PBS has an interesting show scheduled tonite:
I’ll have to check this out. The reality is that nearly 100% of all technological innovations come out of the US. All manner of computing, computer chips, programming languages, computer networking, I struggle to name any technology that wasn’t developed in the US.
Manufacturing and assembly is mostly all done overseas. Other countries do improve on things, but the reality is they copy and often steal US tech.
People who claim we are losing to other countries or we have poor education are wrong. We are the leaders in most everything.
Fascinating. Thanks
Here’s my simplistic theory. Go way back to 60’s and 70’s. All kind of stuff came over from Japan. The labor was cheap so we (Americans) could get the stuff we wanted cheap. Then the wages started going up there and companies moved to other countries to keep labor rates down. Then China, a communist country gets in the act. But the workers there can’t unionize or argue very loudly about low pay or working a zillion hours a week. So the labor costs stay relatively low. And we still get our cheap **it! But our problem now is an awful lot of our stuff is made in that one country. Not good.
When you steal the IP it really cuts down on the R&D costs and timeline. It also helps to keep costs down when you can force people into the manufacturing process and pay them almost nothing.
I agree that all through the 19th and and 20th centuries we were the leaders in tech innovation.
In the past China and Japan have been good at replication and short on invention. Edwards Deming, an American, is responsible in large part for the Japanese capturing a large part of the global automobile market. Deming introduced the concept of bottom-up quality control to Japanese manufacturers in the 1950s after American industry shunned him.
In China, the flame of capitalism, starting with a push from Richard Nixon, was quickly seized by the Communist government and made into the manufacturing giant it is today.
By leveraging theft of IP and shear numbers of money, people and projects, the Chinese are becoming world-class leaders in technology research, development. and production.