In this special episode, we sat down with Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He looks at how nations compare in terms of global market share in the Hamilton Index: Assessing National Performance in the Competition for Advanced Industries. How has the Chinese regime gained so much over the past quarter-century, and how is that impacting America?
Atkinson explains how the Chinese regime has gotten ahead: “A simple way to put it for China would be that they decided to engage in a whole set of unfair practices—massive subsidies, manipulation of their currency to keep the price down, forcing foreign companies to transfer technology that then goes to the domestic Chinese companies. So a whole suite of things that gave them an unfair leg up. For the United States, the answer is that we just didn’t do anything. Too many economists in the United States like to say, agree with the phrase ‘potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference?’ In other words, doesn’t really make any difference whether we have a strong semiconductor industry or a strong machine tool industry, it doesn’t matter. And because so many people—so many economists in particular, and policymakers who listen to them—believe that it doesn’t matter, we’ve lost global market share there. China, it matters to China. They’ve set their sights on dominating these industries by the year 2025.”…