carlgrace said:
Why are you worried? I'm honestly curious.
Because one of the other major events in my life was Tiananmen. What caused the Soviet Union to collapse was when people figured out that Communism wasn't creating economic prosperity. There are things that I like about the American political system (i.e. the fact that the US can run a political system without political prisoners).
If we get to 2030, and it looks like China has obviously superior economic performance, then there will be less pressure for China to adopt what I think are the good parts of the US political system (i.e. free elections and freedom of speech), and some pressure to have the US adopt what I think are the bad parts of the Chinese political system.
Standard of living is not a zero-sum game. Sure, the American standard of living will suffer relative to the rest of the world (because we were the only game in town in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Actually, no. The Soviet Union had extremely impressive growth rates in the 1950's.
My worry is that without heavy investment in science and technology, I worry that there will not merely a relative decline, but that growth will go negative. Something that worries me greatly are the economic ideas of Vladimir Popov. His argument was that the Soviet Union's collapse in the 1980's was due to lack of infrastructure investment in the 1960's. The idea was that in the 1950's, the Soviets were able to completely redo their economic infrastructure as they recovered from World War II. Because central planning made it impossible to undertake new capital investment (i.e. if you shut down a factory, your quotas got killed), there was no new investment in industry, and starting in the 1970's, this caused big problems as the Russians were stuck with obsolete technology. My worry is that the lack of infrastructure spending is going to cause the US to go down the same road.
The conventional wisdom is that China is massively overinvesting, but I wonder if that is wrong and the problem is that the US underinvesting. It's worth going back to the 1990's, and seeing that the example which economists were using of a place that had bad economic policies was Singapore, and Singapore is doing pretty great now. One problem is that a lot of current economic thinking puts too much emphasis on efficiency. Investment in new technology is inherently inefficient because you spend money now, but you don't see any benefits for ten to twenty years. Conversely, if you cut investment now, your numbers look great, but there will be heck to pay in ten to twenty years.
I'm not convinced that this has to be a game to be "won".
I think that maybe there should be. Last person that makes it to Jupiter is a rotten egg.
Something that has a big impact on my thinking is "Space, the Final Frontier." If you look at what caused Europe to develop the frontier, it was national competition. England *had* to set up colonies, because the French were doing it, and the French were doing it because Spain did it. Conversely, the reason that China didn't colonize America was because there was no political necessity to do so. The one exception was Taiwan. For several thousand years, China basically ignored Taiwan, but in the 17th century, you suddenly had a massive effort to colonize Taiwan, and that was when the imperial government realized that if they didn't, the Dutch or the Portuguese would.
If we want to get off this planet, then there has to be some national competition. Hopefully, it will be "friendly competion" in which no one gets killed.
I have lots of nightmares. My big nightmare isn't that China makes it back to the moon before the US. My big nightmare is that China makes it back to the moon before the US, and no one in the US cares. One of the worst things that happened to the Space Race was when the US won it, and one of the worst things that happened to science funding was when the Cold War ended.
Right now a lot of people are taking advantage of cheap overseas labor, but the countries are developing quickly.
And that changes the distribution of power. True story. Multinational corporation has a meeting about hiring people. One realizes that this means more jobs for Ph.D.'s in country X and fewer jobs for Ph.D.'s in the US. Someone at the meeting wants to object because that's bad for the US, but realizes that this is a stupid argument because he happens to be the only American in the room.
The thing about multinational corporations is that they are multinational. In the 1950's, you could get a multinational corporation to act in the American interest since all of the important people in the MNC were American (Europe didn't get up and running until the 1960's). You can't do that today, because most MNC's are multinational.
The other thing is that it's not just cheap labor. It's cheap labor + good infrastructure. Why do companies create jobs in China rather than Haiti? Labor in Haiti is even cheaper than China.
You're quite right that America has chosen against investing in infrastructure. Shame on us.
It's not a matter of shame, but of economic survival. One other thing that worries me is that no one in the US seems to be thinking longer term. The financial crisis is causing a lot of pain, and when you are in pain, you don't think ten to twenty years ahead. If you aren't capable of thinking ten to twenty years ahead, then things like high speed rail and money for public universities are just a useless waste of money.
In China, the economic crisis ended in 2008, and so people are thinking strategically about what things are going to look like in 2022, 2032, and 2042.