Thanks for catching that - I mean Helsinki. But hey, once your above the Arctic Circle, aren't they all the same? (yes, that's a joke)I will suggest that Reykjavik isn't in Finland. Though Iceland is on my bucket list. And you do get points for the Winter War reference.
I do agree some with your bottom point, parents are a big part of education. Kids that have parents pushing them to do better, do better. It is that simple. But we still struggle. We aren't getting even our high performers into STEM. If you go to math departments around the country you will meet a lot of students from Asia and few from the US. We just aren't making kids excited about learning math, or sciences.
In tech, Intel had a huge lead in chips. We've lost it, Taiwan dominates the chip market now and Intel hopes to catch up in 5 years but I don't think anyone believes it will happen. Boeing was once the leader in aircraft design but Airbus has at least caught them.
Generally speaking, the world has been gaining on us across the board.
If one doesn't like the Post, The Hill is considered very centrist:
US is losing ground on technology superiority
A long-held military maxim is to take the high ground and hold it. That may be outdated in today’s electronic and high-tech battlefields, but that notion still holds true for scientific research an…thehill.com
Some of this is we aren't funding research like we once did. But some of it is we just aren't producing enough people doing the research. With a limited supply of people in areas like math, we send them into trading because making money today is where our priorities lie.
QUANTS: Meet The Math Geniuses Running Wall Street
QUANTS: Meet the math geniuses running Wall Streetwww.businessinsider.com
So we don't produce near enough mathematicians and those we do produce enter trading and not engineering/sciences.
STEM studies aren't everyone's cup of tea. You can emphasize those courses all you want and provide scholarships, and a majority of the population will say...... meh. I ended up in IT after taking the required math courses, but I certainly wasn't cut out to be a mathmetician. My son-in-law, who did well enough in a small Indiana HS that he got accepted into MIT (he became a Wells Scholar at IU instead), could be a mathmetician, but he has no incentive - he makes considerably more money trading bonds. So, unless you're going to dramatically increase pay for those types of job, we'd be hard pressed to increase the number of US workers in that field anyway.
The US has developed such a robust economy - despite being the dumbest population on the planet, per you posts - that we have to outsource work. Of course they're going to surpass us with their cheap labor.
But who holds the patents (you might want to explain patents to your compadre, Goat)?