

Baidu CEO Robin Li Interviews Bill Gates and Elon Musk - tim_sw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG0ZjUfOBUs

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nicholasdrake
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.'

