Also, China has a branding problem and it is only going to get worse. They can make short term progress but it takes a long time to build a great brand.
the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule.
American engines of the same vintage probably would have been used if they were available for a similar price.
Imagine the dilemma: you are a nuclear physicist and Lenin says that atoms are indivisible. What do you do? (This really happened)
I'm not an expert in soviet history but I feel like their efforts around science and technology were economically unsustainable and almost all of them were directly or tangentially related to the military. I don't remember the soviets exporting consumer goods to the west.
Academic freedom isn't the only freedom that scientists and engineers care about.
I don't doubt that china can spend a ton of money, trap its engineers/scientists and use its media machine to try to keep its population focused on nationalism. I just think that if that didn't work for the Soviets it wont work for China. That said china's current system will probably work great right until it doesn't. Idk I'm just some person on a computer though....
Take this thread for example: "the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule"
This truism that China "can't innovate" because they live under an authoritarian government is very commonly believed on HN, but it's nothing more than an opinion. However, if you were to suggest to these same people that China is a poor source for sourcing immigrants, because <some unique characteristic of China>, the logical parts of their brains would fire into action and point out how "wrong" that statement is, for obvious reasons.
A lot of people, including people on HN, passionately believe things that are absolutely contradictory, and they vote accordingly.
The GDR did.
It could be possible to maintain lower level of life comfort while keeping the "academic part" competitive, if the world outside USSR wouldn't demonstrate that a better life is possible. So, I think for some time USSR could maintain the lead, which it did, but then it wasn't enough.
China has tremendous advantage in number of people - 4x compared to USSR - and way better economical system, but disadvantage in scientific schools traditions (which it tries - up to a point - to improve) and similar problems with freedoms. Improving scientific level takes time and may lead to conflicts with societal limitations. China may have some years - or even decades - before such problems will become critical.
Yes, we sent rockets to the moon, but an average Ivan couldn't have proper plumbing in his apartment.
Those great leaps were made in things without real life value.
P.R. China on other hand, can't be bothered with "prestige project." The only thing that can bother a government official here is money. And money undoubtedly have value in everyday life... unlike moon rovers.
Human welfare is always a priority that competes with 'national interests'.
One of the reasons that the United States won the race to the moon (while definitively losing the race to space and manned space flight) was because we were the first to dump exorbitant sums of money into the hot (and extremely expensive) new kid on the computing block: integrated circuits.
Before ICs, computer parts were often hand-welded, which NASA determined was too failure-prone to reliably control the lunar lander, as such a device had to be able to handle shaking, cosmic radiation, temperature shifts, extreme G-forces from liftoff, and so on. For that same reason, the Soviets were also unable to complete a reliable lunar lander before the Americans, regardless of their past successes with spaceflight.
NASA’s immense investment in integrated circuits greatly accelerated their adoption, and as a result, computers became much faster, and much cheaper, than ever before.
The history of computing goes straight through the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which does not get nearly as much credit as it deserves.
If it wasn't for integrated circuits, the u.s. likely would not have won the race. And it's not just because I'm a chip guy.
> Very excited to see what comes from that!
I am too :)
>once SBCs can handle heavy-duty machine learning
I think that day will come sooner than you think.
Older properties in London sometimes still had outhouses into the 1960s.
As for the "the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule", that's nonsense that would have found an audience in the 1950's or so when talking about Russia, but it really is out of place in 2018 when talking about China.
China has a lot of catching up to do but this kind of reasoning is so far off-base that it makes me wonder whether or not you've given it much thought at all. The political system of a country does not magically stop people from thinking about technological problems. It's mostly a matter of degree of efficiency than it is of achieving a certain capability.
Despite the incredible amount of good the party has done for the people of china they are still an authoritarian regime. I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.
As long as the rest of the world out-innovates them they may not catch up but do not underestimate the power of over 1 billion people, especially not when a large number of them are very smart.
Have a look at China 30 years ago and China today and tell me that that authoritarian regime isn't moving forward, and relative to the rest of the world they are moving at an incredible pace.
We, the West (assuming you are in the West like I am) should count our blessings that China isn't going full-bore on a market economy and democratic system because the Chinese in such a configuration would be absolutely un-stoppable.
Catching up and innovating are different though. There is so much structure and even culture in China that will make getting ahead in tech and science very difficult.
The protected industries and closed internet incentivizes making copy cat businesses. The lack of established academic institutions hurts research. Innovation depends on individuals, and the lack of individual freedoms does make staying in china less appealing to talented individuals.
I really, really hope china can become more open and democratic. That would be an amazing win for humanity. More opportunity and freedom for more people! For a while they seemed to be on the path to doing that but with Xi staying in power indefinitely I worry that what the powerful and rich want is at odds with what would be best for the population.
"Beijing’s migrants no longer welcome as city caps population"
https://www.ft.com/content/822e982c-1b40-11e7-bcac-6d03d067f...
"How the eviction of Beijing’s migrant workers is tearing at the fabric of the city’s economy"
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/212...
few hundred million of these migrants only make $500/month in the cities.
http://www.clb.org.hk/content/migrant-workers-and-their-chil...
In the end I were always a bit scared/reluctant about the US often touted ultimate justification for democratic capitalism that it is simply more efficient -- "Cultivate freedom -- after all, in the end it's just more efficient!". What if... it isn't?
China is turning the tables on this argument quite a bit. Heavy handed government control, aggressive state-sponsored corporate espionage, citizens surveillance and strict punishment of detractors, exploitation of workers, all combined with hand-picked aspects of market economy to lubricate the system. China is designing itself as an efficient economic machine with minimal regard for personal freedom or expression.
It's still unclear whether China will be able to achieve technological parity, but it's quite probable it will overtake the US as the foremost economy this century.
That’s bad for a society. Most free market economists (before “free market” was taken over by billionaires and plutocrats trying to increase their wealth) understood that regulations (anti-trust, anti-price fixing, anti-dumping etc) were needed to give small players and workers a fair shake.
When the US emerges from this national emergency, will it restore balance to markets as it did in the 1930s and 40s in reaction to the 1920s plutocrats? To me that is totally unclear. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope Europe joins it.
China is already #1 by GDP (PPP) with ~$23 trillions [1]. US is #2 with ~$19 trillions (numbers are from 2017). So here China already overtook US.
If you look at nominal GDP, then US is #1 with ~20 trillions and China is #2 with ~14 trillions [2]. With the government and political system that US currently has it will take very short amount of time for China to close this gap as well.
Another metric that shows that China will continue having growth in near future is human capital. China's school education system is better, they have number of pretty good universities, state supports STEM. Yes, they have a lot of problems, but they have good human capital to solve them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
That's a pretty amusing claim given China is a wildly regressive Communist dictatorship and the world's most indebted nation (before they even get well-off at the median, which bodes very badly for their future). Not to mention that the people of China have few rights at all at this point, the little progress they had made has been revoked by dictator Xi. That extreme repression is going to get worse with time, dictatorships only tend to get more violent and repressive (as witnessed by Xi's million person Muslim concentration camps, one would have to assume that's just the beginning of his reign of terror). Ultimately it will break China if they don't topple the dictatorship. The system that Deng Xiaoping created that made the Chinese expansion possible, will not function under a Mao-like zero rights gulag system.
> China's school education system is better, they have number of pretty good universities, state supports STEM.
The US university system is vastly superior. The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20. China has nothing like: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, CIT, Hopkins, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, et al. China can't even match the second tier US schools. It'll take them generations to catch up in a best case scenario.
Right, and North Korea is the second best country in the world according to the research of North Korean scientists.
It broadly confirms the parent's point, though I disagree with the idea that it will take generations for China to improve.
That is true that China is a dictatorship and I am not suggesting that China's system is better than US's. Their dictatorship does not need to function as effective as US's political system, it can be pretty ineffective, yet they can surpass US and have higher GDP both PPP and nominal, and in a long run they can have higher influence in the world.
>> The system that Deng Xiaoping created that made the Chinese expansion possible, will not function under a Mao-like zero rights gulag system.
I agree, if they push too hard, they can reverse positive changes.
>>The US university system is vastly superior. The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20. China has nothing like: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale... It'll take them generations to catch up in a best case scenario.
I highly doubt that it is going to take them generations to catch up. In past ~30 years China moved out of poverty close to 1 bln people. Number of Chinese students studying abroad is growing, for example look at number of Chinese students studying in US [1], it is 350K students annually and number goes up each year. They do not need to have MIT in China, instead they can send their students to study in MIT and meanwhile invest in their own higher education system to catch up. Also, with modern technological advancements soon every major university is going to have all the classes available online for a fraction of full tuition or for free. China's school system is significantly better than US's and when online world class education becomes more affordable, China is going to have vastly more students studying in top universities than US has. We always underestimate the speed with which world changes, since it is hard for us take in account what technological advancements will take place in the future. If China's economy keeps growing, I do not think it is going to take generations for their higher education to catch up, I think it will take 5-10 years. They have one of the best school systems in the world and it is a good framework to build on.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/372900/number-of-chinese...
No that's the dumbest thing china could do. They would lose their protectionist advantages like the great firewall and currency manipulation which resulted in decade long trade surpluses. China is doing the "walmart strategy" of price dumping and killing off competitors but on a global scale. On top of that stealing IP is a very cheap way to build manufacturing capability while avoiding expensive R&D costs. Homegrown innovation is only required if they no longer have competitors.
Trump's decision to implement tariff is a very conservative strategy to even out the imbalance of protectionism between china and us but unfortunately the execution of the tariffs is terrible, he's targeting components instead of finished goods and he is also targeting allies that are not excessively abusing the trade imbalance.
This is ideology. For growth, it is the outcome that matters. Democracies can make terrible decisions (Brexit) and authoritarian regimes can make great ones. In particular, government investment is a primary driver of economic growth, and China has a fabulous track record of five year plans for transportation, manufacturing, energy, technology, etc. Note that government investment represents state allocation of capital as an alternative to markets. On other aspects such as rent seeking or productivity, it is also unclear whether democracies would be better.
On the micro scale, I agree that markets are needed for efficient allocation and on this scale China is completely capitalist. It has private property rights and free markets. On issues such as consumer protections, China's markets are more free than those in the West.
The USSR came from far behind and beat us to space. Authoritarian regimes may struggle to allocate food efficiently but they're fine at allocating scientists.
I would say that's debatable. The USSR did beat the US to orbit (and in space station technology), but it fell short getting to the Moon, launching scientific space probes, and building a space plane.
Those are arguably issues of running out of resources, to some extent, not inability to innovate. At some point you need money to turn innovative ideas into reality.
By innovating and letting private individuals to do as they please in their own self pursuits the US was able to get that money for space.
Werner Von Braun would disagree.
Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering.
Fermi and Oppenheimer were useful to the US effort but Heisenberg probably had the intellectual firepower to do that for Germany.
The REAL advances the US made were in chemical and metallurgical engineering at an industrial scale. Dealing with gaseous and liquid uranium and plutonium compounds took a lot of innovation. And the plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge were ENORMOUS. So if Germany was going to build a bomb they would have needed a massive industrial complex. Not just physicists.
Apparently Leslie Groves commissioned a public report in 1945. He deliberately put a lot of physics in it, but left out the chemical engineering. Because he regarded the latter as the key difficult steps in bomb building. And the physics was mostly known.
The tl;dr is: mostly they didn't want to build it. Then funding was cut, because the project went on too slow.
This is about as related to the comment above, as yours.
(By the way, the death toll of Mao’s cultural revolution clocks in around 50 million.)
>(By the way, the death toll of Mao’s cultural revolution clocks in around 50 million.)
The 1970s wants its news back. China isn't doing that sort of thing anymore.
*There's of course a lot more to the Holocaust than "wasting human resources". Please read this in good faith.
And yes, it’s pretty scary to think about a WWII scenario with Jewish talent on the German side...
Tolkien said Gandalf couldn’t take the ring because he would be corrupted by power and become an evil autocrat.
There are few rulers who can assume dictatoral power and not use it for ill. And once a family has autocratic power, it is difficult and bloody for the people to take power back.
Another great result is that U.S. businesses now have enormous markets in China and India in which to sell, vendors from which to buy, and more talented employees which to hire. China and India are the top two markets in the world for many products, including cell phones IIRC. Imagine the impact on the bottom line of SV companies if they went away. A smart businessperson wants other businesses to do well; they want rich, successful neighbors; otherwise, who do they sell to? Who do they hire? Who provides goods and services to them?
Yet another result is that those people are familiar with the United States and its values, and can bring them home. Wars start because political leaders can propagandize about how evil the <other people> are, which is hard to do with populations that have direct experience with each other. And the values of democracy and universal human rights (i.e., regardless of political borders) have revolutionized humanity.
And finally, due to immigrants the U.S. has become the academic center of the world. You may notice that much of the great scientific work before WWII was done in Europe, but then nationalism and ideology in Europe chased out their great scientists, who emigrated to the U.S. English become the language of science. The halls of U.S. academia have been filled with immigrants since then. If the center of knowledge and research moved someplace else, the U.S. will have lost what has really become an enormous, and really an unfair benefit. How much does SV benefit from all that research, talent, and knowledge at Stanford and Berkley?
So I want more immigration, more opportunity for more people. How absurd that people with the talent and drive to get PhDs would never have had the opportunity. If the U.S. has to build more universities, that's great.
Contrast this to past academic immigration in the 40s that you refer to, where immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities and levels of development (primarily German Jews).
I don't think that this necessarily invalidates your points, but it's worth pointing out that there are economic consequences when larger slices of the PhD candidates out there are from developing nations instead of other developed nations.
People in the U.S. have been complaining about the 'values' and 'sensibilities' of the new immigrants since Benjamin Franklin would go off about Germans. Then of course it was Irish, the Italians, etc. etc. Older generations of Central European Jewish people even complained about the Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, for most Americans, those people with the 'wrong values' and 'foreign sensibilities' are your ancestors.
Human beings have their own sensibilities as individuals, not those of some country or ethnicity - people in my own family don't even share those things. I'm sure the parent would not want to be told what they will think and what they will do based on where they were born; that they can't determine their own character; it's absurd. And the truth is that when you give them liberty and opportunity, they thrive and share those same universal values. The track record is undeniable.
So please let's not make the same mistake again. The sensibilities of 1930s Germany? Italy? Egads. Though I guess they also discriminated based on nationalism and ethnicity.
It's a happy, wonderful thing: Let's believe in people, give them freedom and opportunity, and everyone thrives.
Or maybe the sensibilities of early 20th century Europe, which was friendlier towards socialist, pro-labor policies than both modern India and China (people tend to forget that the SPD existed before Hitler).
I know it's a hot-button issue, but I'm not anti-immigration and you're preaching at the wrong person. I will strongly disagree with your somewhat extreme belief that sensibilities are purely individual; having lived two separate countries, with two separate languages and cultures, it's a bit quixotic to claim that cultural and other environmental factors are irrelevant, and cultural universals are notoriously difficult to pin down.
These are the sensibilities that led to the two worst wars in world history, that gave birth to both Nazism (and other fascists) and Bolshevik totalitarian Communism, that produced millions of people (in Germany, Russia, Eastern European countries, France, and more) who participated in or stood by while tens of millions were murdered in German-controlled territory and were starved in Ukraine?
All those people were the products of the 'sensibilities' of early 20th century Europe. By the standards of some, the U.S. should never have let any emigrate.
> I can't believe what I've read in this sub-thread.
Human naturally follow the norms around them. It's how they choose their clothes, their music, their phones, and unfortunately, their politics. If they see other people saying these things, they will think it's acceptable; if they see lots of other people saying them, they will think it's the norm and join in.
> Thanks for sticking up for liberty and opportunity
First, I want to make clear that I'm nothing special. Second, I'm going to be an a-hole for a moment and quote a line from a song I heard from a frustrated advocate:
It's nice that you listen; it would be nicer if you joined in.
It's critical that everyone speak up. Imagine that nobody responded in this thread; think of the impression that would leave for readers - these prejudices are an unchallenged, widespread belief. Look at what it means for just one person to speak up. Now imagine two, or three. It's like bullying; one person speaking up can change things. Two do even more, and provide even more inspiration to the third and fourth and fifth people. It takes some nerve and courage for me, but never let these things pass; speak up; in social situations it can be tricky, but find polite ways to speak up. I have the privilege of safety; I'm not going to let some social pressure and natural human herd mentality stop me while people are suffering; people have suffered far more for liberty than that! People worry that there's nothing they can do, but in fact every single voice counts.
I will retort, however, that we Americans should not take our technological dominance for granted, just as a precious generation of carmakers and related industries had to learn what happens when foreign competitors (especially with government support) eat up domestic markets that companies like Ford and GM thought belonged to them forever.
I’m not suggesting that in 20 years Americans will do all their social networking on RenRen or shopping on Alibaba, but there are many, many high tech companies most people have never heard of, churning out profits and paying the taxes that support our society. The more talented, US-educated non-citizens we turn away after graduation, the harder it is for domestic high tech firms to form and hire.
And another thing to note: just because the rest of the world is getting wealthier doesn’t mean they’ll share our values. The biggest geopolitical fucky-wucky of the post-Cold War era was the assumption that Chinese people would demand more freedoms like we have in the West as their living standards approach ours.
China owns A LOT of Hollywood. How many big budget films these days criticize China or make them the bad guys? I grew up watching films that stamped “Russian” and “villain” as inseparable qualities in my impressionable, young American mind - at least until 9/11 happened and the Russians and Arabs changed jerseys.
The economic development of China has been nothing short of a miracle for the hundreds of millions of poor farmers lifted out of extreme poverty, but at what cost to us?
The reaction of a society to a forced drug epedemic will create 2nd and 3rd order effects (like a closed society) that are very easy to criticize today by people who are unaware of one of the largest poisonings in modern history (done by Roosevelts and Forbes family) ...but I digress.
Most damning of all, Mao's bad economic policies directly killed more than 35 million people, mostly through starvation. He killed more people than Stalin or Hitler.
But the CCP does not discuss these much. It's harder to accept that another 30 years of humiliation (from 1949 to 1979) was the leadership of China shooting itself in the foot.
Remember that second and third order effects are difficult to measure. EVERYTHING is first, second, third etc order effect of something that happened in the past. China's current growth can only occur in the post WW2 US world order that allows all nations to lift themselves out of poverty through trade.
For other readers: parent account is 10 months old with only 1 other comment. This is an indication of a 50 cent army member or at least someone who has been influenced by CCP propaganda, which has grains of truth but systematically exaggerates the influence of certain things.
It is though an interesting question to what China would be like if the Opium Wars never happened.
Many historians believe reversal of this treaty caused Pearl Harbor and started WW2.
Quite embarassing for the Nobel Prize winning Roosevelts indeed.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?290682-1/the-imperial-cruise
Most people don't know history, so it's easy to sweep under the rug.
I agree that great power horse trading before and after WW1 has caused a lot of issues. A rules based world order is an improvement on that. I wish USA followed the rules and did not invade nations such as Iraq.
I forgot to mention relative GDP is a bad measure. Absolute GDP (on a log scale) is a much better measure. The relative GDP graph will falsely make it look like India and China declined far worse than they did around 200 years ago. The reason is the industrial revolutions, which separated population size from a nation's GDP (at least until recent globalization). One nation growing due to industrial revolution by itself does not make a stagnating non industrial economy weaker in absolute terms.
I think a large fraction of that relative decline would have happened even if there was not an absolute decline due to misdeeds of certain British and American people in the 1800s.
Industrial revolution works even better if all prevailing exporters all of a sudden fall off a cliff.
"Mean reversion", word of the century.
Interesting bonus fact for economic historians, in 1890, 30% of Britain's GDP was illegal opium smuggling to China.
Would be interesting to see the numbers for the USA (by some accounts, the biggest exporter by that point)...
Courtesy of Aaron Swartz: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3112527
The boundaries of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are "arbitrary [and] invisible" to some extent, and obviously drawn by the powerful. But "the current set of lines are arbitrary and clearly not the only possible solution" does not imply that "no lines is a better solution"; indeed, the latter has only been empirically true when there are preexisting strong and stable force(s) which perform enough of the function of explicit admission criteria to render the latter unnecessary. In real life, you find formerly-exceptional institutions which quickly and irreversibly declined to a lower level after switching to the open admissions policy that your phrasing advocates for (consider the City College of New York in the 30s-60s vs. afterward).
Instead, the most impressive results in both hiring and immigration policy have combined race/nation-blindness with a distinct lack of blindness to other criteria which really do matter. You cannot do the latter (and perhaps more importantly, properly incentivize cultivation of the relevant personal and institutional qualities across the world) without maintaining some "arbitrary, invisible" lines across at least a multi-decade timescale.
So, more immigration and education of foreign students? I'm totally fine with that, for both national and universalist reasons. (This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. None of the 'frenemy' complications we have with China; I WANT Indians to 'steal' more of our tech!) But only on the right terms, which are not being offered by anyone using the language you're currently using in the second half of your first sentence. I suggest that you explicitly distance yourself from those people if you want the rest of your comment to be heeded by anyone outside your tribe.
India has only become a natural US ally fairly recently... And largely due to the 'frenemy' status that the US has with China. (Which in itself is a consequence of the 'frenemy' status that the USSR had with China... It's turtles all the way down.)
Through much of the Cold War, US-India relationships were very, very cool. Instead, they had good relations with Russia, while the US had good relations with Pakistan.
There's nothing 'natural' about nation-state alignment. It's all political, and politics is capricious.
However, I claim that it can be expected to be sufficiently true for the next several decades, to the point that continued rapid development of India should not only be something the US doesn't have a problem with, it should be an explicit strategic goal of 21st century US foreign policy. It's not every day that self-interest and humanitarianism align so well on a matter of such importance; it would be a pity if the opportunity was not taken.
What has made the past 50 years so peaceful (amongst the big powers, at least) is that nations that share values have aligned. France and Germany and the US and Australia share a philosophy of governance, not just a short term realpolitik goal. (Of course sharing a language helps too: Canada, UK, US, Aus, NZ are tight for that reason in good part)
But I think the emphasis on values is unfortunately not true. The parent overlooks all the right-wing dictatorships that the U.S. allied with, from Indonesia under Suharto to Iran (under the Shah) to Iraq under Saddam Hussein (when Iran turned against the US) in the 1980s to Chile under Pinochet to the junta in Greece to Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Mobutu in Zaire/Congo to Central American dictators to many more on every continent.
And today, right-wing dictatorships are arising among NATO allies, but I haven't heard a word about ejecting them from the alliance.
Immigration is, I believe, a human right. It's liberty - liberty to travel, to make the most of yourself, and it's opportunity. People should be free to make the most of themselves. It's also economic freedom, which generally yields more productive economies for all.
For practical reasons, mostly to prevent the economic shocks of mass migrations, it needs to be somewhat limited and controlled. But I want the poorest, most oppressed people coming to my country; they are the ones who need freedom the most - the most marginal social and economic gain. I'm completely confident that they and their children will thrive and make my country better. And for practical and moral reasons, I'd like more diversity; the sooner we can do away with the dominance of any ethnic group, the sooner we can be rid of their BS bigotry, which is a drain on us all. (Imagine, for a moment, the world without bigots - so many problems solved.)
A corollary is that you should be allowed to join organizations that want you.
But entry to any organization, regardless of whether they want you or not? In a world where Google has to hire everyone who applies, or Stanford has to admit everyone, or families have to house and feed anyone who shows up at their doorstep even when they don't want to, you no longer have a Google or a Stanford or a family functioning anywhere close to its current level. "Entry to anywhere as a human right" is an idea which may be initially attractive due to its simplicity, but the only people I know who stick with it after further thought appear more interested in harming groups of people they don't like than trying to lift up everyone.
And as a practical matter, for all of its flaws, the US has nevertheless done more than any other country over the last 7 decades to enforce a right of exit across most of the globe. A more diverse and stronger US would be an improvement, yes, and I'm pretty sure Canada/Australia-style immigration policy will get us there. But there are ways to become more diverse and weaker, too; and importantly, in that world, bigotry is even further from being solved, because the probable leading superpower is a more bigoted, monoracial China. (In contrast, when the City College of New York ceased to be a top-tier institution, the damage was fortunately limited to just itself; other top universities had ended anti-Jewish admissions practices some years earlier.) You seem completely blind to this danger.
It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions?
Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab?
Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function.
We should all care about other humans in this world.
(That said, not all governments care about other humans, and I tend to agree with crchang below.)
Not that I'm arguing against immigration reform, though. Just playing devil's advocate.
No, I don’t want to “deprive” other countries of the education their people get here. I work in higher education. I believe in the transformative power of education for everybody. But the American immigration system leaves talent on the table when people who really do want to stay in America are not given the option of a US green card stapled to their US diploma.
So you end up only learning how to reverse engineer production processes - which takes longer without the context, and don't build the skills needed to create the technologies in the first place.
It's like being handed the answers to your calculus class then being asked to move on. It doesn't help.
One of the lies we were told was that only manufacturing and other low-value-add activities would be going offshore, all the high-pay and -prestige design work would be staying in the West.
But Japan showed in the 80s and 90s that once a country has achieved a level of manufacturing, design comes naturally and quality comes naturally, and the hollowing out of the West shows that once you lose manufacturing, your design capabilities stagnate. And now the West is squandering what little it has left making the same mistake with China.
We even say it on this site often enough, ideas are cheap, executing is hard. Manufacturing is executing.
I've seen this trope repeated here, and it needs to die (IMO). Where's the evidence for this assertion?
The soviet union with it's command economy saw plenty of innovation coming out of its design bureaus (weaponry, rocketry, aerospace engineering). Present-day China seems less authoritarian than cold-war USSR, but I could be wrong.
It's called open source.
Yes, most startups aren't releasing all their code or anything, but there is a huge culture of open source development tools and software.
I think this open source culture, where lots of stuff is available easily and for free, is a big reason why the software industry has been so successful, and why places like SF have been so successful. (IE, SF job hopping, and "stealing"/poaching engineering talent, so that knowledge transfers).
Sure you can, as long as you have the people, resources and the infrastructure.
> Also, China has a branding problem and it is only going to get worse.
So did every country. When we were starting out as a nation, we stole IP from britain and we were known as the nation of the shoddy. Believe it or not, germany was once known as a nation of terrible brands and shoddy products. So was japan. Ask your grandparents. "Made in japan" was equivalent to junk in our grandparents time. The same with korea. It's only within the past 20 years that korea shed the "junk" image with Samsung, LG, etc.
Also, for most of history, "made in china" was considered high quality. That's why we have terms like "fine china". Until the opium wars and the collapse of china, china was renown for quality goods.
History has shown that countries move from shoddy manufacturing reputation to quality reputation. Don't really see why china would be the exception to the rule.
I too have worked in China, and there is nothing sad about fighting and investing heavily to catch your competition. If the competition isn't careful, they'll get blindsided just like auto companies were by similar looking Japanese manufacturing investments in the 80s. Japan used to have a reputation for really low-quality manufacturing.
Name one thing we have adopted from China in terms of manufacturing principles/philosophy.
Saying that China is what Japan was in the 80's is totally absurd and impossible to reason with. Not to mention, immense difference in Japanese and Chinese culture.
Similar story taking place in China, just 30 years later (following the cultural revolution). From 1980 to 2010 China went from 33% agricultural to <10%.[1] Now you're seeing deep investments in education, software, high tech manufacturing, science. In 20 years, it will be normal to see Chinese brands leading the market in some areas the way Toyota, Honda, Sony and Panasonic did in the 90s and 2000s (and still now in some areas).
>Name one thing we have adopted from China in terms of manufacturing principles/philosophy.
I don't know who we are in this conversation, but from my point of view, there seems to be some kind of hegemonic-cultural war going on in the JAPAC region. I have no stake in the fight, so arguments stemming from the point of view of cultural superiority will fall on deaf ears.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Japan#Fact...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_...
edit: A side note is that Japan in the 80s was exporting their highest quality goods to the US while leaving lower-mid quality goods for the domestic market, this is also contributed to Japan's good brand growth internationally.
Could you explain your reasoning?
Another example is Tesla. They will and in the past have throw billions of dollars to build a solid manufacturing lines, suppliers and personnel; but you can see the challenge today when theyre trying to ramp up.
On small scale, you can buy time with money; but on a large scale, that transaction often becomes difficult or simply impossible.
Okay, all that sounds logical, but they're not building a fab from scratch here. They already have (IIRC) 30 operational fabs in China. If you said this in 1999 or 2000 when China had no fabs you could have had a point - but they would have proven you wrong because they did precisely what you said they couldn't do by throwing money at the problem.
>Another example is Tesla. They will and in the past have throw billions of dollars to build a solid manufacturing lines, suppliers and personnel; but you can see the challenge today when theyre trying to ramp up.
Tesla had never built a single car before they got started, I do not think its a comparable example.