there were some great quotes in this interview from bill gates... 'And he [Lee Kuan Yew] was not only just thoughtful, just the very idea that he would take parts of the Western system and say 'Oh this part is good, this part may not apply everywhere,' this part he disagreed with. It was kind of bold because of course the Western system was succeeding, you know, basically all the rich countries in the world had followed the Western system, and so the idea that he thought he would do it slightly differently was a huge contribution. And so Singapore's a city state, so you do things in terms of paying government salaries and excellence there that may not scale up but what he did was very incredible. What we really want is this mix of democracy and expertise and no country has that balance right. If you err on the side of democracy there are certain extreme thing about the wrong person getting in power and if you kick them out then how do you get new people? So a democracy they have some huge advantages that helped the US quite a bit. It is a little scary now when we have complex problems like how do you run a healthcare system efficiently. Why is the US paying so much? And there really isn't at this time any elected representative who can have a good discussion about the dynamics of the system and why it's different from other countries and how we might change that. So government has to deal with very complex issues and the Chinese government although I'd say the trend is a tiny bit away from it has had engineers and scientists in a lot of key positions and a willingness to look at what other countries do and also this notion that if you're going to have a new policy you can often try it out in part of the country see if it works and tune the policy before you try to scale it up in a really broad way. So the Chinese government is a student of policy more than just a, say, the UK Parliament or the US Congress where people are kind of yelling at each other like 'I'm right', 'No you're right' It's not like 'oh we're going to do an experiment.' I've never sat in the US Congress and had them say 'Oh let's try yours out in one state and we'll try out mine and we'll come together and let's combine the best features.' That's not a typical electoral dialogue that we're having right now. So it's a work in progress. There are things like how you run your universities where the US model - you know other people should just adopt it. Then there's things like health systems and governance where they should take some aspects that try out variation. So we get the benefit of 192 countries slightly different experience including at the sub-national level.'Robin Li replies 'We have a very strong government and they have very strong execution capabilities when it comes to infrastructure, like high-speed rail or highways. We have massive constructions and now is probably the largest infrastructure in terms of transportation in the world. But when you have a strong government are you concerned about innovation?
There might be things that are too strict that's going to hurt innovation.
Bill Gates'...in terms of things like, how do you make energy the state policy's not holding back somebody figuring out some big invention. In fact, I have a nuclear power company called Terra Power. That really, China's the most natural partner for us with the breakthrough generation of nuclear. Because China's a lot like the United States was in the 1960s, where the idea you want to go forward and do new things, it's very clear. The idea that the status quo isn't where you want to be. The US today is very careful that they were pretty happy with the current conditions, so if somebody wants to build a new building or take some new approach, there's a lot of 'Hmm, maybe no.' There's like five levels you go through, maybe no, maybe no. Whereas the bias towards moving and doing new things which has a small downside but a huge upside as well. I'd say in terms of breakthroughs in some areas, like nuclear, it's more likely to come out of China than almost any other place because of this bias towards doing big projects. And 1950s, 1960s that was the US and the 70s it started to be Japan. Korea took on that role, that big engineering bias is great for the world.'
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