Slightly off topic, but Finland leads the world in junior and high-school education. They have only one universities in the top 300 of the Shanghai rankings and nothing indicates that the advantage Finish students have leaving high school gives them any advantage at University. One needs to be careful about idolizing the Finish school system. While they are no doubt awesome at producing students that can do really well on PISA tests, they don't seem to be producing students who can go on to achieving academic excellence in a post-high school setting.
The purpose of education is not to enable schools to score highly on the Shanghai rankings - it's to enable students to develop the ability to think critically and independently, understand the world they live in, and learn to sustain themselves within it.
The focus on arbitrary aggregate rankings and making "us" more "competitive" is a dangerous distraction.
The Shanghai ranking doesn't put much weight on student performance.
"The ranking compares 1200 higher education institutions worldwide according to a formula that took into account alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (10 percent), staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (20 percent), highly-cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (20 percent), articles published in the journals Nature and Science (20 percent), the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index (20 percent) and the per capita academic performance (on the indicators above) of an institution (10 percent)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Unive...
However, nice bit of selective statistics to only use the top 300 in your calculation. The shanghai list actually has 500 universities listed, which bumps the number of Finnish universities to 5. So on a per capita basis Finland comes out ahead of USA!*
Not exactly building factories. The facility where they're doing the Karmas has existed for half a century, surviving on whatever specialty manufacturing it has been able to find (e.g mostly Porsches for the last 15 years or so, I think some other sportscars before that). In the news once a year with gloomy reports about how they might lose their current contracts in a couple of years, and don't have anything else lined up yet.
So not exactly a case of a ballsy decision from Fisker to build a new production plant in that corner of the world, but rather having exactly the right kind of factory be out of work right at the time Fisker needed it.
Don't look to China, look to Finland!