If China is to the 21st century what the US were to the 20th century - economically, scientifically, industrially - what should I do as a US citizen working in tech, besides signing up my kids and myself for Chinese classes?
I'm quite lucky in that i have the right to live and work in America, Australia, New Zealand, UK and the EU. I've also thought about this a lot as i near retirement (working in tech in the USA atm, it's been a fun ride but definitely time to think about options).
Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.
Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.
Exports more than it imports.
Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!
An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.
Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.
I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
That's the problem right. Learning Chinese wont help you, China is a closed shop, no immigrants, no sharing work with anyone outside the country, no employing people outside China, no cooperation with any other country really; just keep buying their stuff.
Everyone loves money but socially and culturally China is a lot more closed compared to US, much more so than what people are used to atleast.
US was arguably the most open country on the planet in terms of acceptance of ideas and cultural diversity especially in 20th century.
But I also don't think people need to be very worried but still we haven't had monocultures on the top or close to the top of power hierarchy for several decades so it's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
For instance China is heavily censorious of LGBTQ and very likely against the Idea they haven't banned it outright yet thankfully. But then again lots of countries are in a similar boat.
But the biggest difference is China can easily back slide without possiblity of return on any metric because it's not a democracy.
China has a pretty vibrant LGBTQ scene, even Shenzhen was known as comrade city in the 90s. China is at the same time very closed and very open. It’s hard to describe.
"Was" being the operative word there. It's been a long time since new (foreign) ideas were accepted, and the resistance to cultural change has been ever present.
American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.
I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024...
(But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.
Not to sound like a broken record here but the big problem is housing. When housing becomes the best investment, it cannibalizes capital investment into productive output.
There have been other errors along the way, such as the Bayh-Doyle Act [1], a law signed by Jimmy Carter in a lame duck session after losing to Ronald Reagan to essentially give away NIH research. I'm a firm believer that federal research dollars should come with equity strings attached in the results. Otherwise, fund your own research. And in pharmaceuticals, it's basically all federal research, despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't. Actually there's one thing it does invest in: patent extension.
Also, we've addicted to fossil fuels, IMHO because it induces demand for weapons.
One big difference between the US and China is that China has significant capital controls so China has a captive market of over $100T in household savings that has to be invested in something and it can't just leave. This too creates problems but the gains in China and decrease in costs cannot be dismissed easily. Also, China has basically managed to recreate all the technologies the US has tried to restrict from being exported to China, everything from welding large container ships to the latest and greatest lithography and manufacturing.
But housing absolutely needs to stop being an investment. It's a huge reason why the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out in the West.
The way the US is aggressively footgunning itself, while China (and others) win by default is so frustrating. The US could have invested in clean energy, in social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression.
Like, it's really not that hard. Yes, we'd have to squeeze the richest people and share a little more equally. But not even that much. Like, the rich would still be astonishingly wealthy.
It's just... devastating to see oligarchs who can't just accept being slightly less oligarchic resulting in the collapse of an entire country.
Unironically, Biden's Infra Act was held up by the other acts and policies favored by the left/democrats. America loves to pay more and get less across many areas of economy and society, which is the same reason we are facing a rise in populism. People will try other forms of government if they current one cannot deliver on the promises.
You're right. People will roll the dice if the government isn't working for them. That's why we got Trump, both times. Harris's campaign was clear, "it will be more of the same", and people didn't like that so they rolled the dice on Trump. They will roll the dice again too, maybe one day we'll roll the dice on trying a new form of government.
We haven't had any big changes for a very long time. People want change. They felt Trump was the change candidate, so they tried him.
Obama did the ACA, which was a compromise with Republicans by implementing the Republican plan, that was the most recent substantial change I can thing of, but it doesn't actually fix anything fundamental (and Republicans are forever at a loss about how to fix healthcare, because their plan was already implemented by Obama, so they can't actually say anything good about their own plan).
Political polarisation is also at a point where it's become sports team-esque. People are willing to go to further extremes to dunk on the other side, even if it means the stadium is becoming increasingly messy.
The oligarchs don't care. If they can make a buck ruining the US, they will, and then they'll move to another country whenever it's convenient for them and do it all again. Borders don't really exist for them.
It's easy to blame the rich here. And certainly they are the ones doing the damage and reaping the rewards.
But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.
If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.
With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.
I understand your point here, between social media (for the young) and TV for the old, there's certainly a lot of sources of information.
I get the urge to find someone to blame. It's not the fault of the voter, because that would imply personal accountability. Or at the very least, it would imply a lot about the underlying character of chunk of the population.
On the other hand, you can't blame the media for gas price reports. Or the cost of housing. Or the people dying of measles. Or the men in masks rounding up people. The voter can see all that themselves.
The voter knows about the current conflict with Iran. That is not a "media bias". They are free to decide themselves if that is justified.
The voter who spends all day on Fox news is welcome to decide for themselves if they want a hand-out of cash promised for after the the election. (A promise they've heard before, but not seen).
So yeah, it eould be nice to blame the oligarchs, or the media, or China, or the church, or pretty much anyone, as long as that anyone is not the voter who can see what is happening, and votes for more of the same.
You go to a chinese city today it looks like the future short of flying cars. All the novel things we invent here and cities look the same as they did 30 years ago, only more people in tarps on the side of the road.
With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.
If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:
1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.
2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.
Social programs are the polar opposite of how the US should be spending its money if it wants to outcompete China. Social programs both reduce the incentive for Americans to work while also depriving research/infrastructure projects of funding.
Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.
Pretty much everywhere has proved that ensuring people have a place to shelter and eat doesn't stop them from wanting to do something with their lives. It's the oldest and most wrong talking point from this debate.
This is completely wrong. A majority of people only work because it's necessary to put food on the table and purchase other necessities. You know this is true because you can see how many of them choose to do nothing productive with their free time. Basically nobody is performing research in their free time.
I concur, a majority are not productive most of the time. However a majority is far from everyone.
Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.
Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.
Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.
Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.
Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.
Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.
China has labor laws similar to the US. 40 hour work weeks, extra pay for overtime or for having to work weekends. They just don't enforce them very well. That's what my research tells me anyway, am I wrong?
If you work in China, you get their universal healthcare but you still need a private insurance policy. It’s hard to explain though, you wouldn’t be completely up sh*t creek without a private policy, but some things become really inconvenient, and the standard of care is different (bring your own nurse in the public plan).
China sort has welfare but the hukou system means most people who need it don't qualify in the city they live in.
If it is about "incentivizing people to work" and getting warm butts in chairs or out swinging hammers... well, how are we going to compete with a country that has 4x the number of warm bodies?
We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.
We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.
It's amazing how people think this is true when by every known metric, people who are given a minimally comfortable life almost always end up being far more productive members of society than those who are not.
That is why China is losing to the US. China massively more social programs than the US and it has reduced their economy to shambles because no one has incentive.
I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]
Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).
So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.
the current ai boom started here in america with private funds. china is spending government funds in a desperate attempt not to lose the race. it’s not clear that china is in the stronger position, at least yet.
The amount that the US spends on R&D is a rounding fraction of the excess of military budget compared to other nation's military budgets. And by scaring off most other countries from buying US military supplies in the future, as Trump has been doing, we will end up paying a ton more for less military hardware now.
The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.
It's true that China is remarkable, but the concern is that China is too large.
Basically, these cutting-edge industries require industrial chains to be connected across different countries, but China can do almost everything within its own borders. China's greatness is greatness, but if China becomes highly developed, will this kind of technological development spread to neighboring countries?
U.S. industry, for one, spreads to many countries through outsourcing. But China can consume outsourcing within its own borders. If that happens, what will become of it?
I don't understand the complaint, China will just continue progressing while the rest of the world falls behind. It'd be the same as it has always been in Chinese history, in terms of isolationism.
Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.
I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.
Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.
Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.
I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
I disapprove of the Iran war, but to play devils advocate: there's a major shift occurring right now in the way wars are fought. The Ukraine-Russia war has made it clear that conventional militaries will find themselves in a meat grinder in the next war.. that includes the US.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
Trumo hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.
There are two things that I feel impacted the US here:
1. the R&D tax credit was gone from 2022 - 2025 thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed in 2017.
2. private equity does not invest in R&D
If China is to the 21st century what the US were to the 20th century - economically, scientifically, industrially - what should I do as a US citizen working in tech, besides signing up my kids and myself for Chinese classes?
I'm quite lucky in that i have the right to live and work in America, Australia, New Zealand, UK and the EU. I've also thought about this a lot as i near retirement (working in tech in the USA atm, it's been a fun ride but definitely time to think about options).
Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.
Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.
Exports more than it imports.
Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!
An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.
Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.
I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
That's the problem right. Learning Chinese wont help you, China is a closed shop, no immigrants, no sharing work with anyone outside the country, no employing people outside China, no cooperation with any other country really; just keep buying their stuff.
Probably get a PR in Hong Kong and hope to be automatically "promoted" to Chinese in 20 years?
I mean, have you worked with the Chinese? They're not like that at all.
They love money so much, you could swear they're American!
Everyone loves money but socially and culturally China is a lot more closed compared to US, much more so than what people are used to atleast.
US was arguably the most open country on the planet in terms of acceptance of ideas and cultural diversity especially in 20th century.
But I also don't think people need to be very worried but still we haven't had monocultures on the top or close to the top of power hierarchy for several decades so it's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
For instance China is heavily censorious of LGBTQ and very likely against the Idea they haven't banned it outright yet thankfully. But then again lots of countries are in a similar boat.
But the biggest difference is China can easily back slide without possiblity of return on any metric because it's not a democracy.
China has a pretty vibrant LGBTQ scene, even Shenzhen was known as comrade city in the 90s. China is at the same time very closed and very open. It’s hard to describe.
"Was" being the operative word there. It's been a long time since new (foreign) ideas were accepted, and the resistance to cultural change has been ever present.
American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.
Move there, not sure taking language classes would help if you're still staying here.
Sounds like a horrible idea. You don't need to be in the #1 fastest growing country to have a good life and Asian work culture seems miserable.
Move to a cabin in the woodlands and teach them how to work on engines, and animal husbandry.
Another programmer who played Stardew Valley one too many times, I see.
Neither. Align yourself with the AI that will be running the show and hope it adequately feeds you.
This is the real answer.
But noone is gonna want to hear it.
That American Ai companies have convinced so many this is a foregone conclusion is the defeatism they are after. We can choose a different future
I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024... (But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.
>cuts to immigration
Between 2020 and 2024 the admin let over 11M people walk across the US southern border. It was over 200,000 per month.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...
Since deportations have basically wound down those people are effectively being given amnesty.
2024 should have been THE year to see any positive effects of immigration.
archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/china-overtakes-us-for-first-time-as-t...
Not to sound like a broken record here but the big problem is housing. When housing becomes the best investment, it cannibalizes capital investment into productive output.
There have been other errors along the way, such as the Bayh-Doyle Act [1], a law signed by Jimmy Carter in a lame duck session after losing to Ronald Reagan to essentially give away NIH research. I'm a firm believer that federal research dollars should come with equity strings attached in the results. Otherwise, fund your own research. And in pharmaceuticals, it's basically all federal research, despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't. Actually there's one thing it does invest in: patent extension.
Also, we've addicted to fossil fuels, IMHO because it induces demand for weapons.
One big difference between the US and China is that China has significant capital controls so China has a captive market of over $100T in household savings that has to be invested in something and it can't just leave. This too creates problems but the gains in China and decrease in costs cannot be dismissed easily. Also, China has basically managed to recreate all the technologies the US has tried to restrict from being exported to China, everything from welding large container ships to the latest and greatest lithography and manufacturing.
But housing absolutely needs to stop being an investment. It's a huge reason why the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out in the West.
[1]: https://issues.org/bayh-dole-innovation-policy-woodson/
> despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't.
That's the first time I've heard this. Can you elaborate? How do they produce new drugs without heavy investment in research?
The way the US is aggressively footgunning itself, while China (and others) win by default is so frustrating. The US could have invested in clean energy, in social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression.
Like, it's really not that hard. Yes, we'd have to squeeze the richest people and share a little more equally. But not even that much. Like, the rich would still be astonishingly wealthy.
It's just... devastating to see oligarchs who can't just accept being slightly less oligarchic resulting in the collapse of an entire country.
Sometimes I think about the infrastructure projects that could’ve been done instead of a war in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran.
It’s shocking really how wasteful the leaders of the United States can be.
Unironically, Biden's Infra Act was held up by the other acts and policies favored by the left/democrats. America loves to pay more and get less across many areas of economy and society, which is the same reason we are facing a rise in populism. People will try other forms of government if they current one cannot deliver on the promises.
You're right. People will roll the dice if the government isn't working for them. That's why we got Trump, both times. Harris's campaign was clear, "it will be more of the same", and people didn't like that so they rolled the dice on Trump. They will roll the dice again too, maybe one day we'll roll the dice on trying a new form of government.
We haven't had any big changes for a very long time. People want change. They felt Trump was the change candidate, so they tried him.
Obama did the ACA, which was a compromise with Republicans by implementing the Republican plan, that was the most recent substantial change I can thing of, but it doesn't actually fix anything fundamental (and Republicans are forever at a loss about how to fix healthcare, because their plan was already implemented by Obama, so they can't actually say anything good about their own plan).
you think China is winning?
China is already in a depression and is just recovering, youth unemployment is high and it has maxed out development.
Government stats lies all the time you only need to look at their stock market for the real info.
Sources?
What does the stock market have to do with anything?
Political polarisation is also at a point where it's become sports team-esque. People are willing to go to further extremes to dunk on the other side, even if it means the stadium is becoming increasingly messy.
How to defeat America: Wait.
The oligarchs don't care. If they can make a buck ruining the US, they will, and then they'll move to another country whenever it's convenient for them and do it all again. Borders don't really exist for them.
Our current President first and foremost among them.
It's easy to blame the rich here. And certainly they are the ones doing the damage and reaping the rewards.
But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.
If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.
With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.
It's less a masterstroke of the rich, and more the media environment the various voter blocs you mentioned are soaking their minds in 24/7
I understand your point here, between social media (for the young) and TV for the old, there's certainly a lot of sources of information.
I get the urge to find someone to blame. It's not the fault of the voter, because that would imply personal accountability. Or at the very least, it would imply a lot about the underlying character of chunk of the population.
On the other hand, you can't blame the media for gas price reports. Or the cost of housing. Or the people dying of measles. Or the men in masks rounding up people. The voter can see all that themselves.
The voter knows about the current conflict with Iran. That is not a "media bias". They are free to decide themselves if that is justified.
The voter who spends all day on Fox news is welcome to decide for themselves if they want a hand-out of cash promised for after the the election. (A promise they've heard before, but not seen).
So yeah, it eould be nice to blame the oligarchs, or the media, or China, or the church, or pretty much anyone, as long as that anyone is not the voter who can see what is happening, and votes for more of the same.
That media environment was in fact the masterstroke.
and yet the oversupply of investment funds looking for projects created the current AI boom here in America, not China.
China “leads” but only in iterating on things already invented.
but we never ask what’s wrong with china that they spend so much on r&d but fail to invent novel things.
You go to a chinese city today it looks like the future short of flying cars. All the novel things we invent here and cities look the same as they did 30 years ago, only more people in tarps on the side of the road.
With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.
If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:
1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.
2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.
Social programs are the polar opposite of how the US should be spending its money if it wants to outcompete China. Social programs both reduce the incentive for Americans to work while also depriving research/infrastructure projects of funding.
Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.
Pretty much everywhere has proved that ensuring people have a place to shelter and eat doesn't stop them from wanting to do something with their lives. It's the oldest and most wrong talking point from this debate.
This is completely wrong. A majority of people only work because it's necessary to put food on the table and purchase other necessities. You know this is true because you can see how many of them choose to do nothing productive with their free time. Basically nobody is performing research in their free time.
I concur, a majority are not productive most of the time. However a majority is far from everyone.
Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.
Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.
Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.
Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.
Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.
Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.
So maybe "majority" isn't really the right term?
People need down time, even researchers.
I work on hobby projects when I'm not burned out from working + getting all my other stuff done in the remaining 4 hours of the day I have left.
Doesn't China have better social programs? They have universal healthcare.
No? Chinese people have to work 6 days a week for a lower quality of living than a minimum wage American.
China has labor laws similar to the US. 40 hour work weeks, extra pay for overtime or for having to work weekends. They just don't enforce them very well. That's what my research tells me anyway, am I wrong?
If you work in China, you get their universal healthcare but you still need a private insurance policy. It’s hard to explain though, you wouldn’t be completely up sh*t creek without a private policy, but some things become really inconvenient, and the standard of care is different (bring your own nurse in the public plan).
China sort has welfare but the hukou system means most people who need it don't qualify in the city they live in.
No they don't:
If you work, you automatically get enrolled in a hybrid healthcare system (state+private)
If you are young or elderly you get automatic coverage.
If you are working age but have no job --then you get basic healthcare (not comprehensive)
Lots of people who can afford will buy private insurance on top if they have a serious illness (basic healthcare is not comprehensive)
Also copays and high deductibles. People can end up footing 20 to 50% of their medical bills (out of pocket).
If it is about "incentivizing people to work" and getting warm butts in chairs or out swinging hammers... well, how are we going to compete with a country that has 4x the number of warm bodies?
We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.
We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.
It's amazing how people think this is true when by every known metric, people who are given a minimally comfortable life almost always end up being far more productive members of society than those who are not.
That is why China is losing to the US. China massively more social programs than the US and it has reduced their economy to shambles because no one has incentive.
China forces its citizens to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. The idea that it has better social programs than the US is utterly laughable.
Shambles?
And increasingly so. R&D requires excess wealth, the US has a structural deficit it cannot plug growing faster than inflation.
I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]
Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).
So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a0ffc43a-231a-40aa-b5f9-521757830... => https://archive.li/k3PEH
the current ai boom started here in america with private funds. china is spending government funds in a desperate attempt not to lose the race. it’s not clear that china is in the stronger position, at least yet.
> the current ai boom started here in america with private funds.
private funds until the bubble pops, then it becomes public funds for the bailout.
same as 2008.
The amount that the US spends on R&D is a rounding fraction of the excess of military budget compared to other nation's military budgets. And by scaring off most other countries from buying US military supplies in the future, as Trump has been doing, we will end up paying a ton more for less military hardware now.
The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.
Every year, there is an issue with stats coming from China. Be it casualties, deficit, populations. It's always proven to be wrong after a decade.
This 2024 will be the same as the historical data shows, as China number is never right.
Upvote this in 2034 until then chinese will downvote the crap outta my comment.
It's true that China is remarkable, but the concern is that China is too large. Basically, these cutting-edge industries require industrial chains to be connected across different countries, but China can do almost everything within its own borders. China's greatness is greatness, but if China becomes highly developed, will this kind of technological development spread to neighboring countries?
U.S. industry, for one, spreads to many countries through outsourcing. But China can consume outsourcing within its own borders. If that happens, what will become of it?
I don't understand the complaint, China will just continue progressing while the rest of the world falls behind. It'd be the same as it has always been in Chinese history, in terms of isolationism.
Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.
I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.
Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.
Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
He will continue to ignore Congress and the current laws on the books, probing the limits of what the Supreme Court will allow him to get away with.
He hasn’t bothered to work with a Republican Congress to pass laws. He certainly won’t bother with a Democratic or split Congress.
It might stop the bleeding, but it won't repair the damage, is how I think of it.
I'm 50, and I am thinking basically "the rest of my life" is what it will take to start fixing some of this stuff, if it's even possible.
Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.
I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
I disapprove of the Iran war, but to play devils advocate: there's a major shift occurring right now in the way wars are fought. The Ukraine-Russia war has made it clear that conventional militaries will find themselves in a meat grinder in the next war.. that includes the US.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
Trumo hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.
Trump administration has done such a deep and lasting damage on USA