There's an article in the New York Times today about a student trying to get into India's most prestigious university system, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). Apparently the acceptance rate for applicants to IIT is two percent. Now, here is why the US and other Western countries are in trouble if they don't get their act together - let's assume this young man, Anupam, gets his degree and goes on to make lots of money. More than likely, he's going to remember how difficult it was for him to get an education, and he'll in some way contribute, either to his own family or to creating more opportunities for others. This will continue, and after some time India will have an amazingly well developed higher educational system (and along the way, probably the lower schools will see quality improvements as well). Meanwhile, for example, in the states we're seeing funding for education falling, and public support for educational infrastructure seems to be evaporating. This is going to lead to some issues in the future (or perhaps in the present - witness recent news on China in automobiles and oil companies).

In a related topic, an article in Foreign Affairs magazine (which, by the way, be careful how you type - I ended up at a porn site by typing "com" instead of "org" after the address) has an article about how far behind the US is in broadband internet and mobile phone technology (something I've complained about for years). As the article notes, a "typical U.S. broadband connection, whether DSL or cable, is still only 1.5 megabits per second or slower", whereas, for example, in France the 20 Mbps is readily available and in Japan 40 Mbps. And for the higher speeds, you guessed it, the price is lower than in the US. A lot lower. And don't even talk about mobile phone technology - the US hasn't even sold the airspace for 3rd generation networks yet (it hopes to do so in 2006), while Europe and Japan have fully functional networks available to the public.

I'm wondering though if the geographical size of our country is affecting our ability to install high speed internet and cell phone systems. It seems that the US is concentrating on bringing the net to more people in more places and sacrificing speed and higher technology in the process. Like the time and money is better spent on covering and expanding such a huge geographical area rather than improving one major city's speed. It's easy for Europe to do this--the countries are tiny. Just some speculation, but that was the first thing to come to mind.

It's a fair comment. On the other hand, Europe as a whole is about half the size of the United States (depends on where you stop counting for Europe, and whether you include Alaska in the US), and Europe has nearly 100 percent coverage. The US doesn't even hit all the major highways.

However, the point is not, necessarily, who's doing it better. The point is that, if technology is a competitive advantage, the US is being outcompeted. Worse, it's not even trying to keep up. You could argue that Europe and Japan are way ahead because of government interference, and you'd be right, but you'd have chosen the wrong governments - the US government's monolithic rules making bodies haven't just not promoted new technology, they've actually interfered - witness the fact that 3G spectrum hasn't even been sold in the US, or the horrible mess that's been made of digital and high-def television.

Excellent points. I think the US is taking its (imagined) "Superstar" status for granted and within the near future when we're left behind everyone will be saying "Uhhhhh, what happened?" Everyone assumes we ARE the cutting edge so we're not pursuing any avenues to even recognize that we're already behind. But we all know it's far more important to spend our money making sure that those homos don't get married and protecting our children from Janet Jackson's breast than to be truly competitive in global technical innovation. Removing our heads from their current locations and actually noticing what the rest of the world is doing would be an interesting idea. *sigh* And strangely enough, when we lived in San Jose (the "heart of Silicon Valley") our DSL service was far slower and crappier than what we get here in the OC. Go figure. In other words, I agree with you :).