News on China's scientific and technological development.
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On page 17 of the linked report (), you can clearly see from the graph that the statistic being discussed is the share of researchers relative to the US, not the absolute number. It should also be clear from the context.
Your point being? He wrongly claims that the number of researchers in China is 75% less than the number of researchers in America.
Number of researchers = size of workforce * percentage of workforce employed in research.
The former factor is more than 4 times America's, the latter factor is 1/4 America's, so the number of researchers in each country is roughly equal, not China having 75% fewer researchers than America.
The immediately preceding sentence:
In academic writing, it is acceptable to condense "number of researchers as a share of total workers" to just "number of researchers" when the full meaning is understandable from context. Figure 6 ("Chinese Researchers as a Share of Total Workforce, Relative to the United States") clearly shows the Chinese proportion as 25% that of the US. This is obviously what "75% fewer" describes.
So it's just your tunnel vision and over-eagerness to cherry-pick an avenue of attack. Seriously, it's quoted verbatim in the article as well, with all the necessary context.
In academic writing if one only wanted to talk about the number of researchers in each respective country then condensing it down from "number of researchers as a share of total workers" to "number of researchers" might be reasonable.
However the original study was also trying to make it sound like the absolute amount of Chinese R&D expenditure is somehow inconsistent with the "researchers as a share of total workers" comparison between China and the US.
That is obviously a flawed insinuation, because the absolute amount of R&D expenditure should be more correlated with the absolute number researchers of a nation as well as the quality of R&D that they are doing.
So zek is right in saying that the "number of researchers as a share of total workers relative to the US" is not a particularly useful metric for trying to make sense of a nation's overall R&D budget.
From an outside reader's perspective, looking at the way that particular conclusion is drawn, it almost seems like they're trying to take a particular statistic without context or common sense and use it to try and make it seem like Chinese R&D expenditure is somehow less efficient or less well allocated or less effective or even outright falsely calculated for political reasons.
Of course, the net effect of such a narrative is trying to suggest that the increase in Chinese R&D budget is actually an illusion and not necessarily reflective of any real ability to advance in R&D.
It's a rather par for the course tactic, really.
The statistic referred to by "24% less R&D investment" is actually what is represented in Figure 1: "Chinese Expenditures on R&D as a Share of GDP, Relative to the United States".
Comparing "R&D investment as a share of total GDP" to "researchers as a share of total workers" is reasonable.
Perhaps a reference to the appropriate figure was warranted here.
No, a more appropriate comparison would be comparing R&D investment amount (absolute) vs no. of researchers (absolute).
R&D investment as a share of GDP is an interesting figure, but trying to make sense of it by "researchers as a share of total workers" is not logical, especially if one is trying to make an argument about trying to explain Chinese R&D budget figures.
If anything, the fact that its "R&D investment" variable was calculated as "share of GDP relative to US" makes their entire comparison even more stupid.
Directly comparing an absolute $ figure with absolute headcount makes even less sense when attempting to show a difference in efficiency/allocation of resources.
The entire premise of the article is that Chinese research may be catching up to that of the US. "Share of GDP relative to the US" is an appropriate metric given that the comparison is over a time period (2007-2017).
It makes the most sense out of all of the numbers available, because using anything other than absolute figures means your "share of XYZ relative to US" becomes dependent on the absolute size of your own XYZ (whether it is work force or GDP).
If the premise of the article is trying to judge where Chinese research is relative to the US, clearly absolute budget and absolute number of researchers makes the most sense.
"Share of GDP relative to US" and "Share of researchers in work force relative to US" are completely idiotic, because what if the absolute size of China's GDP was 1/100th the size of the US? What if China's absolute overall workforce was 1/100th of the US?
Or we can look at it the other way, what if China's GDP was 1000 times the size of the US? What if China's overall workforce was 1000 the times of the US?
In both situations, if we applied the same "share of GDP relative to US" number and "share of researchers in work force relative to US" number we would have massively differing consequences in terms of just how much output China's R&D can actually be, depending on how big China's workforce, and how big China's overall GDP are, respectively.
In other words, their "share of GDP relative to US" and "share of researchers in work force relative to US" are useless numbers because they don't tell us just how large the absolute R&D expenditure is and how large the absolute number of researchers are.
Okay, here is the comparison that you claim, it seems, to be solely necessary.
Does this tell you anything about efficiency of resources allocated? Not at all.
Let's look at share of researchers again.
Compared to China, South Korea has a much higher proportion of researchers in the workforce (14.43 per 1,000 people) than China (2.242) despite South Korea's R&D spending being 4.3% of GDP compared to China's at 1.97%. Similarly, the most recent figure for the US is 8.928, while US R&D as share of GDP is 2.84%.
Do you deny that this discrepancy is at all notable? This is exactly the same as what the original article discusses, except in a more distributed form.
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