Interesting. So the decline of the "low-hanging fruits" of technology is the cause, and not the effect, of the decline in the social prestige of science and technology, if I'm understanding you right.
> To sum up, my point in this post was to posit an "internal" explanation, rooted in styles of pedagogy, for why the best and the brightest high school students in the US do not opt for technical majors/careers in college, while those in India do so overwhelmingly. My explanation for this was that, in the US, it is the authoritarian nature of science education, especially when compared with the "creative" way other disciplines (like history or literature) are taught, that is responsible for the math-phobia. On the other hand, in India, the cultural logic of the same authoritarian style of science education works out differently because students can discern a "method" in it, and they can discern no such method in the other disciplines, just a series of facts. Consequently, the best and the brightest high school students in India are less likely to suffer from math-phobia.
I agree the services economy must have something to do with it. But I'm not sure how exactly. It's true that services now employ more people than manufacturing. But even if the number of people employed in manufacturing have declined, the amount of stuff manufactured itself has risen; manufacturing is more productive (even if employing less people) than it was before. I am not yet sure why this should lead to a loss of prestige for science and engineering.
That's a very good point - there could be a third graph which has a lot of tiny lines that are far more densely packed together (then the pre-internet graph) but manage to sample the whole spectrum at the same time.
I agree, it's almost completely a factor of how much time you spend reading and how you manage that time across topics. Increasing the time spent and becoming a better manager probably means you can cover both breadth and depth.
It's true that I was limited to reading Indian dailies when I grew up. But I believe the point stands. I think if your job is not in journalism or politics, then you have a limited amount of time left to read. And you can choose either to read magazines, which gives you a sample out of a wide spectrum of topics or you can go into depth on, say, the financial reform bill, and sacrifice "breadth."
You have a point. Although what I had in mind wasn't so much the "real-time" stuff that we get from Twitter and random blogs but the extensive analysis that's often offered on blogs like Brad Delong's, Mark Thoma's Economists View, Savage Minds, or The Monkey Cage. I find RortyBomb to be the single-best coverage of the current machinations over financial reform going on in Congress. Of course, if you follow the financial reform bill extensively, you're going to have to sacrifice reading about, say, the latest news on Israel-Iran relations or the latest on the national political scene in India.
