| There are obviously differences. The point I am trying to make is that there is no one answer. It is not like the flaw happened to be that the US has 5% too high corporate tax and if you lower that somewhere will become Shenzhen. Shenzhen is special because it was the first area in China to liberalize. The US have already have those features, including special economic zones in form of states. So if Shenzhen is successful because it is special shouldn't the US make some areas special as well? It essentially already did in the form of e.g. the bay area. But Shenzhen didn't stop growing. California has plenty of space in the Central Valley, but no infrastructure. Shenzhen built ~200 subway stations in 15 years. The US is trying to build that rail line between SF and LA. (The line between HK and SZ is delayed because of HK though). So there is no one answer. It is all there. Sure, you could say that the government should step in, tax the tech companies, build infrastructure and allocate land for these cities to expand. But that wouldn't be very popular with voters. Or one could move to Wyoming (?) and pay little tax. But what makes that place special in comparison to other places and what is going to keep people there as living costs go up? And once the companies succeed and the state wants to invest in infrastructure why wouldn't the companies just leave? The best I can come up with is to find some underutilized university and build an incubator where the state (or a company, probably a non-profit) invests in companies for equity while offering some cash, free living and office space. The profits are then used to execute a long term development plan of the area. But that is of course as hard to do as anything else. |
China is still way behind on infrastructure if you divide it by the number of people to serve, they are still catching up. We are reminded of that in whenever it rains all he roads flood or freezing my butt off in southern china in winter because indoor heating is too luxurious.