China only has about 4 times our population. 1,298,847,624 (July 2004 est.) vs 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.) from CIA factbook. China has more engineers per capita. You may be remembering old numbers before China's birth control program and the US's continued rapid rise in size due to immegration. The US has the world's third biggest population. And hell yes it's important even if it's just in absolute terms. The US gained a technology leadership role precisely because it had more scientists and engineers than just about anyone else combined with an economic system promoting creativity. China is making great strides in both. The reason the pace of change in technology is so fast today is due in a large part to the number of people working on it. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that there are more currently practicing scientists and engineers in the world today than ALL of previous history. The only chance we have to stay ahead of China is to maintain a much more efficient and competitive system. I don't think that's going to happen because greedy CEO's are too busy giving away technology to China for the sake of a few years bump in proffits. Maintaining an efficiency ratio of 6 is highly unlikley under those circumstances.

Regards,
Mark