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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

This is largely because Europe became infatuated with austerity and its industrial policy has suffered as a consequence. You want big, cutting-edge fabs? You’re going to need to spend public money getting them off the ground. TSMC’s success is in part due to Taiwan itself designating semiconductors as a key strategic economic interest years ago and making investments/tax breaks accordingly

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Interestingly, in the 1970s, before any fabs on the island, Taiwan arranged for semiconductor engineers from the iconic but slowly dying American company RCA to transfer their technology to a visiting Taiwanese team, establishing what would later become TSMC. RCA pioneered so much: radio, TV, color TV, NBC... And just as it was starting to decline and die, its semiconductor knowledge was transferred to Taiwan!

Asianometry has a great video on YouTube detailing the creation of TSMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fVrWDdll0g

> This is largely because Europe became infatuated with austerity and its industrial policy has suffered as a consequence.

Was austerity broad-based or specifically targeted toward industrial areas? I'd always assumed austerity meant cutting back on public benefits/pensions/etc. but not strategic areas like this which is why I'm curious.

What do you call the infatuation with ducking over small businesses and startups?

It's tied into the culture, tbh, but you know, at least make it easier for someone to start, fail and start again.

Even forming a company is a major struggle compared to US, UK. Nevermind the insanity after a bankruptcy.

Sole proprietorship is still very common, and of course when you are in trouble with that, you are in trouble.

That's an interesting thesis - but, for example, Greece with its "let's piss money away without control for anything and everything" somehow hasn't become an industrial powerhouse either... so it might be that austerity (or lack thereof), in general, isn't really such an important factor?

How much money did Greece spend on getting fabs off the ground?

Greece has other, deeper problems to fix before it makes any attempts in creating any form of industry. The "pissing money away" happened because of internal problems, which can be attributed to corruption and cultural aversion to any form of entrepreneurship that goes beyond the scale of mom 'n' pop stores.

I am not trying to absolve Greece from its liabilities, just pointing out that Greece is a bad example for austerity not playing a significant role in slowing industrial development.

Source: I am Greek living in Greece.

yep.

_leading-edge chip manufacturing_ must be seen like "defence": making money out of it is optional, but it has to stay _really_ leading-edge and should be ready to produce at scale for other failing "friendly" part of the world. Since South-Korea and Taiwan did just that, and the others not, they are now alone on the global market.

To believe the "supply/demand" rule of the economy can magically make the money flow decently and properly is _REALLY_ dangerous, it cannot apply to everything.

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