In particular, they are looking at US manufacturing. While this is a diverse industry, it's clear that in many subfields there is quite a bit of saturation. When everyone has a car, and cars last longer and longer, the need for new cars goes down. Once you get to a point where your industrial capacity can provide enough to satisfy demand, further R&D only reduces the costs of satisfying that demand, not increased output, and in some cases improvements to product quality may even further reduce demand. In the US, light vehicle sales peaked in 2000, and while the numbers dipped during various market downturns, they keep coming back to roughly the same asymptote. The numbers are even more striking if you break it down further - the annual demand for personal vehicles has fallen by a factor of 4 since 1965, and by a factor of 3 since 2000, the difference being made up by increased commercial vehicle demand. Looking at other industries like steel paints a similar picture.
That's exactly what I am describing. It's not that a particular style of vehicle is no longer in demand due to a shift in preferences and factories would need to be retooled to create a different type of vehicle, demand for all vehicles has fallen. Yes, the people who once worked on those auto assembly lines will generally go on to do something else, but it won't count as an increase in productivity in car production.
More generally, demand for pretty much all US domestic manufactured goods has flatlined or fallen. Production capacity is not the limiting factor in almost anything mass produced nowadays. Even dramatic reductions in manufacturing cost aren't going to induce any demand. Throw in demographic changes where there are fewer people who have needs to be satisfied, and better products which don't need to be replaced as often, and we ought to expect falling demand across the board.
If you measure output as GDP - wouldn't GDP have gone down - even if actual production of goods and services has gone up?
Not sure how they measure productivity here.
Perhaps if you are at the apex skimming off a fraction of a percentage of total output then the size of the output matters.
Or perhaps if you are holding debt and expecting the repayments with interest to be made.
That’s why being a fast follower is so valuable, you get everyone else to waste money on the wrong ways to build things. It also causes R&D to show much worse returns.
Just big countries but stuck.
I wouldn’t mind if we could make some plays to revamp Japan and some EU, and maybe grow India while boxing China and Russia together.
As long as those countries have governments that aren’t on our side or at least sympathetic to our vision, they should be kept in check hard. Like manufacturing stuff for us but not really being able to use any of it. Sounds harsh but that’s reality. Nothing personal lol
All they’ve done is steal anyway and extracting knowledge from us after we showed them how to make a factory (reductionist but idc), so it’s not like we would be “morally” wrong.
For much of the globe, the US is the bad guy/bully, and not the "world policeman" - epecially in countries they bombed (like my country).
With recent US administration changes, this attitude is also becoming more prominent in countries which used to consider the US to be an ally!
Although the Putin regime can enter the sea and never return.
I'm so comically bad at pushing powers to do anything that even my wife doesn't listen to me. From what I've seen, most people making things are bad at demanding things from others. Those who are good at demanding things from others don't really need to make things themselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the...
There are lots more.
The person you're replying to would much rather have a discussion about the well-documented atrocities of a waning American empire than the far less documented atrocities of a waxing Chinese Empire that has no democratic institutions to keep it in check.
Commi didn’t work as an experiment after all those death camps and purges anyway. And anyone “communist” today is basically authoritarian capitalist with mini purges and dictators. They take Jack Ma to a “camp” and factory reset him or put all the Muslims out west in a prison city.
America has to play the way it does sometimes because the lobby is dominated by cheaters and toxic scumbags who don’t want to actually score points and win.
Positive-sum doesn't necessarily mean everyone wins. Just that in aggregate things improve.
In fact, for any significant policy change, there will be losers.
And lots of very long term systemic dysfunction, with powerful interests reinforcing that dysfunction, tilting positive returns toward themselves, and negative returns onto others.
“ China has a large wealth gap, and we have many people with lower education levels who earn meager wages through manual labor to support their families.”
This is the crux of the issue, people too close to extreme poverty couldn’t care less about the IP institutions that led to mass technological development that they or their child will benefit from.
To me, it’s analogous to how very poor people treat the environment very poorly because they have no mental bandwidth to care. The best way to help in that case is to raise wages.
People are frustrated with the CCP because devaluing the currency is intentional massive wage theft which keeps the population near poverty with the negative aftereffects.
If this goes on long enough (which it might have), humanity at large suffers if people refuse to invest in technology of the future or everyone starts putting up trade barriers because the lost investments are too painful.
How to raise those wages without enough money? I think money are created from making products. If you just increase wages without changing anything other (like making more products or more expensive products), it means you increase inflation, which is essentially redistribution of money from everyone to those poorer people.
I think the solution is investment into more high and practical education, so that people actually can work more productively and make more money that way. But current accounting practices seem to not see this way, so money are not allocated for such education.
I've studied some sociological and economic theories, and I generally understand that this problem is very difficult to solve.
From my perspective, China's biggest problem right now is actually unequal distribution (especially between different regions), and it's sad to see such a problem in a socialist country.
I really hope our government can truly commit to solving such inter-regional distribution problems, instead of just shouting slogans and doing nothing (which they often do).
I have many classmates from underdeveloped regions who come to Beijing for university and then never return to their hometowns because there are simply no opportunities there. Major resources are concentrated in a few large cities.
I don't know if this is a common characteristic of East Asian countries (Tokyo is also very large, and small cities in Japan are also declining). However, Japan's Gini coefficient is very low, and I think we should learn from Japan in this regard.
The issue is your gov. Same as Russia or anyone else. People are the same individually, but collectively we are not. The Lakers don’t invite the Celtics to a BBQ instead of competing on the court just because they both love shooting hoops.
You are an entrepreneur? You should come to America if you love free-r markets and entrepreneurship. You do know that you can far more easily start a company in America as a Chinese national, than I could in China as an American citizen right? We are all the same people if we go grab a bite or show each other our favorite music videos, but on a global stage we are not the same as NATIONS. That is the key distinction.
As an American, I believe that our way of life, our Constitution, and our proven ability to take all sorts of people and make our nation greater because of it is the epitome of human civilization so far. Others have had thousands of years, still failed to do much. We've only been around since 1776 and been through our own very hard lessons (Civil War, civil rights, Vietnam), though I would argue on a objective scale nowhere close to CCP or Russians..
A quick peek at recent CCP history (hey, we all have skeletons in the closet like I already conceded) shows 10s of millions of their own people murdered in purges (we can argue if it was 10 million or 40 million or 80 million, and it would be totally absurd), Tiananmen Square Massacre, Jack Ma's treatment, drowning Filipino fishermen and other S. China Sea free trade disruptions, and most recently a possible invasion of Taiwan. The possibility of a PLA invasion of Taiwan is why America has invested billions into building chip factories on-shore. As soon as the PLA launches, Taiwan is forced to destroy its own chip factories and other critical infrastructure.
I have zero faith that a CCP dominated world would be a net benefit. It is an exclusionary repressive government, it likes to purge its people randomly, and in general is just not easy to get along with. It also has a boardroom despot that's a dictator. Same thing with Russians, they have been under the rule of some truly awful people and that's just how it is at the end of the day, nothing personal.
I don't need to go on a VPN and be afraid to speak my mind here because being honest about our shortcomings and past is how we forge an actually better tomorrow.
The US also exports culture. I've been around the world, and I see people wearing NBA jerseys or going crazy in the theater watching Marvel movies with subtitles. Even the media in other countries is so heavily derivative of American culture, like pop idol bands or any TV show literally looks like American media from 10-20 years ago but in a different language that I enjoy with subtitles because it is nice to hear a different language and see the scenery there. (Really brings to light what I meant about copy/pasting or stealing from us, in literally every regard though)
They love being American, and acting like it too sometimes. That’s the beauty of America, that anyone can join (legally if physically, otherwise just vibing), and it only makes us stronger. I don’t see anyone lining up to "be Chinese" or "be Russian" in the same way, almost always the other way around. Even our biggest haters are rocking American fashion with their fighter kits lol.
Well, so long as they don't crack down on VPNs here, like the UK is discussing.
The America of yesteryears? Sure. Today's America? Definitely not.
I mean Russia invaded Ukraine. China has literal concentration camps for Muslims and plans to invade Taiwan.
The US has also launched bombing runs in Syria and Libya, again both of which have the faintest connection to the average American's daily life, all in the pursuit of some boogieman War on Terror.
The US has engaged in military coups to overthrow democratic governments in nearly every Latin American country.
And to crown its Opus, the US has now begun building concentration camps (once again), both on its own soil and in foreign territory.
> They are sort of just pawns I guess? None of them will ever become self made. Look what happens to Chinese entrepreneurs who get a little too successful and forget the CCP. They go to a camp and then come out with a factory reset lmao! Russians fall out of windows weekly it seems.
Sure, while the US extends the favor to foreign nationals and kidnaps them to torture them at Guantanamo, often supplied to them willingly by their British vassals. There's a poignant recorded letter in the Guardian of a young child's letter to Tony Blair asking to return his father from Guantanamo.
It’s why America and her people (whether they were born here or immigrated here to become American) are greater than anyone else. We accept our faults, and yet we still strive to build a better world.
And when dealing with such scenarios, whether in business or geopolitics, I’m always partial to the genuine winner who gave an actual shit.
Or do you? There's a significant fraction of America that is clear-cut evidence of the contrary. Your statement alone is a blatant display of misplaced American exceptionalism.
> I’m always partial to the genuine winner who gave an actual shit.
Might want to broaden your scope a bit outside your country then. Check out the following map fyi: https://brilliantmaps.com/threat-to-peace/ Most foreign citizens actively disagree with your assumptions. And since that map is now a bit dated, we ought to add Canada and Denmark to the list too.
Again, I'm nowhere asserting that China and Russia are models to aspire to. But calling today's America as the shining beacon of democracy and capitalism that every nation should aspire to is a bit of a farce. Especially given that your richest and best are secretly seeking citizenship in European nations.
Go talk doo-doo about Xi (if you can even do that), you'll get camped or your family might get rm -rf'd. Same with Putin, Kim Dong or whoever else from a authoritarian regime.
People are free to criticize in America. I know that's a luxury belief that most people won't ever know, but that's also why things are luxuries. Once you have them, it is hard to go back to Target or whatever.
If America was to go mask off and cheat by become Authoritarian like Xi or Putin, we'd wipe the floor in like 20 years tops and everyone will unite under our beautiful flag.
We're better than that though. Hell, we fought ourselves and came out BETTER for it, instead of becoming commies or other losers. We even held ourselves accountable for actions we took in the past, something our authoritarian "rivals" would never concede because they know they're wack.
By the way, I'm replying to your comment via a proxy server in Los Angeles, HN is also not directly accessible in China. I think this is why I didn't truly understand many things until my twenties, which is a pity.
I also hope we can have a democratic government, at least one that allows free access to information and freedom of political expression.
But this conflicts with the interests of those with vested interests, who fear that giving people a little freedom will cause them to lose the wealth they gained through illicit means. I think this is unjust, but I don't know what to do.
Even Jack Ma was punished for saying the wrong thing and disappeared from public view for several years. He's the one who created Taobao and Alipay; an entrepreneur like that would be respected in the US and would have the opportunity to tell young people in the public eye: you shouldn't sigh, there are many opportunities in this world. But the truth is, the mainstream voice only teaches everyone to obey, and successful and visionary people are gradually leaving this country.
However, I see that the United States seems very chaotic, and for my personal safety, I probably won't consider going there. I really like American culture, especially Silicon Valley culture, but I might consider Singapore or Australia as better immigration destinations. Perhaps the situation in Silicon Valley is different from those chaotic neighborhoods? I'm not in the US, so I don't know much about it. I wish someone could tell me, haha.
Because the US can't get their collective heads out of their asses to build a competitive industry?
The USA is losing this imagined fight with China, and the solution is not to destroy an entire nation, but to actually become competitive.
Sure, let's just fucking nuke every country that's more successful than us. That'll show them!
Americans are absolutely fucking insane.
Instead we were backstabbed by the CCP through IP theft and other corporate espionage. Yes America wanted a cheaper manufacturing partner and China at the time when “real communism” was fading seemed like a good partner to onboard for the new century ahead.
I don’t think Americans are insane. It’s that Americans have to live in a world dominated by warlords, weirdos (Kim Jon Un and others like him), shithead dictators and religious zealots.
We aspire to achieve greatness and manifest destiny. Meanwhile we are blocked by literally everyone else who can’t get their shit together.
So yes, it’s necessary for our end goals. I don’t think it’s as bad as what others were already doing to each other before our intervention (hey nothing is perfect and punching up is easy af). It’s not like others don’t benefit. I’m sure for the majority where it worked out they like the GDP boost and using American tech and services. Or they can also copy what we tried and worked and try implementing it there.
While we are building cool stuff, we have to live in a mostly evil world with awful dictators and zealots of all sorts (commies, sky daddy, etc).
It took Europe 50 years to chill tf out and we had to bail them out each time they kicked off a world war. Most of the world is still not a desirable place to live (it’s why my parents moved from a hellhole to here for a better life).
If some people think we are crazy then I suggest they don’t come here for education (even if they plan to go back) or work. Save the room for someone else who actually wants to join the American journey.
It's not 'we,' it's just your opinion, comrade. If the USA were actually run by people with views the same as yours, it'd be no different from Russia or China. But thankfully, there are still many who get that life is about collaboration and compromise, who don't live in fear nor have the dream of domination.
I’m just stating my honest beliefs. Geopolitics or business is won through communication but it’s not “bruh we are all one dawg” because been there done that, most of the world would rather kill each other over dumb shit.
Since we believe in higher ideals, we have to do what’s necessary. Do you think the deals made are 1:1? Or does power imbalance play a huge role in getting a 3:1?
Come on dude.
Fact: They are the ones who escalated into IP theft and espionage.
As for manufacturing but not learning from it…
Oligarchies stemming from massive but continued financial shocks will curb innovation because survival trumps ambition. They are rivals until they’re on our side, and as such if they’re kept financially insecure they will not have the appetite to steal I mean innovate anymore. People want just a job, food, and shelter. CCP already provides education and healthcare. But adversarial global ambitions need to be checked.
Heck I don't think India is going to be stuck for very long
Frankly I think this is the big cultural change in tech generally, isn't it? People come up with ideas and everyone goes "oh I want to do that", so they replicate it off the back of the work everyone else has done. Uncritical FOMO.
But actually it's better to be an even slower follower, generally, as a survivor strategy. Apple and Nintendo shows this. It's better to go "I see what they are all doing, and I see where they think consumers are, but I think they are wrong, and I think it's not just a question of them going about it wrong, but that all of this evidence suggests consumers actually wish they were getting this other thing, and that is what we should build".
I would bet that a company trying to replicate that strategy without the previously established brand image would not go very far.
Or perhaps the time scale of "fast follower" is distorted in my head, compared to the scale of business.
Younger readers might not know that before the iPad came out, Michael Arrington tried to make a tablet before tablets were a thing. So the problem back then was that touch screens were expensive and scaling up from a smart phone to a tablet had a lot of engineering problems. It didn't happen overnight. And Arrington started building TechCrunch’s "CrunchPad" in public, and people thought he might steal a march on tablets. It went a bit wrong with a falling out with a manufacturer, and the manufacturer released the JooJoo.
But obviously Apple had been working on the iPad the entire time, kept their mouths shut until they had perfected it and crushed the JooJoo a couple of months after the JooJoo's release date. The JooJoo was more expensive than expected, almost the same price as the iPad, but had performance issues, poor software, no app store and a short battery life.
You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.
On the other hand, you can argue that they didn't wait long enough because the tech to really pull off this vision simply wasn't there yet (or is there but is obscenely expensive, which is saying something given this headset was already lambasted for cost). It's marketing (after looking back at some commercials) for what it offers was half "oh this is pretty useful" (a workststion with very little footprint) and half "oh this is black mirror" (lying along on a couch watching movies, interacting with kids as you have a giant headset on you). Maybe it's the nature of thr medium, but Apple tended to do a good job is making it feel like their technology brought people closer. Here the socialization felt hollow.
Apple has always liked to dabble with 'failures' too, though. For example, the Newton didn't nail it, but arguably was still an important step towards creating the iPad.
The NES trailblazed the 3rd generation consoles and nearly single-handedly put a term to the NA videogames crash.
Granted, the SNES was nothing to call home about when it came out.
If the crash hadn't happened and Mattel managed to drop the Intellivision 3, then graphically and aurally it would have been very close to the NES. Hardware wise the NES is just "like what came before, but better".
Even the gamepad was very similar to the Vectrex controller, which had the same shape but used a very small joystick instead of a D-pad. The use of a D-pad on a controller could be considered revolutionary I suppose (though the D-pad itself wasn't invented by Nintendo, they used it best).
But the same could be said of the SNES and the shoulder buttons then, the most revolutionary aspect was the controller.
Nintendo has always been an innovative company. They have gone against the rest of the industry time and time again. What they don’t do is follow. They don’t go for ever increasing performance. They don’t chase ports. The Wii with motion control, the switch merging handheld and tv based, both were very new idea.
Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator.
Like you said, Nintendo saw that consumers didn’t really want more polygons/second, they wanted fun. Similarly, Apple saw Rio and other MP3 players and realized that consumers didn’t want a 800 128kbps mp3s in their pocket, they wanted a stylish way to listen to music on the go.
Sure, the Wii controllers and iPod clickwheel were novel and innovative user experiences and big hits, but they weren’t heavy lifting technically.
I think you are making the same mistake that OP.
You think R&D in the video game industry is releasing more powerful systems. It’s not. R&D is proposing innovative value proposition. Nintendo does that all the time from the Switch to the weird game with cardboard. Nintendo does a lot of R&D in an industry where their competitors do very little and mostly just update their existing product. Calling them an exemple of a follower couldn’t be further from the truth.
Apple indeed used to do a lot of R&D. They do a lot less nowadays.
In other words: they have cultural skin in the game. A bad quarter or even year won't have them seeking out private equity funding.
In comparison. How do we think Activision or Ubisoft would have reacted to those kinds of shortcomings?
The implication that these “fanatics” are misguided because they fail to prioritize “cutting edge” over every other purchase criteria tells me you haven’t been around the block enough to realize that cutting edge is not a positive product attribute. Believe me, I have storage bins full of obsolete cutting edge products that I got less joy from than many boring old appliances I use every day.
I Don't Unserstand that. Innovative should increase productivity. If i deploy a new technology i should see productivity gains. Does that Not mean we see should se productivity gains regardless of how fast a technology becomes obsolete? Maybe technologies do not get adopted that fast or the productivity gains do not justify the Investment?
Interested in your project. Can you point to any similar books and how you are expanding on them?
Is it that they deny the entire possibility of a creative genius working in isolation, or deny that a creative genius working in isolation, without a supporting community to spread the good word, will still see his work make it out into the world?
Ramanujan would have still been Ramanujan had he not worked with Littlewood and Hardy (though the world might not have witnessed both his genius and his contributions), but by all accounts he invested an enormous amount of time and effort in mathematics, to the point that his family urged him to do other things. Einstein worked a job that was so trivial for him that he spent most of his time thinking about other things. Newton invented calculus while his classes were halted because everyone was isolating from the plague. Bukowski famously quipped that his choices were to earn a wage, or to write and starve, and he'd chosen to starve.
In the same way that you probably don't get garage startups in a society where no one has a garage, you probably don't get many creative geniuses without good family structures and some level of slack in the system.
All of these followed the model of a relatively small number of smart people bouncing ideas off each other, reviewing them, building on them, and promoting the good ones.
The difference between that and modern R&D is that modern R&D tries to be industrial rather than academic. Academia is trapped in a bullshit job make-work cycle, where quantity gets more rewards than quality and creativity. There isn't room for mavericks like Einstein. Even if they're out there having great ideas, there's no way for them to be discovered and promoted.
Industry focuses more on fill-in developments than game changer mathematical insights, which are the real drivers of scientific progress.
So there's a lot of R&D-like activity in CS, and occasionally something interesting falls out, like LLMs. But fundamental physics has stagnated.
One of the biggest reasons is that the smartest people don't work in research. They work in finance, developing gambling algorithms.
I disagree that the smartest people work in finance. Some very smart people do. From what I've seen, the ones at the very farthest edge of human ability typically aren't motivated by money.
One person's idea can be good enough to be the most revolutionary thing in a field, but it still may not be as well thought-out as if more than one worked on it together from the beginning.
One person's physical efforts can almost always be dwarfed by a team of some kind, and that might be the only way for an idea to become reality, but it's not going to help if there's not a proper team to join or resources to build staff from scratch.
Since most teams do not contain an absolute genius, at least they come up with products because they have a team. Excellent products sometimes, but not often genius level.
In some fields they really think brains are the most important thing, but it's too rare and everybody knows it.
So if they want to get to market any time soon they have to settle for what they have to work with until such a rare genius comes along.
Which may be never so no time to wait, but by the time some miracle-working wizard shows up it's too late because the team has no drop-in task for them to perform, and has not naturally been formed with the necessary structure to leverage anybody's wizardry by then. So never mind, they can't recognize it anyway.
I wasn't referring to that last definition, but to the view that intellectual environment is so important for supporting the exploration of ideas that true solitary creativity doesn't happen. For books arguing this view, try Robert Weisberg, Dean Keith Simonton, and Keith Sawyer. Study specifically on creativity in lab research was done by Kevin Dunbar, who also found the social aspect essential.
The churn is in market attention. While you are setting to capitalize on potential increases in productivity, the competition has already come out with something better and the customer has moved on.
If you measure effort and output - then surely productivity has gone up - but if they measure it in another way - say capital to return - it might not have?
So you're telling me if I have 10 researchers and an economy of 1 billion people, the growth rate should be constant? If I have 20 researchers the growth rate should double? Remember, growth is measured as a percentage increase, not a linear increase
Even if the concepts of what you're talking about make sense when they are being properly elaborated, the way you have elaborated them is extremely poor.
Evading patent minefields, however ...
Especially now that AI can continuously scan for infringement, ideas are getting harder to use.
Most other forms of value-added activity need to start with something of value to begin with.
The closer that that "nothing" can be brought to zero, the greater the leverage by comparison until it wipes the floor with everything else.
It wasn't so bad until all the MBA's came along, they have nothing like the equations that are needed to figure this out when the data is not numbers yet. Regular non-degreed business operators used to be so much more advanced in mathematical intuition regardless.
The researchers stayed as talented, plus got better technology, the founding giants of leadership lasted as long as they could but were replaced by midgets, and here we are.