Research is Positive Sum

“China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S.” reports Keith Bradsher for The New York Times. Except as Christina Larson explains it’s not really clear that much “drawing” is happening so much as “expansion”:

Well, Pinto himself pointed out what the headline left out: For now Allied Materials is building research facilities in China to service the large and rapidly expanding Chinese market for their products; the needs and preferences of that market will be in some ways different from those back home. But that doesn’t also mean, as he states, that Allied Materials is pulling back operations in the U.S. It may also be doing so, but that would be a different story, and wouldn’t neccessarily be the result of expanding operations in China.

A point that’s often missed here is that thought countries do benefit from being the place where cutting-edge research takes place, it’s not generally the case that nations are engaged in any kind of “race” for technical innovation. For example, I can’t think of any major technical innovations occurring in Portugal since the 16th century. Nevertheless, Portugese people benefit from technical advances that occur elsewhere in the world. New products find customers and spinoffs and useful imitators all around the one. The growing extent to which China and India are places where research and development activities can take place is a very good thing not only for the two billion people who live over there, but for the people who live everyplace else as well. I think a little bit of the spirit of international competition in innovation can be healthy, if only because benchmarking is important to producing advances, but it’s worth being clear that advances abroad are good for us.