Posted on 04/01/2010 12:54:40 PM PDT by bananaman22
For the last several months, several observers including ourselves have noted that whatever is going on at the “lower-value-added” end of the manufacturing and technology scale the real challenge China poses to the US lies not in the area of currency valuations, but in the “higher-value-added” regions of so-called “green” or “clean” technologies.
The general argument here, as always, relates back to the fundamentally different role of the state in the economy in each of the two countries.
In the US, the general consensus, shared by both Democrats and Republicans alike, is that the government should just get out of the way and let the private sector make its own path to whatever brave new world its ingenuity is able to bring forth, letting venture capital take the lead in funding the technological innovation that creates economic growth.
Proponents of this view point to the PC / MicroSoft revolution of the 1980s and the Internet revolution of the 1990s as perfect examples of this approach.
Unfortunately, this was also the attitude that allowed the “ingenuity” of the financial sector to run amok in general, and particularly in the area of derivatives – again, famously termed by St Warren of Buffett, “economic weapons of mass destruction” – creating the global economic mess in which certainly the developed world, ie the US and Europe, find themselves today.
And it also leaves out the key fact that the Internet which most Americans think was invented by the private sector was, in fact, an initiative funded for decades by a research wing of the US government, DARPA: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
In China, of course, the attitude is just the opposite: Full article at: Green Technology Research
Well China certainly needs it more than we do-— Beijing is worse than Los Angeles ever was in the 70s.
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Good — let them piss away their money on that nonsense.
Home of their very own “brown air”. Do they know coal burning without scrubbers and filters causes the brown air ...
BTW, the US graduates more lawyers than anything else. China is graduating engineers who may actually solve problems rather than create more legislation.
Go for it!....
Hey I lived in Japan with the honey buckets, and the open sewers in the streets ... And boy did it stink.
Didn’t they do the same honey bucket thing in enlightened Europe until just recent times? Something I seem to recall about plagues and all.
Remember the Chi-Chi's restaurant chain? The final nail in its coffin was the e coli outbreak centered right in our area where one person died and a large number were hospitalized. Up until that time, it was thought unlikely that e coli could be passed from human feces to vegetables if the veggies were properly washed. But when they traced the supply chain back to Mexico they discovered that wea, indeed, the case. It was confirmed by another incident which happened about the same time involving smoothies made with spinach and other vegetable from Mexico. While not quite as famous as the Chi-Chi's incident, a number of people were hospitalized and one toddler died.
E Coli is a massively complicated bacteria. Most are harmless, some are actually beneficial and used in probiotics. But the type which causes damage and disease outbreaks needs to be killed through proper sewage treatment, despite what some libtards may tell you.
This is one of the reasons salads that include uncooked veggies are generally not part of Chinese cuisine.
Of course the Chinese aren’t stupid enough to fall for that green nonsense, but they still recognize a business opportunity when they see it.
Cool beans - now We can steal THEIR technology for a change......
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