The incredible reduction in global poverty in recent decades came from "catch-up growth" in the developing world. What'll happen when they finish catching up, go through their own demographic transitions, and hit the stagnant growth & wealth inequality of developed countries?
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Human beings need certain material things that engineering can provide: food, water, shelter, energy, transportation, protection from infectious disease, age-related disease, and toxic exposure. Real prosperity means making these better and for more people.
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The manufacturing industry is where most R&D comes from. If we want to get better at meeting human survival needs, we need innovation in "hard tech" and a thriving manufacturing industry to put it into practice. (Note that pharma is technically a manufacturing industry.)
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(though agriculture isn't classified as manufacturing, I'd include agriculture as a field where engineering can improve our ability to meet human survival needs. See Norman Borlaug.)
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There need to be more local polities with governance optimized for encouraging novel, hard-tech, atoms-not-bits, industry. Not corporate welfare for particular incumbent companies, but environments that encourage new firm creation.
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The biggest creator of special economic zones (SEZs) today is China; some of these (like Shenzhen) became industrial powerhouses, but from what I'm told, the typical cases (e.g. in Zambia) are mining towns or other natural-resource-extraction operations, with little innovation.
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As an American, I'd like it if the US had an industrial-innovation SEZ, but this is not at all a US-specific need.
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AFAIK, the three essentials for an SEZ are a.) buy-in from the host country; b.) sponsorship from a Great Power country if the host country is not one, as in China's SEZs around the world; c.) an "anchor tenant" business around which an ecosystem of startups can flourish.
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For this to work specifically for high-tech industrial innovation, we'd probably also need to shape the founding culture in a way that promotes technical ingenuity. We'd want to catalyze a ferment of innovation like the early Silicon Valley.
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(IMO one problem with SV today, for instance, is that blue-collar mechanical geniuses and hard-science intellectuals don't mix socially or professionally enough. Classism is bad for innovation. One of many trends I'm trying to buck at Daphnia!)
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