Anyway, American manufacturing jobs have disappeared mostly because of advances in automation technology - A great product of American and German cleverness and innovation.
Now of course, people assume that the Chinese will never start innovating and only copy American or Japanese products.
Innovation is an interesting thing. I think culture feeds a lot into innovation. I wonder if the Chinese government will continue to bend enough to let innovation occur or will it hit some limit?
As an interesting aside, I was at a conference a few years ago on web services. While watching some of the presentations it dawned on me that anytime pricing or some other hard to get exactly right decision came up the students from China always defaulted to having a central authority make the decision. The students from the US always used some market mechanism/crowd sourcing option. The culture that the students grew up in clearly had an impact on their solutions.
Well, obviously culture and society play an important role in innovation. The British believed that the rigid and deferential Germans could never copy British industrial innovation which was based on independent inventors tinkering in sheds. They were right, but the Germans invented the concept of industrial education and close links with technical universities instead.
I wish that political liberty was important to technological innovation, but it might not end up being so.
Culture evolves over time, of course, and not to discount your observations, but I think over time, the success of the entrepreneurs in china will result in a shift in culture in the next generation.
The other edge of that sword, though, is the general prosperity that freedom produced in america has resulted in a culture going the other way.
I think freedom is taken for granted, and then people start thinking they can legislate whatever they want, including a central authority with great control (to "protect them" etc.) which eventually results in less freedom and consequently less prosperity.
One of the curses of getting old is seeing this in action, at least when its going the wrong direction.
Yep. http://blog.american.com/2011/01/the-demise-of-america%E2%80...
Now of course, people assume that the Chinese will never start innovating and only copy American or Japanese products.
Innovation is an interesting thing. I think culture feeds a lot into innovation. I wonder if the Chinese government will continue to bend enough to let innovation occur or will it hit some limit?
As an interesting aside, I was at a conference a few years ago on web services. While watching some of the presentations it dawned on me that anytime pricing or some other hard to get exactly right decision came up the students from China always defaulted to having a central authority make the decision. The students from the US always used some market mechanism/crowd sourcing option. The culture that the students grew up in clearly had an impact on their solutions.