What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion?
My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.
1)you might have been too young to have read it (1992)
2)outsourcing and trade balance was in the full quote
>When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
It's a quote from a fiction of a bygone era though.
You think China can't write microcode?
You think only USA has big breasted women and men with chiseled abs? None of this makes any sense.
High speed pizza had to be tongue in cheek as written. Maybe you missed the point and it was all written tongue in cheek because who truly cares about those things if you don't have all your other bases covered?
Maybe I missed the point. Are we already pinched off?
That’s sort of narrow sighted - Asimov, Clarke are even more a bygone era yet their fiction is still very relevant. It may be the technologies they pin the story to are not the ones that are present in the future they foresaw but the premise still holds.
Snow Crash is positing once the mechanical and geographic advantages flatten globally you’re left with services of some sort - media, logistics, software: FAANG. It doesn’t seem far from the mark.
I wouldn’t be dismissive of the minds of the past. They’re in the context that leads to your present and have a unique perspective. The filter of history means the books that bubble up are from the most insightful and brilliant of their era, which means effectively the signal is clearly separated from the noise unlike the presents analysis of itself. If you want to understand what’s happening now read the science fiction of yesterday.
You're no dick just not fully aware of the situation :)
As of today China hasn't totally, or indeed really, caught up in the first 3. (Think about why). You might argue the Eurozone is up there in music but then you remember TikTok isn't quite YouTube.
High speed pizza delivery is the most hilarious because it's the only material domain that they won't make progress at (in the foreseeable future). They have better EVs better batteries and maybe better food (in general). Just not pizza because pizza is pizza, and drones still lag behind the fastest nuclear bike when it comes to shipping frozen pizza from Shanghai to your doorstep (is there even a market for frozen pizza in Hong Kong?)
(I'm glad he didn't mention games at all because it would have been the obvious one in 1992, but wrong 2025)
Ha thanks, I'll think about it. It's not immediately obvious though... My grandfather was one of the first "missionaries" to China in the 50s, wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Fortunately, there are still plenty: financial services / capital markets, tech, biotech / pharma, media / entertainment, e-commerce, higher ed.
Obviously, there are lots of players in those categories, but the U.S. is at or near top of the pack there. We just happen to be optimizing for the wrong thing right now.
I heard a columnist say, incredulously, “China wants our financial services industry, and we want their manufacturing industry”
No I'm asking also. I guess financial services is based primarily on trust/enforcement. Industry is based on toxic backbreaking labor and deep knowhow. Maybe I'm missing something about financial services, maybe its our ruthless military backing? I don't know man.
Well I don’t know much about manufacturing tbh, but for China to take a chunk of our financial services industry would be very difficult.
The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency by a long way, American capital markets are still the world’s largest and safest, and investors do not like capricious governments that don’t always adhere to established practices and rule of law (see: Ant Financial). Investors don’t want to put money in a place where saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong person could negatively impact your ability to transact in that country (also see: Russia c. 1990).
So I would assume it would take decades for China to maneuver the world away from American financial services.
> Investors don’t want to put money in a place where saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong person could negatively impact your ability to transact in that country
I don't think people understand how fortunate the US is to be reasonably uncorrupt/have a solid rule of law, have the world reserve currency, and for the most part be where any company in the world would prefer to be incorporated. That type of branding is impossible to put a value on.
Unfortunately the US is currently speed running to remove these advantages. Luckily it takes time for large money outflows to occur, and hopefully US law can hold in the meantime.
You’ve articulated one of my biggest, cash-under-the-mattress, doomsday fears: that if the US continues this path of removing those corruption / rule-of-law guardrails, there is a lot at stake for us to lose.
Maybe I’m just paranoid, and I know it doesn’t happen overnight, but my goodness… that keeps me up at night.
I'd guess that they're both hard, in different ways. But financial services... you need the whole rule-based legal climate for that. That's going to be hard to import into China. (See Esophagus4's reply for more.)
You say movies while a sibling comment mentioned media. However, more and more movies are not shot in the USA. Productions have been moving out of Hollywood for a really long time, and some of it is in other states, but more and more are leaving the US altogether. This is why Trump shot off that late night tweet/truth about placing tariffs on movies made outside the US. The only thing the US still has on movies is the mystique of Hollywood. The ability to shoot a film is not unique to the US at all
> What are our strengths/specializations in your opinion?
Not static. The parent post reminds us that "Made in USA" meant low quality. But so did "Made in China". These things change, but if the national-level policy is "let the market figure it out" (the polar opposite of China's approach), they don't change for the better.
>is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.
you exist on americas economic downslope, sadly. an ever declining standard of living in a post manufacturing economy. china and everyone after can just copy your progress and basically be America in its boom days
It changed my life but my son decided to go the blue-collar route and I love him just the same.
In terms of foreign trade, higher-ed is one of our greatest exports. Many other nations would like to knock us off the top, none could come close until Trump scored an own goal.
Yea I've got kids I've got to think about here, quite a few. I get very heated trying to understand the whole global aspect. All I see in the US is a vast resource getting stomped upon. I wish your boy the best and any others. Trump as I see him is a wrecking ball, I'm not sure where it ends up.
I'm proud that Vera Rubin discovered evidence for dark matter at my Uni. I'm proud that Douglas Osheroff discovered Superfluid Helium 3. I'm proud that Gerald Salton invented full text search and that Ivan Sutherland invented 3-d graphics rendering as used in video games.
I'm even more proud that our ag school is helping farmers in New York and the rest of the world make money and feed a growing population that expects to eat better (however they define "better") in a challenging climate. That our vet school trains vets and farriers. That our ROTC trains officers for all of our armed services. I don't see a contradiction that I'm also proud that Catholic priest and activist Daniel Berrigan against the Vietnam war escaped the FBI in the same building where those officers train.
I know these tribal feelings but I also felt... a wider sense of gratitude when at Leiden I saw enshrined Onnes' equipment for discovering superconductivity, or that otherwise insignificant suburban streets were named after Snell, Leeuwenhoek, Huyghens, Rembrandt, .. and other people I ought to have learnt about
There's something to be said for the way pioneers of the hand and mind are remembered as political operators or donors are..
Sure bureaucrats set those up but the exceptionality pointed at there felt inclusive
People can feel whatever they want about the achievements at their own institutions, .. it just feels purer when the institution is just a backdrop for these universal achievements .. plus I can go into any Leidse bakery and introduce myself as a scientist without bracing for sideeye (doesn't happen even on HN!)
That's not pride, that's just a sense of belonging
Why I chose this example. Somehow the Calvinist ressentiment "let no man be greater than I", which is equally present in NL as in the anglo heart/hinterlands.. makes a singular exception for intellectual achievements (as opposed to some purely emotional ones, like some particularly potent puns)
Don't know if villages in China will remember their current & future groundbreakers :)
There's hope: DeepSeek's hometown put up laudatory red banners for him.. nonironically.. is that like confetti for Apollo 11?
I think not. In the latter case, there's a serious case to be made that NASA deserved the confetti more.. that's how ressentiment "works"
People I know from South Asia complain bitterly about the quality of education they get but they get it.
Funny though I used to be proud of the Chinese language collection at my Uni which is one of the greatest outside (any) China and I still am but once I got really interested in the Chinese language it hit me that it's like 1% of what they have at Beijing University.
One might argue networking got Ramanujan to where Canterbrigians can now be proud of him :)
My favorite recollection in that place was going through Ken Wilson's notes. IIRC there was FORTRAN. Most interesting was a proof of Dyson's conjecture. Cant really remember because it wasn't that useful. Thought it was weird that he left-- gossip says it was the wife-- but nice that some people still bothered.
Institutions rise & fall. Become cringe. Achievements can endure, but only thru the effort of wider communities to distill and distribute.
The institution that created all the people who told us that globalization would make us all richer and the world freer when it seems to have done the opposite on a timeline just barely longer than the careers of those people while that industry goes on to severely lighten the pockets of every subsequent generation?
From where I'm sitting it looks like the bully finally made his way around to picking on someone who had it coming.
Just because all the people who touted globalization went to college doesn't mean that college was the reason for it. That's ridiculously surface-level thinking.
Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence.
Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today.
Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have.
Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society.
From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").
Every time a civil war erupts in the middle east there's some warmongers screeching "but what about the <ethnic/religious minority in the relevant country>, we ought to care about them" as a pretext for getting involved.
You are engaging in the exact same. The primary reason academic labs churn out technological advancement for Microsoft, Exxon, etc, etc, is because the tax code makes it preferential to do that rather than run the same thing in-house.
Also, I would like to note the slight of hand you just pulled between education and academia. There is no problem with doctors and lawyers getting their training. But that is absolutely distinct from professional academia. Those people are the customers. They are in and out.
The institutions themselves are absolutely corrupt. It is very comparable to the catholic church scooping up all the wealth in europe in the 13-1500s and justifying it by embedding themselves in mundane parts of society and then screeching "but without us who will do the thing" as if that justified everything else they were up to. (Though to be fair, academia is not the only institution subject to such criticism these days).
Saying "the entire institution of higher education is not collectively responsible for this specific bad economic policy choice" is somehow equivalent to saying "we should go kill hundreds of thousands of people to protect the poor Kurds/Palestinians/Israelis/etc"??
No; even leaving aside your apparent (and wild) misconception that "academia" is a unified, monolithic body akin to the medieval Catholic Church, unless you're willing to dial down your rhetoric to something less self-indulgently overdramatic and engage with actual reality in a vaguely reasonable manner, I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion.
> the people who told us that globalization would make us all richer .......
Your comment is exactly the kind of thinking these people want you to use. They want you to doubt every institution and have some anecdote about why it is the right way to think, when in reality it is the doing of a few elites, not institutions that are largely made up of people like you an mean. They want culture war between us instead of class warfare against them.
Perhaps one day people will start paying attention to the wealth inequality gap and realize what is going on... but increasinly unlikely if you demonize and undermine academia
My main concern as a millennial, who rightly put didn't witness this transformation, is that by continuing down a path of fewer and fewer specializations we get pinched off completely.