The reference to role models reminded me of another item in the same paper: Schmidt, CEO of Google, telling off the UK for neglecting science education and support for inventors. The rot started, like so many other things, with the Thatcher government, who believed we could all get rich by copying the US model of "unfettered" capitalist entrepreneurship - and even then, people who weren't dazzled by the colour of money could see where that model was headed.

(My own son has come up against the problems with technical education. He wanted to take a minor in electronics alongside his major in science, which would have exactly suited his career plans, but his college don't do that any more. They're focussed on courses you take in order to go to University and do more studying: if you want to study something with real practical application, you have to go to the other place down the road, which was called the "Technical" until the Department of Education decided to pretend we're all academics. We're still being divided into the white-collar chaps who are supposed to run things but don't know how to do anything useful, and the blue collars who can make and mend stuff but are kept down on the shop floor where they belong.)

Though the omens aren't good, I'm still hoping that we come out of this crisis with a general acceptance that "unfettered" capitalism, like communism, is an idea which was really seriously tried and didn't work, so it's time to try something else. Though interestingly, the Chinese success seems to be built on combining those two supposedly incompatible systems and somehow keeping the mix from curdling. The most successful economies in Europe are those that kept a balance between socialism and capitalism, so I guess China had to add the most extreme entrepreneurial model to their system to achieve the same balance.

Not an argument, just a few reflections.