I think you are extrapolating from to few cases to something that is way broad. How do you know China is successful because if its investing in education and r

I think you are extrapolating from to few cases to something that is way broad. How do you know China is successful because if its investing in education and research. Maybe it was investment in housing. Or transportation. Or whatever. Economists do not agree on the relative importance in those things. > they invest more than any other country in research Is that true in per-captia terms, because I don't think so. > If one Chinese company will develop something, you can bet the rest will learn that fast This is like cooperating companies here. They might talk a big game but we all no that there is a huge amount of internal infighting. The same kind of things were said about the Soviet Union. "Oh look at the cooperation" but when we actually got the documents, what it showed was bitter infighting. So I would be careful with claims that all these companies are just perfectly willing to share all their technology even if you assume the all belong to CPP memebers. > In China all knowledge is in fact a big open source scheme. That sound like you are projecting. I have seen no evidence that this is the case. Maybe China isn't that special. Maybe its just late to the party and is really fucking damn big with a huge amounts of people and resources. Once the US was reasonably poor and then it grew as fast as anybody ever had in history, and it didn't have massive state driven education and industrial policy and yet by the 1910s it was matching Britain and Germany in many things. Before that Britain was matched an partly overtaken by Germany. And it looked like Germany was magic because its companies were organized by the state in corporatism fashion. Yes they also invested in education, infrastructure and research. But its not a magic pill and the companies in Germany were just as competitive against each other as those in Britain.