Dan Wang

What I really want to do is to inspire Americans to treat technology as a political project as well as an aesthetic project.

I think this is one of the things that China really does well is that

It takes manufacturing super seriously.

And the U.S.

has not taken it super seriously since various points in the 1980s.

I'm fond of quoting a former chairman of the Economic Advisors who said in the 1990s in this glib quip, which is quite funny, but computer chips, potato chips, what's the difference?

As if these things could all be fungibly measured in quantities of dollars.

And I think there is something qualitatively different between high-end semiconductors as well as a spud.

So I think that various parts of the American elite have decided that manufacturing is not so important.

We don't need to manufacture socks and t-shirts.

Fine.

We don't need to manufacture televisions.

And here's where I start getting a little bit nervous.

We don't need to start manufacturing iPhones or munitions or all sorts of other goods.

And that is where I get really nervous.

What I really want is for Americans to feel the importance of having a robust manufacturing base, feel the need to try to recover some of that and err more on the side of doing more manufacturing rather than less.

And so, again, I have no great policy prescriptions.

I am critical of some of the policies of the present administration.

But I think that if we are all much more committed to just building out and recognizing some of these problems that we have and recognizing China's strengths, then I think the conversation flows much more naturally about what we need to do and which statutes and regulations we need to fix.

In the 1950s, I think it was in 1957, there was the Sputnik moment in which a toy satellite emerged from the Soviet Union.