubt going to be unpopular here on HackerNews, I'm going to posit the following: This is almost as bad as have 8 of 9 people being Creationists.

...

One child policies that have resulted in a generation of males without females is pretty much exactly the type of policy I'd expect from a group of engineers.

Let us hope that they will do a better job with global politics and economics than they did with domestic policy.

Has there ever been a culture/major world power besotted with its own engineering prowess? Or is this just a way to describe western civilization in the 19th and 20th centuries? (In particular, Britain, United States, the USSR, and Germany.)

maxklein3• 15 years ago

The one child policy was not created by this cadre of leadership. The male/female imbalance also happens in India, which does not have such a policy.

run4yourlives6• 15 years ago

While India does in fact have a similar imbalance, I invite you to look at the problem in the context of this image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sex_ratio_below_15_per_cou...

Also: (order the chart descending by either at birth or <15)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

The numbers are actually much stronger than I thought they would be.

danssig4• 15 years ago

Doesn't India have a policy of the parents of the daughter needing to pay for all wedding arrangements, making daughters less desirable?

ww520• 15 years ago

"If you look at the best run businesses, they are often composed of people with variable backgrounds - people that approach problems from different perspectives."

Do you have cited studies to back this up?

run4yourlives6• 15 years ago

I must admit that beyond the anecdotal, I do not.

There is a relatively established method though of creating boards of directors and/or leadership "teams" to achieve better decision making patterns; for this exact reason.

The group is more often than not a better performer than the individual.

nonce011• 15 years ago

> Do you have cited studies to back this up?

At first I thought this was satire. You'll excuse me if I take this in a more interesting direction.

Cited studies are not the first and last word on anything, especially when the question is "are scientists better than everyone else?"

Cited studies promote all kinds of false or questionable beliefs, particularly on political issues. As far as finding a study that answers the specific question "are diverse businesses better run?", I promise you won't have to look very far or very hard.

A common sense, thoughtful argument, backed up by information, trumps studies every time. And, surprisingly, an error-prone poll of a population of average intelligence trumps an intellectual's well-thought-out argument---this is why we have polling stations instead of a politburo.

stcredzero9• 15 years ago

Oh, we forgot about our head of the class: China. Astonishingly, since 1980 China has not won a single scientific Nobel Prize. Keep in mind, this is a country of 1.3 billion people.

If China is ruled by engineers, then it is ruled by groups that understand the economic implications of the rocket equation and how this can be overcome using existing technology. Moving off-world is going to be the next huge watershed in human history and economic growth, much as the age of exploration and colonization of North America by Europeans was the last one.

Making the leap past Type I on the Kardashev scale won't necessarily involve Nobel Prize winning breakthroughs in science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Instead, it will involve massive brute engineering and the political will to devote the resources to bootstrap it. The Chinese "Civilization State", ruled by engineers, is in a unique position to marshall those resources and be in the vanguard of what will be an economic and historic explosion of development.

http://today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/u-s-needs-to-deepen-its-unde...

I've seen this coming for almost a decade. If trends continue, China will not only be the next dominant power, but Chinese Civilization in the inner solar system will be to the last half of the 21st century what North America was to the 20th.

est• 15 years ago

there is a difference between a scientist and someone with an engineering degree

Apocryphon3• 15 years ago

A relevant article from 2009 contrasting prevalence of American lawyer politicians vs. Chinese engineer politicians vs. French civil servants and so on.

http://www.economist.com/node/13496638?story_id=13496638

calpaterson• 15 years ago

Bear in mind that a strong part of this is the fact that these guys are trying to use economic planning. In between all these Americans complaining (fairly) about their country's legal power culture, this is an important distinction. Most Western governments aren't economic planners, so technocracy is less interesting/appealing.

westiseast3• 15 years ago

There's an emphasis on science, but it's not an Enlightenment style love of the scientific method that drives this phenomenon.

Why not come at it from a different angle - what good would it be to be a philosopher in China? How far would you get? Or what about lawyers, in a country that has a pretty unhealthy disregard for legal process?

No, the reason scientists and engineers form that majority is because it's how you get ahead in Chinese society. China doesn't want (or tolerate) artistic and liberal sensitivities - it wants economic development and industry.

shmulkey18• 15 years ago

Perhaps this should cause some reflection on the following question: why do scientists seem to be disproportionately inclined to serve authoritarian regimes?

My guess is that scientists believe that people like themselves -- people whose ability in one field they imagine transfers to many others -- should control the world, and those that they consider their intellectual inferiors should shut up and surrender control to cognitive ubermenschen.

Unfortunately, that idea hasn't worked out too well in the past.

patfla• 15 years ago

My reading of the Chinese classics - or rather their authors - is that, historically, the single greatest ambition of China's intellectuals was to advise rulers on better governance. Which didn't seem to me a particularly productive or healthy relationship between the intellectual and political classes.

forensic• 15 years ago

everybody just wants power, nerds and jocks alike

DanielN• 15 years ago

Chinese government is dominated by engineers for the same reason that US government is dominated by lawyers, Japanese government is dominated by businessmen and French government is dominated by doctors and teachers. These are the most easily accessible prestige positions in the given country.

omouse• 15 years ago

Scientists in the mold of capitalists and totalitarians? Disgusting.

dimmuborgir• 15 years ago

Countries should be led by economists, not scientists/engineers.

The Chinese economy is one giant mess. Too many imbalances, over-investments and bubbles. The spectacular 10% GDP growth rate was possible mainly because of bullying i.e., artificial depreciation of yuan giving unfair advantage to Chinese exporters.

Eliezer• 15 years ago

Eight Out Of Nine American Bloggers Cannot Distinguish Between The Concept of A "Scientist" (As In Someone Who Devises Reproducible Experiments To Test Ideas To Determine Whether They Are Right Or Wrong, And Rejects The Wrong Ones) And Anyone In A Technical Profession.

mahrain• 15 years ago

...and did you know that 78% of all statistics are made up on the spot?

comex• 15 years ago

"Remember him from Black Mesa? Your old administrator?"

braindead_in• 15 years ago

Are they scientists or engineers? As far as I know scientists do research, write papers, file for patents etc. etc. and Engineers build stuff. How many papers have the published?

Also, being a scientist does not mean that you will be a good administrator or politician. Politics is better left to politicians.

adamc2• 15 years ago

Having

adamc2• 15 years ago

Having trained as a hydraulic engineer doesn't make Hu Jintao a scientist, it makes him an engineer. There's a difference.

varjag3• 15 years ago

They are not scientists, they are administrators with science and engineering degrees.

Apocryphon3• 15 years ago

And for some reason, many high-profile, that is, thwarted or captured, terrorists are engineers: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.h...

cjoh• 15 years ago

I'll point out its a rookie mistake to compare what is basically the executive branch of China's government to America's representative branch. It's apples to oranges.

Looking at the executive branch, the United States has:

State, Hillary Clinton, Lawyer

Treasury, Timothy Geithner, International Economics

Defense, Robert Gates, PhD History

Justice, Eric Holder, Lawyer

Interior, Ken Salazar, Lawyer

Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, Lawyer

Commerce, Gary Locke, Lawyer

Labor, Hilda Solis, MPA

Health Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, MPA

Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, MPA, Masters in Architecture

Transportation, Ray Lahood, B.S. Education and Sociology.

Department of Energy, Stephen Chu, Ph.D. Physics

Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, Masters in English

Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, Lawyer

Vice President, Joe Biden, Lawyer

Chief of Staff, William Daley, Lawyer

Director OMB, Jacob Lew, Lawyer

Administrator EPA, Lisa Jackson, Chemical Engineering

Trade Rep, Ron Kirk, Lawyer

UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, Doctorate in Philosophy

Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Austan Goolsbee, Ph. D Economics

Better to draw your comparisons with this, than with congress.

teyc2• 15 years ago

This is a direct result of elections. People chose those who are more like themselves.

In China, the political elite also choose those who are similar in outlook. If the original ones were engineers, so to will the new rising stars be engineers.

dreamdu5t• 15 years ago

So politicians in China aren't bozos, but the politicians in the US are? Oh please. The top 9 government officials are no more intellectual than many of those in Obama's cabinet.

Economic growth is not the only measure of success. In fact, it is one of many.

rdixit• 15 years ago

The author first points out that science and engineering Ph.D.'s are disproportionately Asian, and that many return to their mother nations after education. That's true. He then points out that national success is built on the back of technology and science. Also true. But by ending with a back-patting, reassuring comparison with Japan and the claim that Americans have that truly essential quality, "entrepreneurial spirit" and innovation, and Asian nations don't, he makes a claim that reeks of hubris and will likely be quickly proved untrue. Science is the gas pedal, innovation is the fuel-- but without the pedal your full tank of gas isn't going to take your car anywhere. Confidence without substance is empty. My 2 cents

trustfundbaby• 15 years ago

I wonder how many people actually read the article before commenting

sudhirc• 15 years ago

They may be because when they were growing up studying science was their ticket to wealth,respect, and power. Arguments, disagreements, and self correction are pillars of scientific minds. Autocratic society in which a small disagreement can result is you vanishing, cannot possible nurture scientific minds.

speleding• 15 years ago

The article dances around the main reason the PISA scores don't say much about innovation, but doesn't say it: For innovation it's the top 5-10% that counts not the average.

I wouldn't be surprised if a study that compared the best 5% of students worldwide showed the US in a very different place, much higher in the rankings.

Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are Scientists

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