scritic

Interesting. So the decline of the "low-hanging fruits" of technology is the cause, and not the effect, of the decline in the social prestige of science and technology, if I'm understanding you right.

Heh. Some thoughts on this: http://cogsciresearch.blogspot.com/2010/04/math-phobia-pedag...

I agree the services economy must have something to do with it. But I'm not sure how exactly. It's true that services now employ more people than manufacturing. But even if the number of people employed in manufacturing have declined, the amount of stuff manufactured itself has risen; manufacturing is more productive (even if employing less people) than it was before. I am not yet sure why this should lead to a loss of prestige for science and engineering.

I think the rise of the FIRE economy definitely has a role, I agree!

Thanks for the book recommendations, dwc!

That's a very good point - there could be a third graph which has a lot of tiny lines that are far more densely packed together (then the pre-internet graph) but manage to sample the whole spectrum at the same time.

I agree, it's almost completely a factor of how much time you spend reading and how you manage that time across topics. Increasing the time spent and becoming a better manager probably means you can cover both breadth and depth.

It's true that I was limited to reading Indian dailies when I grew up. But I believe the point stands. I think if your job is not in journalism or politics, then you have a limited amount of time left to read. And you can choose either to read magazines, which gives you a sample out of a wide spectrum of topics or you can go into depth on, say, the financial reform bill, and sacrifice "breadth."

You have a point. Although what I had in mind wasn't so much the "real-time" stuff that we get from Twitter and random blogs but the extensive analysis that's often offered on blogs like Brad Delong's, Mark Thoma's Economists View, Savage Minds, or The Monkey Cage. I find RortyBomb to be the single-best coverage of the current machinations over financial reform going on in Congress. Of course, if you follow the financial reform bill extensively, you're going to have to sacrifice reading about, say, the latest news on Israel-Iran relations or the latest on the national political scene in India.

Actually that's what "subway" means in India too. Or at least, that's the word we use to describe the underground road-crossings in Mumbai.

Thanks for the comments, everyone! I don't really disagree on the "external factors" (getting a job, providing for your family, etc.). I think their role is overwhelming, and I say that in the post too. My point is simply to consider the role of pedagogy (and contrast the pedagogies of non-mathematical subjects in high schools in the US and India) and wonder if that has a role to play in the fact that so many "bright" students in India end up being engineers and doctors.

Perhaps, there's also a relationship between the external factors (probability of getting a job, job prestige, etc.) in a developing country and the style of pedagogy in schools that cater to the middle class, although at this point, I can't really think of a mechanism that makes things the way they are.