Asia is pouring money into higher education. But Asian universities will not become the world’s leading centers of learning and research anytime soon. None of the world’s top 10 universities is located in Asia, and only the University of Tokyo ranks among the world’s top 20. In the last 30 years, only eight Asians, seven of them Japanese, have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The region’s hierarchical culture, centralized bureaucracy, weak private universities, and emphasis on rote learning and test-taking will continue to hobble its efforts to clone the United States’ finest research institutions.
Even Asia’s much-touted numerical advantage is less than it seems. China supposedly graduates 600,000 engineering majors each year, India another 350,000. The United States trails with only 70,000 engineering graduates annually. Although these numbers suggest an Asian edge in generating brainpower, they are thoroughly misleading. Half of China’s engineering graduates and two thirds of India’s have associate degrees. Once quality is factored in, Asia’s lead disappears altogether. A much-cited 2005 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that human resource managers in multinational companies consider only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers as even “employable,” compared with 81 percent of American engineers.
I truly believe that we are witnessing a transition from a world where scarcity ruled to one where abundance does. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just check out Chris Andreson’s new book Free (embedded below)… it is about exactly that.
Some would argue that it isn’t true. Natural Resources like fossil fuels are scarce. Fresh water is scarce. Arable land is scarce. That is all true.
But consider the world that we are moving in to. Fossil Fuels are energy for the last century. For this century Solar, Wind, and Hydrogen will be our source of energy. Fresh water will present a larger problem but one that we will be able to overcome. Genius minds inventing serious technology are already moving to make that a reality. The problem of a burgeoning population being supported by less and less arable land is a serious issue. But the solution to that lies in the creation of sustainable cities (cities where urban gardens are grown on rooftops) and increasingly effective genetic engineering.
Writing this remind me of a quote by William Gibson
“The future is already here. It just not evenly distributed.”
We are living in an age of abundance. If you are reading this post then you have already experience what I am talking about. Think about the steps that you took to get here. Perhaps you googled something. Which generated a list of a million and one pages of information for you to browse through. And you clicked on a link which just happened to be the link to this article. When you are finished here you will google something else. Or you will follow one of the links that I have placed here in my blog. Or you will spend the next few hours reading Free.
The best part… it is all free.
Information entered an age of abundance with the birth of the internet. But only recently have we begun to see the truly powerful effects that this has and will continue to have on society. It is utterly transformative and we are only at the beginning, but already monoliths of the past in the Music, Film, and Publishing industries have begun to tetter because of it.
As the future becomes more evenly distributed we will continue to see profound changes in the way our society functions.