State of the Discussion

America definitely has advantages in excavating "innovation points" that have clear commercial value and market acceptance, but when it comes to those "1.1 improvements"—the continuous polishing and optimization—the gap compared to China is obvious.
Most of us here are probably old enough to remember when Kaizen, the Japanese term for continuous improvement, was a hot topic. Japanese car manufacturers, especially Toyota, (and other Japanese manufacturers) were eating American manufacturers lunch. This was the explaination. A lot of American manufacturers even made a big deal about adopting it.
Of course, if you dig deeper, the originator of the whole concept was an American (W. Edwards Deming). But until the Japanese made spectacular use of his ideas, he had trouble getting a hearing in the U.S. From the sound of it, perhaps American manufacturers have lost the thread. Again.

nous, here's an overview of the Economics Explained channel. Perhaps the main criticism is that it oversimplifies economics to appeal to a broad audience.
Detailed Report on the Economics Explained YouTube Channel

This was a really interesting read, lj. Thank you for sharing it.
I haven't read Abundance so to some degree I felt like I lacked some context in following all what was being said - like I was hearing the response to a somewhat large statement, without having heard the original statement. So maybe I should read Abundance?
But even given that, it was a thoughtful and thought-provoking read. I've subscribed to the substack at the free level.
One thing in particular I was struck by came from the comparison of US vs. Chinese "manufacturing culture", for lack of a better term. A number of points are made in the discussion, but the thing that struck me most was more or less summarized in this para:

America definitely has advantages in excavating "innovation points" that have clear commercial value and market acceptance, but when it comes to those "1.1 improvements"—the continuous polishing and optimization—the gap compared to China is obvious. This actually reflects deep institutional design differences between the two countries: America's system encourages high-risk, high-reward winner-takes-all, while China's structure tends more toward stable returns and inclusive distribution. These institutional and cultural differences in risk appetite ultimately show up in the industrial realities and innovation models we see today.

If I were to try to boil this down and restate it in my own words, I'd say:

China is patient, the US is not

In other words, in the US we seem to always be chasing the next "unicorn" - the next disruptive thing that is going to give finance capital that magical 100 for 1 ROI. And we want to see that ROI in a relatively short window of time - 5 or 7 years? Whereas in China, they have the patience to build systems that improve over time through constant iterations to offer more modest, but stable returns, over longer time spans - 10, 20, 30 years.
And the patient, incremental approach is more effective in building out a robust manufacturing sector. Because, as others in the conversation note, while manufacturing processes are reproducible to a great degree (and therefore capable of scaling and moving from place to place), they often require what the contributor Afra calls "tacit knowledge" - information embedded in human minds about how to do things.
Which takes time to build and pass along, and is less amenable to scaling and relocation.
A really interesting - and relevant - read, thank you again for sharing.