In Q2 2018, Global VC Scales Tipped In Favor Of Chinese Startups Over American

China has really great wages for programming (I should know), but lacks in many quality of life factors. For example, many Chinese won’t go back once they have kids because of educatio, hukou, and pollution factors. They would have to pay a lot to get around those.

It's not if you an American.

>Any other country could also open its border to "brains" if they wanted too. The world would probably be better off if smart people (or really any one) could easily migrate to where they can be happiest.

And perhaps we could dispose of the not-so-smart left behind while at it...

Mind: my own theorising, though based on a considerable bit of research.

Monopolies, generally, tend to form around networks, most generally described as flows (material, energy, products, people, information), between nodes, with some cost function. That last isn't just the traditional capital and labour, but a larger set, generally: materials, energy, time, effluent, skill, technical knowledge, O&M, comms protocols (including language choice), access to finance, frictional losses (from hull drag to bribery), and yes, labour and capital.

I'd also add unintended consequenses, though that's a long aside.

Different locations may have favourable or unfavourable standing among various of these factors. Comparative advantage (and disadvantage).

Something like Kirchoff's law of circuit flow may apply, I'm looking into this. There's some prior art, I believe associated with Jules Dupuit.

Edward Glaser, Harvard, makes the interesting observation that cities are an exception to the Anna Karenina principle: major global cities tend to have their own individual focus of competence. This seems particularly the case for ephemeralised goods: television (centering on NYC again), cinema (Hollywood, though, via language frictions, also Bollywood), finance (NYC, though with regional centres in London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo). And of course the San Francisco Bay Area for software, thoughthere are a few other competing centres, notably again NYC.

Glaeser also notes that diverse cities with non-monolithic industries and corporate footprints, tend to maximise diversity -- hecontrasts NYC's garment industry with the company towns of Ford's Detroit and Carnegie's Pittsburgh.

(The bulk material, energy, effluent, and labour requirements of early-20th century auto and steel production are other aspects he fails to dwell on, to his loss.)

But there are also things ccities need to get right: a baseline. Size. Food and water supply. Waste removal, public health, and crime prevention. Transport and tradee. Comms. Quality of life. Fail in these, and aa city wwill decline (though economic failure seems the more apparent proximate cause).

For intellectual and creative activities, opportunity, freedom, removal of barriers & hassles, and lack of oppression, seem key. The mid-20th century transatlantic flow, in both directions, of European Jews west, and American Blacks east, is a particularly inteeresting case: a given location can simultaneously attract and repell.

There are other dynamics: Dutch Disease, Baumal's Cost Disease, Gresham's Law (particularly applicable to brain drain), probably Jevons and Leibig's law.

But getting to your assertion, simply opening borders is far from sufficient.

I live in a third-world country and every single ms/phd I have met were nothing but incompetent.

Edit: I don't know why you are downvoting this but in this country most degrees are bought with money and the ones earned without bribery are earned in an environment where expectations from students are a lot lower than, say, in US.

The dilution of current stakeholders is intentional. I believe it was required by Chinese authorities (my speculation).

I've been following Ant / Alipay with curiosity ever since Jack Ma stole it from Softbank and Yahoo (along with the rest of Alibaba shareholders). There have been a lot of bizarre things done with the company over time. Jack Ma for example gave himself the large majority share of ownership in the spun off entity, and then proceeded to voluntarily debase his ownership dramatically with no compensation. And now, having screwed Alibaba over with the Ant Financial spin out, Alibaba was recently forced by Jack Ma to buy a chunk of Ant again (33% of it).

My guess on some of these choices, is that it's about nationalism (taking Ant away from foreign owners of Alibaba) and the requirement by Chinese authorities that Jack Ma not have too much power (and that Ant's ownership not be so concentrated in general). If he had held onto the stolen position in Ant Financial + his stake in Alibaba, he'd be closing in on the world's richest person title (~$100b in Ant, ~$30b in Alibaba + cash). That's a spotlight you do not want right now if you're under Xi. I'm certain the Chinese authorities do not want one person owning the majority control of something like Ant Financial, given its size and importance to the economy. There's no other rational reason for Ma to have voluntarily given up so much ownership in Ant, he's shrinking himself as a target (plausibly he was given no choice; I suspect it was always the plan from the moment Ant was taken from Alibaba).

Or put it simply: Ant may end up being worth several hundred billion dollars. Imagine Jack Ma owning 2/3 of something worth $400 billion. Now picture the target on his back, that would go along with such power and control over the Chinese economy. It'd be Jack Ma vs Xi, and Jack Ma would lose; a very dangerous game to play if you're a simple civilian. Better to stay smaller and get to continue doing what you want to do (operate Alibaba and Ant), by giving up some power, ownership, and not being in any way perceived as a meaningful threat to the authorities and their absolute control.

What surprised me was the proliferation of Alipay in premium outlets near touristy areas in SF.

Basically overnight. Reason? 1. Alibaba and Tencent basically paying cash for people using their system; 2. POS terminal charges for them are near nil in comparison to rapacious rents Visa/MC processing banks were demanding just a year ago.

American wages are overall flat for 40 years.

Totally agree: once chosen by the Communist Party, a company is likely to enjoy state-sanctioned monopoly status. Not only will they have access to the entire population, the population may have no access to any other service provider in the same sector.

It is true that the development in China is very unbalanced, and habits of different groups of people varies a lot. There are also abundant number of tech products targeting each group of people. For example, Taobao has been very popular in large cities for many years, you'd think they've saturated online shopping market. A new startup Pinduoduo launched in 2015, targeting online shopping market in smaller cities and countrysides, managed to acquire hundreds of millions of users there, and they just filed for IPO a few days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675118

All of the $18B transaction was handled by Ant Financial.