They lost the cold war by “a lot?” What does “a lot” refer to? Money? People? :?
The West, and America in particular also draw many brilliant people from less developed countries. Importing high-qualitypeople from all over the world can compensate for wasting the potential of some home-grown talent.
If our educational system is in such a bad way, why is it that certain Japanese conglomerates have endowed entire buildings on American campuses, with the stipulation that they get dibs on the results? They pay us to do research for them.
The American higher education system is the best in the world.
K-12? Not so much. As mentioned above, a good portion of the really smart people are people from overseas, and most of them, especially those from India/China and other non-first world countries, kinda like to stay here.
This is why I think the H-1B program is a crock o’ shit. We need all the smart people we can get. If you’re importing people for high tech jobs, lets give them a normal visa and let them work for whomever they want.
It is? I could have sworn it was a hotbed of liberalism, socialism, communism and otherism, infested with chi-com sympathizing pinko tree-hugging, anti-God, anti-establishment, anti-American faggots out to corrupt the mind of America’s youth?
Yes, we do. The reason we produce so many more scientists, laywers and business men is because of the incentives involved, incentives that did not exist in a Communist society.
OK, a surplus of lawyers isn’t a good thing, for starters.
Secondly, no, the US doesn’t produce more scientists. It’s out-engineered handily by Europe, easily by Russia, India and China.
I’ve met engineers that graduated from schools in China that then came and got their bachelors degree from a US University. They couldn’t code their way out of a freaking paper bag.
Plus, lets do some math.
India + China = 2.5 billion.
US population. .28 billion.
Hrm. I bet there are more ice cream vendors in China + India too.
Why do you assume that because they’re engineers, they’re programmers?
Incidentally, Russia’s population is HALF what America’s is, and they produce more engineers.
Do they also produce more engineering-related patents?
I don’t know.
So do you have any evidence that Russia is out-engineering the US?
Apologies in advance for not quoting, I will put names by specific responses as it applies. Also sorry how this reply grew in size, but I enjoy this topic immensely and hope not to turn anyone off to it.
For anyone actually interested in learning about what went on in Soviet Russia and how good their shit was in education (and how bad it was in other areas of endeavor, such as sycophantic politics), I’d recommend books on the KGB and on Russia’s war-making machine. The books I have here now are KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, The State Within a State, The Sword and the Shield (all on the KGB/NKVD), and Blind Man’s Bluff (on war machines, specifically subs). There are a ton of other good books one can find in any decent library on Soviet history and technological development, many of which were written within the last ten years, loooooong after the propoganda machine of the Supreme Soviet has passed.
XPav: since you specified the MiG-15, yes it was outclassed by one other jet in the entire world, the Sabre. And there is evidence that the reason the kill ratio over Korea was so good against MiGs was largely due to psychological reasons, including Operation Moolah, but that’s neither here nor there. If you forced me to pick one single example for MiG fighters, I’d probably go with the MiG 21. But you can’t get a whole picture while neglecting the Il’s, Su’s, and Tu’s of Russian jet history
I wasn’t focusing on one single generation of jet technology, and certainly not one of their first post-piston era airplane models. I’d also include commercial, rocket, and helicopter jet propulsion in this category. For what it’s worth, Top Gun was developed as a highly specialized, elite training center to specifically counter the training and technology of the USSR. They couldn’t have been that bad.
On the topic of subs, while the West has usually been better for being quiet, I was laughing at your pooh-poohing of dive depth and speed. That’s all. Truth be told, Cold War submarine tech is an area where there isn’t nearly as much declassified material as there is for aerospace (mostly because it develops slower, so everyone keeps theirr cards closer to their chest for longer). Although again Blind Man’s Bluff is a great book, for instance pointing out the Soviet’s probable advantage in using their electronics, sonar, etc. while navigating under icepacks in extremely cold water (such as the Arctic). Just one example, top of my head.
Oh, also I was wrong on the defectors who handed us cutting edge Soviet jet tech, those were in the 50s. Whoops! Apologies. :oops:
Peter: what I meant was that this claim, concerning literacy, was not only trumpeted but has since stood up to historical scrutiny. For what it is worth, Lenin himself (!) issued the edict to train anyone who was not literate to be so. There is a wealth of info on the topic if you google for soviet literacy rate. Note that first link on Kazakhstan comes from Princeton. :wink:
This isn’t to disparage Western education or educators such as yourself by the way. Clearly there was a push for basic literacy unheard of in Western culture (by “push” of course I mean it was required by the state using methods of persuasion we wouldn’t prefer).
graller: You are right that the US had more money, but more than that we also had more allies. Post World War 2, we (more or less) shared our spoils of Germany’s technology with Britain and France, and they with us. This, in addition to our insane amount of funding being a huge world creditor at the time, we had most of the technology “liberated” from Germany. Russia had maybe 1/3 of it, and this is about the same time that Stalin became openly paranoid (not just inside of the SSRs, but even to the world) and shut out the west. So they didn’t have the sharing OR the funds to keep up, really.
Ben: actually I still read Pravda on occasion. Still a great rag, and probably just about as impartial as any American news outlet. Now, while the Soviets did start with more German rocket tech to lead them off into space and such, a nation full of illiterate farmers (the literacy rate was under 33%, the lowest of all Europe under the Czars) would hardly have been able to take a few working models of the V2 and turn it into Sputnik, Sukhoi, and Tupolev.
I also personally believe that there were only three overall factors (by this I mean large-scale 50-year-long determinants as opposed to small events or particular people) preventing the USSR from winning the Cold War: 1- our ability to spend, 2- our frighteningly superior intelligence services (I’ve said it here before, in hind sight we had little to actually fear), and 3- the complete inferiority of Communist geopolitics. If the Cold War had been based just on education and military technology, as you kind of playfully opined, I believe the West may have lost. Just my opinion, and I’m a rank amateur Sovietologist at best.
Dirt: are there numbers showing that, as a percentage of population, the West produced more lawyers, scientists, or businessmen than the USSR? I’d be genuinely intereted in reading about it. If it is the case, I’d agree largely that the socio-political landscape is the reason.
On patents: I found this image on some japanese research site. Clearly the US leads the world in patents, although I wouldn’t agree that shows our educational system to be better. We do appear to be declining though, in terms of percentages.
On modern Russian engineering: there’s not much to go on right now. Since the Russian borders opened up, natives have been emigrating in droves and they’ve been importing more knowledge instead of making their own. Russia’s population and economic growth are both in the negative. In the meantime, rampant crime and corruption are killing what funding does exist for good education and research now. Once all of the “Soviet era” teachers and their ingrained “don’t need a reliable paycheck” work ethics leave the system, there’s no telling what will happen. Again, just my opinion, and why I gave the 10-20 year guestimate.
If you forced me to pick one single example for MiG fighters, I’d probably go with the MiG 21. But you can’t get a whole picture while neglecting the Il’s, Su’s, and Tu’s of Russian jet history
If you’re saying the MiG-21 was superior to any US or Western aircraft of its time, well, you’ve got a lot of evidence, mainly the lousy performance of the MiG-21 in combat, to explain away. Even during the “dark days” of Vietnam – 65 to 67, US pilots, with really bad training, managed to knock out the entire North Vietnamese Air Force. The MiG-21’s best analog is the F-104, actually – an early second generation jet fighter, and like most all Soviet aicraft – light, simple, and short ranged.
Pakistan vs India in 1971 is a pretty poor example to look at – numbers are small and you’ve got things like Pakistani F-86s shooting down Indian MiG-21s, and Pakistani F-6 (MiG-19 knockoffs built by China) shooting down Indian British-built Hawker Hunters. And of course, F-86s being show down by Hunters. Just strange.
We don’t need to bring up the combat experiences of the IAF vs the Arab Air Forces, do we?
Top Gun was instituted because the USN was getting a mere 2:1 kill rato. It had nothing to do with Soviet technology, and everything to do with the fact that US pilot training suffered heavily after Korea on the belief that electronics were the wave of the future and long range missile shots would replace close in air to air combat. Too bad our missiles sucked ass at that point.
Russian Rockets, yes, the Russians made and still make better rocket boosters that can carry more stuff. Why? Partly because they needed too – US space equipment was lighter due to better electronics.
Truth be told, Cold War submarine tech is an area where there isn’t nearly as much declassified material as there is for aerospace (mostly because it develops slower, so everyone keeps theirr cards closer to their chest for longer). Although again Blind Man’s Bluff is a great book, for instance pointing out the Soviet’s probable advantage in using their electronics, sonar, etc. while navigating under icepacks in extremely cold water (such as the Arctic). Just one example, top of my head.
Lets see, I’ve got Blinds Man Bluff here on my shelf, and yes indeed, once again, you can point out one incident where the Soviets came in ahead. However, lets see here. First SLBM launched from Underwater? US. First nuclear powered sub? US. Number of USN nuclear accidents? 0. Soviets? At least 11.
Oh, also I was wrong on the defectors who handed us cutting edge Soviet jet tech, those were in the 50s. Whoops! Apologies. :oops:
Cites. Please. What jet tech was this?
I thought a mig-25 pilot had defected to Japan with his plane, and our MIL INT guys went over it, only to find vacuum tubes and other obsolete shit holding the thing together.
but maybe my history teacher was just telling us an apocryphal story.
The MiG-25 was in fact regarded as the scariest aicraft ever. Then we got one and we saw all sorts of things that seemed really low tech and made fun of it. It turned out to not be as scary as we thought.
Then we looked again and saw that most of the things they did were pretty good low-tech solutions to very hard problems.
Here’s a MiG-25 link:
http://www.vectorsite.net/avmig25.html
Most all the stuff on vectorsite is great.
After half an hour creating a post where I succesfully crushed my own initial premise, I’ll just state that if you think too hard about the Soviet state, the contradictions will confound you.
One strange link from Shift6 was about Tajikstan claiming a literacy rate of 100% for men and 99% for women. What the hell did they do with the intellectually disabled there? (Besides putting them in charge of economic planning.)
Not out-engineering, but producing more engineers, yes.
Jakub- Cite, preferably with a definition of engineer? Though just because you happen to be producing more people with a given title means nothing. Why are Americans producing so much more? If your answer is “money”, why do Americans have so much more money?
shift6- It’s remarkably silly to think our ability to spend was some ability we picked at the nation creation stage.
Also, our superior intelligence services? You know you contradict that in the very same sentence. If our intelligence systems were so good, we would’ve known we had nothing to fear. Your use of geopolitics is not in a context I’ve heard before. Geopolitics is a school of thought for analysis, you’re using it as if the Communists failed at it.
Engineer = engineer. There’s a pretty standard definition of engineer internationally. Typically, they graduate from the faculty of engineering at a university. Then again, Americans confuse college and university, and they don’t know what football is so… I can understand why you may be confused ;)
My source on engineers? An interview with Craig Barrett on news.com.
This link, also on news.com, shows the declining number of PhDs the US is producing.