[dieulot]

> If we become too insular, then we doom our larger economy to the same mistakes France, Germany, UK, and Japan made.

What are those? (Besides Japan’s which you’ve answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143090)

[alephnerd]

The exact same mistakes as Japan - deciding to concentrate on their large local market which is protected via tariffs, but then completely outsourcing IP in non-target markets via JVs (eg. Renault's JVs in India, Volkswagen's JVs in China, Dassault and Thales JVs in India, Airbus JVs in China), but also failing to attract enough talent from abroad to innovate in these countries.

The Eurozone crisis also completely destroyed Western Europe's competitiveness (like the Asian Financial Crisis and Black Thursday did for Japan).

American companies make JVs abroad as well, but will also help transfer promising employees to the US, give them a competitive salary, and sponsor their visa process.

If you're smart enough to become a MechE for Dassault in India, you're also smart enough to become a MechE for Ford R&D in the US or India. Going from earning €25k in India to €45-50k in France or Germany isn't worth it, compared to moving to America and earning €90-110k.

Germany's automotive industry is a great example of this. In the 1990s-2000s, they began a MASSIVE expansion into China. Chinese consumers ditched their bicycles and motorbikes for the VW Jetta. But while VW continued to concentrate on ICE vehicles, Chinese challenger brands in the 2000s began researching EV technology as they were already the goto suppliers for batteries. Fast forward to today, and now German companies are dependent on Chinese EV R&D in order to build European EV platforms.

[jlangenauer]

This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chinese market, technology transfer was the price to be paid.

(Another example of this is the high-speed trains in China - the first generation was built by JVs with Siemens/Hitachi/etc with an explicit policy of technology transfer, but the newest trains in China are now local, built on top of the technology that has been acquired.)

[snowpid]

Actually Germany's and Japan car industry are more innovative than American one's (and much more sucessfull on the international level)