Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Team USA vs. Team China

While everyone is transfixed by the high drama of American politics, life goes on. The news on the competition front has not been very good. Especially, when you take a look at what is happening in China today.

David Goldman reports on some recent events from China and tells us that it is well past the time that we take China seriously. As a rule we do not. We are convinced that we can easily outcompete a nation whose children are brought up by Tiger Moms.

Recently, China wanted to buy some advanced American semiconductors in order to build a supercomputer. The American government refused to allow the sale because the chips have a potential military. So, the Chinese were forced to make their own semiconductors. They succeeded and produced something that is vastly better-- that would be five times better-- than anything we have.

Goldman explains:

China now has the world's fastest supercomputer, faster than anything we've got by a factor of five. Forget the South China Sea. That's rope-a-dope, and we're the dope that's getting roped. Welost that one. We're about to lose the next round, too.

China has built the computer with chips that it designed and manufactured in China, after the United States banned Intel from selling its fastest chips to China.

China not only has the world's fastest individual supercomputer, but it has more totalsupercomputing capacity than the United States. And its capacity is growing, and getting even faster; China claims it will add a zero to computing speed by 2020, which would make its top-of-the-line box 50 times faster than the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This isn't about virtual reality headsets. Supercomputers are a decisive instrument in economics and war. They break codes (or create hard-to-break codes), for example.  They simulate nuclear explosions. They design air frames. They model the molecular properties of new materials. China's economy, to be sure, is far behind America's in many key areas--but not in chip-making, or computer architecture. Not any more.

Wake up, America. There’s more to life that the current political circus. If you think we are going to solve this by leading the world in transgendered restrooms, you have a problem.

America is also losing its military advantage. In Goldman’s words:

China has surface-to-ship missiles (the DF-21 and its successors) that can sink U.S. carriers. It has satellite-killer missiles that can take out our space-based communications. It has high-speedmaneuvering missiles. We know about all this. What should worry us is what we don't know about yet. China's super-computing capacity opens up a vast number of possibilities for industrial as well as weapons design. It turbocharges the rate of innovation and drastically reduces developing and testing time and costs. This is an advantage America used to take for granted. We controlled exports of fast computer chips, even the ones embedded in game boxes, because we wanted to maintain our edge. And now it's gone. Not a single politician to my knowledge has mentioned it.

Those who make the case against China—which is a case for continued American world dominance—suggest that China does not innovate. You see, our educational system might not teach math or language very well but we teach all students to be creative, thus to innovate. And besides, our college students are such delicate flowers that cannot even listen to an opposing point of view without melting into a puddle. The STEM subjects, of course, are filled with Asian students.

As for Chinese innovation, Goldman suggests:

I'm tired of hearing that the Chinese don't innovate. Most of them don't innovate, but some of them do, and with 1.4 billion people, even a small percentage implies a lot of innovators. You don't need a lot of innovators. You need a few good ones and a lot of people who know how to follow instructions. Chinese students know a lot more math than our kids. Try to solve the high-school level problem below (and compare it to the baby stuff in the American curriculum).

But, isn't China in deep financial trouble? Goldman, a banker by trade, downplays the risk:

I am also tired of hearing about China's impending financial crisis. There is a lot of bad debt among state-owned enterprises. They owe the debt to state-owned banks. In other words, China's government owes money to itself. That's not a crisis. That's a paper reshuffle. At some future point, to be sure, China's debt problems might become dangerous. Don't hold your breath.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Goldman is saying that we have become complacent and overconfident. We are no longer interested in working and competing. We prefer bread and circuses.

He concludes:

Complacency is dangerous. During the 13th-century Mongol siege of Baghdad, the city's caliph thought that its walls were sufficient defense against lightly armed horsemen. The Mongols hired 1,000 Chinese siege engineers, who breached the city walls in eighteen days, after which the Mongols entered Baghdad and killed most of the 1 million inhabitants.

There's no guarantee that China will succeed. China could shoot itself in the foot by suppressing private initiative, or it could unleash its people's enormous talent. Counting on China to collapse of its own weight is not a policy. It's a sorry excuse for the absence of policy.

5 comments:

Ares Olympus said...

Stuart: But, isn't China in deep financial trouble? Goldman, a banker by trade, downplays the risk:

Goldman: I am also tired of hearing about China's impending financial crisis. There is a lot of bad debt among state-owned enterprises. They owe the debt to state-owned banks. In other words, China's government owes money to itself. That's not a crisis. That's a paper reshuffle. At some future point, to be sure, China's debt problems might become dangerous. Don't hold your breath.

Goldman isn't a "banker" but an economist, and Krugman is also an economist if that makes you feel better. Nearly everyone agrees that sovereign government debt isn't the problem, but the problem is once person's wealth is someone else's debt, and when leveraged debt bubbles collapse, a lot of wealth goes with it, either by assets being worth much less than you paid, or by inflation.

Anyway, actually Goldman concludes this below the sponsored ad:
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What should we do?

First, we need to restore funding to basic science and R&D to levels we last saw during Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative drive during the 1980s.

Second, we need to raise the performance bar in our schools. I don't care if some children fail. I don't care if half of them fail, as long as the other half are better than their Chinese counterparts. China has a ruthless meritocracy. We don't have to be ruthless. But we need a meritocracy.
---------

So the way to make schools succeed is to ruthlessly allow students to fail. If we accept a 50% high school graduation rate as the ideal, we can use natural selection to prune out the losers and those who can't afford tutors, and make our country a true meritocracy.

On the other hand, Trump's popularity comes in part from a rebellion against the elite establishment that is sucking up all the perks and exporting all our jobs to China!
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/15/hillarys_meritocracy_problem_the_gop_will_paint_her_as_an_elitist_and_the_right_can_make_that_charge_stick/

All this makes me think that neither the U.S. or Chinese government are in control of our economies. They are both just empowering a new crop of international corporatists who make the rules to their own benefit, and will ruthlessly punish or abandon any country that fails to follow their dictates in the race to the bottom.

So we have to be careful to ask whose success is really threatening ours.

David Foster said...

I would expect a serious article on supercomputing to address quantum computing, one way or the other. If the author doesn't believe it's for real, he should say so; if it is for real, then it is likely to make the discussion in the article pretty irrelevant.

illuvitus said...

"On the other hand, Trump's popularity comes in part from a rebellion against the elite establishment that is sucking up all the perks and exporting all our jobs to China!"

That rebellion is not one against "elites", but against economics. Countries that try to bar free trade always (as in, always) end up reaping dread unintended consequences. Trump just might be as economically illiterate as anyone the Democrats have run.

Ares Olympus said...

p.s. Here's a recent warning issue about China's debt problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/16/chinas-debt-is-250-of-gdp-and-could-be-fatal-says-government-expert
--------
China’s borrowings hit 168.48 trillion yuan ($25.6 trillion) at the end of last year, equivalent to 249% of economic output, Li Yang, a senior researcher with the leading government think-tank the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), has told reporters.

But the huge number, which includes government, corporate and household borrowings, was lower than some non-government estimates.

The consulting firm McKinsey Group said earlier this year that the country’s total debt had quadrupled since 2007 and was likely as high as $28 trillion by mid-2014.
...
The country’s economy grew 6.9% last year, the slowest rate in a quarter of a century, and weakening economic figures have signalled the slowdown has continued this year.
--------

I'm sure a lot of supercomputers can be built for $3 trillion/year of "free" money. (Assuming debt increased from $7 to $28 trillion dollars in 7 years)

Apparently the way debt bubbles work is you have to keep pumping them with more debt every year, or the whole thing implodes. So a 7% growth rate is apparently "too slow" to keep markets flowing. That's a recipe for disaster.

So China's primary advantage is they can change the rules overnight (i.e. Goldman's 'paper reshuffle') when "capitalism fails" they'll happily blame greedy speculators, and execute or imprison a few scapegoats, and then tell their middle class they're no longer rich, but have nothing at all except what the State says they have.

You have to imagine many of Goldman's 'innovators', those who are exceptionally clever, are already preparing for that day, and have their escape plan in order.

Anonymous said...

Bring US military home from Asia. WWII and Cold War ended ages ago.
Let Asians settle their own problems.

Put US troops on the US-Mexican border.

Invest in America. No more wars overseas.