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Comment by magicsmoke | Hacker News Reader

This is going to answer a very important question for the future. Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere, or is it something that can be replicated if you pump enough money into the right educational, institutional, and industrial structures while completely divorced from American culture. Since the fall of the USSR, the global zeitgeist has been that if you want to be a developed country, adopting American values in some form is necessary sooner or later. China is challenging this assumption and many developing countries will be watching the outcome.

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America attracts top talent from all around the world. China has a lot of domestic talent but struggles to put it to good use, and does not really have a compelling proposition for anybody coming from the outside. This I think is the biggest differentiator and unlikely to change for the time being.

American tech dominance is also predicated upon having a huge domestic market that is relatively uniform in terms of the business environment and easy to navigate. Start here and you have access to 330M potential customers. This is something that the EU/EEA is only struggling to become: it's mostly still separate national markets there. China has the same advantage America had as well, and an even larger population to start with.

America has well-oiled financial markets that are good at allocating capital. In China it's the government doing the allocation, and the results have often been abysmal, e.g. technology investment funds being used to further inflate the property bubble in disguise. However, historically, many of the biggest technological breakthroughs in the US were associated with government-funded military projects. No reason why China could not replicate this in principle.

Not sure where the "American values" fit here, it depends what you mean by that. If you meant entrepreneurial spirit and individualism then the Chinese are entrepreneurial and individualist too. If you mean liberty/freedom then these aren't only American values but more broadly the values of the European Enlightenment, and this is indeed another differentiator between China and the cultural West. Would be interesting to know what values you had in mind.

> America attracts top talent from all around the world.

The current administration seems to be trying hard to change this via travel bans etc. The one actually good idea that Trump floated in his campaign was meritocratic points based immigration ala Canada, but it seems that topic got dropped in favor of more attention drawing stunts like the border wall.

> technology investment funds being used to further inflate the property bubble in disguise

Same thing in Silicon Valley, and to a lesser extent many other US cities with good tech jobs.

> meritocratic points based immigration

this is one of the main ideas that Ted Cruz has promoted.

Like China's social credit system, but for immigrants?

No, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Express_Entry#Economic_value_v...

I was applying for PhD in CS in 2017, I changed my destination from USA to Canada specifically because of Trump. Although job prospect is way better in USA, I will never ever come to a country where they don’t treat me right.

(I am talking about government and policies. I don’t have any problem with Americans actually and gave quite a lot of American friends).

By not treating me right I am talking about for example:

1) At that time they were talking about imposing tax for graduate students. That could have had devastating effect on grad student life.

2) Right now they are talking about removing OPT.

I think it’s unsubstantiated to claim that travel bans on select Middle eastern countries have reduced talented immigration to America.

Employment based immigration has been up year on year for the past 5 years: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...

Well the worst aspects of the travel ban were reversed by the courts, but the initial version that Trump tried to pass would have meant that eg Iranians with green cards who happened to be outside the US when the ban started couldn't return to the US, which obviously would have reduced (even reversed?) talented immigration.

Also your link is meaningless because the most common way to get an employment green card is by adjusting status in the US (from eg H1-B status to green card), not by getting an immigrant visa, but that table only counts immigrant visas.

I'm very curious about collaboration in the equation. In the US we have things like github. You have open source via linux and organizations like Apache, etc. What about the role of standards bodies like the IETF or W3C and industry specific standards bodies. China has none of these.

If one reads Anna Lee Saxenians "Cultural Advantage" and the "New Argonauts", you see a lot more missing pieces that are hard to replicate and cultural.

Even in the US, Route 128 was usurped by the culture from the SF Bay Area, which has spread to Seattle, Austin and NYC, but at the end of the day these markets are all extensions of the SF Bay Area not challengers presenting a new model detached from SF Bay Area culture, money and networks. Even strong international markets like Taiwan and Israel are extensions of the SF Bay Area.

I also would not discount the fact that all tech that matters globally ultimately is written by engineers communicating in English regardless of what country the engineer is from or resides in. That goes a LONG way to establishing tech dominance in the US. China would have to de facto move all its tech even within its borders to English first if they want to usurp that. Not that English guarantees success (see England and other English speaking countries), but it's absolutely a barrier for non-english speaking countries. Every programming language that matters has keywords in English and all the best learning materials are in English. Same for all other tech and science that matters outside of programming as well. All English.

> China has none of these.

This seems like FUD. Like it or not, China has made key contributions to industry standards including 5G.

Which of those contributions are in Chinese and are controlled by China?

I didn't say China wouldn't contribute. Chinese people have and they will. Just like people from many nations. And like people from many nations, they will contribute to things that extend the dominance of western institutions. After all the ITU is based in Geneva.

I'm not even from the US or Europe yet all my engineering contributions are here in the US. None of my contributions do anything for the country I'm from.

What exactly do you mean by “Taiwan and Israel are extensions of the SF Bay Area”? What makes them so as opposed to anywhere else that based on a tech economy which will naturally need to interact a lot with SF the same way that the financial industry in any city needs to interact with New York and London a lot?

As for American values, I think the best way for me to illustrate it would be with a thought experiment. Suppose that due to an act of god America ceases to exist tomorrow. However, it can transfer all its wealth and knowledge to one other country in the world which would propel it to take America's place instead. I'm sure that as the soon to vanish Americans debate among themselves about who should be their successor, China would come very low on the list of proposed countries. Frankly, Americans do not want to see a world where China is the world leader and how China would then influence the world. That's the values gap I'm referring to. That nebulous set of characteristics that groups some countries in the world with America as "us" and pushes other countries outside as "them," and how "we" do not want to live in a world that "they" create.

Depends on the situation. If America vanished because of an alien invasion, and Americans debated among themselves about who could best take revenge against the aliens, China would be at the very top of the list of proposed countries.

I feel like Russia would end up higher up on that list.

Their active military engagements and large nuclear arsenal make them perfect for that.

This may be a bit challenging -- especially I can appreciate how most Americans would fear a world where China is the world that "they" create. However, for a lot of people in the world, there is actually a gap of values where America is the "they" in this picture. I still remember the celebrations in Japan when Obama was elected as president (which I thought was being a bit optimistic, personally -- only so much a president can do, no matter how much they wish to do good (or not)). But the thing for me was, why are all the people in my office so invested in an election, half way around the world, where they have absolutely no say? Of course it is obvious. What the US does affects everybody and it doesn't always affect non-Americans in a good way. In some ways, I think it is good that Americans get some inkling that you don't really want a single country imposing their set of values on the rest of the world. Of course, I have no idea what the best alternative is, but I think it's food for thought.

Greece: Acceptable food, weather & landscapes. DEMOCRACY! Corruption. Drama.

India: Same, more drama.

Italy: Same, historically more corruption & drama. Elegance.

France: Same. More chic.

> China has a lot of domestic talent but struggles to put it to good use

Is there something quantifiable you're referring to?

More Chinese people come here to America looking for opportunities than the other way around.

That's quite a leap being stated matter-of-factly

Your argument is true with most countries in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese. Are you saying Myanmar does a better job of putting talents to use than China?

America has currently slammed the doors shut on top talent from anywhere, even its allies.

I think the most interesting market and the best predictor for eventual dominance may be neither China nor the US, but the rest of the world. Chinese companies like Alibaba are investing heavily in the South-East Asian tech scene, and this market alone has twice the population of the US. However, to date the market has largely been the domain of homegrown players (Grab, Gojek, Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee etc) that remain basically unknown in the region.

Top companies in the US still hire developers from abroad. I've personally interviewed and onboarded from China and India in the last 3 years. I'm not sure "doors shut" is the right metaphor.

AFAIK, H1B, E3, etc visas are still going through and maybe a bit stricter but relatively unchanged.

Err. LOL? Uniform business environment? Different sales tax everywhere? Different environmental and recycling laws? Some things not allowed to cross state lines? Other things maybe some state lines?

R U serious?

edit: I mean in the U.S. of A.

> Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere

To an extent I think it was, nothing inherently American but openness and a certain amount of cowboyness has been a key differentiator in what tech thrives and what dies and authoritarian cultures/governments/organizations don't tend to favor openness. Look at the web verse what it could have been though something like minitel or AOL, look at linux vs commercial operating systems, unix itself and windows fostered a cowboy culture where everyone could write there own programs, bring there own hardware and generally and do what they want.

For the most part I think American tech is abandoning those values anyway, walled gardens are becoming more common and getting more restrictive, open standards are yielding to proprietary services, users are being restricted in how they operate their own machines. That's something China can compete with and win, you wouldn't get IRC out of china but you would get slack, you wouldn't get Linux but you would get apple.

>Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere

I'd question if that's even the case inside the US. America was industrialised on the back of the American System and Silicon Valley was built on top of defense contracts.

Napoleon brought the first civil code to France and Germany's national education system is a result of Prussian militarism.

In many countries that tell a story of some sort of Western transparency and laissez-faire culture it was arguably authoritarian structures that initiated reform not unlike those you find in Singapore or China today.

There's this popular narrative today championed by people like Acemoglu of "extractive" and "inclusive" institutions with the latter leading to progress and the former being bad, but even in Western nations a significant amoung of progress was built by the former and inherited by the latter.

Linux came from Finland, not the U.S. And there's quite a lot of underground "cowboy culture" in Chinese tech, though people will disagree as to whether that promotes good quality.

> Linux came from Finland, not the U.S.

Not really.

Linux is a clone of Unix, developed by Bell Labs in the USA, and Linus' salary over decades has come from US companies (Transmeta) and foundations (The Linux Foundation.)

>> Linux came from Finland, not the U.S.

> Not really.

Yes really. Linux is technically Unix-like, wherein the code is original. The closest analogue is BSD which is based off the Unix source code. This history notwithstanding, the re-implementation of Unix came from Finland, not the US.

Software is almost universally designed and built from the lessons of other software. This doesn't discount the achievements.

Userland was mostly American though. If not Linux, then we'd would have used very American FreeBSD, almost 100% same thing.

No, it's not a matter of magic cultural mojo. Japanese tech was ascendant for a long time in the 1970s and 1980s, and arguably even today beats the pants off American tech in many areas like automobiles (until Tesla came along, at least). And while Japan has adopted/had some American values rammed down its throat post-WW2, it remains very different culturally: there's very little in common between a Silicon Valley startup and a Japanese megacorp.

Post WWII, Japan was able to differentiate itself from other developing nations in becoming a major economic center precisely because it was the first to adopt American ideas such as the free market and free enterprise. A free market and a lack of regulations is what enables America today to be center for innovation when it comes to technology. Likewise, an uptick in regulation explains why car manufacturing is a stagnant industry in the US. Just to drive the point, the downfall of Detroit coincides timeline-wise closely with the city becoming a union town.

The example of Tesla being forced to stay closed is another one.

Japanese automobiles are still much higher quality than Tesla's. But yes, Tesla is pushing boundaries.

Alternative answer: America's geography makes all the important things easy, leaving us the resources to take risks and innovate.

We have some of the best farmland in the world. With a river system to feed it water and easily transport goods. As well as a relatively flat landmass to facilitate transportation of people and goods. Add to that the largest energy deposits in the world, and nearly every other natural resource needed to run a modern economy.

We have it pretty easy. A highly inclusive democratic society is just the cherry on top that pulls it all together.

And BTW- Chinda does not come out very well on any of those metrics. They are a massive net importer of food and energy, for instance. That makes it much harder for them to come out ahead in a global economic shock. Say one brought on by a global pandemic.

By no means trying to be racist or dismiss the natives, but the geography of North America surely did not change since white man came. Which clearly shows culture is probably just as important as geography.

The pre-industrial world was a very different place than where we live now. Back then, technology and information gave you a massive advantage. Nowadays information moves relatively freely.

Also, there were some extenuating circumstances. An epidemic that wipes out 90% of your population makes it pretty hard to compete.

In the sense that “being exposed to the literal rest of humanity’s innovations” is culture, yes.

Anything and everything had to be independently developed in the Americas prior to contact due to isolation, the white man backwater of Europe got to ride the coattails of R&D across the entire Eurasiafrican supercontinent for millennia, as a comparison.

For a concept like a wheel to spread from, say, Northern China to Southern Spain, they could literally just roll on over.

Could it be the lack of horses? Horses enables faster transportation and communication over a larger distance. This is essential for trade, governance and technology transfer.

> the geography of North America surely did not change since white man came

Effectively, it did change. The Erie Canal, the Welland Canal, and the Illinois & Michigan Canal were transformative. And then the railroads came...

White Man in NorthAm came into post-apocalypse caused by sickness, brought on by earlier White Man in SouthAM and LatAM, spreading northwards. And maybe, just maybe a lil' bit of climate change.

>We have some of the best farmland in the world

Is that still the case though? Things are changing, and it seems things aren't as good as in the old days with draught, and climate changes.

I don't think you can separate the educational etc structures from the culture.

Another poster mentioned cowboyism, which I think is apt. The US culture reveres the rugged individual ideal, and the structures allow or encourage it.

All the big US tech companies have an origin story with one or two people, often without traditional credentials, who turned a small idea into a big idea and a huge company. Usually not a lot of group glory, unless it's the five or ten people who left after building a big company and made their own bigger companies (see the traitorous eight that formed Fairchild and went onto form others companies; or the many video game companies starting with A formed by Atari employees such as Activision)

You don't get innovation by doing what everyone else is doing. You get it by doing stuff that seems crazy and turning out right.

> Since the fall of the USSR, the global zeitgeist has been that if you want to be a developed country, adopting American values in some form is necessary sooner or later. China is challenging this assumption and many developing countries will be watching the outcome.

Imitating the leader is just common sense if you want to emulate their success. China has been doing it bigtime also. Central planners can do a fine job of catching up once the path is obvious. Train people with these skills and have them build these products. Just watch the news to learn how. But even if they take over their targeted fields, US tech will move on to new ones. To lead means to figure out what to do next, before it's the biggest thing in SV already.

No, that is the illusion.

The primary thing you need is capital. Money, and lots of it. Then a service and manufacturing economy to support and sustain it.

But the most important ingredient, is to be sovereign. And not get invaded for a hundred years, while you build out your economy and institutions.

The last major war on American soil was the Civil War. You can achieve a lot of momentum, when war and invasion is not happening on your territory.

Basically, don’t be poor. And have a lot of nuclear weapons to F! up your opponents, if they dare attempt to invade you.

If you have all that, then everything else will fall into place.

I'm not sure this makes sense as an explanation of tech dominance. Tech is one of the least capital-intensive industries around. The capital required to build Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, arguably even the Internet, was available in many contemporary countries.

Each of those companies solved hard tech problems to scale and also only managed to achieve that scale because of venture capital subsidization (prior to monetization). They also benefited from major human capital involvement. Looked at the right way, they were extremely capital-intensive endeavors. It just came into more play going from “1 to n” than “0 to 1”.

In fact, I’m willing to bet that you’ll find lots of examples of 0 to 1s similar to Facebook and Twitter that preceded them but lacked the capital necessary to get to the same scale.

To have $2 billion available to invest in Facebook you need to have $200 billion laying around to invest in all the Webvans you find while looking for the next Facebook.

What do you mean by American values? Specific examples?

Democracy naturally leads to competent and benevolent government, there are no circumstances under which human rights violations are ever acceptable, freedom of the individual takes priority over total benefit to the group, all individuals have the same intrinsic value regardless of their economic/social status, etc.

> Democracy naturally leads to competent and benevolent government

That hasn't been an American value for quite awhile, assuming it ever was.[1] Thus Reagan's famous quote: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help'.

[1] I'm willing to accept that it was for relatively brief but important periods, such as the 2-3 decades after WWII. The U.S. would still be a backwater were it not for moments where pragmatism and a shared sense of responsibility trumped cynicism and a reflexive fear of authority.

Perhaps I should have worded it as Democracy is the most tolerable form of government. No matter the disillusionment with Democracy in America today, the idea of adopting China's government is completely outside the Overton window in America. In other parts of the world, I'm not so sure.

Disobedience.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

"Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other."

This is more of a young person thing, and only for specific personality types.

And America is much less forgiving of disobedience today than it was, even just 20 years ago. Unless you come from a privileged group, run-ins with the authorities are not pleasant.

Maybe that's why you see China catching up - because America is falling back and suppressing disobedience.

> America is much less forgiving of disobedience today than it was, even just 20 years ago.

Do you have any examples of this? I've always been american, but I was only 15 years old 20 years ago.

Jared Diamond, who is much more researched than anyone else commenting here, has written a lot on this topic, and briefly stated - it has more to do with a society's capacity to receive and process outside ideas. It's less about American culture and more about the fact that America has been for the most part an open society, but more so American metropolitan society and not America as a whole.

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