We are in a frantic race for post-industrial dominance

The scale of investment by the world's two superpowers as they conduct a proxy war through aggressive industrial policies is epic. Given the opaque nature of China's Communist Party government, the most cited estimate is that even five years ago, China was spending 1.7% of GDP on industrial-policy projects. That ratio has surely gone up since. This January, the government expanded its goals to include an emphasis on "photonic computing, brain-computer interfaces, nuclear fusion,” according to The Economist, and in a classic Beijing micro-management mandate, decreed that research institutes "spend more than half of their basic funding on scientists under…