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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.