From The Washington Post, via A Glimpse of the World:

People and organizations create statistics for a purpose ” to call attention to a problem, or to argue for a policy change. Americans consume vast quantities of statistics every day. Most zip in and out of our brains, but others somehow take root in the gray matter, then move about the culture as something that everyone just “knows.”

Among such recent attention-getting statistics are 600,000, 350,000 and 70,000. These are, allegedly, the number of engineers produced in 2004 in China, India and the United States, respectively. The numbers first drew major notice when they appeared in a Fortune magazine story on July 25, 2005. The cover showed a brawny China bullying a scrawny Uncle Sam on the beach, a parody of the old Charles Atlas comic book body-building ads. “Is the U.S. a 97-Pound Weakling?” the cover asked. We’re losing our competitive edge, the article stated, citing the numbers above.

These numbers attained seemingly impeccable credibility when they were featured in a press release last October about a new report from the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy, a joint group from the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine (which, with the National Research Council, are collectively known as the National Academies). “Last year more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China,” the report stated. “In India the figure was 350,000. In America, it was about 70,000.” To dramatize the seriousness of the issue, the academies titled the 543-page report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” an allusion to Winston Churchill’s book “The Gathering Storm,” about events leading up to World War II.