The subtitle of the linked URL is:

"China has six times as many engineering grads as the United States."

If that doesn't give you the fear-of-god then I don't know what will. We (the United States) enjoyed overwhelming economic, technical and military superiority over the rest of the world from 1948-1968. Since 1968, we shifted away from pursuing excellence to become increasingly focused on enjoying the good life. We've had a good run. For over 35 years we've been getting fat on our grandfather's seed corn. Unfortunately that seed corn is running out. Look at us now: Everytime the cost of crude oil goes up a few cents, the Dow Jones tanks by over a 100 points. Our Gross Domestic Product is now directly coupled to the cost of FOREIGN (mostly Arab) oil. The Chinese are positioning themselves to wipe out our automobile industry just as the French have positioned themselves to wipe out our aircraft industry.

The standard soothing reply to all this doom and gloom: We'll come back through "High Tech". What "High Tech" will that be? Aerospace is mostly dead. There's almost no profit left in semiconductors. The Dot Com wiped out information technology as a path to riches. Nanotechnology is just hype, smoke and mirrors. Biotech is exciting but will it serve as our next economic enigine? That sums it up: Our three future options are biotech, biotech and biotech. However what happens if biotech is too hard to commercialize? I wish we had options.

Gary

p.s. As bad as our situation is, we're positively healthy compared to the Europeans. Those guys have some serious grief ahead of them.