China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024(japannews.yomiuri.co.jp) |
China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024(japannews.yomiuri.co.jp) |
1. the R&D tax credit was gone from 2022 - 2025 thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed in 2017.
2. private equity does not invest in R&D
Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.
Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.
Exports more than it imports.
Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!
An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.
Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.
I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.
Between 2020 and 2024 the admin let over 11M people walk across the US southern border. It was over 200,000 per month.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...
Since deportations have basically wound down those people are effectively being given amnesty.
2024 should have been THE year to see any positive effects of immigration.
There have been other errors along the way, such as the Bayh-Doyle Act [1], a law signed by Jimmy Carter in a lame duck session after losing to Ronald Reagan to essentially give away NIH research. I'm a firm believer that federal research dollars should come with equity strings attached in the results. Otherwise, fund your own research. And in pharmaceuticals, it's basically all federal research, despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't. Actually there's one thing it does invest in: patent extension.
Also, we've addicted to fossil fuels, IMHO because it induces demand for weapons.
One big difference between the US and China is that China has significant capital controls so China has a captive market of over $100T in household savings that has to be invested in something and it can't just leave. This too creates problems but the gains in China and decrease in costs cannot be dismissed easily. Also, China has basically managed to recreate all the technologies the US has tried to restrict from being exported to China, everything from welding large container ships to the latest and greatest lithography and manufacturing.
But housing absolutely needs to stop being an investment. It's a huge reason why the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out in the West.
[1]: https://issues.org/bayh-dole-innovation-policy-woodson/
Like, it's really not that hard. Yes, we'd have to squeeze the richest people and share a little more equally. But not even that much. Like, the rich would still be astonishingly wealthy.
It's just... devastating to see oligarchs who can't just accept being slightly less oligarchic resulting in the collapse of an entire country.
Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).
So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a0ffc43a-231a-40aa-b5f9-521757830... => https://archive.li/k3PEH
private funds until the bubble pops, then it becomes public funds for the bailout.
same as 2008.
The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.
This 2024 will be the same as the historical data shows, as China number is never right.
Upvote this in 2034 until then chinese will downvote the crap outta my comment.
U.S. industry, for one, spreads to many countries through outsourcing. But China can consume outsourcing within its own borders. If that happens, what will become of it?
It’s shocking really how wasteful the leaders of the United States can be.
China is already in a depression and is just recovering, youth unemployment is high and it has maxed out development.
Government stats lies all the time you only need to look at their stock market for the real info.
What does the stock market have to do with anything?
But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.
If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.
With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.
China “leads” but only in iterating on things already invented.
but we never ask what’s wrong with china that they spend so much on r&d but fail to invent novel things.
If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:
1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.
2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.
We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.
We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.
Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
He hasn’t bothered to work with a Republican Congress to pass laws. He certainly won’t bother with a Democratic or split Congress.
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
I'm 50, and I am thinking basically "the rest of my life" is what it will take to start fixing some of this stuff, if it's even possible.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
We haven't had any big changes for a very long time. People want change. They felt Trump was the change candidate, so they tried him.
Obama did the ACA, which was a compromise with Republicans by implementing the Republican plan, that was the most recent substantial change I can thing of, but it doesn't actually fix anything fundamental (and Republicans are forever at a loss about how to fix healthcare, because their plan was already implemented by Obama, so they can't actually say anything good about their own plan).
I get the urge to find someone to blame. It's not the fault of the voter, because that would imply personal accountability. Or at the very least, it would imply a lot about the underlying character of chunk of the population.
On the other hand, you can't blame the media for gas price reports. Or the cost of housing. Or the people dying of measles. Or the men in masks rounding up people. The voter can see all that themselves.
The voter knows about the current conflict with Iran. That is not a "media bias". They are free to decide themselves if that is justified.
The voter who spends all day on Fox news is welcome to decide for themselves if they want a hand-out of cash promised for after the the election. (A promise they've heard before, but not seen).
So yeah, it eould be nice to blame the oligarchs, or the media, or China, or the church, or pretty much anyone, as long as that anyone is not the voter who can see what is happening, and votes for more of the same.
Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.
Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.
Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.
Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.
Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.
Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.
So maybe "majority" isn't really the right term?
China sort has welfare but the hukou system means most people who need it don't qualify in the city they live in.
If you work, you automatically get enrolled in a hybrid healthcare system (state+private)
If you are young or elderly you get automatic coverage.
If you are working age but have no job --then you get basic healthcare (not comprehensive)
Lots of people who can afford will buy private insurance on top if they have a serious illness (basic healthcare is not comprehensive)
Also copays and high deductibles. People can end up footing 20 to 50% of their medical bills (out of pocket).
US was arguably the most open country on the planet in terms of acceptance of ideas and cultural diversity especially in 20th century.
But I also don't think people need to be very worried but still we haven't had monocultures on the top or close to the top of power hierarchy for several decades so it's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
For instance China is heavily censorious of LGBTQ and very likely against the Idea they haven't banned it outright yet thankfully. But then again lots of countries are in a similar boat.
But the biggest difference is China can easily back slide without possiblity of return on any metric because it's not a democracy.
American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.