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China Set To Surpass US In R&D Spending In 10 Years
dcblogs writes "China is on track to overtake the U.S. in spending on research and development in about 10 years, as federal R&D spending either declines or remains flat. The U.S. today maintains a large lead in spending over China, with federal and private sector investment expected to reach $424 billion next year, a 1.2% increase. By contrast, China's overall R&D spending is $220 billion next year, an increase of 11.6% over 2012, a rate similar to previous years. This finding is shared by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. 'China's investment as a percentage of its GDP shows continuing, deliberate growth that, if it continues, should surpass the roughly flat United States investment within a decade,' it said in a report last month."
America has become an anti intellectual society. Particularly when talking about STEM. All the pundits like to scream how we need to hire eleventy zillion teachers and then turn around and pout and scream that they're not all social workers focused on bullying, eating disorders and special needs. And if anyone so much as suggests that all the MFA's in Italian poetry pay more in tuition to offset the cost of the courses in engineering we're told we're all redneck knuckledragging philistines.
Someday, soon, a bunch of Federal grant wielding puppeteers will put on a show in Esperato about how we used to have fire but the inventor died.
Sadly, the USA is not focusing on science and engineering education, except for paying lip service to the concept of STEM courses in college. There are even proposals to tie tuition payments to the popularity of courses: charge more for engineering courses and less for liberal arts (which is the opposite of the right way to influence it if you're trying to coax people into the sciences and into engineering). The idea seems to be that majors which will earn more money should have a higher tuition associated with it. China sends more scholars over here. Meanwhile we have been making it harder for the best students in the world to come here for political reasons and visa bias when it would make more sense to encourage the best of the best to come here to learn and to stay here and innovate!
Well, of course. China has 3x the population of the US.
And the interior provinces aren't even fully industrialized yet. That will change rapidly as the expressway and high speed rail networks are built out.
There no point for the US investing in R we get everything we need from China.
Better focus on what we're really good at: creative financing
that they never get close to the bang-for-buck that the US gets.
Quite true, but what happens when China spends, say, twice as much on R&D ? They will overtake US at some point, if the current trends in both US and China continue.
China's labor is 1/10 the cost of the USA so in comparison, China is spending 5x times as much on R&D as the US or $2 billion if we compare actual wages. China and the US are in an economic war and the US is losing. Free trade with no tariffs is causing the economic collapse and closure of manufacturing due to the unfair wage difference between China and the Western world.
I remember in the 70s, that attitude was the same for "made in Japan" then Japan became one of the technological leaders in the world. China is doing things that the States can't even dream of considering its economic situation. They are making most every thing that you buy now under as name brands as most manufacturers out-source the actual assembly to China. We can start with the iPhone, pretty much every apple device, computer, stereo, television, network equipment, etc.. Keep your blinders on because you don't want to see the reality of the world where the States aren't the techno king anymore.
How is the iPhone crap?
Keep in mind that if it weren't for the iPhone, you'd probably still be using some piece of shit Samsung flip-phone right now.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Exactly. Just like how the USA slowed down after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. It's a shame they never recovered from it.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
We are going backwards, and they are going forwards... The rate does not change the end result, only the time to get there.
I'm going to take a wild guess that Apple's US R&D designed it, China just builds it.
They are spending more than twice now if we compare wages. Their $200 billion gets a lot more R&D then the States $400 billion. There is such an inequality in wages in the order of 10 to 1, that I would guess that they are actually getting the equivalent of $2 Trillion in State's R&D.
"Give us a product at the lowest possible cost so we can maximize our profit. Damn the consumer." ...They make crap because American corporations ask them to make crap.
1) A lot of that US land area is Alaska.
2) Population is more relevant to GDP as Japan can amply demonstrate.
They eventually did, after a world war that destroyed half of the world's production capacity -- the other half being, for all intents and purposes, in the US. I dearly hope that such a scenario isn't on the table today.
It is cheating. Basically the culture in China right now is one of do whatever you want to get ahead. Cheating, lying, all ok, expected even. So it goes on in research all the time. Straight out fabricated results and such. The problem is, as Feynman said, Nature cannot be fooled. So you can have all kinds of results that say X causes Y, but if X doesn't in fact cause Y it isn't helpful.
It is a societal thing that will need to change before they start to produce more useful research.
Methinks you're fantasizing. China needs the US and the EU as much as the US and the EU needs China for cheap wares. If the the US and the EU go down and crash, China will crash even more. They've no interior market/consumption to speak of, and need to rebalance.
Fantasizing, you say? Whatever. The fact is, the wealth of the world is being redistributed, and the US and EU are coming up losers. China is gaining. The real catch to all this redistribution is, the world's central banks are reaping the lion's share of the profits. For each ten dollars we lose, China gains a dollar, and the banks steal nine dollars.
But, the situation with the central banks don't affect the fact that China is ascending, while we descend.
China may be dependent on us today, but what happens in fifty years, or a hundred? We're selling off our great grandchildren's future.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
No interior market? That's actually where a lot of their growth has been and why they didn't go completely belly up when the US economy sneezed a few years ago.
If the talent is better and equal or cheaper in cost then this game is over
I guess the next question is "does this game actually matter?" Germany's population is about the same fraction of the US population as the US is of China, and presumably their R&D budget is much smaller than ours. But you never hear the Germans wailing about how the US has surpassed Germany in R&D spending; indeed, Germany's economy is one of the strongest in the world (especially Europe), with a large manufacturing sector and excellent technology, despite relatively high labor costs. Which doesn't mean that Germany is perfect or doesn't have problems - just that being overtaken in R&D spending doesn't automatically turn you into a third-world country.
This maybe stereo typing but I think in general German engineering is really top quality in terms of building products to a set specification in a reliable and predictable manner. Given that they have been able to hold onto manufacturing jobs is also a plus..
http://www.hawknest.com/
and it's got absolutely nothing to do with spending. Instead the problem is with our educational system preferring to not teach our kids how to think for themselves. The continual dumbing down of America is happening each and every day in our schools when they refuse to teach Civics, Geography, Math - when so called high school grads working at McDonalds can't even count back change w/o the damn computer telling them how much of what type of change to give back. Hell I've watched the same kids getting their change and they don't even know how to count it anymore.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
What does debt have to do with capitalism? There is nothing about debt that precludes capitalism.
Had we let the auto companies fail, what would have been created in its place? Nothing. The expense of setting up a new car company is unbelievably expensive. All we would have gained by letting them fail was the loss of over one million jobs and the death of the American auto industry. I fail to see how that helps capitalism.
You make a point of singling out unions but fail to mention all the banks that were too big to fail and have no unions. Should we have let them fail? By your logic, we should have. But by all accounts we would have entered a full blown depression (ala 1939). Keep in mind we were losing over 700,000 per month at the time. Are you pro capitalism at the cost of a depression? I hate to tell you this but unrestricted capitalism is what caused the problem in the first place. Saving the banks (as disgusting as that feels) is what saved capitalism. The reason social programs like medicare exist is to save capitalism. Study history and you'll understand why.
What most capitalism purists fail to get is that there are no pure systems and that includes the economic system of capitalism. Do you think the stock market is a free market? Not even close. Such things just don't exist.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
1) Yeah, what of it, punk.
Learn to love Alaska
The fact is, the wealth of the world is being redistributed, and the US and EU are coming up losers.
The wealth of the world being rebalanced so everyone has more equal wealth is a good thing, in my opinion. I'm not sure how it isn't, in any way at all.
Now, if you're saying that corporations are taking most of the money, and distributing the wealth unequally, that's a different issue, which is a result of our current system, which they've adopted to some degree.
More equal wealth will allow manufacturing and farming to actually exist in the west without subsidies, too. At the moment we're clinging on to high tech specialised manufacturing, but I doubt that will last for that long.