Creativity,
Entrepreneurship, and other American Myths
The
Myth of American Competitive Supremacy
By Larry Romanoff, August 13, 2022
Americans boast incessantly about their
competitiveness and the miracles of their predatory capitalist system, but on
examination these claims appear to be mostly thoughtless jingoism that
transmutes historical accidents into religion. If we examine the record, US
companies have seldom been notably competitive. There is more than abundant
evidence that their efforts are mostly directed to ensure an asymmetric playing
field that permitted them to avoid confronting real competition. And, in very
large part, major US corporations have succeeded not because of any competitive
advantage but by pressure and threats emanating from the State Department and
military. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman stated the
truth quite accurately when he wrote, “The hidden hand of the market will never
work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell
Douglas."
Xerox was once almost the only manufacturer of photocopiers in the world. Kodak
was once almost the world's only maker of cameras and photo film; Where are
Xerox and Kodak today? More recently, Motorola was the leading
manufacturer of mobile phones; Where is Motorola today? US-based RCA
Victor was one of the largest producers of TV sets in the world. Where can you
buy an RCA TV set today? Where are the great Pan Am World Airways and Continental
Airlines? Where are E.F. Hutton, General Foods, RCA, DEC, Compaq?
Where are American Motors, Bethlehem Steel, Polaroid cameras, and so
many more? Gone, because they couldn't deal with effective competition.
Boeing Aircraft would be gone today if not for the extensive subsidies it receives from
the US government. It's true that Airbus receives subsidies too, but Boeing is
supported by billions in US military research grants against which it can apply
much of its current expenses. Not so many years ago, IBM was the only
manufacturer of office and home computers. Where can you buy an IBM computer
today? GE was once the largest manufacturer of electric home appliances,
lights and lighting fixtures. Where is GE today? Transformed into a financial
company, beaten out of all consumer markets because it couldn't compete. IBM
defenders will tell you that the company willingly abandoned the PC market to
focus on mainframe computers and information services, but no company abandons
a profitable market. The truth is that IBM faced manufacturers who could
produce PCs for a quarter of the cost, and were forced out of the business. GE
defenders would make a similar claim, but GE couldn't compete in the vast
consumer markets and was driven out too.
The three major US auto manufacturers are
in the same position. Chrysler has been bankrupt three times already,
and survives today only because of Fiat having taken it over. The great General
Motors went bankrupt, and was saved only by $60 billion of cash injections
from the US and Canadian governments - money which will never be recovered. And
in spite of that, GM would have anyway disappeared from the earth if not for
its sales in China - which are now three times GM's sales in its own country;
even Americans are refusing to purchase GM's tired and dying brands. Only Ford
has been able to keep its head above water, and then only just. We could
produce a list of hundreds of US companies who thought they were great until
they faced some real "competition", and then rapidly disappeared.
It's true there are business failures in every country, but other countries
don't boast about their God-given omnipotence and their world-beating
competitive supremacy.
Along similar lines, the Americans have
never forgiven the Europeans and Russians for producing supersonic passenger
aircraft after all US attempts failed. And they are unlikely to forgive China
and Russia for the deployment of working hypersonic missiles when all domestic
attempts have failed.
And then we have the genuine mythology of Alexander
Graham Bell who didn’t invent the telephone, Thomas Edison who, by
his own admission, never invented anything – including the light bulb, the Wright
Brothers who were never the first to have powered flight, and the great Albert
Einstein who plagiarized everything he published. The list is very long.
Descriptions of American ingenuity and
competitiveness were never accurate or valid, but mere jingoism fabricated by
Bernays' adherents to further promote the self-serving mythology of virtuous
American capitalism. The truth is that the large US companies thrived on only
brute force, heavily supported by their own government to limit competition
both domestically and abroad. The US government and military have always
existed primarily to browbeat other nations and economies into submission, to
help US corporations obtain unfair trade deals, exclusive access to resources
and markets, effectively colonising and subjugating much of the world. American
business has seldom been able to compete when placed on an equal footing with
other competitors because the US business model works only on a "take it
by force" basis. Kodak, Xerox, and so many other American icons disappeared
when the playing field did indeed become level.
We need only look at the US domestic market
to see the truth of this. When Japanese and German automobiles were finally
permitted into the US market on equal terms, the American auto firms mostly
entered a long slide to bankruptcy - because they couldn't compete. Almost
every computer and electronic device sold in the US today is a foreign brand
because Americans couldn't compete when the playing field was level. Motorola's
crappy phones were a great success until Nokia and others entered the US
market. Harley-Davidson exists only because of a 50% import tax on
competing motorcycles; Ford Motors would also be in bankruptcy if not
for the heavy protectionist tax on light trucks. The American mobile phone companies
and ISPs would disappear into the bankruptcy courts within a year if foreign
firms were permitted into the market. Cisco Systems, the grand American
Internet infrastructure champion, would within three months be reduced to
assembling Playstations for Sony if Huawei were given free access to the US
market. The story is the same for countless American firms that were once
dominant in their home market but quickly disappeared when protectionist trade
tariffs and duties were eliminated and foreign products could enter the US on
fair or equal terms. The dominant US firms surviving today are able to do so
due mostly to rampant protectionism and oligopolies created by the US
government to ensure their survival.
The same is true in foreign markets. Few American
companies have been able to survive in other countries, other than the
fast-food chains. Most recently, Domino’s Pizza is leaving Italy with
its tail between its legs after ten years of failure, blaming the bankruptcy on
COVID. But there is a long string of American failures preceding this; E-Bay
and Home Depot left China in tears a few years ago. Uber’s China
business was taken over by Didi, and there are many more. Those American firms
that have survived, have done so primarily by purchasing domestic brands and
using that distribution system to support their foreign market entries, and
most of those have succeeded only due to astonishing criminality in their
foreign joint ventures.
And it is an axiom in the auto business
that nowhere in the world can you buy an American car except in North America
and China, and the China market may soon disappear in spite of what seemed an
initial success.
At one time, US banks, radio and TV
companies, print publishers and others were heavily restricted from mergers and
takeovers on the sound basis that society needed to be protected from the
predatory nature of concentrated ownership. But for the past 50 years the
elites who control the large US corporations have exerted enormous influence on
the government to remove domestic restrictions on monopolies, and eventually
their political influence succeeded to the point where today the entire nation
has only a few media firms, auto manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, oil
companies, telecommunications firms and major banks. In each case, companies
were bought, merged, swallowed or bankrupted until only a few very large
survivors remained.
American banking corporations were once
permitted to operate only within a single state, in part to sensibly ensure
that local deposits were converted to local development loans rather than being
siphoned off to develop other richer regions. But the powerful East-Coast
bankers, heavily supported by the FED, convinced the government that all those
small regional banks needed "competition" to make them "more
efficient" and to bring them into the big leagues of the modern financial
world. And of course, once approval was received, most of the local banks were
purchased, enticed into a merger, bankrupted or forced out of business, and now
a small number of banks controls most of the US economy. And, as we would
expect, the new mega-banks did indeed siphon off local deposits to richer
centers, thereby vastly increasing the nation's income disparity and relieving
the government of its control of regional development. All the claims about the
need for, and benefits of, competition were false. The purpose of these mergers
and purchases was never to foster competition but to eliminate it. Today, a few
major US banks control the bulk of the nation's business, and instead of
competing with each other in some meaningful way they generally conspire
together to plunder their customers. Where there is real competition consumers
have choices, but what are the choices with the banks? You can leave one bank
that offers poor service while cheating you to go to another bank that will
offer poor service while cheating you.
The US mobile phone system, an oligopoly,
is the most expensive and dysfunctional in the world. An Internet-enabled smart
phone that can be managed well in China for less than 100 yuan a month ($15.00)
will cost $200 per month in the US. Until recently, SIM cards could not be
removed, to prevent customers from changing suppliers; unlocking the phone to
enable its use with another phone company or in another location, would lead to
a $500,000 fine and a ten-year prison sentence, thereby protecting the
oligopoly from competition. Like all American systems, communication was
designed by and for the benefit of private enterprise, meant to hold consumers
captive and milk them for every dollar they have. It was never considered as
infrastructure nor designed with any thought of what was best for either the
consumers or the nation.
This pattern prevailed in banking,
transportation, telecommunications, the media, the petroleum industry and
others, to create a situation where these giant firms could totally dominate an
industry to control not only prices and production levels, but also the rates
of both future investment and technological innovation in these industry
sectors. Those innovations escaping this capitalist net were soon either driven
out of business or were purchased and killed. These are precisely the same
arguments American companies and the US government utilise today in China to
pressure China's government to open industry sectors to US multi-nationals,
claiming the benefits of competition and the need for efficiency as necessary
credentials to enter the modern world. These claims are equally as much a lie
in China as they were in the US.
In fashion similar to their mythical
inventiveness and entrepreneurship, nostalgic and misinformed Americans today
pine for "the returning of pride once again to what was once the global
standard of creativity, quality and style in manufactured products - the mark
on all our goods saying 'Made in the USA'".
But this is just one more foolish
American myth. The US was never a world standard of anything except weapons and
maybe pornography, and even then they stole most of that from Germany and
Japan. Mostly, American products, like their automobiles, have always been
crappy. It is true there have been some products of acceptable quality emerging
from the US, but these have always been much in the minority and the few
examples used as evidence of this claim are virtually the only examples. The
Americans have never been able to produce machines or tools that could match
those of Germany, or shoes and clothing as fine as those of Italy, or wines and
food products as good as those of Europe.
We are constantly reminded that the
Americans, being so creative and innovative, spend huge amounts of money on
R&D, but these claims are short on detail and therefore disguise the
objectives of corporate R&D in America. Companies in most countries invest
in research to produce products of higher quality and greater reliability or
durability, but US firms typically have interest only in finding ways to
produce more cheaply so as to enhance profitability. Large American firms focus
at least 60% of their entire R&D budgets on ways to lower costs, with
product quality inevitably being the loser. American investment in R&D is
merely a kind of race to the bottom, with every firm competing to discover new
ways to substitute substandard materials and produce a more cheaply-made
product that can be sold at the same price. Many components are internal where
the materials quality is not obvious to consumers, but for those which are
external and subject to consumer evaluation we see superficial America at its
best. Manufacturers conduct consumer tests of their R&D 'innovations' to
determine if the public are able to detect the cheap substitutions, the goal
being to degrade product quality and cost as much as possible in a way that
will not be apparent to the consumer. Lawrence Mishel, President of the
Economic Policy Institute, wrote that "the US is a country interested only
in finding the shortest route to the cheapest product".
Despite all the mythical propaganda, the
Americans have never placed much value on a skilled work force, and the quality
of American goods has reflected this for 200 years. Neither American people nor
their corporations have ever valued product quality, the people having for
generations been programmed to value superficiality and appearance over
substance, eventually resulting in the almost universally low quality throwaway
society we see today. One of the main results of this low-class attitude is the
American use of technology. Companies in Germany, Japan, China, and much of
Europe, will take advantage of new technologies to produce better and
higher-quality products but the Americans almost invariably use it to lower
their cost of production and raise their profits. Product quality is always the
loser. Even today, a German Volkswagen that requires repairs after a year is
an anomaly; an American Buick that doesn't, is a miracle.
The American Entrepreneurial Spirit
Americans have a bad habit of sloppiness
with their vocabulary, an unthinking and simple-minded tendency to contaminate
definitions by exaggerating them beyond the bounds of all good sense, mostly to
fabricate grist for the propaganda mill. One such foolishness is of course the
American definition of democracy which sometimes seems to include a thousand
unrelated and mostly mythical items like freedom. One American acquaintance
stated that a pet's 'right to dog food' was 'a human right' and therefore
included within the meaning of democracy. I sincerely doubt that one American
in 50 could provide an intelligent definition of either democracy or freedom;
the words simply mean whatever each person wants them to mean, the media
pundits even less intelligent than the rest of the population.
We have the same problem with the use of
'entrepreneurial' as an adjective, the definition often expanded to include
things like innovation or creativity or independence, and sometimes even
'freedom', and of course including the filing of new patents. But when the US
military funds MIT for weapons research and obtains useful discoveries, this is
hardly an example of the entrepreneurial spirit at work. An entrepreneur is
someone who takes the initiative to form a new enterprise, the term being only
peripherally related to innovation or the generation of ideas. Richard Branson
may be entrepreneurial in designing and building a new space ship for tourists,
but for each one of these we have several million who open their own pet shop.
The Americans constantly flaunt companies
like Microsoft, Google and Facebook as examples of their entrepreneurial
abilities but, like most all else, the few examples claimed are virtually the
only examples that exist. And in almost every case I know of, especially with
examples like Google and Facebook, there was enormous government, State
Department and CIA political involvement, heavy funding, and enormous
commercial pressure without which these enterprises would never have seen the
light of day. Google is virtually a department of the CIA; Facebook and
Twitter may not be much better. Warren Buffett and Michael Dell may be
exceptions, but there are precious few of these. Apple would qualify, as would
the creation of Hewlett-Packard, but America's list is much shorter than
China's, with firms like Huawei, Wahaha, Xiaomi and 50 million others who
started their own businesses. Like all the supposedly great things about
America, the nation's entrepreneurial spirit is just another utopian myth
created by the propaganda machine as one more aspect of brand marketing.
In the US, a new college graduate who has a
job and isn't already bankrupt with student loans, will take his first
paycheque to a car dealership and borrow whatever he can to buy a car, and
spend years paying off the debt. A new Chinese graduate will leave his full-time
job at 5;00 PM and wash dishes in a Chinese restaurant until midnight, saving
every penny until he can put a down payment on a house or an apartment which he
will then rent out. And he will continue applying his salary from both jobs,
supplemented by the rental income, until the house has enough equity for a down
payment on a second property. And he continues, while he lives in a small
rented flat, and after 5 or 6 years he has one house paid for, which he can
then live in almost free, with another well on its way. He will continue to
apply all income and rentals until the second home is also paid off, after
which he can bank his entire salary and buy a new Mercedes if he wants one, or
start his own restaurant, or buy a third house. Which way is better? Where is
the evidence of "the entrepreneurial spirit" in the American?
Nevertheless, and in keeping with the
American defense of their pitiful PISA scores and educational system, the
propaganda machine never tires of boasting of the breadth and depth of entrepreneurial
America, of the adventurous spirit that pervades the nation, of the US being a
veritable hotbed of entrepreneurs and business leaders and inventors. But of
all claims of American superiority, and in spite of all the blatantly false
myths about every other part of American excellence, this claim is so silly as
to defy understanding of its origin. In a lifetime of travel, I have almost
never met an American who dreamed of having his own business, and the same is
true for Canadians, Brits, Australians and Germans. Italians yes, many;
Americans, none. But in more than 25 years of constant exposure to Chinese
people, and in a decade of experience within China, I am still genuinely
surprised to meet a Chinese who does not dream of having his or her own
business. The desire to be one's own boss is virtually embedded in Chinese DNA
and would serve as one of the defining adjectives of the Chinese people. There
is nothing in the US to compare to it, and there has never been. In fact, it is
China, not the US, that is flooded with entrepreneurs and the spirit to strike
out on one's own. Ningbo, a small affluent city in East China, is known
primarily for its abundance of millionaires, and has an extraordinarily strong
private business base, with one in four local people involved in export-related
industries. Where do we find this in America?
In the business school of the university in
the small town of Yiwu, in Zhejiang Province near Shanghai, all the students -
all the students - have their own businesses. They may only be Taobao online
shops, but they all make money. In fact, it is part of their business-school
curriculum that they at least open online shops to take advantage of Yiwu's
massive commodities markets, and learn how to buy, sell and market those goods
across the nation. Many accept largish orders and market internationally - and
these are kids. Some of them make $100,000 a year in this minor part-time
occupation while they are still undergraduates. Many are also quite fluent in
English and are taught to act as agents, purchasing advisors, negotiators and
translators for foreign buyers, accumulating business skills and experience of
enormous value. Where do you find this in America? Where do you find this at
Harvard? The American business schools pretend that entrepreneurship entails
imagining an iphone in your garage and finding an angel willing to pump $200
million into putting your show on the road. But for every one of those you can
find in the US, China has 6 million of its kind, and guess who's driving the
Ferraris. And guess who spends 6 hours in front of the TV every night, still
believing the sun revolves around the earth and still unable to find his
country on a map of the world.
As well, if you read my E-book on 'How the
US Became Rich',(1) it is heavily documented that great numbers of products which the
mythological narrative now credits to American inventiveness were simply copied
or stolen from other nations, often with the encouragement and financial
support of the US government. Coca-Cola is one such example, but there are
literally hundreds of others, including most manufacturing machinery and
processes.
There are a great many of these
"firsts" that were never American, but where the claim has been made
and the title confiscated as part of the long series of historical myths used
to bolster the jingoism of American supremacy. Americans firmly believe they
are exceptional in their ability "to turn the abstract into practical
products for everyday people to be able to afford". In evidence, they
produce a long list of products and consumer goods that evolved from their
"scientific research", and that, according to them, is "so long
and obvious as to sound like bragging". The only flaw in this mythical
narrative is that none of the claims are true. Almost no items on their
"bragging list" were invented by Americans, and in the cases where US
residents were the first to apply for patents, they were not Americans but
virtually all by immigrants who had built on someone else's work. Many
Americans believe that IBM created the personal computer, but Germany's Konrad
Zuse built the first functional programmable computer in 1936, and Olivetti in
Italy as well as scientists in Russia and Poland had working computers long
before that.
And it goes much further than this. The
Americans are exceptionally proficient at creating historical myths that
demonstrate their supposed moral superiority in virtually every area, freely
rewriting history or carefully burying crucial facts in juvenile attempts to
mislead. One such myth concerns the fabled military aircraft, the P-51 Mustang
which, according to the Americans, single-handedly won the war in Europe,
defeated the German Luftwaffe all by itself, and "is widely considered the
best piston single fighter of all time". Of course, it is no such thing,
except to the Americans themselves. For one thing, the Americans' brief flash
at the end of the conflict hardly 'won the war' but, more importantly, this
aircraft's original designation was the XP-78, a name almost nobody has ever
heard of, and for good reason. The aircraft's performance was underwhelming to
say the least and, with its American-built Allison engines was of no more use
during wartime than a lawn mower. It was the re-fitting of this aircraft with
the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that made it useful. With the Merlin
generating twice the power with less than half the fuel consumption of the US
engine, the aircraft did indeed have great range and performance - as did the
Spitfires and other British aircraft, but the original American version
wouldn't have made a list of the top 500. And yet nowhere in any American
narrative do important facts like these appear. In these areas, as in so many
others, the US is a nation based on lies.
In related propaganda, anything developed
first by another nation will not actually exist in the American mind or be
recognised in the American narrative until it is subsequently copied and
produced by the Americans, at which point they will assume full credit for
having taken a flawed and primitive foreign concept and developed it into the
only real good version. The British Harrier aircraft is one such example that
comes immediately to mind, as are Italian espresso and cappuccino. On the other
hand, any country creating anything similar to that existing in the US will
discover its product being immediately denigrated as just a cheap copy of an
infinitely-superior American invention. Americans are such a pain in the ass.
Creativity and Innovation
The floods of new patents notwithstanding,
there is no evidence that Americans are any more innovative or creative than
any other nation of people. Equally, there is no evidence that Americans are
any more resourceful than people from other nations, and I would argue they are
rather less so. Moreover, two major conditions serve as strong
contra-indications of these claims of American inventiveness.
One is that most of the invention and
innovation that occurred in the US was not done by "Americans",
whoever they are, but by people from other nations, a large percentage of these
being Chinese. In fact, in America's famous Silicon Valley 50% of the participants
are Chinese and another 40% Indian. That wouldn't seem to leave too much
creativity or innovation for Americans. Indeed, without these foreigners, US
innovation might come to a virtual standstill and Silicon Valley might have
amounted to nothing. The US has for decades offered free graduate-level
education and attractive research jobs to the best and brightest of other
nations, which is simply colonialism in another form, effectively purchasing
the brightest students from other nations then taking credit for their
inventions or patents. The truth is that precious little of the inventiveness
that occurred in America in the past was ever done by Americans. Even today, a
recent study financed by New York mayor Bloomberg proved that 75% or more of
all patents emerging from US educational institutions were obtained by
foreigners, a great many of whom were Chinese. The US educational system has
never fostered either inventiveness or creative thinking; what it has done, and
perhaps done well, is to hire creative minds from other nations and then claim
their work for itself. It has been only through plundering resources and the
brightest people from other nations, that the US has progressed and become rich
overall. If not for that, America today would be of no more consequence than
Australia.
The second is that a surprising amount of
the innovation emerging from America in recent decades did not come from lofty
ideals, satisfying consumer needs, or other moral truisms, but was simply
commercial fallout from military research. As noted elsewhere, MIT, one of the
most prominent and praised US educational institutions, was created for the
sole purpose of military research and until recently was almost 100% funded by
the US military. The US may well have its share of intelligent and innovative
people, but their talents have been mostly directed to war, marketing, and the
marketing of war. When the Americans were flooding the people of Vietnam under
a tsunami of millions of liters of napalm, they discovered the Vietnamese were
cleverly avoiding their planned immolation by submerging themselves in water
and extinguishing the flames. The Department of Defense quickly assembled the
best and brightest Americans (at Harvard) who, innovative as always, discovered
they could infuse the napalm with particles of white phosphorus that would burn
a man to death even while under water. American ingenuity at its best.
The US government has arranged widespread
'public-private partnerships' with many educational institutions for the
purpose of military research, and after the military determines how to
weaponise something, they then let parts into the private sector. The Internet
was a military project, as was the American GPS system. Google Earth
resulted from US military spy satellites; radio, computers and microwaves were
military projects. The list is long. When this massive seconding of the
American educational system for military use became a target of public
objection, the US government did what it and its corporations always do: they
moved it offshore. In late 2013 der Spiegel reported an outbreak of public
condemnation when it was revealed that German universities had received tens of
millions of dollars from the US for military research, and many other foreign
universities are in the same position. The Americans are now attempting to
utilise the best and brightest from all Western nations in their headlong rush
to create military invincibility, hijacking the research departments in the
world's universities and paying scientists and researchers from all nations to
make their contribution to American military superiority.
Americans are not "inventive".
They are greedy and self-serving, interested much more in commercial domination
and control than in creativity. Creativity is defined by art, not by money and,
since Americans have no art, they have redefined creativity as something that
produces money. And it's even worse than this. As I've noted elsewhere, about
two-thirds of American R&D budgets are directed exclusively to finding ways
to degrade product quality and lower the cost so as to make a cheaper product
and increase profits. In what way is this a reflection of
"creativity"? Even worse, the US government and corporations have not
only hijacked all American universities as incubators of profit but also as
hotbeds of weapons research, now extending this to the research departments of
universities in other Western nations. I'm sorry to say this, but of all the
available fields of human endeavor that would benefit from the application of
imagination, the Americans have chosen only two: the search for ways to provide
less while charging more, and ways to kill more people faster and from a
greater distance. This is not creativity. It is a kind of mass hysteria in a
population that long ago lost its moral compass and sense of values, a people
rendered powerless by a profusion of propaganda that redefined a life worth
living as one of superficiality, greed and domination.
In late 2015, Robert McMillan wrote an
article in the WSJ in which he noted that China's supercomputing technology is
growing rapidly and that China has had for years the world's most powerful
supercomputers. China's Tianhe-2, which had for years been ranked the world’s
most powerful supercomputer, could perform 34 quadrillion calculations per
second. The machine in second place, the US military's installation at its Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, could perform 17 quadrillion calculations per second
- exactly one-half as fast as China's, and this in spite of spending billions
of dollars to improve their capability. McMillan stated that the increasingly
poor American results are not from a slowdown in the US effort but an
acceleration of research in China. Only a few months later, Xinhua news
reported that China's National Supercomputer Center would soon be releasing the
prototype of a supercomputer that will be 1,000 times more powerful than its
original ground-breaking Tianhe-1A (which was then superseded by the Tianhe-2).
A few months later, in 2016, China introduced its new supercomputing system,
Sunway-TaihuLight, the world's fastest for the seventh straight year, and using
entirely Chinese-designed processors instead of US technology. This new Chinese
computer is capable of 125 petaflops, or quadrillion calculations per second,
more than seven times faster than America's Oak Ridge installation, and the
first computer in the world to achieve speeds beyond 100 PFlops. The
supercomputer's power is provided by a domestically developed multi-core CPU
chip, which is only 25 square centimeters in size. As well, in 2015 China
displaced the US as the country with the most supercomputers in the top 500,
China having 167 and the US 165, with Japan third at only 29.
I must say it was not only comical but
instructive to follow the heavily-politicised transcript emerging from the US
government on these 'computer wars', and so heavily parroted in the US media.
For years, the Americans published - at full volume - lists of the world's
fastest computers, with their equipment always leading the pack, with
calculation speed being the only appropriate measure. In that process, US
government officials and the American mass media took advantage of every
opportunity to denigrate the Chinese for their lack of innovation. Then one day
Chinese engineers produced a supercomputer twice as fast as the Americans' best
effort, and suddenly the goalposts were moved. The measure was no longer
calculation speed but the fact of using home-grown processors, so even though
the Chinese machines were much faster than those of the Americans, they were
using US-sourced microprocessors, so the Americans still won. The US government
and media even enhanced their deprecation of China, loudly proclaiming that
China would be nothing without US technology. So Chinese engineers designed
their own microprocessors and produced a supercomputer five times faster than
the best the Americans could manage, and suddenly the Americans have
disappeared from the radar. Neither the US government nor the media appear to have
any further interest in either the capability or the numbers of supercomputers,
and the Americans seem to have lost interest in publishing lists of the world's
fastest computers. But on the bright side, Chinese authorities report that the
NSA has launched hundreds of thousands of hacking attacks, looking for a way to
steal and copy the technology for China's new microprocessors.
*
Mr. Romanoff's writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on
more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30
countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff
is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive
positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international
import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan
University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA
classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of
ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new anthology 'When China Sneezes'.
(Chapt. 2 -- Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at:
http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
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Notes
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Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2022
