Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

China's goals for pushing electric vehicles very hard are multi-faceted and strongly aligned with their long-term national strategies:

* Reducing their dependence on oil, one of few strategic resources which they do not possess in sufficient quantity and is subject, in large part, to the inclinations of foreign entities. Advanced electronics is another such resource on which they are also investing heavily to address the dependence.

* Building up technical expertise by accumulating experience in designing and scaling up production of affordable electric vehicles for the masses. (Unlike ICE vehicles, this is an area where no one has a huge lead.) It is clear that EVs are the future. The size of global automative industry is in the trillions and can provide jobs for a huge number of people.

* Improving urban air quality especially in tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai to address the concern of talent who they try to attract (and attract back) from abroad as well as to address people’s demand and to reduce long-term public healthcare expenses.

* Helping with global warming which may affect cities like Shanghai in the future. But this is possibly not a primary goal. As another commenter mentions, other approaches like carbon tax could be more effective.

Governments in several developed nations should at least be concerned that, if they invest insufficiently in EVs, the issue of unemployment and underemployment in traditional manufacturing hubs could become more severe than it is now.

Yup, it's too bad that politicians in the US open purse strings when you say "national security depends on producing a leading fighter plane", vs "national security depends on an infrastructure for energy independence and ecological stability". China is basically investing in the second which yields nice secondary and tertiary economic benefits while the US builds a next-gen fighter with much weaker secondary economic benefits.

Right. How come we don't learn anything from the same policy that resulted in failures such as ARPANET and GPS.

It isn't the same policy anymore and it borders on dishonest to claim that it is.

The investment is no longer substantial in public R&D. Instead, it gets funnelled to investors who don't explore beyond the minimum.

> The investment is no longer substantial in public R&D.

The US is spending over half a trillion dollars per year on R&D total, and the Federal Government is spending $113 billion - every year - on R&D. How is that not substantial exactly? A trillion plus dollars every ten years is a lot of R&D.

The US total spending on R&D as a share of GDP is about 40% higher than the EU and is about 30% higher than China's current ratio.

China's total R&D spend, between public and private sectors, is around $260b to $300b. So the US Federal Government all by itself is spending ~37%-43% of what all of China combined is on R&D. That's substantial.

Currently on an inflation adjusted basis, Federal spending on R&D is as high as it was in the late 1990s. There's a fair argument to be made that it should be perhaps $50 billion higher. Federal spending on R&D nearly doubled during the Bush Administration, and then flat-lined under Obama before declining in the last few years of his Presidency. If you continue the spending expansion of the Bush years, it would add up to around $50-$60 billion more.

The problem? The US has an inbound trillion dollar budget deficit, 2/3 of which consists of entitlement costs ballooning ever higher. Business spending on R&D has massively expanded in the last 30 years, going from $60 billion up to $360+ billion or so. To an extent I'm ok with that arrangement, the government can focus on more important things like entitlements. The $113 billion per year in Federal R&D is plenty to put toward long-term projects that the private sector isn't funding.

The ability to recognize key areas to build up capability is not discernible in absolute R&D numbers (it looks like FY2018 there is about $140B planned in total R&D). The other thing about your numbers is that we need to know if there has been a purchasing power adjustment to make them comparable.

With respect to the US Gov't R&D, you don't mention that about 50% of that R&D is for defense. Personally I would argue that a bigger split to non-defense uses would yield pragmatically better "defense" of the US. Of the non-defense funding, much of it goes to "FFRDCs" Federally Funded R&D Centers. There is this game that the US plays with liberal (in the economic theory sense) firewalls where we have increasingly bought into this ideological stance that the gov't should never compete with private interests. In contrast, I would guess that China's R&D went much more directly towards creating new industries. I think China is being much more pragmatic about it's R&D expenditures than the US.

https://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-rd

Not enough red queen thinking in that line of thought.

Project CyberSyn and GLONASS show that these things were an eventuality, just a matter of who got there first.

How much did the $2 trillions invested in the Irak War paid back ? I mean beside the obvious benefit of parasiting the invaded country and suck all you can out of it ?

Because $2 trillions (more than 60 millions of man year at minimum US wage) invested in schools, research and clean energy would certainly have yielded some interesting results.

It also has the small benefit of killing less civilians, not destroying the UN trust and avoiding a few PTSD.

I agree with you generally, but I don't think you can say that the US was parasitic in Iraq. I've never heard from any credible source that the US looted the country and in fact Trump has often complained about that ("We should have taken the oil!"). That said, companies hired to develop infrastructure in Iraq, it seems, were highly parasitic toward US-supplied development and defense funds.

Because of a downvote, I'll supply a few links simply from Google's first few results for the search "kkr iraq wasted money". Btw I was thinking of companies such a KKR and Halliburton.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/much-of-60b-from-us-to-rebuild-...

https://www.wired.com/2013/03/iraq-waste/

For the record, I was opposed to the war in Iraq, and am also in opposition to Trump. I wouldn't usually mention political leanings on HN, but it seems relevant here.

I don't understand the downvote. That's a polite and constructive comment.

I don't mean the US looted the country, but the reconstruction brings a lot of gigs that the US are distributing to whomever they want.

At that time the US was in SOW mode. For the past 15 years it has been in REAP mode.

At least, many of us -feel- we were reaped.

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