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As a European immigrant who came to the US to be an entrepreneur, I can tell you there are many reasons for the US leadership so far, many of which are still tr

As a European immigrant who came to the US to be an entrepreneur, I can tell you there are many reasons for the US leadership so far, many of which are still true. My top list: - biggest unified market. This is HUGE. Not like the EU "unified" where you can't even speak the same language, but really unified. This means an early idea has big enough of a market to worth pursuing, among other things. - a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk - world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above. If China was ever to become democratized and continue its growth trajectory it could truly challenge the US gobally but that may not happen for years or decades. Overall I think we should welcome more innovation, even if the US has to share some of the leadership it had until now. But articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else.

cmehdy 6y ago
China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there. Notwithstanding the fact that the research and academic works coming out of China, while still facing issues in quality on average, have still been rising in quantity and quality. When the combined US+EU market is less than half the amount of people of your own economy, stumbling upon itself with regulations and inner struggles and disagreements, and you are the single most important builder of things in their world.. I'm not sure democracy is a prerequisite to be able to achieve domination eventually. Sure, average quality of life still isn't on par with the EU or the US.. but then again, they've taken 600 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades, they're the single biggest current builder of nuclear power plants, they're developing their own space agency at a rapid pace, and are perfectly fine increasingly making major US businesses bend to their will (in tech, in sports, in the industry, and in bending America's cultural influence in the world through things like Hollywood), and they seriously lock down the innovation and profit so that it circulates internally first and foremost. I'm not saying all these things for the fun of it: I'm from the EU and I live in Canada, so I'm both very much wanting the world to go towards the models that the EU and Canada are trying to achieve (as far as democracies strive to improve themselves, ever-so-slowly sometimes), but I'm also pretty keenly aware of how small those players actually can be when compared to a behemoth with a very long history, a critical mass, and willing to make any necessary concessions to dominate. You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  "China is five times the US in population." etc lol. When do you clock off?
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    What's your point? I'm a EU citizen with roots in the Maghreb. I have no interest in singing praises of an economy with which I have major ethical concerns (extended to the issues with the Uyghurs, HK and Taiwan, and I have dear friends in the latter places), and all my personal experiences have had much more to do with countries that are very much not into China's attitude (EU, Canada, Japan, to name a few). If you keep trying to play this bullshit game of astroturfing warfare, you're going to completely miss the real discussions. So please tell me again, when do I clock off of what?
  - ahmedalsudani 6y ago
    Can we please stop with those low-effort, snide remarks. It says a lot about you that you regurgitate this nonsense. Reconsider who the “troll” is.
- rottingfruit 6y ago
  I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place? Yes. Who said they hadn't? For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world. E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough". 1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1). Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period") "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo... https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1200-2017-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...
free_rms 6y ago
If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it. That's a way bigger deal than any (often overstated) difference in freedom or innovation.
- wonnage 6y ago
  Chinese is not some mysterious language that nobody knows...
  - free_rms 6y ago
    Compared to English, say.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Chinese is popular regionally in Asia and among diaspora, but it doesn't have the anywhere near the number of outsiders trying to learn the language to tap into the social/cultural system as English does.
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
      English took place of French, in future mandarin might replace English.
      - Twixes 6y ago
        French and English have much much more in common than English and Mandarin though.
      - toyg 6y ago
        English is effectively half-French, like French was half-Latin, which in turn was half-Greek. Europeans basically moved from a language to its immediate cousin, for more than 2000 years. Han might be half-something too but it's definitely not something anybody ever spoke in Europe, South-America, or Africa. Europeans will likely never speak Chinese in numbers comparable to modern-day English.
coldtea 6y ago
>China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above. The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that. The rest of Asia, Africa, Australia, and perhaps Latin America, wont have as many issues being led by China.
- RestlessMind 6y ago
  > The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that. US + Europe, along with other US aligned nations (Japan, Australia, NZ etc) account for >50% of the world GDP[1]. > The rest of Asia ... wont have as many issues being led by China. Any more details to back this assertion? Just a brief glance at the current geopolitical events reveal the following Asian countries having issues with China: Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam. Some other are heavily aligned with the US (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, ...). A lot of these have significant populations and/or economies in Asia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
justicezyx 6y ago
An EU immigrant commenting on US social and economy development, and equally assured of oneself of the same authority on China. Chinese netizens have a sarcastic name for people with the tendency to comment on grandiose topics with some form of unfounded authority, who unfortunately dont have a long professional career as an academic researcher or as a long time practitioner of that area. That name is called keyboard politicians, or 键盘政治家/键政 First as an immigrant, you are farm from the dynamism and inner working of the society. An EU immigrant is surely more informed than a Chinese one, but I would put both as largely blank paper compared to a native person. For China... I left China 2008, and today I consider myself no fundamental difference when dealing with Chinese affairs than an American. Any one who had not lived in China for the past 4 decades, simply have no way to understand the unprecedented changes and the fundamentally different social dynamism in China. In short, these statements might be true. But more likely to be wrong. And in the end, they not too far from from a gibberish produced by GPT-3 trained from randomly sampled web articles. Good luck with the belief...
- PestoDiRucola 6y ago
  So an immigrant cannot be as informed as a "native" based only on the fact that they were not born there? What sort of claim is this?
  - disown 6y ago
    > So an immigrant cannot be as informed as a "native" based only on the fact that they were not born there? Certainly someone who immigrated to the US as an adult cannot know more about the US than someone who grew up here. > What sort of claim is this? A fairly straightforward one. I don't think the guy's comment was that controversial or baffling.
    - type0 6y ago
      > Certainly someone who immigrated to the US as an adult cannot know more about the US than someone who grew up here. They certainly can, might even get a Ph.d in Cultural anthropology albeit without necessarily grasping small local intricacies, but the same could be said about someone from a different state. Though US here is a bad example, it's just too culturally heterogeneous compared to China.
mellosouls 6y ago
a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk Many other cultures have the same, perhaps to a lesser extent, but balanced in that regard (say) by more rights for workers or protection from corporate abuse or a higher quality of life. world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country Depends how you look at it - for example, per capita the UK has more Top 10 universities than the USA. articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else It's important to take a balanced view on these things; a US decline is probably simplistic as you indicate - but a rose-tinted view of it is just as unhelpful.
bleepblorp 6y ago
A society the size of the US has a huge amount of inertia and fears over imminent US loss of global status are overblown. However, the US does have several serious structural problems that will eventually threaten its global position if they are not addressed. You note in your post that has very strong academic institutions. This is certainly true at the postsecondary and advanced degree level. However, the backbone of American innovation through academia is foreign students who come to study, then develop businesses and stay. This pipeline is under increasing pressure due to anti-immigrant reactionary politics and it is unclear if the foreign student to entrepreneur pipeline will survive both tightening official obstacles (e.g. restrictions on visas) and increasingly mainstreamed public hostility to immigration. It is unclear whether domestic students will be able to take up the slack in the event foreign students are excluded. Tied into this is increasingly steep American descent into dysfunctional politics, where the dominant political culture is now driven by hatred for the people and regions that actually make the US economy work. It is unclear if economically productive areas of the US will remain economically productive now it has become a stated objective of the dominant political culture to persecute productive areas and deprive them of the resources they need to maintain their human and physical infrastructure. While a second civil war along defined battle lines is unlikely, the historical record provides no reasons to be sanguine about the prospects of polities that reach this level of internal division. Political collapse into anti-intellectual despotism, potentially spurred on by outside help ('Russia, if you're listening....') is far from impossible. Finally, the US has a massive problem with inappropriate investment. The US pours a huge amount of public and private money into investments that are either socioeconomically useless, or only redistribute money into the pockets of the very wealthy, instead of enlarging the economy for everyone. Maintaining economic primacy requires creating and deploying innovations quickly enough that competitors cannot catch up. The past few decades of US investment, however, have been much more greatly oriented towards profit taking, oligarchic rent extraction, and graft rather than developing and deploying innovations on a large scale. It does no good to have invented the Internet when it's barely available in many parts of America and the Internet's primary business-to-consumer purpose is to help various economic parasites suck even more money out of consumer's pockets. The modern US falls down both on mass deployment and on maintaining enough of a market balance to ensure that the benefits of innovation aren't seized by rentiers. These are major vulnerabilities. The US is in good shape now--in no small part because both China and the EU have their own problems--but the red flags are rising and US standing will fall if nothing is done.
cutemonster 6y ago
> a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk Sounds as if you've found a bubble and mistake it good being the general population. Therere similar bubbles (even whole cities maybe I could say) with many startup people and innovative culture outside the US too, eg here where I live > biggest unified market Good point, thanks for writing
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
The Thing is, Everyone does NOT have to speak the same language in the EU. Only the people selling and marketing and moving the goods do. also...The EU does not value Technology? Innovation? or take Risk? (I mean what Risk is there in the US, when the large out of control corps are crushing the little makers??)
sbmthakur 6y ago
I share this sentiment. Another important point is that the US still manages to be a center for education and entertainment for most of the world. While China is attracting more students and artists, the barrier of language still remains as China's majority of institutions essentially cater to the domestic market.

cmehdy 6y ago

China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there. Notwithstanding the fact that the research and academic works coming out of China, while still facing issues in quality on average, have still been rising in quantity and quality. When the combined US+EU market is less than half the amount of people of your own economy, stumbling upon itself with regulations and inner struggles and disagreements, and you are the single most important builder of things in their world.. I'm not sure democracy is a prerequisite to be able to achieve domination eventually. Sure, average quality of life still isn't on par with the EU or the US.. but then again, they've taken 600 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades, they're the single biggest current builder of nuclear power plants, they're developing their own space agency at a rapid pace, and are perfectly fine increasingly making major US businesses bend to their will (in tech, in sports, in the industry, and in bending America's cultural influence in the world through things like Hollywood), and they seriously lock down the innovation and profit so that it circulates internally first and foremost. I'm not saying all these things for the fun of it: I'm from the EU and I live in Canada, so I'm both very much wanting the world to go towards the models that the EU and Canada are trying to achieve (as far as democracies strive to improve themselves, ever-so-slowly sometimes), but I'm also pretty keenly aware of how small those players actually can be when compared to a behemoth with a very long history, a critical mass, and willing to make any necessary concessions to dominate. You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.

gerdesj 6y ago
"China is five times the US in population." etc lol. When do you clock off?
- cmehdy 6y ago
  What's your point? I'm a EU citizen with roots in the Maghreb. I have no interest in singing praises of an economy with which I have major ethical concerns (extended to the issues with the Uyghurs, HK and Taiwan, and I have dear friends in the latter places), and all my personal experiences have had much more to do with countries that are very much not into China's attitude (EU, Canada, Japan, to name a few). If you keep trying to play this bullshit game of astroturfing warfare, you're going to completely miss the real discussions. So please tell me again, when do I clock off of what?
- ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  Can we please stop with those low-effort, snide remarks. It says a lot about you that you regurgitate this nonsense. Reconsider who the “troll” is.
rottingfruit 6y ago
I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place? Yes. Who said they hadn't? For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world. E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough". 1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1). Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period") "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo... https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1200-2017-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...

free_rms 6y ago

If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it. That's a way bigger deal than any (often overstated) difference in freedom or innovation.

wonnage 6y ago
Chinese is not some mysterious language that nobody knows...
- free_rms 6y ago
  Compared to English, say.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Chinese is popular regionally in Asia and among diaspora, but it doesn't have the anywhere near the number of outsiders trying to learn the language to tap into the social/cultural system as English does.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
    English took place of French, in future mandarin might replace English.
    - Twixes 6y ago
      French and English have much much more in common than English and Mandarin though.
    - toyg 6y ago
      English is effectively half-French, like French was half-Latin, which in turn was half-Greek. Europeans basically moved from a language to its immediate cousin, for more than 2000 years. Han might be half-something too but it's definitely not something anybody ever spoke in Europe, South-America, or Africa. Europeans will likely never speak Chinese in numbers comparable to modern-day English.

coldtea 6y ago

>China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above. The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that. The rest of Asia, Africa, Australia, and perhaps Latin America, wont have as many issues being led by China.

RestlessMind 6y ago
> The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that. US + Europe, along with other US aligned nations (Japan, Australia, NZ etc) account for >50% of the world GDP[1]. > The rest of Asia ... wont have as many issues being led by China. Any more details to back this assertion? Just a brief glance at the current geopolitical events reveal the following Asian countries having issues with China: Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam. Some other are heavily aligned with the US (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, ...). A lot of these have significant populations and/or economies in Asia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

justicezyx 6y ago

An EU immigrant commenting on US social and economy development, and equally assured of oneself of the same authority on China. Chinese netizens have a sarcastic name for people with the tendency to comment on grandiose topics with some form of unfounded authority, who unfortunately dont have a long professional career as an academic researcher or as a long time practitioner of that area. That name is called keyboard politicians, or 键盘政治家/键政 First as an immigrant, you are farm from the dynamism and inner working of the society. An EU immigrant is surely more informed than a Chinese one, but I would put both as largely blank paper compared to a native person. For China... I left China 2008, and today I consider myself no fundamental difference when dealing with Chinese affairs than an American. Any one who had not lived in China for the past 4 decades, simply have no way to understand the unprecedented changes and the fundamentally different social dynamism in China. In short, these statements might be true. But more likely to be wrong. And in the end, they not too far from from a gibberish produced by GPT-3 trained from randomly sampled web articles. Good luck with the belief...

PestoDiRucola 6y ago
So an immigrant cannot be as informed as a "native" based only on the fact that they were not born there? What sort of claim is this?
- disown 6y ago
  > So an immigrant cannot be as informed as a "native" based only on the fact that they were not born there? Certainly someone who immigrated to the US as an adult cannot know more about the US than someone who grew up here. > What sort of claim is this? A fairly straightforward one. I don't think the guy's comment was that controversial or baffling.
  - type0 6y ago
    > Certainly someone who immigrated to the US as an adult cannot know more about the US than someone who grew up here. They certainly can, might even get a Ph.d in Cultural anthropology albeit without necessarily grasping small local intricacies, but the same could be said about someone from a different state. Though US here is a bad example, it's just too culturally heterogeneous compared to China.

mellosouls 6y ago

a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk Many other cultures have the same, perhaps to a lesser extent, but balanced in that regard (say) by more rights for workers or protection from corporate abuse or a higher quality of life. world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country Depends how you look at it - for example, per capita the UK has more Top 10 universities than the USA. articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else It's important to take a balanced view on these things; a US decline is probably simplistic as you indicate - but a rose-tinted view of it is just as unhelpful.

bleepblorp 6y ago

A society the size of the US has a huge amount of inertia and fears over imminent US loss of global status are overblown. However, the US does have several serious structural problems that will eventually threaten its global position if they are not addressed. You note in your post that has very strong academic institutions. This is certainly true at the postsecondary and advanced degree level. However, the backbone of American innovation through academia is foreign students who come to study, then develop businesses and stay. This pipeline is under increasing pressure due to anti-immigrant reactionary politics and it is unclear if the foreign student to entrepreneur pipeline will survive both tightening official obstacles (e.g. restrictions on visas) and increasingly mainstreamed public hostility to immigration. It is unclear whether domestic students will be able to take up the slack in the event foreign students are excluded. Tied into this is increasingly steep American descent into dysfunctional politics, where the dominant political culture is now driven by hatred for the people and regions that actually make the US economy work. It is unclear if economically productive areas of the US will remain economically productive now it has become a stated objective of the dominant political culture to persecute productive areas and deprive them of the resources they need to maintain their human and physical infrastructure. While a second civil war along defined battle lines is unlikely, the historical record provides no reasons to be sanguine about the prospects of polities that reach this level of internal division. Political collapse into anti-intellectual despotism, potentially spurred on by outside help ('Russia, if you're listening....') is far from impossible. Finally, the US has a massive problem with inappropriate investment. The US pours a huge amount of public and private money into investments that are either socioeconomically useless, or only redistribute money into the pockets of the very wealthy, instead of enlarging the economy for everyone. Maintaining economic primacy requires creating and deploying innovations quickly enough that competitors cannot catch up. The past few decades of US investment, however, have been much more greatly oriented towards profit taking, oligarchic rent extraction, and graft rather than developing and deploying innovations on a large scale. It does no good to have invented the Internet when it's barely available in many parts of America and the Internet's primary business-to-consumer purpose is to help various economic parasites suck even more money out of consumer's pockets. The modern US falls down both on mass deployment and on maintaining enough of a market balance to ensure that the benefits of innovation aren't seized by rentiers. These are major vulnerabilities. The US is in good shape now--in no small part because both China and the EU have their own problems--but the red flags are rising and US standing will fall if nothing is done.

cutemonster 6y ago

> a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk Sounds as if you've found a bubble and mistake it good being the general population. Therere similar bubbles (even whole cities maybe I could say) with many startup people and innovative culture outside the US too, eg here where I live > biggest unified market Good point, thanks for writing

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

The Thing is, Everyone does NOT have to speak the same language in the EU. Only the people selling and marketing and moving the goods do. also...The EU does not value Technology? Innovation? or take Risk? (I mean what Risk is there in the US, when the large out of control corps are crushing the little makers??)

sbmthakur 6y ago

I share this sentiment. Another important point is that the US still manages to be a center for education and entertainment for most of the world. While China is attracting more students and artists, the barrier of language still remains as China's majority of institutions essentially cater to the domestic market.