The real “yellow peril”

It was fashionable several decades ago in America to worry about China, about the “yellow peril”. The joke at the time was that optimists were learning Russian, while pessimists were learning Chinese. It was reported that if there was a bridge from China to the US and the Chinese were to run across that bridge onto our shores at full speed, ten abreast, the birthrate in China would keep up with the flow. America military leaders worried that China would shortly replace the Soviet Union as the real military threat to the Western world.

In more recent decades that xenophobia seems to have abated somewhat, but in fact there really is a “yellow peril” we ought to worry about in this nation, though in fact it includes India as well as China, and to a lesser extent other Asian nations.

Here is the logic. Human intelligence, as near as anyone can tell, is pretty evenly distributed around the world. At the moment, it is our pool of bright, innovative minds that is keeping America top dog in the world, a major economic powerhouse. Several studies have shown that a small proportion of the work force, in a relatively small number of sectors, accounts for a major share of US productivity. That isn’t surprising. One Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison can produce thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wealth. It is the few bright, innovative, driven entrepreneurs among us that are keeping the nation afloat, not the great mass of 9-5 workers. That may be politically incorrect to say, but it is true nonetheless.

Let’s say we look at just the pool of Americans (including recent immigrants) bright enough on average to get an undergraduate degree – say about one standard deviation above the mean intelligence of 100, or IQ of about 115. In a normal distribution that represents just under 16% of the population – let’s round it to an even 16%. US population currently stands at just about 314 million, so we have just about 50 million Americans in that bright group.

China’s current population is about 1.3 billion (1,343 million), and India adds another 1.2 billion (1,205 million) for a total between them of about 2.5 billion. Now neither of these nations is anywhere near as prosperous as the US, but at a first approximation the intelligence of their people is probably distributed normally just as it is in the US. That means they have some 16% of 2.5 billion = 400 million pretty bright people, or about eight times the number of bright people that we have.

Now up until recent times all those bright people on the other side of the world mostly got little or no education, and few opportunities to really make use of their talent, but that has changed over the past decade or so, so that places like Silicon Valley are full of very bright, very well educated, technologically savvy Indians and Chinese and other Asians. And of course now with the internet, and with major US universities increasingly offering technical courses free over the internet, the pool of well educated people in that part of the world will expand rapidly. Moreover, both the Indian and the Chinese cultures produce energetic, pragmatic, hard-working people.

China alone reportedly graduates over 600,000 engineers each year, and India another 350,000. In recent years the US has graduated about 125,000 a year. The same ratios hold in most other high technology and science fields. Yes, their education may not be quite as good as ours (yet), but the weight of numbers alone makes up for that. And their schools are rapidly improving, while ours are not.

So what is the message here? It is that America can’t afford to squander ANY of its bright, high potential people by giving them poor educations, discriminating against them, diverting them to high-paying but unproductive careers (like Wall Street trading) or in any way failing to make the very best use possible of our limited quota of such people. We are, to put it bluntly, outnumbered in bright people at least 8 to 1 just by China and India, not even counting the rest of the world. And we in America have gotten intellectually soft and lazy, while they still have the unrelenting drive to work hard and succeeded that our immigrant ancestors had.

More than that, we cannot afford to turn away ANY of those bright immigrants who want to come and live here and start businesses here and create innovations here. WE NEED THEM. If they aren’t here in America, working to keep America’s economy healthy, they will be back in India or China competing with us. THAT is the real “yellow peril”. The term may be insensitive, but the threat is very real.