07/31/2021 12:00 AM
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 07/31/2021 12:00 AM
Seven of the ten most valuable companies in the world are North American: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon / AWS, Google, Facebook, Tesla, and BerkshireHathaway, owned by Warren Buffett, and the same is true of 14 of the top 20.
The strategic data that is more relevant than the merely quantitative one is that
the five largest high-tech digital platforms in the world
, which constitute the spearhead of the capitalist system in the 21st century, are American, accompanied, significantly, by two Chinese: Alibaba and Tencent .
Financing is the other face that decides the primacy in global capitalism in this historical stage;
And in this respect, the condition of number 1 of the United States is indisputable.
Venture capital investment - the so-called “Venture Capital” - amounted to US $ 487,000 million in the North American economy between 2018 and the first quarter of 2021, while in the People's Republic, United Kingdom, India, Germany, France, Canada, Israel, and Singapore, combined, climbed to $ 379 billion in the same period.
North American universities are unequivocally
the vanguard of world knowledge
, both as centers of education and research.
That's why five of the top ten are American, and the same is true of ten of the top twenty.
87% of the total Nobel prizes in the global system are concentrated in
them
.
The entire North American economy (US $ 22.6 trillion / 25% of global GDP)
has turned to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (CRI)
, the process of complete digitization of manufacturing and services.
The only thing holding back the CRI in the US was the low level of investment that existed until 2016 (12% of the product);
and in the last 5 years
the investment rate grew 4 points of the product
, not counting the immense mass of capital that it received on Wall Street.
This means that the US
never experienced any kind of technological lag
when it came to IRC equipment, and its production was always the most advanced in the system.
The great competitive advantage of the US is the US itself,
centered on two factors
that make up the very essence of American exceptionalism.
"USA.
it is the largest laboratory of 'creative destruction' the world has ever known… and it is founded on a growth culture obsessed with doing business, and multiplying initial capital investment, ”says Alan Greenspan.
It is
a passion for entrepreneurship
.
"It is a frontier country, created by pioneers and adventurers, willing to take great risks in the face of enormous opportunities," adds Greenspan.
There is a second characteristic trace of the American genius: it is
the ability to innovate
, to create the new, to foresee the future, inventing it.
This is Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Bill Gates among many others, to the point of turning this fiercely innovative attitude into a kind of DNA of American civilization.
The best example of this exceptional strength was World War II, which was the largest economic boom in American history: GDP doubled in real terms between 1939 and 1944, and productivity, the core of America's historic success, it was twice that of the Third Reich and five times that of Japan.
"It was a miracle of productivity" in the terms of Alan Greenspan.
The period 1939-1945 showed that
the North American resource mobilization capacity is incomparable
;
and it did so essentially with the leading role of the 35 main US corporations, which produced - alone - more than 80% of the US weapons, with which it fought and won both in Europe and in the Pacific.
General Motors / GM produced more than 10% of the total American armament in World War II.
It was the American factories, centered on the assembly lines created by Henry Ford, that overwhelmingly imposed themselves on Nazism and the Empire of Japan.
It was a historic triumph of military "Fordism."
The Democratic government of President Joe Biden has now resolved, faced with the challenge of strategic competition with the People's Republic, which is the largest in American history, to set aside these underlying trends in its history that make up the essence of its exceptional identity. , and turn to "industrial policy" and the centralization of resources, in search of the so-called "national champions."
This is what the "US Competition and Innovation Act" implies, voted by the US Senate on June 8 of this year by a large majority (68 to 32) both Democrat and Republican, in a clear reply (imitation ) of the incentive program of the People's Republic towards advanced technologies of the IRA: “Made in China 2025”.
The idea that the North American response, which has led the capitalist system in the last 200 years, creator of successive "miracles of productivity" throughout its history, to the challenge of the other superpower of the century, is an imitation of "Made in China 2025 ”, is frankly laughable, or rather
deeply pathetic
.
