Why is China smashing its tech industry?

Another perspective:

https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-ushering-in-new-era...

> There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government.

I think you have a point with your use of "technocratic," but it is an oligarchy. The party is the olígos. Autocracy implies stuff like the army reports to the leader, not the party. I think things are trending that way, but I don't think it's historically accurate (at least for the last several decades).

The USA tech industry did start with hard-tech. The hint is in the name "Silicon Valley". The spur in innovation in the American tech industry started with companies working on projects from the defence and aerospace industry. Along the way they lost the plot, mostly during the dot-com bubble when the investment/banking/family-office industry(that does not understand tech) got heavily involved into it to make quick money! That diversion from hard-tech to click-bait tech has continued even today, because the investors want quick return whereas for hard-tech you have to have a lot of patience to see positive outcome.

One country that, to some extent, successfully emulated the early Silicon Valley type strategy is Israel that has encouraged lot of personnel from defence and aerospace industry to form commercial ventures.

Not many countries understand this point; many go by the PR bling that is spewed by the USA internet companies(mostly pushed by get-rich-quick minded VCs) and try to encourage this type of non-essential startups in the hope of being "successful similar to Silicon Valley". The definition of successful is obviously is being set by these get-rich-quick VCs rather than the country itself. It is not surprising that you see lot of the VCs/Accelerators/Incubators fund me-too type companies in other geographies in the hope that they will be acquired by companies in the US! It is all bait-and-switch game and not meant to develop R&D and innovation that benefits societies at large. Benefits to the society, if at all there is one, is the by-product or after-thought of this whole process.

I don't think there is such a name. But you're on the right track about it being difficult to distinguish between value and rent-seeking.

One thing to note is that governments themselves are, by definition, rent-seekers. This is inherent to how a government - a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within an area - works. Once you are sovereign within a territory you can extract rents in the form of taxes, and if you don't extract enough you will be deposed by someone who does.

Most governments also tend to encourage their own industries to rent-seek as well. If your country needs heavy industry or scientific research or cultural behemoths, it's far easier and politically defensible to construct new narrow property regimes (e.g. copyright, patents, PDOs, etc) for those companies to exploit rather than just paying them subsidies. These regimes can be selectively weakened when you need to build your industry domestically (what the US did to the UK, or what China did to the US) and then strengthened later when you need to protect it internationally (what the US forced into WIPO).

Very little of capitalism is actually adding value, in the sense that you have a business that hires people, buys materials, and turns them into goods and services at a prevailing market rate. At the lowest rungs of the chain, sure - you might have, say, petite-borgeouis crustaceans hiring workers to cook food and sell it to people who need it. But that's not where most of the actual profit is. Compare that to, say, a fast-food franchise; which doesn't usually run any restaurants or sell any food. They instead sell trademark rights and supplier relationships. In particularly egregious systems like McDonalds, they even rent their franchisees the land that the restaurant must be housed in.

Left-wing critiques of capitalism are typically extra-cynical about this, and would consider even the small profit Mr. Krabs makes on burgers to be rent, not value. This is usually in the context of the employee-business relationship, however; not the business-customer one. Small businesses generally don't extract a premium on the goods or services they sell just because they're the only company that happens to own a stove or know some secret recipe. But in the context of employees, they are getting paid less for their labor, albeit in exchange for not having to bear up-front capital costs or deal with inconsistent revenue. Whether or not this constitutes rent or value is most likely a political opinion, not something that you could actually devise some economic criteria for.

With books you have to actually read. It’s an active thing. Vegging out on the couch or bed even, is passive. Often you don’t even have to think because it’s mostly action with lots of repetition and little mystery.