China, Statistics and The Genius Factor

The other day my professor was talking about something I found very interesting and had never really thought about before. Statistics are a very interesting tool to view the world around you or even predict the future if used lightly. Relying on only statistics is usually be a bad idea because sometimes the statistics can have bias that skews them to not fully reflect the entire population, however using basic statistic theory can almost always be used. What do I mean by statistic theory? Well the example I am going to use and talk about in this article is the distribution of geniuses amongst the population. However, before I go into that idea I want to talk about the past of China.

Many people don’t know this, but before the industrial revolution in the west, China was actually richer than most of the west combined, just because of their sheer numbers. They also made a massive amount of scientific discoveries because unlike future discoveries being based on theory, much of the early scientific discoveries were based on practice. If you were a farmer and suddenly you realized that cultivating a crop in a certain way would make it grow faster and stronger, you would look into why. This is the main reason why we can thank early China for inventions such as gunpowder, more efficient paper making, silk, ect.

However, once the industrial revolution started in England, the tides changed so to speak. The West, started to invest in the small amount of geniuses they had versus China, who failed to do so. The western countries, many times through the church, funded geniuses and let them do their own research, while China forced them into a specific regimen of classical teachings. China soon began to fall behind and eventually became one of the poorest countries per capita in a short amount of time. After that they were exploited by the west for hundreds of years until only recently where they were able to win back their freedom. So why does the history matter?

Well if we look at the genius distribution in populations, statistical theory tells us that the greater the population the larger amount of geniuses it will have. While China in the old days forced geniuses into the status quo, a new light on Chinese capitalism has the government better utilizing the smartest people in the country to build and design the future. While they are nowhere as efficient as the west in this matter, there will still be a much larger level of competence with the new generation of geniuses. I fully suspect that China in the next 100 years will be one of the main countries that is creating and bringing innovation to the world because of this fact.

It isn’t only China, but India as well which is starting to rock certain sectors, especially technology. One of the hottest places in the world for innovation right now is in a part of Bangalore India, which is being called India’s Silicon Valley. If both countries push individual thinking and better utilization of the geniuses they have, who runs the world will completely shift in the next century. It isn’t definitive as many changes will need to take place, but the odds are on their side quite literally. The west has a fraction of the population and a fraction of the potentially smartest people in the world.

If we want to stay competitive in the west, we need to bring efficiency to a whole new level or else it is only a matter of time before we are economically engulfed by the east. Countries like the US have always done well because of innovation and a focus on individualization and this needs to continue. In addition, we need to push more people to science based and computer fields because those are the jobs that will run the future. I have talked many times before about how we will most likely see a huge shift in what jobs humans will actually be doing in 50 years, so we must get ready for the probably competition from many of the countries we now consider third world. Their time will come and population is the greatest commodity a country can not buy, so we need to prepare.

-Calaber24p