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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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It's really about what's more important to you and where you set your priorities. Or maybe it's actually about being short-sighted or far-sighted.
The US seems to believe that having "rich" people and a poor-rich divide will somehow foster or speed up technological development. I would say that is an almost religious belief. I don't really agree with it too much personally, and also i don't like how they approach their population as "wave slaves" who are threatened with starvation and homelessness if they don't work; but also i'm not gonna interfere with US internal affairs.
I really do think that all the "corporation" things are short-sighted, and it is wise to take the "long-run" perspective and ask what will be in a 1000 years, in a billion years.
I do think that being a bully like the US is is short-sighted, an in fact disadvantageous in the long run, because it makes people distrust them, and that's a thing that puts you in a disadvantageous position in general.
I mean, it's a really competitively efficient system. We outpaced the rest of the world on a lot of things for a while there. We even have the 1% self-exploiting with highly specialized skills, 3X as likely to work more than 50hrs a week. All gas, no brakes.
The competition = efficient / spurs invention is mostly a myth.
The peak period of US inventions, was from ~ 1930-1980, when it was forced (by the USSR's rapid growth) to adopt a similar public-planning model, and allocate a ton of resources to public projects. This article gets into it.
There's also the book, The people's republic of wal-mart, which isn't the best, but it does contain one good argument: companies like Wal-mart and Amazon are many times the size of the GDP of even many countries, and they don't compete internally, and use full-scale planning, with information provided at every level. It shows a few cases where companies tried to emulate the "compete = win" by splitting their company into many competing divisions, and of course the companies quickly imploded because of the massive waste of resources.
Another good book on this is CJ Chivers - The Gun. It compares the history around the development of the AK-47 (which was collectively designed and had input from many state-level entities), vs the M16's development, and how these two different development models affected their success.
I'm really interested in those books, thanks for citing them.
But peak period? You're missing the whole information age. In AI alone, we lead the world.
And competition from the USSR is competition, too. You're right that top-down planning is ideal for a lot of things, so the definition of 'competitively' I most intended was more like 'stronger than other countries.'
*Deep Seek has entered the chat.*