What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion?
My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.
My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.
1)you might have been too young to have read it (1992)
2)outsourcing and trade balance was in the full quote
>When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
--Snow Crash,1992
Why should you care about a quote from any time period? Because it expresses something well.
Why should you care about an older quote? Because it expresses something well enough to have endured.
You think China can't write microcode?
You think only USA has big breasted women and men with chiseled abs? None of this makes any sense.
High speed pizza had to be tongue in cheek as written. Maybe you missed the point and it was all written tongue in cheek because who truly cares about those things if you don't have all your other bases covered?
Maybe I missed the point. Are we already pinched off?
As of today China hasn't totally, or indeed really, caught up in the first 3. (Think about why). You might argue the Eurozone is up there in music but then you remember TikTok isn't quite YouTube.
High speed pizza delivery is the most hilarious because it's the only material domain that they won't make progress at (in the foreseeable future). They have better EVs better batteries and maybe better food (in general). Just not pizza because pizza is pizza, and drones still lag behind the fastest nuclear bike when it comes to shipping frozen pizza from Shanghai to your doorstep (is there even a market for frozen pizza in Hong Kong?)
(I'm glad he didn't mention games at all because it would have been the obvious one in 1992, but wrong 2025)
Snow Crash is positing once the mechanical and geographic advantages flatten globally you’re left with services of some sort - media, logistics, software: FAANG. It doesn’t seem far from the mark.
I wouldn’t be dismissive of the minds of the past. They’re in the context that leads to your present and have a unique perspective. The filter of history means the books that bubble up are from the most insightful and brilliant of their era, which means effectively the signal is clearly separated from the noise unlike the presents analysis of itself. If you want to understand what’s happening now read the science fiction of yesterday.
Obviously, there are lots of players in those categories, but the U.S. is at or near top of the pack there. We just happen to be optimizing for the wrong thing right now.
I heard a columnist say, incredulously, “China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry”
Which one is easier to nab?
The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency by a long way, American capital markets are still the world’s largest and safest, and investors do not like capricious governments that don’t always adhere to established practices and rule of law (see: Ant Financial). Investors don’t want to put money in a place where saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong person could negatively impact your ability to transact in that country (also see: Russia c. 1990).
So I would assume it would take decades for China to maneuver the world away from American financial services.
I don't think people understand how fortunate the US is to be reasonably uncorrupt/have a solid rule of law, have the world reserve currency, and for the most part be where any company in the world would prefer to be incorporated. That type of branding is impossible to put a value on.
Unfortunately the US is currently speed running to remove these advantages. Luckily it takes time for large money outflows to occur, and hopefully US law can hold in the meantime.
Maybe I’m just paranoid, and I know it doesn’t happen overnight, but my goodness… that keeps me up at night.
Not static. The parent post reminds us that "Made in USA" meant low quality. But so did "Made in China". These things change, but if the national-level policy is "let the market figure it out" (the polar opposite of China's approach), they don't change for the better.
In terms of foreign trade, higher-ed is one of our greatest exports. Many other nations would like to knock us off the top, none could come close until Trump scored an own goal.
I'm even more proud that our ag school is helping farmers in New York and the rest of the world make money and feed a growing population that expects to eat better (however they define "better") in a challenging climate. That our vet school trains vets and farriers. That our ROTC trains officers for all of our armed services. I don't see a contradiction that I'm also proud that Catholic priest and activist Daniel Berrigan against the Vietnam war escaped the FBI in the same building where those officers train.
There's something to be said for the way pioneers of the hand and mind are remembered as political operators or donors are..
Sure bureaucrats set those up but the exceptionality pointed at there felt inclusive
People can feel whatever they want about the achievements at their own institutions, .. it just feels purer when the institution is just a backdrop for these universal achievements .. plus I can go into any Leidse bakery and introduce myself as a scientist without bracing for sideeye (doesn't happen even on HN!)
That's not pride, that's just a sense of belonging
Why I chose this example. Somehow the Calvinist ressentiment "let no man be greater than I", which is equally present in NL as in the anglo heart/hinterlands.. makes a singular exception for intellectual achievements (as opposed to some purely emotional ones, like some particularly potent puns)
Don't know if villages in China will remember their current & future groundbreakers :)
There's hope: DeepSeek's hometown put up laudatory red banners for him.. nonironically.. is that like confetti for Apollo 11?
I think not. In the latter case, there's a serious case to be made that NASA deserved the confetti more.. that's how ressentiment "works"
In liberal arts nobody comes close, but the "value" of that is largely explained by "networking" (network effects if we're to be charitable :)
In theoretical research, gap is rapidly closing.
In hard sciences research, I only see clear supremacy in capital intensive areas. Guess that's where the footguns were aimed at.
The classroom teaching is a mixed bag
Funny though I used to be proud of the Chinese language collection at my Uni which is one of the greatest outside (any) China and I still am but once I got really interested in the Chinese language it hit me that it's like 1% of what they have at Beijing University.
My favorite recollection in that place was going through Ken Wilson's notes. IIRC there was FORTRAN. Most interesting was a proof of Dyson's conjecture. Cant really remember because it wasn't that useful. Thought it was weird that he left-- gossip says it was the wife-- but nice that some people still bothered.
Institutions rise & fall. Become cringe. Achievements can endure, but only thru the effort of wider communities to distill and distribute.
From where I'm sitting it looks like the bully finally made his way around to picking on someone who had it coming.
Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence.
Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today.
Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have.
Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society.
From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").
You are engaging in the exact same. The primary reason academic labs churn out technological advancement for Microsoft, Exxon, etc, etc, is because the tax code makes it preferential to do that rather than run the same thing in-house.
Also, I would like to note the slight of hand you just pulled between education and academia. There is no problem with doctors and lawyers getting their training. But that is absolutely distinct from professional academia. Those people are the customers. They are in and out.
The institutions themselves are absolutely corrupt. It is very comparable to the catholic church scooping up all the wealth in europe in the 13-1500s and justifying it by embedding themselves in mundane parts of society and then screeching "but without us who will do the thing" as if that justified everything else they were up to. (Though to be fair, academia is not the only institution subject to such criticism these days).
Your comment is exactly the kind of thinking these people want you to use. They want you to doubt every institution and have some anecdote about why it is the right way to think, when in reality it is the doing of a few elites, not institutions that are largely made up of people like you an mean. They want culture war between us instead of class warfare against them.
Perhaps one day people will start paying attention to the wealth inequality gap and realize what is going on... but increasinly unlikely if you demonize and undermine academia
Saying "the entire institution of higher education is not collectively responsible for this specific bad economic policy choice" is somehow equivalent to saying "we should go kill hundreds of thousands of people to protect the poor Kurds/Palestinians/Israelis/etc"??
No; even leaving aside your apparent (and wild) misconception that "academia" is a unified, monolithic body akin to the medieval Catholic Church, unless you're willing to dial down your rhetoric to something less self-indulgently overdramatic and engage with actual reality in a vaguely reasonable manner, I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion.