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If you believe that there is a country that could, seems to me you would be taking it on faith, and in my opinion, ignoring uncountable foreign inputs. Unless y

• culturestate 7y ago
  There probably is a country that could go from rocks to finished pen entirely domestically (Germany?) but that wasn't really my point. I was trying to illustrate the broad chasm between theoretical and practical expertise. Just because someone "knows a lot of STEM" doesn't mean they can actually produce a useful thing. China already had perhaps the most highly concentrated amount of manufacturing engineering expertise anywhere in the world, yet still they needed help with what most people would consider a basic item. This is fine! Most countries, as you noted, are in the same position. It's a desirable outcome of globalization. It becomes problematic, though, when your goal is to build an incredibly complex machine that requires expertise beyond your own (like a particle accelerator, perhaps) and the people and countries whose help you require are unwilling to work with you.