Sam Roggeveen
On his blog, Marginal Revolution, American economist Alex Tabarrok has made some unflattering comparisons between the way the US educational and scientific establishments responded to the Soviet threat in the 1950s to the way it is responding to China today. Tabarrok calls it the “Sputnik vs DeepSeek Moment”:
“In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik triggering a national reckoning in the United States … The country’s self-image as a global leader was shaken, creating the Sputnik moment.The response was swift and ambitious. NSF funding tripled in a year and increased by a factor of more than ten by the end of the decade. The National Defense Education Act overhauled universities and created new student loan programs for foreign language students and engineers. High schools redesigned curricula around the “new math.” Homework doubled. NASA and ARPA (later DARPA) were created in 1958 …
America’s response to rising scientific competition from China – symbolised by DeepSeek’s R1 matching OpenAI’s o1 – has been very different. The DeepSeek Moment has been met not with resolve and competition but with anxiety and retreat.”The observation sparked New York Times columnist David Brooks to join with Tabarrok and speculate on the causes for this change.
Tabarrok’s preferred explanation is the rise of zero-sum thinking in the United States – the belief that China’s gain must be America’s loss. Brooks unwittingly reinforces this explanation in a column last week. He lists a series of awe-inspiring Chinese scientific and technological advances to illustrate the extent to which the United States is falling behind. Yet Brooks never acknowledges that China’s advances don’t necessarily come at the expense of the United States and are in many cases beneficial to it. He assumes that technological progress in China can only have negative consequences for America.
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