Ray,
At 17:11 25/02/2012, REH wrote:
Keith, you sound like my high school football coach on the Quapaw
Indian reservation talking about the "Oriental mind." The year was 1958.
In that case he was more prescient than me! One example of the
difference between the Chinese (and Japanese) mind and others is the
car. The first cars that China produced were almost exact copies
of some GM and Italian models. You'd have thought that in the 1980s
they'd have designed much smaller cars for their new market. In
contrast, in India the newly set up Tata Motors has designed a brand
new one, the Nano. It's small and low price but isn't cheap and
nasty. It's destined to be exported to Europe also.
Keith
REH
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2012 5:32 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION
Subject: [Futurework] China will get stuck also
Until the Chinese learn how to loosen-up their authoritarian
teaching methods, then China will never become the lead country in
the world. It will undoubtedly become a very large economic force in
terms of GDP -- if not the largest -- just as Japan almost managed
to do in the 1980s (but was then poleaxed when America insisted on
the yen being revalued upwards so much that Japan's export trade
became stabilized instead of growing further). Like Japan, China
will remain brilliant at reverse engineering almost every advanced
product that is made in America, the UK or Germany, but it will
never initiate any new industrial or commercial sector on its own
anytime soon -- other things (parental ambitions and education
methods) being equal.
A possible exception to this may occur if China were to send enough
of its children at a young enough age to be educated in the West.
When they reach their 20s, these Chinese would likely be at least as
innovative as Western 20 to 30-year olds. But it would then depend
on whether the innovators return to China to advance their ideas
there or whether they remain in the West (as many post-Doc
researchers do). Also, innovators need supportive friends and
colleagues of like (maverick) mind, not to mention rich individuals
who are prepared to invest in whacky ideas. There may not be enough
of those back in mainland China for many decades yet. Goodness
knows, venture funds have taken a long time to become established in
the West. On balance, therefore, although Chinese people are likely
to be as prosperous as those in the West in 20 years' time and with
wage rates just as high, China is likely to be stuck as fast as
Japan now is with nowhere else to go.
There is already too much evidence that biology will dominate man's
next commercial phase. As the 'metal-bashing' industrial revolution
in the West continues to pause in the coming decades while China
catches up, and when no new mass-produced consumer goods appear in
the shopping malls or on the internet, when will the biological
revolution take place? Whether we are talking of extinguishing
mid-life killer diseases, or of breeding better quality children
(that is, with fewer harmful mutations), or of carbon-based products
(with DNA-based machine tools) far superior in performance to the
present metallic or simple plastic ones, or of repopulating denuded
ecosystems for our enjoyment, then this is where the West is already
clear in the lead with tens of thousands of research scientists
exploring every nook and cranny.
Governments in the West ought to be heartened by the better
long-term prospects but, of course, politicians and civil servants
are almost completely uneducated in the basics of the last
revolution, never mind the coming one. As in the 18th and 19th
centuries, they're going to have to run very hard behind new
businesses in order to retain even a semblance of seeming to lead
their punter-electorates.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
