Konstantin Kakaes tells us to chill out and stop worrying about Chinese science:
The bible of the competitiveness crowd is a National Academy of Sciences report calledRising Above the Gathering Storm. (In terms of melodramatic white paper titles, the United States is surely a world leader. The report was first issued in 2005; a 2010 revision was subtitled: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.) The 2010 report notes, “30 years ago the United States had 30 percent of the world’s college students. Today we are at 14 percent and falling.” This is cited as evidence of a decline in American competitiveness. But that’s like saying the United States has a smaller percentage of the world’s well-nourished people than it did 30 years ago. It is good for people around the world to go to college and be well-fed. Neither takes anything away from the United States.
The competition rhetoric is almost always linked with calls for increased investment in research. But as Argentino Pessoa of the University of Porto, among others, has pointed out, there is a slight negative correlation between R&D intensity and GDP growth—in other words, spending more on research doesn’t necessarily make you richer. Amar Bhide, in his book The Venturesome Economy, cites the example of Norway, which isn’t even in the top 20 countries ranked by share of scientific papers published, but has the highest labor productivity in the world.
Knowledge—of which technology is a kind—gets shared widely. A Dec. 7 New York Timesarticle called “China Scrambles for High Tech Dominance” gets it exactly wrong. “If the future of the Internet is already in China, is the future of computing there as well?” The future of the Internet isn’t in China any more than the present of the Internet is in the U.S. Technonationalists (as Bhide calls the competitiveness caucus) like to trumpet the fact that Google is an American company. But the benefits of quartering Google’s corporate headquarters are dwarfed by the benefits of using Google (and its peers, like Baidu, a Chinese search engine) and other revolutionary technologies. And those benefits get spread widely. The Internet, for example, was invented in the United States—but that does not mean we get the most benefit from it.
