China is catching up to the USA, while Japan is being left behind
lemire.me
lemire.me
I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.
I'll quote this article in the future!
In his own words: "Does any of it matter? Many people believe, or assume, that great output in terms of research articles should cause economic prosperity and innovation. I have post entitled Does academic research cause economic growth? that makes the contrary point. That is, though China is catching up in terms of scientific output, this may be a consequence of their prosperity: they can now afford to have their very best minds work on producing research articles. It is much easier for rich countries to fund people so that they can publish in Nature. So being rich will allow you to catch up. But Japan shows that you can be a very rich country and choose not to produce many great research articles. In the least, this establishes that you do not need to produce many great research articles to be prosperous."
While I agree with democracy as a whole, I think
0. A thorough understanding of the state of China is needed. In order for democracy to actually work, you need a population that is educated enough to make the right choices for the country. You also need to fight corruption first, or else people will take advantage of the democratic system. In the past 40 years there have been a lot of much higher priority things to the average Chinese citizen than having a fully democratic system. The last thing people want is another period of socioeconomic upheaval and chaos. Stability is the first priority of many. Democracy will come with time and I'm sure everyone wants it, but most people don't want to lose well-being on the road to get there.
1. Democracy isn't the biggest driver of scientific advancement. It's kind of irrelevant. Rather, you need:
- capitalism to distribute money to things that people want (China has a booming VC and startup ecosystem now)
- government funding for longer-term scientific research that has not yet identified a business model, and a system to distribute that funding to people that are worthy of it (funding is there in China; the distribution system needs improvement)
- education that trains the individual to self-learn and nurtures self-exploration rather than rote memorization (work is needed here in China and throughout Asia); education should encourage taking side projects and research seriously, if not more seriously, than classes
- good universities with skilled faculty (there are a few world-class institutions in China, but far too few good universities for China's population -- hence the competition)
Another issue is what defines progress. We have defined it thus far as GDP. But in the future we need new methods of defining progress. The world cannot just grow indefinitely, and we are hitting environmental and resource constraints in a number of ways already.
It is not obvious to me that this is the case.
> and I'm sure everyone wants it
Really? I doubt if Xi Jinping does.
He is the man, and he has the vote.
None of the items you've listed do it alone, but taken together and with the cultural idealisation of innovating and bringing to market a novel idea or product, we have been able to create the world as we know it today.
https://www.amazon.com/Bourgeois-Dignity-Economics-Explain-M...
I'm not sure what this means, given that the U.S. was uneducated and had massive, widespread corruption throughout the 19th century...but I've never heard anyone put forward the argument that democracy didn't work for the first 150 years of the U.S.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the two most democratic countries, USA (at least at local level) and Switzerland are also among the most successful ones.
The "they have to wait until they are ready" argument was always a red herring regarding democracy. It's like with any other skill, you don't learn by waiting until you're ready to become an expert, you learn by doing.
So I often just say I dont know, if I was asked to comment on anything. Because I really did not know much to form a valid point.
I advise you to do the same.
At the end of the day we don't need that much tech to have a great civilization and 'how to do it' is not rocket science.
Eating shellfish, having a glass of wine with a beautiful woman on the cost of the Med recently made me realize that someone could have had this very nice pleasure 2000 years ago.
If people act intelligently and responsibly both in life, in work and in governance, there's no reason any country can't be fairly advanced.
Especially since the dawn of the industrial revolution - we have surpluses of almost everything.
Especially since mass information/media the knowledge for how to do this is widespread.
If individual actors act intelligently then they can make generally a high standard of living for themselves in whatever region.
For about 100 years now most people have not had to work on farms to establish the food base, and are freed up to do all sorts of other things, so it's a matter how how to efficiently deploy them.
The beauty and serenity of perfect weather, a perfect taste, a perfect smile - the moment. This is civilization, just not so much in industrial or even hard intellectual terms.
Healthcare? Education?
At what point does the economy serve the people instead of people serving the economy?
Not sure if you meant that literally but I've been to some pretty poor places in China and they do have refrigerators...
In an example related to the parent, China's cold chains while rapidly improving are well behind what would be acceptable in the developed world:
> While between 85 percent and 100 percent of fruit and vegetables sold in the U.S. are transported in refrigerated conditions, in China, only 20 percent of those perishables are shipped in such a manner, resulting in a high spoilage rate of up to 40 percent. In the U.S., that rate is closer to 5 percent.
http://www.livingstonintl.com/freight-transportation-updates...
US fish buying: Buy a pleasant-looking filet off a bed of ice, get it into refrigeration asap
China fish buying: Bring a plastic bag, put live fish in bag of water, transfer to a short-term tank at home. It's actually superior, you can't get any fresher than "I killed this fish 5 seconds ago".
And then there's all the salted food around spring festival. Plain cabbage has never been so appealing.
One thing that strikes me about China is their attitude towards foreign politics - They still want the world to consider them as a "developing country". Sure, it's a gigantic country, both in land and population - There are still many challenges to overcome, but this is now a country with enormous cash reserves, who own a significant lump of US debt, and making truly gigantic strides on all levels of society.
- Myth: China is developed. Truth: Start in Shanghai Huangpu (very rich neighborhood, in a very rich city). Take a subway a few stops in any direction. When you come out, you are surrounded by dilapidated communist blocks and electric bikees. Take another ride a few more stops, you are surrounded in villages that are right out of middle ages (shoddy huts with shared toilets). This is the same for any of the rich city in China. 90% of people in China live in middle ages. 9.99999% of people live in 1950s. 0.00001% of people live very richly.
- Myth: Chinese citizens saves and are rich. Truth: most rich people have left China already. The remaining middle class ($1000/month, many of my Chinese friends) are able to buy into the massive inflated housing with savings from parents. The savings, borrowed money from relatives, credit card debts are now stuck in real estate. My friends all have (fake) gucci, LV, brand name products. They take out loans to afford conspicuous lifestyle. These things are all for show. Some of them are paying all of their salaries into the mortgage payment every month!
- Myth: Chinese economy is doing fine. Truth: Many of my banker friends (expats and locals) know that it's all propped up by debts that will collapse any day now. There's a massive inflation happening everywhere, from food to housing to foreign products. It's harder to harder to get money out of China (I'm helping some with bitcoins). Most of them aren't optimistic.
- Myth: China is leading in green-tech, research, innovation, etc. Truth: tons of copy, chabuduo (good enough), cheating in classes and in business, pollution in Shanghai and Shenzhen is still cancer causing, most smart people want to go abroad.
Your analysis is harsh, however: there are still rich people left who haven’t migrated. China is all developed, developing, and undeveloped at the same time...it is a huge place after all. There is plenty of trouble on the Chinese eceonomy to work through, and the propaganda is incredulous, but they have made a lot of progress that isn’t going to go away even when the inevitable crash comes.
China could go through a decade or two of Japanese-style stagnation if they refuse to reform and allow the market to work out bad economic blood with crashes and failures. They could also go the other way, focus on real growth and start avoiding white elephants. Let’s see.
Ya, there will be a bunch of losers when things go south, but wealth has been so concentrated that the number of losers will also be. Ya, it will be bad, but totally recoverable as most of what is lost was never really gained in the first place.
Xi isn’t really a dictator yet, he is the most powerful leader since Jiang Zemin, which is saying he is just stronger than Hu jintao. People forget that this isn’t much of a change, that the Hu era was just an exception.
I can't think of anyone I know that did not want to buy a house. It's a prerequisite for getting married. It's a prerequisite for having your kids get married. It's an investment vehicle. It's a store of value. It's all everyone talks about. Besides, rents have been going up everywhere.
> but wealth has been so concentrated that the number of losers will also be
These would-be losers are communist party bosses. I'm sure the peasants will feel the pain, not the bosses
> Xi isn’t really a dictator yet
https://qz.com/1112527/chinas-19th-party-congress-how-xi-jin...
https://www.economist.com/news/china/21590499-chinas-preside...
You are right that it will depend on if they take their losses themselves or force the people to take it. But they really can’t handle that much worker unrest, I’m sure they’ll eat it, or better yet, have a corruption campaign and get their political enemies to take most of the losses (then it will depend on who has power when the bubble pops).
A core tenet for a successful dictator is the power and willingness to replace anyone that acts against your interest with someone from a large pool of replacements. A dictatorship also only thrive when most people are relatively uneducated so that they can't challenge you and that most people do not have enough resources to afford dissidence.
If you want to learn more about the topic "The Dictators Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" is highly recommended.
Most of what you've written are arguments for China to be on the up-and-up in the next 10-20 years, not in decline as you seem to think (undeveloped parts = still has areas for future growth).
Others are just on par with the situation in the West (credit debt, propped up etc).
>(I have a good hunch most people that comment favorabily on China here, have never been)
Which doesn't say much. There are tons of people who don't understand anything about their own society despite having been born and raised there (which entails more familiarity than merely living in some place for some years).
And Chinese products first have to show care for craftsmanship to command these prices, which is something I haven't seen so much until now. India is probably worse.
That's not the point though.
It's that if they have the same quality AND high wages, then they would be like a 1.6 billion strong USA.
It's not just about market competition -- and even if it was, their huge domestic market (further developed to Japan levels as you expect it to) would be a huge advantage in itself.
>And Chinese products first have to show care for craftsmanship to command these prices, which is something I haven't seen so much until now.
Craftmanship? The kind of stuff they can make, few if any factories in the US can. There's a reason almost all high end stuff is made in China as well (from Apple and Armani, to BMW parts). If they make and sell cheap stuff too is not because they can't make the good stuff, it's because that sells.
(And of course in the level of high artistry and craftmanship China as a culture, has had extreme global masters for millennia, in painting, sculpture, woodwork, and tons of other arts. Of course they don't compete with that -- which are very low yield -- but with mass products for the industrial age).
Yeah, they're cheap. If you've ever worked with Chinese suppliers unless you give them a lot of crap they will send you parts where 10-20% aren't useable. They only pay attention to quality if there's a foreign company putting lots and lots of pressure on the factory to produce to their standards.
>China as a culture, has had extreme global masters for millennia, in painting, sculpture, woodwork, and tons of other arts.
Yes, but they lost them in the last century because of some movement, where they killed artists, intellectuals, etc... They still haven't recovered from this. If you kill a whole generation of intellectuals it will take probably a few more centuries to regain that culture they lost.
Those that don't often have a very skewed viewpoint compared to those who do.
It would be like judging the entire US based on living in Silicon Valley your entire life.
This is like an Chinese international student coming to the US, reading about the opioid epidemic, obesity epidemic, the rust belt, black gang violence, out-of-wedlock birth rates, the world's highest incarceration rates, Hurricane Maria destroying Peruto Rico, mass shootings in Vegas, Flint water crisis, healthcare bankruptcy, the rise of alt-right Trump voters, 11M illegal immigrants, high P/E in the stock market, unsustainable pension obligations, social security crisis etc. and coming to the conclusion that the US is doomed. Obviously, the US has many problems but to only focus on the negatives but not the strengths is not an objective analysis.
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Regarding your anecdotes:
1) I a cousin who grew up in rural Shandong, who moved to Shanghai with nothing and live in one these neighborhoods "a few subway stops away" and drives an electric scooter. While the living standards is not as good as the city center or rich western cities, his apartment is small but clean with running water and functional toilets. His standard of living is not any worse than when my family first immigrated to Canada. To say 90% of Chinese people in Shanghai lives in squalor is absurd and shows how biased you are.
2) These anecdotes of some your rich friends are pretty meaningless. I'm sure you can find vain people in any western city including the bay area as well. I know rich Chinese families who "half" immigrated to Canada who still have plenty of assets and business in China and want their children to go back after graduating from a Canadian university.
3) Making bets like this has cost hedge funds billions of dollars: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-07/down-240-...
4) Make similar comments like this about African American achievement and you'll quickly realize how racist it is and stop. But it's suddenly okay to say the same thing about Chinese since westerners aren't socialized to understand the racism and do not feel the same amount of shame.
Bashing chinese is PC in western world, in general.
China's per capita GDP is only 8000 USD (vs 57000 for USA). So average Chinese people are still poor, and only few people are rich. But that's what is supposed to happen in a developing country undergone huge socio-economic changes.Also impoverished districts and poor people on streets can be found in pretty much any country, developed or not.
Older Chinese people (born before 1980) are mostly savers with mortgage paid off. Younger Chinese in big cities are more open to spending. Because those older people still hold majority of the existing wealth, China is a saver economy overall. That may change when younger generations start to take over. Housing is expensive and bubbly in big cities and certain regions but more affordable in smaller cities and rural areas. There is no property tax on housing in China and rent is expected to rise for many years to come. So high property cost is not as crazy as the price comparison suggests.
Chinese economy has some problems. Its debt load and housing bubble may bring major slowdown to the economy. But a recession will not be the end of China. Economic cycles should occur in China anyway. USA has experienced many financial crises and recessions and is still doing fine.
Pollution is bad in China, as in many other developing countries and in US and Europe a hundred years ago. That does not contradict its leading status in green-tech investment and research. Big problems lead to big problem-solving effort and political support.
Whereas when I started to hang around local, blue collar Chinese workers (who don't speak English or hang around expats at all), their outlooks were extremely optimistic about China's future.
It makes me wonder if this is more of a class issue. The poorer, blue collar workers will start to prosper more, but the upper-middle class will start to face difficulties.
I would also add that all my Chinese friends that stayed in China are wealthier than those that left. And of those that left, many are returning to China. But again, these are all people that are outside the expat bubble so perhaps their viewpoints would be different.
A lot of my Chinese coworkers left for the states while I was there. Something about “pollution and young kids” was their reason, not to make more money. You can make a lot of money in china, as long as you don’t mind knocking a few years off your lifespan (and just forget about it if you have kids, unless you can afford the private schools with full bubbles around them, and even then....).
Ironically that's why China will fall sooner rather than later. It's because most people aren't aware of the downfall until it's too late, because of censorship.
They have a job and are making a reasonable salary? Things are great.
There may be all sorts of looming major issues for the country, but their existence is local, not looking at national debt loads, workforce statistics, and the like.
I don't think their outlooks are particularly useful other than as a measure of consumer confidence in their little area.
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"The poorer, blue collar workers will start to prosper more, but the upper-middle class will start to face difficulties."
Why? It's a serious question. Poor, blue collar workers in China (and elsewhere) are generally that because they lack useful skills to do anything higher-paying.
Are they going to suddenly develop those skills as adults?
Is China's economy going to have big increase in it's need for unskilled labor and a decline in it's need for skilled labor? (And if so, do you expect that is somehow also going to be paired with rising economic opportunity rather than a decline and return to sweatshops?)
I don't see how any of that is likely.
No mainstream media are saying that, and anyone thinking like that is very much uninformed.
I very much agree with your view, although i believe it is a little over exaggerated. Because if you take the whole world into account, US, EU, I dont think China is in such a bad shape at all. Especially the EU i dont even know if it is fixable. China comparatively speaking has lots and lots of upside, that is why they are battling to bring those undeveloped parts to balance things out.
And it is not they are running out of tools and waiting for the bubble to burst.
Yes there are lots of things i dont like about China, but truth to be told I dont think they are going to be in decline anytime soon. I think, with the government power now all concentrated in Xi's hand and relatively stable. Their best has yet to come.
But the rest hints at real problems, actually about my comment above, France has suffered problems due to the way they tried to improve things at mass-scales (which backfired into social problems 30 years later and now people back pedal a bit).
Now if we extrapolate this to the scale of China, and the frailty/falsity of their infrastructure.. and a sensation that they mostly want to feel like a great nation on the international scene .. I could see a catastrophic implosion.
Anyway, there is a looming demographic catastrophy that nobody has mentioned: The working age population in China is due to crash in a decade or two thanks to irrational family planning policies of the past and it may already be too late to prevent it. Japan's decline coincided with their own demographic crisis and some even claim that the USSR collapsed because the Soviet society have never fully recovered from the massive population loss iN WWII. I don't see how China could get themselves out of the same fate.
Exactly that:
And by the way things go, it seems they froze in time. Nobody moves the country forward
Japan’s tech cannibalism saps Abenomics - https://www.ft.com/content/238c993c-427d-11e6-9b66-0712b3873... might need to Google it
Some other day I saw people complaining that in Japan they still use a mechanical mouse (not an optical one, the older ones)
Progress without purpose is not progress. GDP over quality of life is like measuring your success of curing HIV in a human using bleach. You’ve succeeded, but for what?
There are side effects to growth. We lose cultural practices, we lose languages, we lose neighborhoods, we lose species, we lose entire ecologies.
I actually really appreciate the conservative (well...Republican) argument that sometimes it’s worth it. Maybe we should burn some fossil fuels to help developing countries build economically, bring down mortality, be able to support larger investments, etc, in exchange for some extinctions, and the loss of some indigenous culture. I’m open to that.
But you also have to be open to the fact that sometimes it’s not worth it, and ask what does it look like if we were to try to preserve our cultural and biological heritage. This is a conservative ideal too.
And when I think about how to do that, I am drawn back to Japan over and over who solved many of these problems hundreds or thousands of years ago. Japan has already asked the question: “should we destroy all of our native ecologies and cultures in order to fuel industrial growth?” And they are one of the few countries who has taken a stance on that issue, and succeeded at preserving things America seems destined to continually destroy in its relentless path towards an industrial monoculture.
We can’t write that off as provincialism or regressiveness. We (in the U.S.) have something to learn here, and the advantage is not entirely ours.
From my own experiences living there, Japan may have a strong sense of community that shines during crises, but that connection is often only surface level. Relationships are heavily compartmentalized. You may have drinking buddies, golf friends, etc. But they aren't friends in the sense that you'll visit them outside of those activities or really open up to them to reveal your vulnerable side. If an older person loses a spouse, they often don't have anyone else for companionship.
Japan's suicide rate is still among the highest in the world and 2nd highest of rich, industrialized countries. It is the leading cause of death for women 15-34, who are amongst the longest lived in the worls.
Career satisfaction is also pretty low. The reality of work. The system is based on seniority. Hours are unecessarily long, most likely hurting produxtivity. Gaining advancement based upon merit is rare.
I think the problem arises before that, from a civilization that only respects what it can quantify.
They don't want to move forward, under the condition that Japan would still be rich and prosperous as it is/was today.
No, not anymore.
The Japanese has lost their electronics industry to US/South Korea/China. The myth of Made by Japan equals high quality is debunked by scandals that just doesn't seem to stop. And look at the crazy policies Japan had used to stimulate their economy. Don't want? No, they are more than desperate.
When you stay static, the world moves forward, you will be left behind. If US decides not to move forward, then China would happily reap all the economical outcome for the years to come, and US would become poorer and jobs would go away too. It is indeed a myth that politics can fix this. No, it cannot. Conservative thinking that they can freeze the time by voting is fantasy. Growth is a game you have to participate, it is a capitalist world, after all. However, what politics could fix, is to solve the redistribution problem, to have more people share the pie, not a handy few.
And I would agree with you if they didn't have things like long work shifts that are almost mandatory, because they're not exactly happy as is.
They don't need to focus in growth, they could focus in improving their conditions, but instead it seems they're coasting aimlessly and no one is grabbing the steering wheel.
Then the country will die -- and in due time it might be taken to be a satellite to another power.
It's not about wanting to present their current way of life (as opposed to changing customs etc). They could be doing that and be still fine.
But they've already sacrificed quality of life over GDP (working themselves to death), and now they're also dying in numbers (not enough young people).
A huge percentage of Japanese young people don't want to have sex. We may want to understand what's going on in the national psychology.
BTW isn't Japan on the cutting edge of robotics and always has been? I remember dynamism.com website like 10 years ago.
But https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japan-sex-prob...
men: "Women are scary."
women: "Men are lazy, just into porn."
That sounds all too familiar :(
Collective suicide.
All your graph shows is that China has a huge population.
Back then, everything was done in-house. The Frythe employed people like Joseph Chatt and James Black. You don't have central research like that any longer, except at Facebook/Amazon/Google/Microsoft, and that's a problem. They can sell us ads but will not come up with the next antibiotic when the present ones have become useless.
Scientific excellence is not worth very much economically if it does not trickle down into society. This didn't happen in the UK and that's why the economy is suffering.
In my field (programming languages), I can name one total paper that I liked that came from a mainland Chinese university. It stood out for that reason. A friend in another field (CS theory) complained similarly: massive amounts of shoddy work comes out of China, but nothing worth reading.
Meanwhile, China now has a spam journal called "Nature and Science," so you can tell your friends "I have 5 papers in Nature and Science."
I’m curious about the quality of published work coming out of china in ML. Has anyone who does ML research read recently a paper that came out of china that had something really useful to them in it? I think those are fairly good measures of output (a contribution found useful).
The paper I have in mind is Zhai et al's "Automatic Model Generation from Documentation for Java API Functions" presented at ICSE last year, from Nanjing University. It is arguably more of an SE paper though, and a lot of the authors are at US/Canadian universities; for all I know, she did most of the work in the US.
Still, the number of good faculty who come from China is growing; it's only a matter of time before some of them choose to start research groups back home.
China’s normal research faculty system is really messed up, more so than the American system. Special labs like Andy Yao’s are actually funded well (so no need to body shop your grad students to make ends meet), but seem to be the exception. Let’s see what happens.
It was really annoying to us because the professors would always keep their best students (especially undergrads, the good ones were better than grad students as they would go abroad and not become grad students in china) not allowing them to work for us as interns unless we had really tight guanxi with them. America is still 10 times better than china in this regards. Unless they root out the corruption, they are never going to advance beyond paper farms no matter how much money they throw at it.
Some European (Belgian?) students told me that, in their country, it was common to have an "industry-funded" Ph. D. (hence all the people I've met doing DSLs for insurance companies). I wonder to what extent their system is similar.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01852 Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification. Also known as PreLU, citation 1600+. The initialization scheme is widely adapted by a lot of following works.
Those are the most influential ones, all come from Kaiming He. He is now in FAIR, and keeps very good publication record, with works like MASK-RCNN, but that doesn't really count as purely Chinese contribution, so we skipped here.
Some recent memory: 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06211
2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01507
3. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01083
4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06993
5. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01088
Those are all good papers.
So, we had someone from another field go searching for examples of good research from mainland Chinese universities, and come up empty-handed. I think this counts as further evidence for mainland Chinese universities being paper farms. :)
And, what do you know? Kaiming He did his Ph. D. in Hong Kong, not mainland China.
Majority of authors of the papers are from China, the research is done by Chinese, mainly in mainland China, I believe they are Chinese enough, the point I want to make is obvious. Otherwise, I feel majority of the US CV papers would be disqualified because they are likely not done by locals here.
Last but not least, I was answering to the question as regards to good Chinese papers, not specifically from Chinese universities, not directly towards your question after all.
I understand you may be upset that I didn't like your answer, but I ask that you assume good faith and not accuse me (us?) of believing something we didn't say.
If u feel being accused of and it is not what u mean, I am sorry. However, your post comes with a fighting spirit, and a trollish account, that seems to designatedly trigger people, if you expect good faith, I would suggest u to improve on the use of language
"The report echoes my earlier observations: lots of new countries are become scientific powers in terms of publication output, with China leading the charge. The major claim made by the report is that developed countries continue to dominate in terms of highly cited publications."
The trend the article is talking about is China is catching up in terms of publication output. I've heard elsewhere that in Chinese universities things like tenure, promotions etc. are heavily weighted by publication output - perhaps without much respect for the research quality. I could see some fields/journals becoming echo chambers where researchers spam publications without actually making meaningful technical accomplishments. That's probably what we're seeing.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608266/the-truth-about-ch...
The fact that in many places it is measured in number of publications gave us Hindawi/Elsevier open access and OMICS spam conferences.
That said, the number of really good publications from China in Western journals has risen from almost none in 1995 to a few in 2005 and nowadays they are plentiful. India, not so much, Japan, not so much.
This is why I would never hire Indian software engineers. There are a few good ones, like in every country, but they're hard to find among a sea of terrible software engineers that went into software engineering, because everyone does, and that went to a school only teaching with rote memorization.
The biggest problem with Japanese universities is not funding (there is to much), but the old chaff with tenure.
Unfortunately old second-rate researchers has a lot of institutional power (and funding).
This is a little self congratulatory in HN, but entrepreneurship is the application of research. So you need that to "activate" research.
China is catching up not (just) because of research but also because they're applying it.
Engineering is applied research, entrepreneurship is one method of funding engineering.
China's formula has been GDP at all costs. It's an experiment in Keynesianism on meth. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. One visible result is some of the worst regional environmental destruction in human history, which could be considered a form of debt.
That's not a very bold prediction, that the truth is somewhere between the two extremes.
Can you elaborate? I just came back from Shanghai for a business trip, curious if we're seeing the same things.
How does this hurt the society? Well, now you have to take toilet paper with you wherever you go. It's a deadweight loss for the society, and China is riddled with these due to the empathy gap.
EDIT: you are probably familiar with the homeless guy, down on his luck, who visits a restaurant, doesn't buy anything, takes a huge helping of free condiments and uses the bathroom. Now imagine a society where it's not just the homeless guys acting like this.
I'm not sure I chalk up the lack of TP towards that as much as there being no expectation of offering free TP so nobody does it. For instance there are also toilets in Japan where you have to buy the TP in a vending machine but people there are exceptionally considerate. In many places in Europe you usually have to pay to use restrooms in public places too. Just a different norm.
But, getting back on track, things are different. China is 10x the size of Japan. If China's GDP per capita gets at least close to that of Japan's, they will both double the world's economy and also become 50% of it, like the US was a few decades ago. They will dwarf everyone, including the US. So there will definitely be a huge Chinese influence, world wide.
Agreed. The world rests on China's and soon also India's shoulders. They already rule the world economically and diplomatically, the next domino to fall will be cultural influence. Russia is a good demonstration of the impotence of military power alone, and hard power is looking like the US' only advantage over China.
Please try to post constructive comments. This is not Reddit.
Imagine a discussion of average tech salaries among the tech giants and someone points out they know a company with 2 people and the average salary is $350k per person. That's irrelevant and derailing.
It's also good that your point is empirically, observably false. Few non-Americans can actually match Americans in the amount of passion that goes into doubting and angrily denouncing American exceptionalism.
I'll leave you to pat yourself on the back. The downvotes don't bother me in the slightest.
Ironic.
We have all grown up in an era of unprecedented peace, and I think it's easy to take that peace for granted. But that would be unwise. When you look at history since time immemorial people constantly have disagreements on the right path forward. And the group that decides which path is taken is the most powerful group - which is often decided by force. I see no reason to believe that this has changed. But the peace? What has changed is that we've created an international stalemate thanks to nukes. Mutually assured destruction makes military enforcement of will a nonstarter.
Consider the very recent comments made by USAF General Kwast a few days ago [1]. He is not concerned about China militarizing space - that is taken as a granted. He is concerned about the militarizing space before we do. In his words: "Militaries will soon work more extensively in the space between the earth and moon. That realm is the next high ground, where nations are straining to gain a strategic advantage." It's not even a question of if there will be another great conflict but rather when will it be. Whenever it is, it's likely that this conflict -like so many before- will be decided not by man, but by the technology of man.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/10/usaf-general-steve-kwast-chi...
India vs China vs Japan vs the United States vs ...
Trillions of dollars invested into research.
"catching up" and "falling behind"
It is not a statement about "things in general" around the world.