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America Losing Its Edge In Innovation
jaywhybee writes "Forbes has an interesting article about America losing its edge in innovation because engineers and scientists in the US are not as respected as they are in other countries, and thus fewer youths aspire to become one. Quoting: 'I’ve visited more than 100 countries in the past several years, meeting people from all walks of life, from impoverished children in India to heads of state. Almost every adult I’ve talked with in these countries shares a belief that the path to success is paved with science and engineering. In fact, scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the US, but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the US, almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.'"
Only brainless jocks are perceived to have leader quality in the US, as long as you are tough and aggressive.
People think that fear is respect and thus think that the one instilling most fear has to be respected most.
No time to read this article, I have to see what my favourite hollywood actress is doing with her hair this week
People tend to gravitate towards professions that pay better. For instance, your typical Wall St analyst has about the same level of education as an engineer. If somebody is looking at those two options (because they're good with numbers and analysis), and wants to make the big bucks, which one are they going to pick, the one that will pull in $120K a year or the one that will pull in $250K a year?
The wonderful thing about using the numbers here is that it's a completely objective measure. Unlike "respect" which is harder to quantify.
I am officially gone from
It doesn't matter if innovation ceases in the US because innovation will occur elsewhere. The ideas, the innovations, that tangibly improve life will be shared by their creators wherever those creators are. Those ideas will still benefit us, whether those ideas were conceived in Hydrabad or Sunnyvale. Ideas and innovation are a type of imaginary property. Ideas are written down and transmitted digitally. Like any digital copy, when you share an idea with someone else, you do not deprive the person who conceived that idea of their property.
I was just thinking of this the other day. We put so much importance on children to excel in sports, hoping that one dey they will make it into the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB that we neglect to realize how minuscule that chance is. The problem with trying to excel at sports is that if you aren't good enough to be in the top league, you are basically just a point where you don't make any money at all, or at best have to have a second job even to make ends meet. Even if you are good enough at football to make it to the CFL, you still have to have a second job because you don't make enough doing your sport. On the other hand, if we pushed kids to excel in school and intelligence, even if they didn't make it into the elite, for instance being a world class heart surgeon, they would still have plenty of good jobs to fall back on if it turned out they couldn't achieve being one of the best in the world. They could be a family practitioner, a nurse, or do many other things in the same field, and still make quite a decent living. There's only a market for 400+ (432 currently based on quick google) professional basketball players. The market for most other professions is quite higher. There's probably 400 doctors in my city.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
why is it always the cynical capitalists that complain
about lack of engineering talent. it's not like they're willing
to pay for them.
if you're a bright kid and want to make money, you don't
go get an engineering degree. you go into finance.
Who cares? Can't we just outsource that, too? Actually, *don't* we just outsource that, too?
Anyway, America is about money, jesus, and big tits. Success is about catering to the common denominator. Intellectual advancement and pursuit is for "elitist" pricks with their fancy words and all. Anyway, America loves Jesus and Jesus doesn't give a shit about it. Jesus cares about celebrity and sports. If you need proof, just think of the last time you heard a scientist thank jesus for their discovery? Never! Because jesus only helps football players blond bimbos accepting their Golden Globes.
And society reinforces this. I've been a jock and a nerd my entire life and I probably don't need to tell anyone what activities and accomplishments got audiences, rewards, cheerleaders, public acknowledgement, and respect . . . and which didn't.
In America, you purchase respect. America losing its edge in innovation because engineers and scientists in the US are not as well paid as they are in other countries relative to local prices. Why would anyone spend 4 years training to become a low paid engineer when they could become a highly paid lawyer or financier or manager?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It has been obvious for more than a decade for anyone watching USA from abroad.
From watching US TV series I learn that brains have been replaced by God or other mysticism. Pseudoscience galore and the good science (from PBS) has no viewers.
Universities are graduation foreign students in the sciences and Americans with lawyers and political degrees. Luckily you still have a private sector that has a lot of innovation and hires brains from other countries. That keeps a lot of the patents and wealth in USA.
Imaginary property law shifts the balance of power away from engineers and towards the paper pushers. It doesn't matter how smart an engineer you are if some lawyer waving a patent gets to determine what all engineers can and cannot build. By definition, patent monopoly grants prevent a free market in engineering services, distorting the market so that it's more profitable to be a lawyer with the right to control what thousands of engineers can do and horsetrading those rights. So smart americans aspire to be lawyers not engineers, because in america it's the lawyers in charge, thanks to patent grants. You have to really love engineering to become an engineer in america, because it's a fundamentally irrational choice to do so in america.
Patents are a "right" to prevent other people doing something - engineers, psychologically, typically simply don't want to do that (there are exceptions, and lo, they are giant douchebags hated by most actual engineers - see edison vs. tesla...).
Politicians in America (especially at the higher levels) are almost exclusively lawyers, with a handful of businessmen and sports or movie stars. The only exception are the two or maybe three former doctors that I can think of out of about a thousand in the house and senate. There are a few religious nuts sprinkled in, too -- but for the most part, almost 100% of politicians merely cater to the religious nut angle, because that's the lowest common denominator which consistently wins them elections.
This should not come as much of a surprise. After all, some American people want to teach creationism in schools. If science does not get respect at the bottom most level, its hardly surprising that it doesnt get it at the higher ones.
I'm not sure that a lack of respect for science is necessarily somehow tied to the reduction of male television parts being reduced to blubbering buffoon that natters at his wife's apron strings.
I think a better example of the changes can be seen by recalling how much astronauts were admired and their pursuits followed by every man, woman, and child in the country (and outside of it), when my mom was growing up. The names and accomplishments stick with us today. Their generation watched it live on television in absolute awe.
In my life, the only big events were two exploding shuttles about twenty years apart. The only time there is television coverage is during the launch of the shuttle that directly follows the one that just blew up. The only modern astronauts any of us can think of are the crazy cross-country-driving adult-diaper lady and the husband of the blonde chick that was shot in the head a couple weeks ago. There is no major mission expected in the foreseeable future and most of us don't expect to have an experience like our parents in our life time. Exploration and advancement is seen as a waste. I don't need me no space explorations -- I need the potholes in mah gawd-dayum street fixed and a bigger social security check, so I can afford me some smokes when I go play bingo!
It seems that the article's author leaps to the conclusion that a lack of engineers and scientists in politics is a bad thing for innovation. I would like to see evidence of that.
In fact, one can argue the opposite: that engineers and scientists focused on engineering and science, rather than politics, is a better way to insure innovation.
But since this article was probably not written by a scientist, I suppose we're unlikely to see any scientific methods used in his argument.
We had an Astronaut/physics guy as the main character in I dream of Jeanie, A senior marketing executive as the husband of a witch in Bewitched, and many many others
Well, if someone thinks a "senior marketing executive" is a position that inspires technical innovation, I think I've found why the US is losing its edge.
In other TV shows of the time there was "Get Smart" with the most incompetent secret agent you can imagine and "Gilligan's Island" with the most incompetent sailor you can imagine. Of course, in the 1960s you also had "Hogan's Heroes" with a bunch of pretty competent fliers. Then in the 1980s there was "MacGyver" which is the epitome of technological ingenuity.
No, I don't think you can get much information on this trend from TV shows.
The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about.
No more do we look up, listen to and expect people with expertise to give us the benefit of their experience. Rather we shun 'experts' with their 'facts', since surely that sort of commitment to their field has made them biased and unreliable sources. Only the truly uneducated and ignorant are 'pure' in their innocence, only the most intuitive, simplistic and superficial description of the world maybe be considered honest. Anyone with an explanation longer than a sound bite, let alone a formula, is a charlatan, using his book-knowledge to fool us!
Trust your gut feelings, your most primitive prejudice, that which you share with those who are the loudest. Because they are the ones in charge now, they are the ones who get what they want in this world. Who gives a toss about the laws of physics, logic or math, when the truth is determined by everyone - with mod points.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
When we keep cutting (or allowing to stagnate) the funding for science and engineering research, this is exactly what we get. We can't expect good science to be done with no financial backing. Scientists who love their work will indeed work for embarrassingly little money, but eventually they do need to pay the bills to keep the lights on in the lab to keep the work moving.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
From TFA: "Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.
Part of the problem is the lack of priority U.S. parents place on core education. But there are also problems inherent in our public education system. We simply don’t have enough qualified math and science teachers. Many of those teaching math and science have never taken a university-level course in those subjects."
Um. If the jobs aren't there for US grads, it's the fault of their parents and teachers? Logic much? Seems like a rational choice to avoid areas where there's not a lot of work on.
Why not look at how entrepreneurs are funded -- by VCs who fund almost exclusively men, even though businesses started by and run by women are twice as likely to succeed.
Why not look at the gross discrimination against women in engineering, science and mathematics at all levels -- we could easily double the pool of US engineering talent by simply developing more objective measures of success, or at least heeding them where available.
Think back to the TV shows of the '50's and '60's. We had an Astronaut/physics guy as the main character in I dream of Jeanie, A senior marketing executive as the husband of a witch in Bewitched, and many many others. The key factor was, they were all intelligent.
These days we have Homer Simpson and the King of queens, et al.
That has a lot to do with man bashing. Intelligent women are permitted on prime time, just not intelligent while normal men, for purely political reasons.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
From an outsider's perspective, I'd have to disagree. I don't see your government doing that much differently than it has in the past.
- which past? If we are talking about the last 98 years, then you are right, the gov't is doing mostly the same thing (safe for Harding, who actually cut gov't by 70%, fired 70% of federal gov't to fight the Fed caused recession in 1920, which was a huge success, the recession was over in 1 year).
But the chickens came home to roost. The inflationary policies of the Fed and gov't, the borrowing, the spending, the growth of gov't, the growth of spending of borrowed money, the wars, the ever growing size of list of business regulations, the growing monopolization of all industries by gov't intervention, yes, all of those things have been happening in one form or another, but now, the USA is no longer a producer of goods. It's running 50+ Billion USD/month trade deficit because it cannot supply itself with goods, energy and even food (thank you, department of Agriculture). The USA cannot supply itself with educated people (thank you, department of Education.) USA has a gov't, which caused massive problems in everything, from foreign policies to civil rights. Yes, imagine, I am one of the people who is against all rules and regulations, including the part of the Civil Rights act, which concerns private establishments. Why, do you ask? Am I a racist? No. I am looking at this and seeing the exact same thing: backfiring. Before the Civil Rights act the young black people in USA from ages of 16-24 had 85% employment. Today they are 50% unemployed. That's not good, but the society is NOT more racist today, far from it. But the policy of the government has created this problem, it backfired, because the small businesses cannot afford any lawsuits and thus they would rather avoid hiring anybody who is a minority, than hire them, then risk having a lawsuit on their hands - be it a woman, and a possible sexual harassment lawsuit, be it a minority, and a possible discrimination lawsuit resulting from trying to fire them.
But you see, people were always hired and fired, but once you have gov't laws on your side, you can now try and apply them for any situation, and even situations that have nothing to do with you being fired.
Gov't policy on agriculture subsidies and food price fixing policies have backfired and caused massive obesity in population because fructose is in everything, because it's subsidized and cheap, while prices on food are 'fixed' by gov't and so instead of having them fluctuate, the companies look for the most efficient ways to lower costs all the time - thus ingredients that are worse and worse.
Gov't foreign policy is constantly backfiring. All of the intervention, the wars - Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Iraq, Kuwait, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other 'unseen' wars, Columbia... The drug wars.
The war on poverty - well, here is another war that gov't started and again, the poverty is winning.
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I am of an opinion that anything that gov't does can be understood completely by just turning it on its head, upside down and looking at the opposite of what gov't is proposing, and then you will see the real meaning, the real results.
If gov't is 'fighting poverty', then it means gov't will increase poverty.
If gov't is 'fighting drugs', then there will be more deaths associated with that and more drug problems.
If gov't is helping Osama Bin Laden, then he'll be eventually trying to kill US citizens.
If gov't is helping Saddam Hussein, then eventually there will be a war with him.
If gov't is setting a liability cap of 10Million dollars to let deep water oil drilling while simultaneously prohibiting shallow water oil drilling - prepare for a disaster.
If gov't is saying: everybody must have a house, then NOBODY will have a house.
If gov't is saying: we will insure your bank deposits with FDIC, then they w
You can't handle the truth.
Unless he has a 4-year degree in engineering, he is not an engineer. Its very unfortunate that the job title "engineer" is so commonly misused in the US.
Unless he has a 4 year degree in photography, he is not a photographer. Unless he has a 4 year degree in english lit, he is not a writer. Unless he has a 4 year degree in business, he is not a manager. Repetition of a meme is not proof of a meme.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The Arabic countries led by the Muslims were the most advanced scientists and engineers in the world, until they let the religious crazies take over. Just sayin', America...
That's stupid. "Engineer", like "doctor" is a reserved title in many societies. In Quebec you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have a degree. Photographers and writers are not responsible by what they do for the lives of people. An engineer who designed a bridge because he decided to call himself an engineer is a menace to society and therefore must be regulated. Surely you're smart enough to understand that?
Funny... that stuff was also taught in the early 1900s as well... didnt we become a superpower in that timeframe?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Salesman & marketing pukes run my company that was founded & ran for it's first 50 years by engineers. Now we do nothing unless it's chasing the competition. At that point our leaders point & claim how our engineers dropped the ball & did not come through with the innovative product. All the while outsourcing more & more tech work to India & China. & we wonder why kids don't want to go into engineering.
We get no respect. We get little resources. None of them ask for our will listen to our opinions. All we can do it work more hours (to keep our jobs) while looking for work elsewhere. From what I read in my user groups, marketing pukes running the company is becoming quite common.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
As an engineer I work on things everyday that have direct and immediate consequences in the physical world. Hence my errors of judgment or bias have a direct feedback to me. The physical world is a hard unforgiving taskmaster.
A politician is buffered from any consequences or feedbacks to his actions by distance; the bureaucracy surrounding him as well as the physical disconnect.
As an engineer I must compromise between contradictory and opposite qualities and find practical combinations that satisfy a multitude of specifications and demands. I must accommodate as well as critically evaluate the demands of users, marketing and design and architecture people, and come up with a mutual understanding of what they actually want within the means of what is possible.
A politician is defined only by what that supports him in power - those who fund and elect him for the next term.
The limits with my work are the laws of physics - both direct resources: money, time, people - as well as all kinds of non-intuitive ones: scaling, flow rate, logistic function, probability distribution. Hence my sense for the 'truth' is not based on passion but experimentation, and I appear unsure and as having no confidence in my 'opinions' - which I don't really have at all, as most people understand them. An opinion for me is always something I can explain - at least to myself - and most of the time to others. It is this process that both helps me understand my own reasoning better (keeps me honest to myself), as well as provides a further insight into my cognition as well as to some extent of those of others.
A politician swims in the superficial memes of popular sentiment. He maybe an ideologue but a successful one is also a pragmatist: he shapes truth into what is most convenient for the occasion and in doing so may actually benefit from self-delusion, even intentional and conscious.
It maybe be argued that in this way a politician is more 'human' than an engineer and thus is more suited to lead us. And that my friends is the conclusion that cost me my mod points.
Burn baby burn!
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Well, your answer kind of dances around the real problem - the high-paying jobs are not in science. In fact, it is unbelievably difficult for recent science grads to find any kind of job right now, and universities can't get enough funding for tons of grad students, even if there were enough professors to support them academically.
I mean, how exactly did all those well-off parents get to be where they are today? Evidently it was not by doing well in school, or else they would probably encourage their kids to do that more than sports and so on.
There's just so much absurdity and stupidity in that sentence I *have* to answer. In the 1960s half the planet was computerized. The 1960s were THE decade of computer innovation. It's sad that you remember the '60s as the decade that put a lot of kerosene into a metal tube and not the decade that gave us the mother of all demos and sketchpad.
The Mother of All Demos by the man who invented the mouse in the '60s
Yeah, guess what, the mouse wasn't invented by Apple.
Sketchpad. As a youtube commenter puts it: ooooomg.... 1962/1963 !!! I just can't believe it! Way cooler than going to the moon!
Computer on the Saturn V
And as for your assertion that there was no prior art, that's just fucking stupid. What the hell do you think NASA took the best Germans for? Their potato salad recipe? Do you honestly believe all these heroic Americans just invented everything out of thin air in less than a decade because going to the Moon is just so useful? Get your head out of your ass. America went to the Moon as the biggest stunt in history using the developped technological base that came out of WWII and business and science needs that drove the computer industry. NASA was a *USER*, not a developper of computers.
You probably think we only have computers today because of the Moon missions when it's the other way around.
Look, in 1959 there were already experimental graphic design tools for making CARS. *Nothing* to do with rockets or going to the Moon.
Picture
Learn some history I've rarely seen such pig-ignorance, and in an era of instant information access, it's PATHETIC.
And as for your retarded spelling of "cosmonaughts", Jesus wept, man, Jesus wept.
Well-connected people don't need technical or scientific skills. They only need personal and networking skills, and the understanding of how to leverage their contacts to take advantage of the less fortunate. Therefore it makes sense for them to work to succeed in sports since that will increase their cachet among their peers, and they will be able to parlay that into influence among those same peers later when those peers have influence of their own to exert against society.
On the other hand, for the disadvantaged, education is everything, since only a statistically insignificant percentage of the population will become a sports hero or a music legend. Unfortunately, they are still trying to emulate the rich without understanding that acting like you're #1 only serves to make you into a #2.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So anybody at all can be an engineer if they just decide so?
Yes! exactly. Engineering is about a state of mind. You can sit in a school all you like but you'll never become an engineer.
An engineer is someone who makes things, makes things better, as is passionate about it. The questions is: when did I become an engineer?
When I took apart my first machine and put it back together?
When I designed my first circuit, programmed my first code?
When I sold my first design, setup and registered my own business?
You can cry into your pillow all you like about formal qualifications - the most successful and inspiring engineers I know never benefited from or cared much for the education they went through - they were already engineers.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
and more about a lack of respect for any sort of intellect. At least here in the US.
Turn on Fox News.. at least once during every host's shift you'll see a casting of all things liberal and intellectual as evil and bad for america. 'My politics are right. Yours just aren't wrong, they're evil.' (Jon Stewart comment iirc)
It's an inferiority complex. Dumb people are just smart enough to know they are dumber than intellectuals. And like every insecure bully ever, they lash out.
...(which begs the question, whom is more stupid?)...
who, not whom
Funny... that stuff was also taught in the early 1900s as well... didnt we become a superpower in that timeframe?
Uhm, no? You became a superpower when Europe was torn apart by wars, and many scientists fled to the US to continue their work.
Any engineer or scientist who doesn't want the responsibility can easily duck it, and usually does. They know doing an honest job of it is hard work. They know leaders are targets. And there is an unending supply of loudmouthed suckers who will leap at a chance to be The Man because they think "it's good to be the king", think they'd enjoy calling the shots. They think the ones doing it now are a bunch of idiots and doing better than them will be easy. Or they don't give a damn, and just want the bigger paycheck. All the engineers have to do is be quiet, and the loudmouth will look proactive, "can do", and energetic. The higher ups or customers will fall for it almost every time. Once in a leadership position, they find it very convenient to blame problems on the "incompetent" engineers, as if they could do any better. Everyone else sees the bosses slanging the engineers, so what to they do? Pile on of course. Galling to work under someone who has no clue how hard or easy the work is, and who has caused many of the problems being blamed on the engineers. As if mere technical problems aren't plenty hard enough, have to deal with all the politicking too.
The opinionated loudmouths are the ones who shouldn't be leading, but they end up in a disproportionate number of leadership positions. Even when the engineer wants to take on the responsibility, it's tough to compete with the flashy, smooth-talking, boot licking Man with a Plan who understands the Realities of Business. And if the quiet engineer somehow wins the job anyway, then this guy is a constant thorn in the side. He's angry, and he's looking for any chance to take the engineer down. And being the sort of fool he is, he may well do it even if that leads to disaster, and gets everyone fired or causes the company to tank.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Experts can be wrong too.
No shit? Everyone screws up from time to time, but take a guess at who is more likely to be right, an expert or an idiot. That experts are periodically wrong does not mean we should trust ignorance instead, which is what a lot of people seem to be doing these days.
The slashdot story comes from this article in Forbes. As expected, the forbes article is just another cookie-cutter pro-H1B propaganda article. Same old "arguments." Basically, they are saying "because of the desperate shortages of US tech workers, we need to temporarily allow more H1Bs, just until US schools get up to speed."
This corporate propaganda has been fully disproved many times, but the flood of these cookie-cutter articles, continues. Tell a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.
From Forbes:
Jan 20, 2011
Danger: America Is Losing Its Edge In Innovation
* Improve K-12 science and math education.
* Invest in long-term basic research.
* Attract and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers in the U.S. and around the world.
* Create and sustain incentives for innovation and research investment.
http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/01/20/danger-america-is-losing-its-edge-in-innovation/
Here is the real situation:
Duke University study reporting no shortage of US Engineers:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Study-There-Is-No-Shortage-of-US-Engineers/
PISA Scores Show Demography Is Destiny In Education Too—But Washington Doesn’t Want You To Know
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/101219_pisa.htm
Yet unlike idiots trusting their gut on complex societal and engineering issues, experts have a means of discerning when they are wrong and a means of correcting the errors.
Anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-intellectualism, and declining opportunities in the US as opposed to other immigrant destinations has diminished this desirable in-migration. The same factors that discourage native-born citizens from entering technical professions also discourage immigrants
The interesting thing is that's tons of immigrants here, especially illegal ones. I live in Arizona, ground zero for illegal immigration, and they're everywhere. But these people aren't exactly pro-intellectualism either, they're exactly the opposite. They're basically just like dumb white rednecks, except their skin's a little bit darker and they speak Spanish, and they're much more interested in starting fistfights to prove their manhood.
Basically, we're allowing in a bunch of uneducated, backwards immigrants, because businesses like having an ultra-cheap labor pool, while no longer being attractive to the highly educated and skilled immigrants who are the people you want to come to your country.
So, what are we supposed to be, great leader? Automatically submit to authority no matter what just so we can earn its favor and maybe some cash too?
You didn't get it.
There is a very important difference between being "good" and being "unique". When everyone is "unique", the term loses all meaning. It becomes a triviality. And besides, it matters little. What matters is if you're ok, good, a positive being. So what if everyone else is also ok?
That, in a nutshell, is the problem of american culture. That it isn't sufficient to be good at something, you have to be exceptional. It doesn't matter how good you are, if you aren't unique and special, you don't count. That creates a culture of opposition and hostility, because you can't accept that someone else is also good - it would devalue you.
In reality, this system of thought continually devalues you, because no matter who you are and how good you are, you will always find someone who is better at something. Subscribing to this belief is setting yourself up for disappointment.
The other mindset, the more asian one, is that it matters how good you are, and if someone else is also good, or even better, that's ok. You may strive to become as good if he's better, but it doesn't reduce your own value - you are still good.
Basically, americans consider personal value to be a relative measure - how you relate to others. If someone else is 2 points ahead of you, your value is -2. If someone else is 10 points behind you, your value is +10.
Asians (and some europeans, though the number is decreasing) see personal value is an absolute measure - how you relate to the world. If you are a 15, then you are always a 15, no matter how others score. Seeing that someone else is a 17 makes it clear that you can do better, but you are still a 15, not a -2. Likewise, seeing that everyone else is a 5 makes it clear that you are indeed very good, but your personal value isn't +10, it is still 15.
None of the systems is perfect. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages we found out about the hard way is that the relative system combined with the demand to be special and unique leads to frustration, depression and low self-esteem. Because you're putting up a goal that is impossible to reach. If the goal is to be among the top 1% in anything, then automatically 99% of the participants will fail no matter how well they do.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org