China and the West are in a race to foster innovation | The Economist, Oct 13th 2022
ioi_ab's bookmarks 2022-10-19
Summary:
"...America’s government is investing more in innovation. In August Congress approved $370bn of spending on green energy, including lots of money for research. The month before it passed the Chips and Science Act, which provides $52bn over five years for the semiconductor industry, some of which will incentivise private r&d.
The act also revamps the National Science Foundation (nsf) to put more emphasis on applied science and technology and potentially doubles its funding. Germany, Japan and South Korea are making multi-billion-dollar investments in computer chips. Last year Britain announced the $1bn Advanced Research and Invention Agency (aria) to supercharge high-risk, high-reward science.
The result of all this is a global boom in investment in innovation. In 2020 the world’s spending on r&d exceeded $2.1trn, over 2.5% of global gdp, a record. The binge has three notable features. The first is the heavy involvement of governments, which are unwilling to leave investment to capital markets and are instead both funding r&d and subsidising production of certain high-tech goods. Both China and the West explicitly link such spending to geopolitical competition. “Technological innovation has become the main battlefield of the international strategic game,” said China’s president, Xi Jinping, in a speech last year to Chinese scientists. “We’re in a multi-generation era-defining competition against the ccp [Chinese Communist Party],” rhymes Mr Young, one of the sponsors of the Chips Act...."