Alex Tabarrok:

I have argued that there are on the order of just 164 thousand very high-IQ workers in the United States. How do we get more? Ian Calaway on the job market from Stanford has an interesting paper arguing that early math mentors can be a force multiplierfor students with superior math abilities. Calaway estimates that having a math mentor at a school, someone who runs a math club and organizes entry into top math competitions, increases the number of students earning PhDs and pursing careers as scientists and professors. Not every school has such a math mentor but Calaway estimates (after taking into account underlying abilities, he’s not naive) that over 27 years, math mentors identified 9,092 American Math Competitions students (the cream of the crop) but there were 11,168 missing students of very high ability.

These 11,168 additional students represent the missing exceptional math talents who would have participated in the AMC and been identified as exceptional if they had access to a mentor…these mentors would have increased the number of these students attending selective universities (3,017 students), majoring in STEM (3,465 students), earning PhDs (1,652 students), and pursuing careers as scientists and professors (1,850 students) during this twenty-seven year period.

“and that “executing to a Chinese standard is now going to be the most important priority”.