Everybody is worried that the Chinese are going to take over the world. They are beating us hollow by making cheap knockoffs to sell in WalMart and they are stealing all our IP (intellectual property).
All true. And, of course they are also building a global transportation network in their Belt and Road initiative, and they are meddling in Africa.
In other words, China is copying the United States, the current global hegemon. Back in the day, the US had a high tariff policy to encourage local industry against those perfidious Brits. And the Brits, at least around 1800, had all kinds of laws to prevent textile industry technology, which they realized was the basis of their world power, from heading across the Channel or across the Atlantic.
And they may be right. Maybe the future is in a replication of the US ascendancy; maybe the future is in selling cheap manufactures to the US; maybe the future is in the exploitation of current intellectual inventions; maybe the future is in a transportation and trading network organized on the old tributary system of imperial China.
But I start from the position that people in politics are all idiots. I mean: what kind of idiots would have a war in Europe, twice in a century, that killed off the flower of its youth, not to mention liquidate the kulaks, the best farmers in Russia, and decimate the Jews, the smartest kids on the block? What kind of idiots would inflate their currencies so that today's dollars and pounds and whatnot are worth about 5% of their value in 1900? What kind of idiots would mew up 30-40 percent of national income in unaffordable middle-class entitlements?
My point is this. The story of the Miracle of the last 300 years, or if you prefer the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, is that nobody saw it coming. The key to understanding it, in my view, is successive waves of innovation by nobodies that the political elite was too stupid, or too late, to kill in their cradles: textiles, railways, electricity, oil, personal transportation, better living through quantum mechanics, IT.
Now. Do you think that a bunch of Chinese politicians and their hangers-on and their tame scientists have a clue what is coming down the pike, what staggering innovations are about to spring on us? If you do, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Look. I've been a computer guy all my working life. But do you think that I had a clue that today I would have a smartphone sitting beside me here that cost $129 with 16 Gb of memory, with an amazing camera, with all my music on a 64 gig micro card? When I was programming with punch-cards on a 16k IBM-1130 computer I assure you that I had no idea, no idea at all, what was coming.
By the way, do you know what the difference between 16 Gb and 16 Kb is? It is 9 orders of magnitude. In other words, my personal $129 smartphone has not 10 times or 100 times but 1,000,000,000 times more memory that the office $30,000 minicomputer of 1970.
My whole view is that we have entered an era, as Nietzsche says, of the transvaluation of all values. The old tribal culture of defending your patch of food-growing land is over. Because food-growing land doesn't matter any more. What matters are the crazy ideas in the heads of crazy kids and entrepreneurs.
Notice that China is still going down the old path, thinking that the key to the future is to control your trading network, control your people with a political hegemony, to take advantage of your trading partners, to steal other peoples' ideas.
Maybe they are right. But I doubt it.
All true. And, of course they are also building a global transportation network in their Belt and Road initiative, and they are meddling in Africa.
In other words, China is copying the United States, the current global hegemon. Back in the day, the US had a high tariff policy to encourage local industry against those perfidious Brits. And the Brits, at least around 1800, had all kinds of laws to prevent textile industry technology, which they realized was the basis of their world power, from heading across the Channel or across the Atlantic.
And they may be right. Maybe the future is in a replication of the US ascendancy; maybe the future is in selling cheap manufactures to the US; maybe the future is in the exploitation of current intellectual inventions; maybe the future is in a transportation and trading network organized on the old tributary system of imperial China.
But I start from the position that people in politics are all idiots. I mean: what kind of idiots would have a war in Europe, twice in a century, that killed off the flower of its youth, not to mention liquidate the kulaks, the best farmers in Russia, and decimate the Jews, the smartest kids on the block? What kind of idiots would inflate their currencies so that today's dollars and pounds and whatnot are worth about 5% of their value in 1900? What kind of idiots would mew up 30-40 percent of national income in unaffordable middle-class entitlements?
My point is this. The story of the Miracle of the last 300 years, or if you prefer the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, is that nobody saw it coming. The key to understanding it, in my view, is successive waves of innovation by nobodies that the political elite was too stupid, or too late, to kill in their cradles: textiles, railways, electricity, oil, personal transportation, better living through quantum mechanics, IT.
Now. Do you think that a bunch of Chinese politicians and their hangers-on and their tame scientists have a clue what is coming down the pike, what staggering innovations are about to spring on us? If you do, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Look. I've been a computer guy all my working life. But do you think that I had a clue that today I would have a smartphone sitting beside me here that cost $129 with 16 Gb of memory, with an amazing camera, with all my music on a 64 gig micro card? When I was programming with punch-cards on a 16k IBM-1130 computer I assure you that I had no idea, no idea at all, what was coming.
By the way, do you know what the difference between 16 Gb and 16 Kb is? It is 9 orders of magnitude. In other words, my personal $129 smartphone has not 10 times or 100 times but 1,000,000,000 times more memory that the office $30,000 minicomputer of 1970.
My whole view is that we have entered an era, as Nietzsche says, of the transvaluation of all values. The old tribal culture of defending your patch of food-growing land is over. Because food-growing land doesn't matter any more. What matters are the crazy ideas in the heads of crazy kids and entrepreneurs.
Notice that China is still going down the old path, thinking that the key to the future is to control your trading network, control your people with a political hegemony, to take advantage of your trading partners, to steal other peoples' ideas.
Maybe they are right. But I doubt it.
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