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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Where there are factories and competition, innovation will happen. When we started manufacturing in China, we had experience building and they didn't so we had to show them how to do everything. Now they manufacture without our oversight, have the relationships with suppliers, and figure out how to do things faster, cheaper, and higher quality because it directly benefits them.

Meanwhile, we don't have the experience building things that they do with their equipment and people.

The only problem is believing that other people innovating hurts us. It doesn't.

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Not read TFA, but in my country (Western Europe) there's so much talk of how in the future we're going to live off our ideas and innovation, not manufacturing, and there always seems to be this.. underlying... thing that the people who run the factories don't have any ideas of their own. So we're going to sit here and think up brilliant things, and send them off to a land of smoke stacks and cheap labour to be made. And I just don't see how that system could ever be anything other than temporary. After we've outsourced all the dirty work, when would the expertise out there not insource the thinking work and cut me out? I would if I was them.

(And honestly it is very hard to ignore the colonialist undertones of this thinking)

France motto since the seventies: "On a pas de pétrole mais on a des idées !" (We don't have oil but we have ideas).

That's a great argument for a business model like ARM has, where all profit comes from IP licensing and no manufacturing is done in house. A bit ironic, then, that SoftBank just acquired it.

SoftBank are Japanese, not Chinese.

I wasn't around back then so someone else will have to fill in, but isn't that what happened with Japan? First they just copied American TV and Radio designs, killing American manufacturers simply by undercutting them on price and then BOOM suddenly they were inventing the Walkman and all-in-one camcorders (Marty McFly: All the best stuff comes from Japan!)

>>..isn't that what happened with Japan? First they just copied American TV and Radio designs..

That's correct. My dad worked in international sales for a company that makes industrial equipment, from the early 1970s until the late 1990s.

He says that in the early days, whenever he sold a product to a Japanese company, a few months later, one of his Japanese competitors would mysteriously come out with a product that seemed to look and function exactly like the one he just sold.

It seems to me that it's not that different from how people learn - you start by copying what other people do, and even though you're not doing anything "new," you're learning the low-level basics of why things are the way they are, and then you use your unique perspective to spot ways to improve upon that.

Exactly - personally I can't complain since I'm Swedish and one of our largest tech companies (telecom innovator Ericsson), got their start by ripping off Graham Bell designs before they were patented in Europe

The problem would seem to be that you can't build a deep economy on just ideas. Sure, whoever works for Apple gets nice paychecks, but most people don't. Trickle-down economics has always been a smoke screen for trickle-up power.

It takes decades to build up a world-class university. Maybe centuries.

Certainly one day there will be cutting-edge research and innovation - the things that create a lot of value - in many countries. Some would say that China already has these things. But so what? Does China having those things mean that Europe shouldn't? Does having manufacturing there make China better at these things?

Not every country needs to do heavy manufacturing, any more than every country needs to grow its own food, or every country needs to mine its own raw materials. Specialization is fine.

>It takes decades to build up a world-class university. Maybe centuries.

This has been accurate so far but it could be because the idea of disrupting university education and research is only now gaining prominence. The incentives are bigger than ever.

If a substantially leaner alternative to either is found somewhere, it will at least be tried in China. Whether it succeeds will then depend on many factors.

Overtones

I think that you may be failing to separate the dissimilarities between two different ideas, "service economy vs. industrial economy" [1] and "robot revolution". The two share the single commonality that I think you've latched on to, that they both involve people whose entire job is to build ideas that they don't manufacture themselves, but are otherwise completely separate and the thoughts you've noticed don't transfer.

The "land of smokestacks and cheap labor" thought comes solely from the division between service and industrial labor, noting that, at the present moment, someone has to be doing the industrial labor. The badness of industrial jobs is an unfortunate consequence of bloody evolution horribly murdering anybody that tries to fix it [2]; service jobs bottom out in overwork and psychological problems, while industrial jobs bottom out in pollution, disease, and dismemberment. The problem is now is that part of the global economy is forced to remain on industrial labor when they should have advanced to service labor.

The "in the future we'll live off our ideas" thought is entirely derived from idea of the robot revolution, which explicitly rejects the very existence of the "land of smokestacks and cheap labor". Indeed, the robot revolution will force everybody into service jobs, because it will do to industrial jobs what automation has already done to agricultural jobs: automate them all away.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy#/media/File:Gd...

2: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

You are exactly right. There is this inherent superiority complex in this thinking. And I think I know the reason why:

The elites in western nations aren't builders or doers. They are talkers (lawyers, bankers, politicians, MBAs) who have told themselves their entire lives that builders don't matter as much as the talkers. They love Steve Jobs, but wouldn't know who Woz was if you asked them. They talk about the "jobs of the 21st century" but make fun of the technology experts by calling them nerds on the floors of Congress.

If this is your line of thinking, then the whole "let them build the stuff, and we'll do all the ideas and innovation" makes perfect sense. Its a perfect example of why the remaining "doers" in the US have such a deep-seated hatred of all politicians and government. I'm talking about the remaining auto-workers and the oil-drillers, etc.

Fantastic comment. This country seemingly has a genuine disdain for its laborers, an attitude that has pervaded into every section of government and will surely bite us in the ass much like Brexit did in Britain. It's very telling that I've yet to read a single comment showing support for that movement online yet 51% of the voting population approved of it.

It's impressive that we manage to disdain laborers and intellectuals at the same time.

It's classic, text-book divide-and-conquer! You tell group A that group B are "liberal college-educated elitists" and you tell group B that group A are "gun-loving Bible-thumping rednecks" and let them go at each other's throats!

53%, you mean.

There have been plenty of comments supporting Brexit online. Even here on Hacker News. Perhaps you just didn't spot them, or were not reading the right sites to find them.

I don't doubt that they existed, but the disparity seen in online forums would have you believe that it was a fringe far right <1% group that voted for it, certainly not 53% of the population.

“Now they manufacture without our oversight”

I know several people who's job is overseeing Chinese manufacturing. They need constant oversight and quality inspection otherwise everything falls apart very very fast.

I'm currently living in South West China and, while this may sound culturally insensitive, there is a very very serious cultural problem with quality and attention to detail. People will work really long hours, but will always do the very bare minimum. It's at times absolutely staggering and infuriating. The reason manufacturing is in China isn't so much because they know how to do things, but because they will work long hours doing mundane work (because of very strong commitments to supporting their families) and because the supply chain is located here. If you need 10 thousands units of some widget by next week you can get it. Its quite likely it will be defective, but you can just buy another 10 thousand from the factory next door. The same infrastructure doesn't exist anywhere else

The reason innovation will happen is because Chinese people are doers. They just go and do things instead of talking about it all day. And sure, they do a lot of dumb things, but at the end of the days it all seems to work out. Thats why they own half of Africa already

Which is oddly similar to Silicon Valley, where there's a very serious cultural problem with quality and attention to detail. People will work really long hours (due to a misguided hero belief, so we're different there). And sure, they do a lot of dumb things (Color? Uber for pet walking?), but at the end of the day it all seems to work out.

Except, it doesn't - not for China, which is slowly choking to death on the effects of costs externalized to the environment, nor for America, due to the costs externalized onto everybody who's not a company.

Andy Grove wrote a great essay on exactly this topic: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grove...

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