The US went soft over the decades in economic competition with Europe, Japan and the USSR.
Europe had to rebuild itself after World War 2 and then Europe had more regulations and less willingness to rapidly change and innovate.
Japan was a strong competitor for a while, but then Japan had decades of stagnation. Japan also has an aging and now declining population level.
The USSR and now Russia always had massively flawed economic systems.
Finances, decision making and execution speed and aggressiveness in business
The US out-hustled Europe.
The USA produced nearly 50,000 Sherman tanks in WW2. More tanks than Germany and Great Britain made during the entire war. Germany only produced about 6,000 Panthers.
10 years ago a poll showed just 12 percent of Americans approved of a universal basic income. A new Northeastern University/Gallup survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults shows 48 percent of Americans support it.
Is the US out-hustling China?
There is some analysis from the book – Grit by Angela Duckworth. She analyzes how effort is squared in the formula for success. She also notes that gritty people have a growth mindset. China has targets for 6-6.5% overall GDP growth.
* China is on track to surpass US venture capital
* China could surpass the US in many other financial areas
* China already has a far larger mobile and e-commerce market
* In 2016, China surpassed the US to become the world’s largest retail market . By 2020, China’s retail market will be 30% larger than the US retail market.
* China is the world’s largest e-commerce market. China was $1.13 trillion in 2017. This was almost triple the US e-commerce market of $451 billion. The UK was at $110 billion and Japan at $95 billion.
US accounted for the largest portion of the total deal activity, Asia also made up a significant proportion of deal activity, with $65 billion invested in Greater China and $10 billion in deals announced for India.
Asia is gaining on the U.S. as the largest source of venture capital, more than doubling to $70.8 billion in 2017 compared with the U.S. at a 17% gain to $71.9 billion. A separate year-end VC survey by KPMG breaks out China figures and notes that China venture capital investment rose 15% last year to more than $40 billion. What’s hot in China tech is artificial intelligence, autotech and enterprise services.
Europe saw a 40 percent rise in financing to $17.6 billion.
In 2017 alone, $12.5 billion in startup funding flowed into artificial intelligence companies, with Chinese startups receiving 48 percent of that money.
Trying to Protect existing companies and technologies is less effective than racing ahead
This week, President Donald Trump cited national security concerns when he blocked Singapore-based Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of Qualcomm.
In April 2015, the U.S. government blocked Intel from selling new Xeon chips to Chinese supercomputers. In 2016, China unveiled Sunway TaihuLight, a supercomputer which has theoretical peak performance of 124.5 petaflops. This made it the first supercomputer to break the 100 petaflop barrier. The TaihuLight runs entirely on Chinese hardware, using ShenWei CPUs developed at the Jiangan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi.
Losing the Chinese supercomputer orders in 2015 reportedly cost Intel between $1 billion to $1.3 billion in revenue. It was about 6% to 8% of Intel’s $16 billion in Data Center revenue in fiscal 2015.
The US Supercomputer Chip ban delayed China’s 100 petaFLOP computer by 8 months and contributed to Intel laying off 12,000 employees.
Elon Musk in the US has been far more effective by racing ahead with the development of lower cost rockets and reusable rockets. If SpaceX and Elon Musk did not exist then the US would be losing its lead in rocketry by trying to protect $400 million Delta IV Heavy rockets and United Launch.
Speed of execution and faster innovation are the keys to winning.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.