alt Hacker NewsI guess I can relax and stop worrying that we're falling behind a bit. But I do wonder what the numbers really are, and just how many engineers we produce compared to China, of course, without qualifying everyone that learned Visual Basic as an engineer, unless, of course, that's where they're actually getting their own numbers from.
I see you're getting downvotes, but my intuition strongly aligns with yours. Many of the top minds/academics in (North) America are from overseas, and most of the time that's India and China. And it's been this way for a long time, and it basically makes sense from a numbers perspective. Note that I say this without a particular bias for or against.
So when many of the top minds, publishing most of the top papers in your country got educated in USA but will most likely return to their country of origin - that needs to be factored in to the calculation (especially if tensions increase). At the end of the day I think it's arrogant and wrongheaded to pretend that the USA has dominance in R&D, against China in particular.