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Comment by saidajigumi | Hacker News Reader

I'm just saying, isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D?

I think it's a mistake to underestimate just how much native R&D goes on in the broad and deep ocean of China's modern manufacturing complex. That entire industry has been working hard for decades now at learning from its customers, continually seeking opportunities to "level up". The particulars of this specific, sketchy case aside, the idea that Foxconn hasn't invested in sophisticated R&D facilities at this point in the game is far less believable to me.

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Indeed. What a lot of people don't get is that companies don't "buy American", because they can't. We simply do not have those manufacturing capabilities. It's not just the factories. It's the skilled, trained, and experienced workers needed to do that particular flavor of high precision work.

For the US to change this, to compete directly with China at large-scale electronics manufacturing, would take decades of work and untold billions of dollars of long-term focused government effort. And frankly, the US government isn't great at long term thinking. Makes you appreciate an old-school Marxist Five Year Plan.

Makes you appreciate an old-school Marxist Five Year Plan.

When does that sort of thing work, and when does it dramatically fail? I suspect that it's the looser forms of central planning that succeed and the tighter ones that spectacularly fail.

Never underestimate the capacity of government, in ALL its forms, to fail.

The fault lies not so much in systems as it does in people. Certainly some systems are a better "fit" for people than other systems, but to say that having a 5 year plan or not having a 5 year plan is going to be the key to success or failure is incorrect.

Even more than how they are incentivized, WHO the people are you have working on something is the key to its success or failure. A team of uninterested geniuses will be as useless as a team of diligent dullards, and in either case, there is a high probability of failure for your project. It won't really matter how you organize either of those teams to get the job done.

Never underestimate the capacity of government, in ALL its forms, to fail.

It's the Thermocline of Truth. The bigger and more powerful the organization, the deeper the thermocline and the more threats can be hidden therein. National governments are the biggest organizations around. Ergo, they can fail the most spectacularly.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...

The Soviets decided where the factories were built, how much to invest, in whom, what the products would be, quotas, volumes, suppliers, quality, etc. etc..

The Chinese gov. is mostly centrally planning strategically, i.e. with investments, loans, subsidies, de-facto monopoly rights - which is another thing entirely.

In some ways, what the Chinese are doing is kind of like what Japan, S. Korea and even Europe did after the war.

But it's likely they are heading into a 'different stage' now where that doesn't work so well.

Also, Foxconn is Taiwanese, worth noting.

My take on Soviet Five years plans and the like is a plan is usually better than no plan. Good plans usually spec the what not the how. Also Soviet stagnation occurred under Brezhnev's policies which de-prioritized consumer goods and infrastructure.

On the other hand Communist China seems to have gotten better at planning over time. (What you do you get good at)

'No plan' would describe US industrial policy since Reagan.

When does it fail, and why does it fail? As I've noted elsewhere, per capita income in China has increased about 130x (in constant dollars) since 1960. They've gone from abject poverty to Western standards of living for most of their citizens. That's astounding.

Small nations that have stayed with old-school communism and are mired in poverty - North Korea and Cuba at this point - have been almost totally isolated from the rest of the world for decades, unable to trade with large, obvious, prosperous neighbors. Is it the five year plan, or the sanctions?

The USSR eventually failed, but they did improve a great deal over the economic situation Russia was in at the time of the revolution. And honestly, there's no guarantee that a financial collapse won't wipe out the world of western capitalism, either. The US came perilously close to that in 2008.

This is just random nit picking but the five year plan is a stalinist concern to rapidly industrialize an agrarian to fit into a marxist model of having a means of production to conflict over in the first place. Marx had no such concerns.

Deng Xiaoping and his advisors actually didn't turn to Marx for his 5 year plans. He looked at capitalism. Education, infrastructure and the rule of law would make Western/Japanese companies invest and they did.

I think a lot of people haven't realized this yet

gotta upvote this, even a smart guy like Elon Musk had to sleep on factory floors to push forward the native R&D.

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