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This is going to answer a very important question for the future. Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values th

• Hydraulix989 6y ago
  What do you mean by American values? Specific examples?
  • magicsmoke 6y ago
    Democracy naturally leads to competent and benevolent government, there are no circumstances under which human rights violations are ever acceptable, freedom of the individual takes priority over total benefit to the group, all individuals have the same intrinsic value regardless of their economic/social status, etc.
    • wahern 6y ago
      > Democracy naturally leads to competent and benevolent government That hasn't been an American value for quite awhile, assuming it ever was.[1] Thus Reagan's famous quote: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help'. [1] I'm willing to accept that it was for relatively brief but important periods, such as the 2-3 decades after WWII. The U.S. would still be a backwater were it not for moments where pragmatism and a shared sense of responsibility trumped cynicism and a reflexive fear of authority.
      • magicsmoke 6y ago
        Perhaps I should have worded it as Democracy is the most tolerable form of government. No matter the disillusionment with Democracy in America today, the idea of adopting China's government is completely outside the Overton window in America. In other parts of the world, I'm not so sure.
  • emiliobumachar 6y ago
    Disobedience. http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html "Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other."
    • mywittyname 6y ago
      This is more of a young person thing, and only for specific personality types. And America is much less forgiving of disobedience today than it was, even just 20 years ago. Unless you come from a privileged group, run-ins with the authorities are not pleasant.
      • fakedang 6y ago
        Maybe that's why you see China catching up - because America is falling back and suppressing disobedience.
      • mac01021 6y ago
        > America is much less forgiving of disobedience today than it was, even just 20 years ago. Do you have any examples of this? I've always been american, but I was only 15 years old 20 years ago.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• blackrock 6y ago
  No, that is the illusion. The primary thing you need is capital. Money, and lots of it. Then a service and manufacturing economy to support and sustain it. But the most important ingredient, is to be sovereign. And not get invaded for a hundred years, while you build out your economy and institutions. The last major war on American soil was the Civil War. You can achieve a lot of momentum, when war and invasion is not happening on your territory. Basically, don’t be poor. And have a lot of nuclear weapons to F! up your opponents, if they dare attempt to invade you. If you have all that, then everything else will fall into place.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'm not sure this makes sense as an explanation of tech dominance. Tech is one of the least capital-intensive industries around. The capital required to build Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, arguably even the Internet, was available in many contemporary countries.
    • sp527 6y ago
      Each of those companies solved hard tech problems to scale and also only managed to achieve that scale because of venture capital subsidization (prior to monetization). They also benefited from major human capital involvement. Looked at the right way, they were extremely capital-intensive endeavors. It just came into more play going from “1 to n” than “0 to 1”. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you’ll find lots of examples of 0 to 1s similar to Facebook and Twitter that preceded them but lacked the capital necessary to get to the same scale.
    • ponker 6y ago
      To have $2 billion available to invest in Facebook you need to have $200 billion laying around to invest in all the Webvans you find while looking for the next Facebook.
• flukus 6y ago
  > Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere To an extent I think it was, nothing inherently American but openness and a certain amount of cowboyness has been a key differentiator in what tech thrives and what dies and authoritarian cultures/governments/organizations don't tend to favor openness. Look at the web verse what it could have been though something like minitel or AOL, look at linux vs commercial operating systems, unix itself and windows fostered a cowboy culture where everyone could write there own programs, bring there own hardware and generally and do what they want. For the most part I think American tech is abandoning those values anyway, walled gardens are becoming more common and getting more restrictive, open standards are yielding to proprietary services, users are being restricted in how they operate their own machines. That's something China can compete with and win, you wouldn't get IRC out of china but you would get slack, you wouldn't get Linux but you would get apple.
  • Barrin92 6y ago
    >Is American tech dominance the result of some magic cultural mojo born from American values that can't be replicated in a different cultural sphere I'd question if that's even the case inside the US. America was industrialised on the back of the American System and Silicon Valley was built on top of defense contracts. Napoleon brought the first civil code to France and Germany's national education system is a result of Prussian militarism. In many countries that tell a story of some sort of Western transparency and laissez-faire culture it was arguably authoritarian structures that initiated reform not unlike those you find in Singapore or China today. There's this popular narrative today championed by people like Acemoglu of "extractive" and "inclusive" institutions with the latter leading to progress and the former being bad, but even in Western nations a significant amoung of progress was built by the former and inherited by the latter.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    Linux came from Finland, not the U.S. And there's quite a lot of underground "cowboy culture" in Chinese tech, though people will disagree as to whether that promotes good quality.
• 4cao 6y ago
  America attracts top talent from all around the world. China has a lot of domestic talent but struggles to put it to good use, and does not really have a compelling proposition for anybody coming from the outside. This I think is the biggest differentiator and unlikely to change for the time being. American tech dominance is also predicated upon having a huge domestic market that is relatively uniform in terms of the business environment and easy to navigate. Start here and you have access to 330M potential customers. This is something that the EU/EEA is only struggling to become: it's mostly still separate national markets there. China has the same advantage America had as well, and an even larger population to start with. America has well-oiled financial markets that are good at allocating capital. In China it's the government doing the allocation, and the results have often been abysmal, e.g. technology investment funds being used to further inflate the property bubble in disguise. However, historically, many of the biggest technological breakthroughs in the US were associated with government-funded military projects. No reason why China could not replicate this in principle. Not sure where the "American values" fit here, it depends what you mean by that. If you meant entrepreneurial spirit and individualism then the Chinese are entrepreneurial and individualist too. If you mean liberty/freedom then these aren't only American values but more broadly the values of the European Enlightenment, and this is indeed another differentiator between China and the cultural West. Would be interesting to know what values you had in mind.
  • klipt 6y ago
    > America attracts top talent from all around the world. The current administration seems to be trying hard to change this via travel bans etc. The one actually good idea that Trump floated in his campaign was meritocratic points based immigration ala Canada, but it seems that topic got dropped in favor of more attention drawing stunts like the border wall. > technology investment funds being used to further inflate the property bubble in disguise Same thing in Silicon Valley, and to a lesser extent many other US cities with good tech jobs.
    • malandrew 6y ago
      > meritocratic points based immigration this is one of the main ideas that Ted Cruz has promoted.
• 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  No, it's not a matter of magic cultural mojo. Japanese tech was ascendant for a long time in the 1970s and 1980s, and arguably even today beats the pants off American tech in many areas like automobiles (until Tesla came along, at least). And while Japan has adopted/had some American values rammed down its throat post-WW2, it remains very different culturally: there's very little in common between a Silicon Valley startup and a Japanese megacorp.
  • Dirak 6y ago
    Post WWII, Japan was able to differentiate itself from other developing nations in becoming a major economic center precisely because it was the first to adopt American ideas such as the free market and free enterprise. A free market and a lack of regulations is what enables America today to be center for innovation when it comes to technology. Likewise, an uptick in regulation explains why car manufacturing is a stagnant industry in the US. Just to drive the point, the downfall of Detroit coincides timeline-wise closely with the city becoming a union town.
    • dannyw 6y ago
      The example of Tesla being forced to stay closed is another one.
  • winrid 6y ago
    Japanese automobiles are still much higher quality than Tesla's. But yes, Tesla is pushing boundaries.
• toast0 6y ago
  I don't think you can separate the educational etc structures from the culture. Another poster mentioned cowboyism, which I think is apt. The US culture reveres the rugged individual ideal, and the structures allow or encourage it. All the big US tech companies have an origin story with one or two people, often without traditional credentials, who turned a small idea into a big idea and a huge company. Usually not a lot of group glory, unless it's the five or ten people who left after building a big company and made their own bigger companies (see the traitorous eight that formed Fairchild and went onto form others companies; or the many video game companies starting with A formed by Atari employees such as Activision) You don't get innovation by doing what everyone else is doing. You get it by doing stuff that seems crazy and turning out right.
• unishark 6y ago
  > Since the fall of the USSR, the global zeitgeist has been that if you want to be a developed country, adopting American values in some form is necessary sooner or later. China is challenging this assumption and many developing countries will be watching the outcome. Imitating the leader is just common sense if you want to emulate their success. China has been doing it bigtime also. Central planners can do a fine job of catching up once the path is obvious. Train people with these skills and have them build these products. Just watch the news to learn how. But even if they take over their targeted fields, US tech will move on to new ones. To lead means to figure out what to do next, before it's the biggest thing in SV already.
  • blackrock 6y ago
    It is much easier, when you have a lot of money, and available capital. And especially the ability to print money. It also helps a lot, if your country got that initial seed capital, from ill-gotten gains, and spoils of war.
• oillio 6y ago
  Alternative answer: America's geography makes all the important things easy, leaving us the resources to take risks and innovate. We have some of the best farmland in the world. With a river system to feed it water and easily transport goods. As well as a relatively flat landmass to facilitate transportation of people and goods. Add to that the largest energy deposits in the world, and nearly every other natural resource needed to run a modern economy. We have it pretty easy. A highly inclusive democratic society is just the cherry on top that pulls it all together. And BTW- Chinda does not come out very well on any of those metrics. They are a massive net importer of food and energy, for instance. That makes it much harder for them to come out ahead in a global economic shock. Say one brought on by a global pandemic.
  • raducu 6y ago
    By no means trying to be racist or dismiss the natives, but the geography of North America surely did not change since white man came. Which clearly shows culture is probably just as important as geography.
    • oillio 6y ago
      The pre-industrial world was a very different place than where we live now. Back then, technology and information gave you a massive advantage. Nowadays information moves relatively freely. Also, there were some extenuating circumstances. An epidemic that wipes out 90% of your population makes it pretty hard to compete.
    • readarticle 6y ago
      In the sense that “being exposed to the literal rest of humanity’s innovations” is culture, yes. Anything and everything had to be independently developed in the Americas prior to contact due to isolation, the white man backwater of Europe got to ride the coattails of R&D across the entire Eurasiafrican supercontinent for millennia, as a comparison. For a concept like a wheel to spread from, say, Northern China to Southern Spain, they could literally just roll on over.
    • enaaem 6y ago
• OnlineCourage 6y ago
  Jared Diamond, who is much more researched than anyone else commenting here, has written a lot on this topic, and briefly stated - it has more to do with a society's capacity to receive and process outside ideas. It's less about American culture and more about the fact that America has been for the most part an open society, but more so American metropolitan society and not America as a whole.