Private Equity does fund R&D.. mostly the D(evelopment) part. Most R&D, both in the US and China, is not fundamental/basic research.

I'm quite lucky in that i have the right to live and work in America, Australia, New Zealand, UK and the EU. I've also thought about this a lot as i near retirement (working in tech in the USA atm, it's been a fun ride but definitely time to think about options).

Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.

Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.

Exports more than it imports.

Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!

An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.

Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.

I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?

As someone who lived in China for 5 years pre-pandemic, it's fine to visit China, enjoy the cuisine, enjoy the culture. Learn the language, all good.

But living full time in China and competing with Chinese in China as a non Chinese person- that's not something you want to do.

I get the intention, but I feel it may be a particularly extreme comparison, since the US being what it was to the 20th century involved two world wars, decolonization, the cold war, and decades of reconstruction.

Currently, even if China pulls ahead, it doesn't have to mean things getting worse in the US. Contrary to what the current government seems to believe, growth is not necessarily zero sum. Despite Americans' perception of Europe, they too remain competitive in various domains of research. Similarly with, say, Japan.

That's the problem right. Learning Chinese wont help you, China is a closed shop, no immigrants, no sharing work with anyone outside the country, no employing people outside China, no cooperation with any other country really; just keep buying their stuff.

The UK was still doing quite well after the Suez crisis, but the oil shock and thatcherism was when deindustrialization really hit. Try to prevent that.

Move there, not sure taking language classes would help if you're still staying here.

Move to a cabin in the woodlands and teach them how to work on engines, and animal husbandry.

Neither. Align yourself with the AI that will be running the show and hope it adequately feeds you.

This battle was lost 20 years ago, and to reverse it you would need to go back 40 years to prevent US industry from outsourcing to China after it joined the WEF.

You can't divorce engineering from manufacturing, because designing better stuff heavily favors those who also make the stuff. The US was convinced otherwise by economists who don't believe in nation-states, because shareholders correctly saw that they could make massive profits by paying Chinese wages rather than American wages. But now China builds more ships in a year than the US does in a decade, and all of a sudden, the chickens have come home to roost. It will take generations for the US (and indeed the West in general) to regain what was given away, if it's even possible.

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...

> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.

> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.

>cuts to immigration

Between 2020 and 2024 the admin let over 11M people walk across the US southern border. It was over 200,000 per month.

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...

Since deportations have basically wound down those people are effectively being given amnesty.

2024 should have been THE year to see any positive effects of immigration.

Sometimes I think about the infrastructure projects that could’ve been done instead of a war in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran.

It’s shocking really how wasteful the leaders of the United States can be.

you think China is winning?

China is already in a depression and is just recovering, youth unemployment is high and it has maxed out development.

Government stats lies all the time you only need to look at their stock market for the real info.

Political polarisation is also at a point where it's become sports team-esque. People are willing to go to further extremes to dunk on the other side, even if it means the stadium is becoming increasingly messy.

The oligarchs don't care. If they can make a buck ruining the US, they will, and then they'll move to another country whenever it's convenient for them and do it all again. Borders don't really exist for them.

It's easy to blame the rich here. And certainly they are the ones doing the damage and reaping the rewards.

But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.

If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.

With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.

and yet the oversupply of investment funds looking for projects created the current AI boom here in America, not China.

China “leads” but only in iterating on things already invented.

but we never ask what’s wrong with china that they spend so much on r&d but fail to invent novel things.

With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.

If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:

1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.

2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.

Social programs are the polar opposite of how the US should be spending its money if it wants to outcompete China. Social programs both reduce the incentive for Americans to work while also depriving research/infrastructure projects of funding.

I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]

Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).

So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a0ffc43a-231a-40aa-b5f9-521757830... => https://archive.li/k3PEH

the current ai boom started here in america with private funds. china is spending government funds in a desperate attempt not to lose the race. it’s not clear that china is in the stronger position, at least yet.

The amount that the US spends on R&D is a rounding fraction of the excess of military budget compared to other nation's military budgets. And by scaring off most other countries from buying US military supplies in the future, as Trump has been doing, we will end up paying a ton more for less military hardware now.

The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.

> despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't.

That's the first time I've heard this. Can you elaborate? How do they produce new drugs without heavy investment in research?

I don't understand the complaint, China will just continue progressing while the rest of the world falls behind. It'd be the same as it has always been in Chinese history, in terms of isolationism.

I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.

Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.

Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.

Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).

It might stop the bleeding, but it won't repair the damage, is how I think of it.

I'm 50, and I am thinking basically "the rest of my life" is what it will take to start fixing some of this stuff, if it's even possible.

Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.