Davos is back on the topic of "Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution," but in my opinion, it's a great irony that this topic was chosen to open in Europe. If there is any place that is absolutely impossible to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I will definitely vote for Europe first.
Which is the world's largest industrial country at the moment? Is it the United States? Is it Germany? Is it Japan? Is it Russia? No, don't look around, the answer is this country standing at your feet, China.
I know that many people in China worship Europe, or German manufacturing, one moment saying a hundred years of inheritance, the other saying that the precision is incomparable. I also admit that in some areas at present, the European products that have accumulated over a long period of time are indeed much better than ours. But if we only see this, then I can only say that those people who blindly worship our countrymen have not even understood the most essential things of industrialization.
What is industrialization? In essence, industrialization is to use machines to build machines, so the question is, who designed the machines that make machines? And who built it? Or even who ultimately does it?
1 Large historical scale
When you look at the entire era of industrialization on a larger timescale, ten, twenty, or even fifty years, you will understand that it is ultimately people, the industrial population, that determine the future of an industrialized society.
Whether in the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan, or any industrial society, the number of industrial populations not only directly determines the scale of the industrial economy, but also determines the complexity or advanced degree of the industrial system.
Because the development trend of modern industry is that the division of labor is getting finer and finer, the products are more and more complex, and the basic accessories are more and more. To ensure the normal operation of the industry, it is not possible to lock the process in the library and expect to check it when it is used. Even if there is a problem of practice making perfect, it is impossible to make progress - no one can develop a second time based on knowledge that they do not understand.
Therefore, in the core part of the industry, on average, each basic accessory should correspond to at least one full-time person to reserve and improve the production process.
With the development of industrialization, the industrial population occupied by the core industries and the complexity of industrial technology, as well as the number of basic accessories, have increased in the same proportion. However, the core industries cannot form a complete society by themselves, and they also need the labor force of the tertiary industry such as consumer goods industry, construction, transportation, commerce, service industry, administration, military, social security, and primary industries such as mining and agriculture. When these people are equipped, the entire industrial system can operate smoothly, and at the same time, each member of society can have a relatively easy and rich life.
Together with the children and elderly supported by these laborers, it can be roughly estimated that the population required for an independent industrial system is about 10 times the number of basic accessories, and at least not less than 5 times.
In the middle and late 19th century, the industrial system only had the steam engine as a power, and the most complex industrial product at that time was nothing more than an ironclad ship, and an ironclad ship had hundreds of thousands of parts, so an industrial country at that time needed nearly a million people to meet the core industry, and the smallest industrial country, Belgium, also had a population of 4 million.
After the second industrial revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, two major categories of electrical appliances and chemicals were added, and the basic parts and components of the industrial system also doubled several times, and nearly ten million core industrial laborers were needed to maintain the integrity of the industrial system. At this time, the belgians and the like were no longer included among the great powers, the least populous France was 40 million people, and france's industrial system was not complete, and it was necessary to fight the First World War with the support of Britain and the United States when it was hit by Germany of more than 60 million people.
By the time of World War II, the number of basic components had increased to several million, corresponding to 65 million Germans who could go to war, while France was out a month after the start of the war. But Germany must also abandon the development and production of superweapons such as strategic bombers, aircraft carriers and atomic bombs, and Japan, with a similar population, can build aircraft carriers but cannot build decent tanks. On both sides of the sea and on both sides of the ground is the United States, which has a population of hundreds of millions. The Soviet Union lacked technical reserves in the navy, but the construction of tanks, artillery, and rockets could always overwhelm Germany.
When the world enters the nuclear age, a complete industrial system needs to be composed of tens of millions of basic industrial accessories, which determines that only industrial countries with a population of hundreds of millions, that is, the United States and the Soviet Union, are eligible to become world-class, and other industrial countries can only be vassals. During this period, although Britain and France were both permanent members of the Security Council and possessed strategic nuclear weapons, they could only face the fate of the river.
In the middle and late Cold War, the number of industrial accessories further increased to more than 30 million, and the population of about 200 million in the United States and the Soviet Union was completely occupied by various industrial sectors, and it was difficult to develop a more complex industrial society. However, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was willing to maintain this bipolar world situation, and both hoped to continue to expand industrial power, develop more new weapons, lengthen the industrial chain, continue to increase their industrial complexity, and technically overwhelm the other side, that is, to incorporate more industrial population into their cold war confrontation system.
In this case, the United States transferred civilian industries abroad, while continuing to occupy the products of these factories by financial means, feeding the indigenous population, and concentrating on an arms race with the Soviet Union. This is equivalent to increasing the country's industrial population without introducing immigrants and increasing pressure on agricultural and social welfare.
In this way, Japan, Germany, and China in the 1980s all contributed to the United States the industrial labor needed for the Cold War, increasing the industrial complexity of the American side and promoting the high-tech upgrading of the United States.
The population of the Soviet Union is only more than 200 million of its own plus tens of millions in Eastern Europe, and to compete with the global system under the control of the United States, it can only continue the pre-World War II science and technology industry system that is more suitable for war preparedness, and obtain high efficiency in the application of technology through a top-down approach, so that its own industrial system has lost the ability to upgrade itself.
On the other hand, the lack of population also forced the Soviet Union to concentrate its limited population on military industry and heavy industry, and by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the total population of the Soviet Union was only 280 million, but there were 70 million industrial workers, and on average 4 Soviets there was 1 industrial worker, the vast majority of whom were in the military and heavy industry sectors. This directly led to the long-term contraction of the Soviet civilian industry, which eventually collapsed.
2 Empires of the Rising River
From the above point of view, Europe's eventual integration process is not because the EU wants, but if it does not integrate the industrial population and manufacturing capacity of these two dozen countries in Europe to form an entity with hundreds of millions of people, Europe will not be able to sustain it.
But according to the current BIRTH RATE AND POPULATION SIZE OF THE EU, the Third Industrial Revolution, that is, its limit, the requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the complexity of the entire industrial chain and the number of industrial workers, are beyond the reach of the EU.
unbelief? Look at the fighter jet that represents a country's high-end industrial system.
At present, only two countries can meet the standards of fourth-generation fighters, China and the United States. The Russian t50, which is flattened by su27 beats, doesn't count. In Europe, no country can independently afford the research and development of the fourth-generation fighter, three and a half generations of Typhoon fighters, is the peak of the strength of the whole of Europe combined, the fourth-generation fighter F-35, can only be jointly developed with the United States. But even if Europe and the United States join forces with a bunch of puppet countries such as Japan and South Korea, the whole development process has been exhausted. The development process of the F-35 encountered a lot of problems, one of the very big obstacles is the design of the flight control software, the modern aircraft is almost a flight computer, almost all functions must be done through computer software and hardware. "Moore's Law" applies not only to hardware, but also to the development of software technology, because the capacity of the chip will double almost every 18 to 24 months, and the computing power it brings will also support the doubling of the size of the software. The F-22's onboard computer software, which entered service in 2002, includes 4 million lines of source code, compared with 19 million lines of F-35 software that has just entered trial production. Software is written by people, when the F-22 software was written, the Americans also used a special military ADA high-level language, but after the source code has been doubled several times, it can no longer make up so many programmers who understand ada, so they have to change to the civilian C language, but even the military programmers of the C language can not make up so much, the software of the fighter jet can not be outsourced casually, the F-35 software development progress has to be delayed again and again, and the cost is also rising with people eating horses. The Americans proposed the development of this light fourth-generation fighter because the F-22 was too expensive and needed a cheap aircraft to make up for its shortage. In the plan at the time, the performance of this fighter was almost half of the F-22's, and the cost was only 1/3 of its cost. However, until now, the F-35 has not yet been officially mass-produced, and the cost has already exceeded the F-22.
Gathering the strength of the United States and Europe, it is still difficult to build a fourth-generation fighter, and what do you think are the chances that the EU can single-handedly trigger the fourth industrial revolution?
The Industrial Revolution is a process of accumulation from quantitative change to qualitative change. After each industrial revolution, new technological means will greatly improve manufacturing accuracy. Once the accuracy of the machine improves, the next change is that of a machine that can make more complex products. The more complex the product, the more parts it contains, and these parts need to be manufactured, so how many kinds of parts there are in an industrial system basically requires how many workers and technicians to master the manufacturing process.
In the final analysis, for a country to maintain the continuous upgrading of its industrial system, it must have a sufficient industrial population. Whenever a more complex machine emerges, industrial upgrading can only continue if enough workers and technicians are recruited. In one industrial upgrade after another, only countries with sufficient populations can shake off all opponents.
On the contrary, if the industrial chain has been stretched to the point of using up the population base, it can only dismantle the old and make up for the new. Every country will keep the military industry used to save its life in its hands, and the industry that is dismantled is first of all a civilian industry that can make money and can develop on a rolling basis, and when the civilian industry is almost dismantled, the machine tool and industrial equipment manufacturing industry will also chase after the big customer of civilian industry, leaving only the military industry.
Although the military industry often represents the highest level of technology in a country, the guns and cannons made by the military industry can no longer be used to build other machines, and once there is no civilian industry in the country, the military industry cannot transfer the advanced military technology to other industries. There is no way to achieve the industrial cycle of making machines with machines and building more advanced machines with older machines. As soon as someone else's industrialization cycle began to work and a new generation of technology was accumulated, those former empires would soon be nothing.
For the foreseeable future, the whole of Europe will be like a domino array, with one country after another falling, from Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, the pig countries, to Britain and France, and finally Germany. If there is an objective historical law that is irresistible to human beings, this is it.
3 Afterword
If there is a fourth industrial revolution soon, then I personally guess that it is likely to announce the advent of an era with the three iconic things of nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
And the most fundamental of these must be a revolution in the way energy is sourced. In the field of fusion energy, at present, it can be determined that there is only one country that has three devices that set reverse field hoop magnetic shrinkage constraint, superconducting tokamak, and non-superconducting tokamak, that is, China. The other, probably the United States.
As for Europe, the core component of the giant hadron collider built in Europe, guess what country it made in?
This article is published by the author ne0 with the permission of Luo Jisi, and is selected from the WeChat public account "Hong Kong Stocks Those Things".
The perspective of this article is both grand and novel.
1. The division of labor produces efficiency. This was the first cornerstone of the economics edifice.
2. The Internet has given us a lot of illusions of "reverse division of labor", but the final outcome must be a more detailed human division of labor.
3. The competitiveness of a country is not the number of people, but the number of people involved in the division of labor.
(4) The competitiveness of a country depends not only on the size of its own population, but also on how much of the international population can be drawn into its own system of division of labour.
Again recommend "The General Theory of The Evolution of Things", in which the principle of "weak compensation" reveals ——
The evolution of all things conforms to the general law of "differentiation-harmony". Pay attention to the "Luojisw" WeChat public account and collect the "General Theory of Material Evolution".