Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation
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But at that time companies were still built for their home markets first and on that regard the USA is big and unified. Since software is mostly winner takes all it means that when the USA companies came to Europe they had already won the USA and could steamroll the local competition
There is for example no way a swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps , which had so much search monopoly money backing it up from the start
The only way Europe could have prevented this is to just ban foreign monopolies, wich is what china did, and why they are now succesfully ‘innovating’.
I read often on this website that europe cannot ‘take risks’ or ‘innovate’ and is ‘riding on american innovation for free’ and I find that a bit insulting, because I fell that as things are geopolitically it’s just not possible for Europeans to compete fairly with Americans
Further, I would like to add a few ideas:
- innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling.
- a certain degree of protectionism is good. I am a big fan of how China made it. They have a really fantastic digital landscape that is superior in so many areas compared to Europe (if you exclude the data privacy issue)
- reliance on the old economy is bad and this is a political decision.
- too many people are too scared of new technologies and want things "how they used to be". This is bad and is typical for many Europeans, especially here in Germany. Cultural change must happen but you cannot force it.
Obviously we already have English, nearly universally spoken as a second or third language in the EU. So I assume you mean English, or some other language as the first language.
Which I think means all other languages would after a few generations become nearly extinct. Like Latin these days.
But despite how much I wish we had more innovation, I don't think losing all languages is worth it.
If that were the cost, then it would not be worth the price. Fortunately, it is completely unnecessary. It suffices to look to when Europe was at her best.
Technology is mere instrument. What you describe is Procrustean cultural destruction to satisfy some metric. Technology is not the end, but a means that has its proper place. The destruction of the various cultures that make the world rich is a recipe for monoculture and thus lack of inspiration. A diverse and decentralized Europe permits the exchange of ideas to occur in an atmosphere of diverse cultures. "Scale" is about de facto standardization and standardization is a double edged sword, not an unalloyed good. If anything, scale is what makes monopolies possible.
The solution is not to create a bland mass of rootless "citizen consumers" crafted out of the corporate pop culture, though, to be honest, Europe is practically there already, wearily drifting along, preferring to keep warm. The solution is a fundamental awakening of Europeans to the deep roots of their civilization and what made it great. That's where the life force is. The EU is in practice a form of managed decline perpetrated by delusional ideologues, petty bureaucrats, and ignorant airheads. It is antithetical to a vibrant Europe so looking for a solution there is like asking a dictator of some banana republic what makes a vibrant country.
Can't overstate how important this is. India is slowly coming to terms with adopting English (instead of Hindi) as the lingua franca - it has been a reliable economic mobility driver for millions of people. More European states might do well by adopting a bilingual/trilingual approach to expand economic opportunities for the population. I think parts of Scandinavia already manage to do this quite well.
Interesting, I hadn't seen the term localisation used beyond language. IMO, the major hindrance to European unification is nationalistic reflexes together with too many voluntary projects: EEC vs EU, Schengen, human rights, immigration, the euro... the instigators of such projects thought the success of these projects/goals would encourage more countries to opt in at a later date, which never happened, as a general rule. This resulted in more ways to slice and dice what "Europe" means, instead of contributing to unification.
A frequent occurrence is national politicians pretending they played no part in the council of ministers and blame-shifting towards Europe in order to gain or maintain domestic popularity. This actively undermines belief in EU institutions.
The facts seem to indicate the individual countries want to keep the systems they have in place, which can include vast differences in labour law, bureaucracy, remuneration schemes, pension plans, sick leave regulation and workplace safety, despite a basic common regulatory framework. As far as I'm aware, US states don't have as much variance between them.
As a result, a would-be tech giant has higher startup costs if it wants to employ people throughout Europe. I would say actual language localisation is a much less prohibitive cost.
As a German, do you see greater unification happening any time soon? I'm not sure I do, as one of your smaller neighbours.
To stay competitive Europe needs unity in the political process, defense and border security for example, and not in regulations in economy, finance, immigration etc, which are excessive already.
I'd say the main US advantage is that it's set up to create stagnant monopolies that can then leverage that power into other areas.
Microsoft is now one of the players in gaming consoles, but they basically bought their way in on the back of monopoly rents from Office and OS.
Abuse would be when a company leverages a monopoly to enter or influence another market, such as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
Not Swedish, but Danish founders, working in Australia. Google purchased the company and made it google maps
The rate of new business creation is higher in Europe than the US. I would guess that the US has more venture-backed entrepreneurs, but more businesses are being start by Europeans than Americans.
“The net rate of business creation among the EU economies has been over three times faster than in the USA and Canada since the financial crisis, according to research by RSM International, the seventh largest global network of independent audit, tax and consulting firms.”
== https://www.businessawardseurope.com/news/item/rate-of-new-b...
I agree with you to a degree on capital and tax (although there are exceptions within Europe if you take the time to look).
However, if you say Europe should be adopting the US employment system, I'll tell you right now that you can stick that where the sun doesn't shine. Sure the European employment model is not perfect, but by god is it a gazillion times better than the Wild West model deployed in the US.
An Israeli one did.
How does a company’s stock price affect salaries? Companies only receive capitalization (via stock) at IPO.
Stock market valuations do enable higher total comp through RSUs / options.
Put it this way: if products depend on viral growth, then European countries are socially distanced from each other as a result of these barriers.
I'd also not be so quick on the regulation front. Looking at the (lack of) environmental regulation in the US right about now or the absolute astonishing cost of any medical emergency, I'd say they went too far in the other direction.
Europe does not share a language in common, a culture in common, not even a currency in common. The "federal government" idea would be rejected by many out of hand. The history of bitter wars between European countries has not simply been forgotten and many would feel it encroaches on their sovereignty.
Just look at the reaction to mild proposals for an EU armed force as an example, or the many "Euroskeptic" politicians going around.
I think you underestimate what it takes to form a strong federal government.
With the turn the democratically elected Hungarian and Polish governments have taken the past few years, I sure hope there won't be a powerful federal EU government any time soon.
Germany tried that twice but the Americans stopped it. Either because the US didn't want that particular genocide or because they didn't want a unified Europe under european control.
https://hai.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ai_index_2019_r...
Sorry I can't link directly to the plot. Go to page 16 in the pdf, a section titled "Published papers: AI Papers by Region".
In short, Europe has been the region with the most output in AI research in the last 30 years with US second and China initially at third place, but overtaking the US around 2006 ish and finally Europe in 2018.
It seems from my perspective that most European countries are pretty decently innovative, in particular with a variety of companies offering advanced engineering and technology services.
Is there actually a lack of innovation, or is it specifically a lack of “innovation” in the “there is no Airbnb so Europe sucks” sense?
And that's talking about the things that are already there. Looking into the future I don't see anything technology related on the horizon either.
The main technological thing that isn't like that is cars, but even there EVs from Tesla appear more innovative.
I think that many people conflate "innovation" with "big companies" which isn't the case: You don't need a google/Apple/Facebook equivalent to innovate (and having such towering companies may hurt in the long run, but wether or not big "googlesque" companies are a good thing is an entirely different question)
There are also a lot of unknown companies that have huge influence on the overall market by being global leaders in very narrow non-consumer facing areas, so called "hidden champions". These companies have become more important due to globalisation. To give a concrete example: While your phone wasn't built in the EU, odds are that it was at least partially produced with machines by ASML, a company that produces lithography machines for ~80% of chip manufacturers.
Also, due to this site here literally being "hackernews" and the pervasiveness of digital systems in normal life, we are getting a pretty skewd look at the industry as a whole: For example, the biggest chemical company in the world is BASF, a european company and the chemical company Bayer now owns a majority share of agricultural chemistry.
I know it's off topic, but could you clarify how you could see this happening?
I mean the only issue I can see is that the EU will end up with multiple, smaller finanical centres, hindering scale. But other than that, I can't see the problems of EU with respect to Brexit.
Now, the euro without transfers, that's a bloody problem, but that's been a real problem for 20 years, and no amount of ECB bandaging will fix it.
I cannot look into the future, but as far as I know, i would rather be in the same club as all the wealthy guys than stand outside and not have anything to deal with.
The UK might still have the idea and arrogance of being a big kingdom, but they're really not. We'll see, i don't think it will end neither good or bad for the EU in that regard, but if the days comes that UK is derailed in any way, the EU will not help - i think.
And that's dangerous of course, but its solely a problem the UK put on themselves. Good luck
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/former-exec-of-f...
But the issue I see is that innovation is a bit like herding cats. You can't really push for it. And even in the US, most of it is located on 2 cities. And of course, being on SV it is much easier to get you a check for 10Mi dollars for a worse idea than 1Mi or even 100k in Europe
I don't see China's "innovation" as being much that (maybe except in AI and maybe ByteDance is a new thing, still) but more scaling up known solutions (ecommerce, fb on steroids in the form of wechat, etc) and market protection.
and other industries they have a lead in include drones, solar technology, EV (arguable).. considering the unparalled hardware ecosystem in Shenzhen/the PRD, I expect more and more industries will be getting added to the list
Agreed, non-trivial but also not rocket science (at least not now - I guess it's easier today than at the beginnings of twitter and fb for example) and throwing money at the problem usually helps.
Agree on the other industries, and maybe their innovation is building things more cheaply than other places (externalities aside)
Its best years are already behind it.
As for innovation? US isn't even top 10 when it comes to Nobel prize per capita (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_l...).
IKEA, SAP, Beretta, Airbus, Spotify, Linux, Prometheus, Grafana, Booking.com just from the top of my head of things that are proof of European innovation and tech sector.
Your per capita list is an epic compliment to the US.
The fact that the US is #15 per capita is extraordinary, given your list is comparing the US to top ten countries like East Timor, Saint Lucia, Luxembourg and Iceland, where if you get one or two you leap ahead of the entire world.
Among large population nations, only the UK and Germany rank higher, with Germany only slightly ahead. The UK for their part are far beyond everyone else on any reasonable comparison scale.
The US has five times the population of France and exceeds them on Nobels per capita. That is an amazing performance by the US.
The fact that the US is so massive and still ranks ahead of: the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Finland, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc. - is similarly staggering.
The US has over three times the rate of Italy, nearly double the rate of Canada, and over five times the rate of Japan.
The US per capita rate is 46% higher than the EU.
I'm going to drop Saint Lucia, East Timor, Iceland and Luxembourg from the comparison list because it's beyond silly, they all have one Nobel and micro populations. On a more rational list, the US is #11, with an 11.7 rate per 10m people. A nearby comparison is Ireland with a 14.5 rate; Ireland has seven total, the US has 383 and roughly 70 times the population. Like I said, it's an epic compliment for the US to be so highly ranked on a list dominated by small populations. The US is the sole country over 100 million population until you get down to #35 Japan at a 2.2 rate; except for the UK, the top 10 is all under 10 million population.
Compare that with the resources available and it will look much less extraordinary
It is extraordinary that countries with much less resources, much less competition and orders of magnitude smaller pool of talents to chose from (4 orders of magnitude in the case of Iceland, East Timor and Luxembourg), can rival the richest and most powerful country in the World in modern history
But let's look at the US noble prize winners
19 born in Germany
12 born in Canada
11 born in United Kingdom
7 born in Italy
7 born in Russia
6 born in China
6 born in Austria
4 born in India
4 born in Hungary
3 born in South Africa
3 born in France
2 born in Poland
2 born in Netherlands
2 born in Romania
2 born in Japan
2 born in Israel
1 born in Venezuela
1 born in Turkey
1 born in Taiwan
1 born in Switzerland
1 born in Spain
1 born in Norway
1 born in New Zealand
1 born in Mexico
1 born in Korea
1 born in Ireland
1 born in Egypt
1 born in Australia
Israel has more than 3x more unicorns than we in Germany that tells one thing or two...
For example, if you look at foreign direct investment, the Netherlands lead the pack in 2017 with $4.888 trillion invested by residents of other countries. [1] Yet apparently there's only one Dutch unicorn (team.blue). Evidently there's a lot of investment going to other companies instead of betting on a single unicorn.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Put it in another way: their success is due military application of technology
Besides: what does counting unicorns proves?
Is Israel GDP per capita higher than Germany?
Is Israel richer than Germany?
Europe values other metrics more than simply pure market valuation
For example WhatsApp only employed 50 engineers when already had 900 million users
In Germany, and Europe in general, we prefer businesses that increase the general population employment than pure profit margins
EDIT:
a few resources about military industrial complex in Israel
https://medium.com/@davidsperorn/a-match-made-in-hell-israel...
https://www.tni.org/es/node/13511
https://www.jstor.org/stable/174246
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0140239830843716...
- Uber, whose only innovation is price dumping using infinite investor cache on losing billions of dollars yearly
- Facebook, whose only innovation is creating festering echo chambers, siphoning private data wholesale and dodging laws
- JUUL, whose only innovation is selling electronic cigarettes
- Coinbase, whose only innovation is to be a middleman in bitcoin scams
- Magic Leap, whose only innovation is siphoning off investors' money and finally producing a subpar gadget
- Pinterest whose only innovation is spam Google search results with stolen pictures
etc.
There are very few actual innovators among these "unicorns".
Interestingly, those tables show the EU, as a whole, being several places behind the US per capita, both overall and in terms of science Nobels specifically. Kind of negates your point.
I go to the US every 2 or 3 years for a few days, and that's enough to end up on a bunch of American marketing lists. GDPR is here to prevent things like that.
It also prevents companies from holding my data hostage, and gives me a way to delete it.
There are other privacy-related laws that prevent companies from publishing a mugshot of me and extorting money from me to remove it.
There's more, but I think you get the point.
For ease, I've singled out this one point:
> For example, Chinese telecoms infrastructure giant Huawei spends as much as $20bn (£15.6bn) on research and development - one of the highest budgets in the world.
Any member of Chinese society knows that budgets like this are announced to look impressive, and that the money itself goes through so many layers that siphon off 20% that when the project(s) are finally delivered, it was done on a shoestring and the deliverable looks like a rough approximation of what was in the scope. Just don't look under the hood.
Then there are all the other grand initiatives where the money is quietly put into the stock market and again the deliverable is a "driverless car" etc. that in reality doesn't work.
Obviously, there's a lot more nuance than this, but if I went around refuting all these "China experts", I'd have no time for anything else. The point is: don't believe the hype. Just because a lot of low-hanging tech fruit is highly visible and China has a lack of ethical and legal oversight does not mean the country is innovative.
The US I can't comment on.
Which is awesome.
Because framing it as "ahead" or a "gap" is completely backwards. Innovation isn't a competition or zero-sum game.
Innovation coming out of China benefits the world, just like innovation coming out of the US does. What matters is the total.
How about we be thankful that there are now so many more scientists the world over contributing to research and knowledge? How amazing is that for the human race?
Now, if there's an article that actually proves US innovation is slowing compared to itself in the past somehow, that actually measures total results rather than government-funded inputs (e.g. including private funding and taking impact/effectiveness into account, not just # of papers published)... then I'd be very interested in that.
But this article isn't that. This article is just cheap nationalism. Ugh.
The article uses published scientific papers as an example. That's open. That's research results the US is getting for free, from China. Which is awesome!
The only way I can interpret your comment as making sense is if we were talking solely about military innovation -- innovation in China's navies, in its air force, in its missiles, or even its ability to hack and disrupt foreign networks.
But Schmidt clearly isn't talking about that, he's talking about basic scientific and engineering research.
I don't disagree there are people who see it as a competition and want to see the US "win", but that is cheap nationalism to me. Because the fact is, the more research that gets done, the more everybody wins.
Even if it's not the intention, why don't you think that research is, indeed, ultimately resulting in the betterment of humankind? Isn't that what progress is?
Here's another way to think about it: producing research is like producing anything else, like iPhones. The world is better off because China has the manufacturing capacity to churn out iPhones cheaper and better than anyone else. Which benefits us all. Because it's not a competition -- it's progress.
China is a huge country with a non-democratic ideology. And it works immensly well - just look at all the US corporations which has invested heavily in chineese labor.
Oh, and btw. China own what... 20% of US?
Schmidt might say you’re missing the point: government funded science is a leading indicator of future results because the government is the largest body investing in and sharing the results of basic, foundational, non-product research in the weirdest variety of subjects. Turn that off and you turn off the fountain from which innovations can be productized.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-should-fund...
> [in 2017] the federal government funded less than half of all basic research in the country for the first time since World War II.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/trump-once-again-req...
> [2019:] For the third year in a row, President Donald Trump’s administration has unveiled a budget request to Congress that calls for deep spending cuts at many federal science agencies, including a 13% cut for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a 12% cut for the National Science Foundation (NSF)
Cutting funding for the NSF is and will continue to decelerate the pace of innovation because the basic research is no longer being done.
Personally I do not find article count a good number to base the claim on. Percentage of GPD might not be a good reference either but then again I am not 100% sure a dollar for dollar comparison works well in all cases.
[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/top-ten-countries-lea...
Can someone link me historical total R&D spending data for US?
I found https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf which states:
> The United States became a global leader in R&D in the 20th century, funding as much as 69% of annual global R&D in the period following World War II. 1 Figure 1 shows the growth in total U.S. R&D expenditures from 1953 to 2018 in current dollars. 2 U.S. R&D in 2018 was 112 times higher than it was in 1953 in current dollars, and more than 15 times higher in constant dollars.3 By sector, business-funded R&D grew the most during this period. However, faster growth in total R&D spending of other nations reduced the U.S. share of global R&D to approximately 27.7% in 2017.
That'd likely tbe because most the rest of the developed world had been reduced to rubble.
27% is still a hugely outsized slice of the pie.
Doesn’t mean we can relax, but nothing about China can be judged by Western standards.
Google is still a fantastic company to work at as far as compensation and benefits, but it won't be for long (maybe 10 more years?)
Google isn't a startup and there's no reason why it should be or why that would be good. "Innovation" isn't valuable if it isn't scaled up.
Translation -- US software engineer salaries are still too high for his liking, so he wants to dilute the market with more to lower the overall cost.
The flip side is that the US has traditionally attracted the best talent in the world. This class has gone on to win the most Nobel prizes and create the most valuable companies in the world. Focusing on a real negative externality (labor arbitrage) fails to recognize the immense benefits skilled immigrants bring to this country.
I’m a son if one of them. My dad came this country in the 60s to get his masters in math at BYU. Probably the only South Asian in the entire class. He overcame extreme poverty,(half of his siblings died in childhood), disabilities to go on and achieve so much. I benefit from his achievements and being a US citizen.
That being said, we’re losing our preeminence due to growing xenophobia and a strident “might is right” worldview. But it doesn’t have to be this way - we can embrace our shared humanity while still competing on the global stage for talent.
Google under Eric Schmidt literally colluded with other large SV companies to depress wages. There was a court case, it was a big deal, ~$400M was paid out over it.
""I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric". Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme."
It's not cynical, it's true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
Something interesting happened in the early '70s and it deserves a much better explanation https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
It really annoys me when they bitch about not being able to bring in skilled workers from overseas because they can't find skilled people here... Hey, maybe they should fucking train someone!
Usually when a tech boss is complaining about not having skilled staff locally it's code for "... I want to find someone cheaper overseas". It's like seeing a job ad that wants a wizard at everything but has terrible pay, they just want to import a cheaper worker.
Training of a highly educated person takes at least 15 years starting with elementary school. Looks like the US school system is in bad shape, but it a bit strange to demand from Eric Schmidt to fix it. Immigration is a way to get skilled workers which doesn't require waiting many years for the results, but it doesn't preclude fixing education meanwhile.
The millenials and later go straight for politics and dethroning anyone who was there longer than 5 years.
It shows in the Rube Goldberg BS they are producing.
I do not mind a little competition if we bring people who might improve our technological edge. China is going to surpass the US eventually and oh lord, we are in denial!.
This is my opinion, I am not claiming to know the absolute truth or facts.
A lot of things would need to change for that to happen. Switzerland naturalizes more people every year than the PRC has ever naturalized and the Swiss are not known for making joining their nation easy. Shanghai, the richest city in China, has a GDP per capita on par with Poland last I checked and the country as a whole is ranked 96th, a bit above Thailand. The EU isn’t that attractive either. Germany is poorer than all US states but Mississippi. Money isn’t the only thing when it comes to brain drain but it’s a big, big thing.
A European long-term resident of China.
If that's true, then his point stands, I guess?
I have two tangental questions.
#1 In general terms, what's China's commitment (investment) in higher ed? Compared to the USA and other economies?
USA's tuition, loans, student debt is always good for an argument on HN. Almost no one mentions that the USA decided to privatize higher ed some decades back. So I was wondering if China and others made the same mistake.
#2 How does current China think about growing inequity?
One persons's story in "American Factory" resonated with me. Glass furnace technician Hong We https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10930334/ works his ass off, making huge personal sacrifices, to further enrich Fuyao Glass America owner Jeff Daochuan Liu.
Shown is gob standard corporate team building meetings where Fuyao uses economic nationalism to motivate their underpaid staff.
What is Hong We's future? When will the feel goods not be enough? When will Hong We demand to be paid fairly?
I assume Labor in China will follow the American trajectory. With all that political and cultural strive that entails. But I'm keen to hear what others think.
Edit: I think Cao Dewang is the founder and owner, not Jeff Daochuan Liu. I regret the error.
There are plenty of people on HN who likely would not have made the cut in a EU country.
I believe that what's actually happening with US higher ed supply is that we stopped founding large research universities. Many of the great public schools were endowed using federal land[1] and eventually the government ran out of valuable agricultural land.
Student tuition has replaced a lot of government funding. As we can see it has gone to administrative spending. Do you think new unis would fix that?
I would be very interested to see any research discussing the reasons for this difference and whether cultural expectations account for any of it (expecting a degree on the employer side driving up demand).
How would you remedy that?
Access to education seems higher in the US as-is though it is still in perfect. I am one of the people the US system left behind. Not sure how to get back to school.
Maybe if so much of the tech industry's wealth and resources weren't pooled together into a handful of massive monopolists who have nearly complete control over whether any competitor lives or dies, the US (and really, the entire world) would have more opportunity to innovate.
Whats worse is Google wants all their software to be as intangible as possible by forcing it all on their servers. Google hasnt had many desktop apps you can use without their servers involved in a long time. I dont consider Chrome a desktop app since it is their own OS and the new IE based on its hostility on the web to build up a Google Monopoly.
We have always had seemingly invulnerable dominant tech companies. Remember Intel? Their dominance was seen as holding down chip innovation, but it was also an instrument of American soft power. The latter is what Schmidt is talking about.
The US Government spent the money and effectively donated trillions in profits to the rich elites of today.
I find it hilarious how ignorant we are of the last 50-70 years of details of our history. Basically the lifetime of Bezos, Gates... their parents changed the rules to benefit their mini dictators
Here’s a hint: no different than what’s happened with covid handouts, government pays out big dollars to their buddies, we all get to then fight over a seat at the hand chosen ones table
Free market isn’t anything more than a simple propaganda line
Anyone that can believe human biology has evolved away from the behavior of a generation ago is a childish fool
Keep sequestering social power into the hands of a minority of barons and lords, everyone. That’s the goal, no different than a church; keep you focused on their lofty ambitions and need for capital at the expense of your own.
Our biology is just as susceptible to blind faith as our ancestors.
"Almighty Chinese gods, can you please design, prototype and mass produce this device for me. I would like to use it as a platform and run my crappy code on it so I can compete with your own people".
Or in other terms, do you think that laws are slower than the cost of innovation? You're right to quote "innovation" here, because it seems nebulous. But the only reason it seems so is because it is difficult. To "innovate" independently of national boundaries, a company must have infrastructure, talent, and capital (at the least) that can pick up and move.
I'm aware of capital mobility, but at some point "the buck stops." In the case of innovation, real results need to come from real people. You can't business and finance it away to some remote island.
Edit: Changed something like "imagine you're a group of GOP officials" to "imagine you're a group of like-minded people in power in the world's most powerful country right now." My thoughts aren't meant to be political, so interpret the latter however.
DoubleClick was a competitor and the acquisition faced antitrust scrutiny [3]. In addition to eliminating a competitor, the acquisition helped Google expand into display ads, and DoubleClick was seen as the market leader in that segment [3]. Google had previously only been a leader in search and contextual text ads [3].
While Google does not break out display ads, they do break out ad revenue from Google properties, Youtube, and ads on 3rd part sites. Google generally only displays text ads on Google-branded sites, while Youtube and 3rd party site ad revenue is a mix of text and display ads. From their most recent earnings report, Google-branded site ad revenue was $21,319 M, Youtube was $3,812 M, and 3rd party sites was $4,736 M [4]. As you can see, to this day, display ads make up a small portion of Google's ad revenue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.... [4] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020Q2_alphabet_earnings...
Google gets more ad revenue from Search than they do from all other ads put together. So if we follow the money they are still a search company.
Android was bought at well.
(Disclosure: I was a Googler for a few years, joining through an adtech-related acquisition, and a Google intern one summer several years before that. But I haven't worked for Google in over five years.)
But somehow China a country with even more Xenophobia and nationalism is catching up to us. And the U.S. used to have more Xenophobia and nationalism in the past and was also substantially more innovative.
Maybe the real problem is that the U.S. (all the way up to the top) has become anti-intellectual. We have completely dumbed down our culture so that children today want to be basketball players instead of astronauts. Our schools and government explicitly oppose meritocracy. There is just too much money in junk media and junk education that its never going to be fixed and instead we have to bring in more immigrants.
This is very unlike US style xenophobia where Murica number 1 and anything about foreigners sucks.
I know at least 3 genius-level people from Europe that refuse to go to the US, because they are white, and every single moment they see these "whitey are racist by just being white" they simply descend even more into their beliefs. Also, their humour would get them fired within a minute in the USA.
Something tells me the modern left (which generally isn't seen as xenophobic or nationalistic) would not take very kindly to the importation of Nazi rocket scientists in [current year].
A high proportion of scientists go through major US universities. This imbues them with certain ideas and creates social (IRL) networks where 'information ought to be free'. Those who then work elsewhere (let's say 'return to China') just cannot completely drop them, and some even broadcast those ideas and associated behaviors.
Moreover the US supremacy on software provides them with increasing means to effectively spy on research conducted in all countries.
Consequently, the US ability to benefit from innovation payed for by other nations keeps growing.
In a way it is similar to the 80's "Strategic Defense Initiative" against the USSR ('let them dissipate resources'), with the added bonus of being able to rack a fair part of the benefits up.
So, for example, autonomous vehicle technology now is more a matter of implementations than theory. This is where China has an advantage over the US by virtue of the willingness of its government to make large scale infrastructure investments. The US once led in such endeavours e.g. Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that paid for 90 percent of the cost of construction of Interstate Highways.
Now, in the government domain, the leader is China.
China intends for self-driving cars to propel smart megacity
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-intends-for-self-drivi...
On your actual point (sorry for the digression) many machine learning papers have at least 2/3s of authors with Chinese-sounding names, though affiliated with US institutions (or companies). Maybe no major papers have come out of "China", but they sure have come out of the work of Chinese citizens.
China has increased its research output and impact in recent years. The AI Index report has a plot:
https://hai.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ai_index_2019_r...
You'll have to go to page 19 to the pdf for the section titled "Published papers: Citation impact by region" which shows Field-Waited Impact by region and over time- sorry, I can't see a way to link directly to the page.
Other plots in the sam report also paint a similar picture: China is revving up its research engine on AI.
I see this as a missed opportunity. Most Chinese researchers are and were trained in US and UK institutions. Unfortunately, instead of making sure to forge strong bonds of friendship and collaboration that would hold after the return of those students and researchers to China, the US at least has chosen to see them as a threat, so the effect is that they've basically been training their competition. The UK is a bit more on the fence about it for now.
Isn't in China's best interest not to make public any innovations that they can leverage against other countries?
"In the race for publishing papers China has now caught up."
Drumming up a scary vision of global war against China using flying AI-killer robots in outer space while your companies are siphoning billions of dollars out of defense budgets and you get your competition (Huawei, TikTok etc.) banned on national security grounds.
Innovation comes from a functioning global market place of "ideas". It is a 1+1=3 game, not a zero-sum one.
Drop the new cold war and get back to doing business.
The biggest "ball" that was dropped on innovation in the US was to allow companies to outsource their manufacturing to mainland china.
https://ifr.org/news/robots-china-breaks-historic-records-in...
> Dr Schmidt, who is currently the Chair of the US Department of Defense's innovation board, said he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now.
“Invest in my next project now, before it’s too late!” is what I read it as.
Edit: let me clarify. Innovation isn't zero-sum. I believe America is the most fascinating experiment – balancing (albeit imperfectly) innovation with ethics. There's a lot of innovation that can happen – and at a cost that's too great.
For example, North Korea has demonstrated an ability to develop nuclear weapons (deep technical advancement), and China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people (broad technical advancement). But, the ethical costs are too great. I don't want to celebrate cultures of innovation that do this – foreign or domestic.
Sure, let's always have an eye on increasing our investments against R&D – fundamental and more broadly. But I'm no apologist for falling behind when the truth is that that view of innovation is a zero-sum game where we lose our humanity in the process.
The cost of the NORK's replicating nukes and China's profiling their citizens contrasts with the US in that those costs are much lower in the US. The US isn't carting off undesirables to re-education camps (there's a prison system with a lot of people in jail but every single one of them was put there by a jury) or starving its citizenry to make innovations (although there is a point to be made there). This, in turn, tends to increase the rate of innovation (people don't come to associate the change with bad things and because they are discussing them more people are exploring them).
China or Europe can be #1 in scientific paper publishing but until I see robots that can do what General Dynamics is doing or even what Honda was doing 5 years ago, it's all just copying the leader and the development cycle for those countries to product decent copies is quite long and tends to be inconsistent due to people developing bad cases of I-don't-give-a-shit-itus. E.G. China has problems innovating for the same reason they have problems making an aircraft carrier and maintaining a navy; their steel mills churn out inconsistent crap.
The BBC article is trying to deliver a message using Schmidt's name, and isn't coming to any conclusions or providing any data. It's pure propaganda and a total waste of time to read or comment on really.
However the people there are ironically submissive, dictatorial, flexible and long term thinking. Every now and then magically CCP would adopt some bottom up Suggestion and turn it to top down strategy that does the right thing
The people of Hiroshima or the victims of agent orange might have something to say about that.
You know what I found most fascinating about the Hiroshima memorial in Japan? They go on about how bad the bombing was but literally have a statement to the effect that if Japan was invaded they would have fought to the last man, woman and child. Millions would have died on both sides and the country would have been a wasteland. So unpleasant as it is, sometimes ethics does require the lesser of two evils as there is no good choice.
> Bаsеd on а dеtаilеd invеstigаtion of аll thе fаcts, аnd supportеd by thе tеstimony of thе surviving Jаpаnеsе lеаdеrs involvеd, it is thе Survеy's opinion thаt cеrtаinly prior to 31 Dеcеmbеr 1945, аnd in аll probаbility prior to 1 Novеmbеr 1945, Jаpаn would hаvе surrеndеrеd еvеn if thе аtomic bombs hаd not bееn droppеd, еvеn if Russiа hаd not еntеrеd thе wаr, аnd еvеn if no invаsion hаd bееn plаnnеd or contеmplаtеd.
Americans have invented this popular narrative about Hiroshima solely because it undergirds the fragile notion of “heroism” that country still clings to. Unnecessarily nuking a city that was at that point primarily women, children, and old people is anathema to the story we tell about ourselves, so we’ve simply decided it wasn’t so.
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_...
Then they avoided responsibility for the deaths they caused by spending millions in the us court system to reduce the damages payout to less than one years profits.
Was that a good thing? Was it a bad thing? Is there a definitive ethical answer to this question?
There probably is - but not for this culture.
It’s the very same innovation that is used to wage wars that have destabilized whole regions and led to the deaths of millions. Or the same military force that is used to implicitly backstop dictators that have carried out some of the worst genocides of this century.
I’m not sure this is what balancing ethics looks like.
America is innovative. Sure. America is god gifts to humanity the most ethical and innovative civilization we couldn’t do without ? No.
So where is the scientific answer to that? Is there any serious additional research effort, and more industrial effort, going into models that are less reliant on training data, for example? What industries are trying to become less dependent on massive data collection, and on massively data-driven models?
You can still get heaps of money with a product that can be aptly described as "it does linear regression with sugar on top and it'll tell you great things if you throw more than 100GB of tables at it". Selling an analytics SaaS that sucks up data from every imaginable data source to tell you things about your Google Analytics graphs is still a pretty profitable business. On the other hand, serious researchers in academia, and a lot of talented engineers, are struggling to get funding for topics that do not have the magic words "machine learning", "data-driven", and "AI" in them, and they mostly go ignored because everything can be solved with enough data.
The GP clearly meant the US is ethical RELATIVE to other countries currently "innovating" i.e. China.
Even as stoutly anti-American as my country and people are, I still fervently hope it's the USA and NOT China who prevail in future techno/political battles.
My theory is that as countries become stronger and more confident that they can withstand internal pressures without outsiders immediately being able to take advantage of them, they'll slowly become more and more democratic as they prosper.
I think this is vastly preferable than having the CIA install a pro-US puppet regime that is deeply unpopular and will only lead to another coup, meaning investors are not confident in the country being stable enough for investment and the populations suffer.
Though also class projects strike me as a good way to encourage exploration and creativity, and seems to be something emphasized much more in the US versus other countries in my experience.
My own observation has been that with the 3D printer for example, innovation was stagnant for the 20 years that they were under patent. Once the patents expired, innovation in the space boomed and the price of a decent 3D printer dropped by 100x.
So with the US so patent-heavy, are we actually making things more expensive and crippling innovation? What would it do to the price of your washing machine if it was open source hardware? Prusa Research has seemingly had good competitive success even with all open source products and many clones, so I feel like the economics can work. Would we be better off if we learned the economics of open source hardware and pushed the industry in that direction? Have any economists taken this question seriously?
This blog post on innovation from Bunnie Huang talks about the real on the ground experience of innovation without IP restrictions here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
Libertarians make a good case against intellectual property restrictions too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A
I've seen this in other fields as well. Regular printers were mostly giant appliances until xerox's patents expired. I suspect the extremely slow start for VR (before it finally has started going somewhere now) is due to the flurry of patents you can see from the 90's finally expiring. I'm quite hopeful that a lot of technologies will take off in this way in the next few years, due to the expiration of patents from the internet bubble's R&D.
And regardless what one thinks about patents in theory, in practice it has clearly become a horrific mess, with the patent office rejected far too few applications. Applying technology everyone learns in college to a new problem actually counts as novel and non-obvious to them.
The "saving grace" is America's "ask forgiveness later" business culture. Basically violate patents as necessary, and if you make it big, pile up your own counter portfolio of patents to go to war with. The beneficiaries are the patent office and of course lawyers. Patent trolls become a problem though, as they have no products to get counter-sued over.
[0] http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
America will win only when we can support both use cases.
Open source hardware is really good at making things low cost, because whoever can offer the best value (low cost, reasonably quality) will succeed. So what if we did that with big stuff like MRI machines and semiconductor fabricating equipment and robotics? Wouldn't that make all that stuff cheap, thereby making us better off? Like health care and car repairs and manufacturing would all be cheaper, and we can use that to thrive.
Openhardware is more than about being the cheapest...it is about free modification of anything and everything involved in the project and the ability to share, innovate, sell (as long as GPL is respected) and create. I would actually argue that what makes OSHW projects weaker is the race to the bottom. I watched this happen in more than one OSHW community so far that I have been involved in. Largely, the core devs abandon projects once they get big enough to bring in the cloners since typically you end up getting a lot of "You need to fix this because we are using it, we don't care if we buy your hardware, you are responsible for making it work to my needs". I know this is very common in OSS as well. It is very frustrating to watch happen knowing that the cloners (in our case) do not respect GPL of the project, do not handle their own customer support and sell at a rate which makes it so the "real devs" cannot afford to maintain the project.
Even knowing all this though...I still have a focus on OSHW over patents. My personal belief is that patents only are valuable if you can defend them. I also feel that if I have something valuable enough to want to patent it is probably something the world may need...why not give it away and help everyone.
The real benefit of OSHW is the same thing that can make it very difficult as well...everything is open, so you leave yourself open to all compliments as well as criticisms...there are times where some people with very high level training are willing to help by contributing but more importantly by trolling. If you can fix the issues that they are complaining about, it shows that you are interested in helping the community (and at times they are also very high level people who are not intending to help but they are pointing out issues which may be opaque to the devs).
As far as OSHW robotics. Look into Moveo for a hardware example (there are others) and ROS for control software.
Background: I have been working directly with Reprap since 2011 (Long time member and Op in #reprap@freenode) and working with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project since ~2013 doing QA/Inspection/Test/Rework/Hand building protos.
Unless the designers are careful about controlling the results of their labor they won't be the ones "thriving", or even benefiting. It only works in certain niches where the technical aspects of production or market naturally exclude most other manufacturers.
Or what about designers who don't necessarily want to be in production just to make money?
Ask someone who has spent years and thousands of dollars developing something only to have a copy shop in Asia start selling their widget for half the cost a month after the design files get posted if they think that's a sustainable business model.
I think the makers would still make without patents. I know that I do.
Eric is smart, no doubt but Google’s success was him getting out of the way and letting him just talk to stroke his own ego
Now he has the government backing him to stroke his massive ego
Does anyone really think Eric does anything for “America’a” interest or your interest?
... yes, by:
* Letting capital become concentrated to an incredible level, especially in the tech sector.
* Degrading public education through under-funding, privatization (and perhaps problematic pedagogical approaches).
* Allowing infrastructure and welfare services to degrade, contributing to many people being saddled with "life overhead" that inhibits their disposition and availability to innovate technologically.
* Encouraging US residents, in particular students, to become saddled with large amounts of debt.
and I could go on.
Now, it's true that federal and state investment in research has dropped, but Schmidt seems to be focused on getting what amounts to indirect government subsidy for R&D.
Not saying that’s the whole picture but there’s certainly some “pot calling the kettle” going on here.
Edit: Perhaps a real issue would be looking at how big-tech lobbies government and its impact on innovation
Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think. Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore, in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed.
What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".
There's also just the quality and access to education seems it's getting worse and worse.
I don't know, but it frustrates me that the truth is the US doesn't have the know how that its companies require anymore, and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.
"Almost" really isn't necessary there anymore. There's a growing group that believes virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children.
These used to just be a fringe group. Now it feels like about half the people I know are buying into that stuff. Even some college-educated professionals think only their field is valid, and everyone else is part of "them."
I mean, I won't fault anyone if they are jaded and distrust everything the "experts" have to say these days. Look at what we witnessed in the last 20 or so years:
1. Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.
2. Financial crisis, where the so-called masters of the Universe from Wall St crashed the entire economy and the "maestro" Greenspan denied the existence of a housing bubble in 2005.
3. Recent revelations that scientific studies about the ill effects of sugar were suppressed in 60's / 70's and instead sugar lobby spent money on deflecting blame to fat.
4. Snowden revelations.
5. Details uncovered about the Harvard admissions process which show how the elites are favored via legacy or obscure sports admissions.
6. TPP, especially the way it was conducted where the elected representatives didn't have any access to the details of the negotiations, while the lobbyists from the key industries had full access.
You keep reading that kind of stuff and you start discounting "elite opinions" more and more.
There is a fair part of subjectivity in those opinions, for example most of us tend to forget/neglect granted benefits and focus on unwanted side-effects.
It seems to me that a growing opinion is that governments less and less understand what is going on, and therefore cannot efficiently adequately assess and plan. This is especially true when it comes to managing innovation, which is intrinsically full of new concepts and uncertainty.
However, as a possible member of this community of fools myself, I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them. Of course, everything can be ridiculed by making such a generalizations as "virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals": about every possible sentence starting with something as generic as that would turn out either ridiculously false, or ridiculously obvious.
The point being pretty much the contrary: unfortunately, having a title doesn't equal "being qualified and trustworthy" even on topics that supposedly should be covered by that title, much less on making generic political/historic/socio-economic claims. Moreover, being a professional liar with a nice title seems to be a pretty solid career choice nowadays (well, pretty much always was, if you ask me, but it is you who is claiming that number of people who notice this is growing).
From my point of view I think that is a healthy reaction against technocracy, and it's not US-specific. Those "doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields" can't expect to take the decisions that influence the life of millions each and every day, with almost no over-sight, and then complain when people question those decisions.
"But science says that we should do that and that!" is not a valid enough reason anymore, because science has "said" lots of things that have been proved to be very bad to some parts of the populace (see eugenics, which has been demoted to "non-science" after the fact so that those technocrats that had tried to implement it could wash their hands off of it).
That might carry over to education. The biggest mistake the US seems to be making is centralising and standardising a whole bunch of functions (education, healthcare, etc) at the federal level. Then if the anything goes wrong there is no escape. And the US federal government doesn't seem to be up to the task on a good day.
The US has always had a big ignorant population dragged along by a small core of ingenious, often foreign, visionaries. That doesn't seem to have changed recently.
I suspect that the education problem may be on the demand side (due to the above reason) rather than on the supply side (even though the prohibitive higher education costs do play a big role).
I think a lot of it is pricing and the debt model we use to fund it.
> Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore
The returns on that investment just aren't as good as they used to be, couple that with the required debt above, and stagnant wage growth in these industries and I'd say it's clear they aren't valued anymore.
> and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.
That's actually seems more like part of the reasons for the above issues than it is something that follows from it.
Combine all this with the fact that total self-employment and other measures of entrepreneurship have been trending downwards lately while the level of corporate integration and mergers have been increasing and it's a recipe for the destruction of middle to middle-upper class incomes and careers.
> What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".
This is a symptom of a sick system, and when the system is sick, it's inhabitants become sick as well.
I've had more than person tell me that there's no way this was taught at a university (threading, OS knowledge)
The problem is political dynamics meant that the attitudes of the backward parts of the country have actually set policy for quite a while. That benefited American corporations in the short term - lots of CEO probably think for-profit, student-loan-driven education is a great idea. But it's harmed the US and even US corporations as these policies show their longer term results.
I went to RPI, which is not an ivy school but it is a good engineering school.
Sharing memory between processes was a mess before that. Java green threads (emulating threads in user space, which often blocked badly on IO) were horrifying.
Python threading implementations were even worse of a joke till fairly recently.
> What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".
It's because outside of a few exceptions(tech in particular), you would earn more money being a businessman than being employed, academic or professional.
People always say that we should value teachers, nurses, etc. But it's all just lip service.
Money and salary are what society uses to indicate how much they truly value you.
I don't know about access in other countries, but the quality of education is dropping like a stone pretty much in every developed country right now. (And it's not a recent trend, it's been years in the making)
I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time.
It’s hard to justify not working for a FANG and taking a pay cut.
Could be true but it’s far less important than the brute fact that advanced study is a loser, monetarily. A very big loser. If you can get a doctorate you can get an MBA or a JD in less time and earn a lot more money. Less likely to damage your mental health, far less likely to end in failure and drop out, job market is either better or much, much better.
A documentary by WIRED UK done in 2016 explains many cultural and legal reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
China has hardware industries that work similar to how open source software works.
An article on effects of expiring patents on 3D printing (2013): https://qz.com/106483/3d-printing-will-explode-in-2014-thank...
90 Minutes a Day, Until 10 P.M.: China Sets Rules for Young Gamers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/business/china-video-game...
Many Asian countries have already taken strong steps for digital addiction (which will be the next important problem to tackle after covid, I bet).
China’s sustainable urban transport revolution: https://dialogochino.net/en/infrastructure/11025-chinas-sust...
https://www.citymetric.com/transport/no-hong-kong-has-best-t...
> Overall, 79% of people between the ages of 12 and 24 in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia say they feel optimistic about the direction of the world, compared to only about half of those in far more well-off places like Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden. In the United States, the number is 63%.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90241302/where-in-the-world-are-...
> Of the top countries on our survey, China has developers that are the most optimistic, believing that people born today will have a better life than their parents. Developers in Western European countries like France and Germany are among the least optimistic about the future.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019
China is also much larger country than US. It has 3x more people than US. Those individuals are going to be at par with people in west at some point. There are so many interesting things to discuss and question.
Another big part of this is ego. We, collectively, have this massive Murica number 1 ego that we are unable to accept that we actually collectively have started sucking hard. We have elected numbnuts who don't have any desire to improve society and make it an engine of innovation instead of a society divided by issues of the last century.
In general, in the US, whenever you hear "there's not enough people to do X" it means "there's not enough people willing to do X for what I want to pay"
The truth is, in the US there's a ton of different well-paying careers. CS isn't like medical in US with artificial limits on the number of doctors that graduate every year. The only thing stopping more people from doing CS is money. If they offer enough money they will have a practically unlimited talent pool.
Tech CEO's are always whining about lack of tech workers so they can abuse H1B visas to get employees below market rates. Since they're basically indentured servants to their employers for years to decades until they can get a green card.
The lack of government money in CS research I think everyone in the tech field agrees with
It’s much easier to make money in trades or similar things these days than in most bachelor degree fields.
The reason is very simple, ruling party gets vores by fooling people. They announce the same monetary package year after year without actually giving the package and their media i.e. entire right wing funded media starts praising the package and hailing our supreme leader.
Pet rocks? Million dollar idea.
Water? As long as it's .00000000000000001% poison, it's a homeopathic remedy you can sell for $500 a vial. Add more water to make it more expensive.
Ever think about using the equity in your home to consolidate your credit cards and other debts?
Dumb dumbs spend more and expect less. Bad education is good for the economy.
1 - 61% of US population above 25 has “some college” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_th...
Maybe companies such as OpenAI are the answer to this problem?
It certainly doesn't sound very insightful and he should know better. China has perfected the schooling system and employee discipline, this gives them a considerable advantage. US schools and colleges are a politicized mess, kids are distracted by "diversity" and other decadent but useless ideas. Perhaps it's hard to see through the eyes of someone who hired only from top universities (though they are messed up too), but I don't believe his statement was actually honest.
When American $1.2k per citizen landed in accounts, I remember checking local Walmarts in the weeks that followed and I noticed all the TVs were gone.
With such a system, China could even launch excess solar as far as Germany in their afternoon peak sun angle when German duck curve morning peak begins?
According to the government, only 7% of recipients used any part of their stimulus money to buy household items.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/receipt-and-use-of-sti...
A lot of folks became retail investors for the first time right about then, too. Hertz wiped a few of them out, and SoftBank profited off the rest.
Even a "trickle up" bailout gets taken advantage of by the big fish.
Seems like for most Americans, the money went to debt payment and savings, which seems quite rationale in times of uncertainty.[1]
For those in the lower income ranges, more of it went to consumers goods, but that would be expected at those income levels.
[1]https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/02/how-did-...
An asset like a solar plant or a HVDC line produces revenue for the public. And there's no reason an independent publicly owned corporation can't function well.
I'll admit guaranteeing that the revenue isn't wasted by a government that becomes addicted to its revenue streams is another problem. (Denmark has a bridge with €30 plus tolls that were promised to become toll free once the loans were paid off. Never happened. Norway seems to do a better job with its oil fund.)
To bring China back as the reference, important government posts are extremely prestigious and held by very capable people. Outside of propping up their stock market, it is hard to fault their public investment stategy.
However, I disapprove of the surveillance state and the human rights abuses.
However, I do agree that the US should be spending more on infrastructure. A LOT more. Arguably, spending less on infrastructure is what’s caused the loss of a lot of blue collar jobs...
I mean, if I had an extra 1.2k (btw, I didn't qualify), I might spend it on something fancy.
People are comparing the official numbers of Governments on the West, like Covid expansion, economy growth, investment on R&D and so on with the Chinese's. But the Chinese numbers are just a lie.
You just can not trust whatever numbers the Chinese give you. You can not trust any government in the West either but those governments have a democracy, journalists that can expose the truth or reality,competition and super super important, rule of Law.
In the West you can expose what your government does bad by law. It is not perfect but orders of magnitude better than on China.
For example journalists or scientists can investigate covid traceability, in China it is just officially forbidden.
Belgium has one of the biggest official numbers on coronavirus deaths just because they lie less than other Governments like Spain that have actually bigger real numbers. And Chinese numbers are in another league.
You just can not compare the numbers given by democratic governments with those of totalitarian regimes, because on paper they are fantastic, but in reality they are not true.
In China everything is controlled by the CCP, including (specially) the statistics.
People that have never lived there just can not comprehend how amazing are the structures that we have in the West(that took centuries to develop).
We take those structures for granted and believe other countries have those and are playing with the same rules as we do, but they do not.
China has lots of problems today, floods and covid had created havoc in the economy, much more than in the West. It is not easy to feed the enormous population they have.
But you don't know about it because giving bad news about China is just forbidden. In fact China had censored Western articles about China(Do you want face masks? We are sorry but until you remove that and that person that criticizes China on your media you will not have face masks.)
The population is growing older fast, they have less women than men because they abort girls and they can not do anything about that because abortion there is super easy.
When the economy was booming everything was great. People lived a tough life but expected their children to life much better. When the bubble burst is completely different.
The US has much brighter future than China. I say that as a European. People on USA have kids and they have much more resources because of the small population density.
Gosh imagine that, even a former online Bookseller (amazon) is more innovative than google.
MapReduce, Spanner, Protocol Buffers, Gmail, Go Lang, Android, Chrome, Microservices, Borg, Tensorflow, TPUs, Google Maps, Google Street View, Google Docs, Google Translate, Dremel, Duplex, Chromebooks, ChromeCast, Daydream, mobile first development, BeyondCorp, V8, Kubernetes, LevelDB...
Those are just some of things I can think of from the top of my head and doesn't include the machine learning research that google and deepmind are doing.
I'm not a fan of google but they've done a handful of things since the turn of the millennium.
Given that Schmidt is an intelligent person capable of parsing logic, is it fair to ask if he has ulterior motives here?