How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries.

We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.

China could not only be ‘equal’ but ‘better’ than the USA - we should get used to the idea. China has an average IQ of 104 out of 1.4 billion people, while the USA has an IQ of 97. In purely statistical terms, this means that the USA has around 700,000 people with an IQ >= 140. China has 11,480,000 people with this IQ. This human capital will make the difference.

IQ isn't much of a proxy for anything, especially in this context.

It's especially related in this context, which is engineering success. IQ is directly related to academic achievement in STEM, which is directly related to engineering career success.

Well we're not talking about career success, we were talking about comparisons of nation states. Having an IQ advantage there might prove marginally more helpful, but it's not really that important. I'd argue physical size and strength of a people are even more important than IQ when we're looking at across the board averages. Plus you have things like, idk, access to raw materials, geographic advantages, cultural advantages or disadvantages, systemic advantages or disadvantages including strong or weak institutions, training programs, etc. In fact, if you wanted to do a comparison between America and China you'd really have a lot better things to look at to show China as better than IQ.

With respect to "career success" you can have 50 million people in your country with IQs >140 and there's still a limited market to sell to. There are diminishing returns on capacity - you can have business analysts or call center folks with the IQ of Einstein and they'll be limited by the systems they are placed in.

The other side of this is that just because you are smart doesn't mean you are capable of doing well in the real world. Recall how there are a lot of "dumb rich people" and "smart poor people".