Get the latest tech news

The rise of the U.S., the rise of China

I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th century, and (to a lesser extent) China today.

In “ Science, The Endless Frontier," the famous 1945 report advocating for robust government support for basic research, Vannevar Bush notes that in the 19th century, American industrial progress often involved “Yankee ingenuity” building upon the scientific discoveries of Europeans. The captains of modernity, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Goulds, and their admirers; all the people yearning to strike out on new salients, buy more things, behave in new ways; immigrants seeking release from the encrusted semifeudal strictures of Old Europe: they all reveled in the change. Consumers were expected to be sharp in their interactions, and legal doctrine for commerce was based on “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware): an unrestrained business environment allowing risky and dangerous enterprises was thought to be necessary for the “‘industrial and commercial development…of a new and expanding nation.” In Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff, Edward Balleisen writes:

Get the Android app