Comment by epistasis
3 hours ago
> he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this
What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?
In the mid 20th century, the Green Revolution, partly led by Norman Borlaug, fed billions, and was a huge transfer of knowledge to other countries, and hugely beneficial for all of humanity. (The critiques, well they exist but they are refinements, not critiques that would justify not doing the Green Revolution).
In the case of Apple in China, this was not a one-sided transaction, both sides benefited massively.
Now I do think we should be encouraging the US to compete more, which was what the Biden administration was really good at getting going. But mere ban of commerce, and not providing the industrial policy for US industry to catch up China's excellence, leave us in a world where we are all poorer, both the US and China.
The world is not a zero-sum place, capitalism and technological change are in fact quite positive sum, and when we act like everything is zero-sum we are all worse off.
> What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?
Actually, this is fairly standard via export control laws. When a certain technology is deemed critical, it can be put under export control. When I worked in the semiconductor space, some of the advanced tech we had was subject to these laws. Countries came under different tiers - we could freely discuss the tech with most European countries, but had to be a lot more careful with China and Russia. We couldn't/wouldn't hire Chinese/Russian nationals unless they already had a green card (the legal process was too challenging).
Of course, not saying electronics manufacturing should have been in that bucket. But there is plenty of precedence.
Thanks, that seems like a reasonable way to do it, if it were to be done, though the types of manufacturing would have to be very specific.
We could perhaps outsource mass precision manufacturing of aluminum iphone and macbook cases to Germany, or try to build up the industry over time in the US that would enable such manufacturing. But such multi-year delays that are kinda-sorta in the interest of a nation but not at all in the immediate interest of a private company and US consumers, imposed by politicians that have not bothered to dive deep into the issue but are instead responding to half-informed populist revolt, seem like a dangerous path.
If something like that were to be done, a carrot approach is far more likely to yield better outcomes than the stick approach of export controls, IMHO.