{"id":30883,"date":"2006-06-13T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2006-06-13T10:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2006\/06\/13\/lies-and-statistics-600000-chinese-engineers\/"},"modified":"2006-06-13T10:00:59","modified_gmt":"2006-06-13T10:00:59","slug":"lies-and-statistics-600000-chinese-engineers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20060613-59\/?p=30883","title":{"rendered":"Lies and statistics: 600,000 Chinese engineers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Everybody &#8220;knows&#8221; that China produced 600,000 engineers in 2004 (as compared to 70,000 in the United States), but Carl Bialik at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/\"> <i>Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a> [corrected 9:30am] smelled something funny, so he chased the source of the numbers to see whether this &#8220;fact&#8221; was indeed true. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2006\/05\/19\/AR2006051901760.html\"> It wasn&#8217;t<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/\"> NPR<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=5478159\"> interviewed a Duke professor whose class undertook their own investigation of these bogus numbers<\/a>. The US number is really closer to 140,000. The count of Indian engineers? Nobody really knows. Deans of universities don&#8217;t even know how many colleges belong to their university! China was even stranger. <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> The Chinese central government in Beijing had simply decided that 600,000 is the number of engineers they want China to graduate each year. &#8220;The government has told the provinces that they have to graduate more engineers, so the provinces tell the government what they want to hear.&#8221; <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> If the central government decrees that the country will produce 600,000 engineers, then by golly, that&#8217;s what the official statistics will say, what a surprise. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everybody &#8220;knows&#8221; that China produced 600,000 engineers in 2004 (as compared to 70,000 in the United States), but Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal [corrected 9:30am] smelled something funny, so he chased the source of the numbers to see whether this &#8220;fact&#8221; was indeed true. It wasn&#8217;t. NPR interviewed a Duke professor whose class [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-30883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Everybody &#8220;knows&#8221; that China produced 600,000 engineers in 2004 (as compared to 70,000 in the United States), but Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal [corrected 9:30am] smelled something funny, so he chased the source of the numbers to see whether this &#8220;fact&#8221; was indeed true. It wasn&#8217;t. NPR interviewed a Duke professor whose class [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}