“Chinese citizens have the sense that they’re in a country that can do anything. I remember that growing up. America felt like that in 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s and it went away.”
Shenzhen today, makes about 90% of global electronics, especially in the information technology area. In the past 30 years, what happened in Shenzhen is that they democratized production.
~ David Li
Executive Director of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab
New York City educates more Black, Brown, and Asian children than anywhere else in the United States
The Jackson Administration will bring elements of Shenzhen culture to New York City and ensure that entrepreneurship is taught in the New York City Public School System.
The Board of Education of New York City educates more Black, Brown, and Asian children than anywhere else in the United States. I was taught calculus at the Bronx High School of Science and I also attended NYU’s Stern Graduate School of Business. There is little being taught to MBA students that cannot be taught in high school. In addition, MBA students are mostly being trained to be widgets in large corporations. They are not being educated to become creative critical thinkers and entrepreneurs.

I am very proud of my daughter Tia who is a graduate of Stanford University and played rugby. She was also a teacher and currently works at the North American Association for Environmental Education.
I attended New York City Public Schools from K-12 and taught at Morris High School in the South Bronx and George Washington High School in Washington Heights. I never came across any of the history of African American entrepreneurship in the New York City Public School system, either as a student or as a teacher. You cannot become what you cannot see.
Thirty-five years ago, Shenzhen, China, was just a fishing village outside of Hong Kong. In 1979, China’s Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping designated the city the country’s first Special Economic Zone, opening the region up to capitalism and foreign investment to fuel its development.
Today, the boomtown is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with about 12 million residents. In 1979, just 30,000 people called Shenzhen home.
If you need a hardware manufacturer or injection-molding master, there are factories that can make your product in a few days. And since the city makes 90 percent of the world’s electronics, expert packagers and shippers aren’t far away.
Creating a hybrid system to bring together the best of both worlds.
In the past twenty years, everybody who wants to make it in Silicon Valley has to go through this very tight and small selection process by a small group of people who are the venture capitalists. Young, White males between twenty to thirty, controlling how technology will be developed, how technology will be applied, and how technology will be available to the general public. That is the very definition of controlled economy. (51:41)
~ David Li
Executive Director of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab
Of the 61 countries represented on the Forbes Global 2000 list, the United States is home to the largest number, 575 companies. China and Hong Kong were next with 309, followed by Japan with 223. The breakdown looks very different than it did when Forbes first published the Global 2000 in 2003. That year, the United States contributed 776 companies while China and Hong Kong had just 43.
In 1978, 90 percent of the Chinese people lived below the extreme poverty line. By 2014, 99 percent lived above the extreme poverty live. Today, the socialist market economy of the People’s Republic of China is the world’s second largest economy by nominal GDP and the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity. Until 2015, China was the world’s fastest-growing major economy, with growth rates averaging 6% over 30 years.
Clay Shirky [14:04]: China is incredibly optimistic right now…. [Chinese citizens have] the sense that they’re in a country that can do anything. I remember that growing up. America felt like that in 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s and it went away….
Scott Galloway: You expect to see chickens running around JFK.
The United States is currently being challenged on the global scene by China and Russia. In addition, over the past 60 years the U.S. economy has shifted from financing the exploitation of natural resources to making the most of human talent. Yet, instead of addressing these threats in a nuance and intelligent matter, Trump has chosen to double-down on White Supremacy.
Trump’s embrace of White Supremacy makes it impossible to “win” against China
“Every schoolchild in China and every educated Chinese person knows about the ‘century of humiliation,’” said Stephen R. Platt, a historian and author of “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.” “There’s a lingering memory of that history from the 19th century that goes a long way to explain the desire in China for a global trading order that works more on China’s terms.”
Is it now 1840?
百年國恥
Century of Humiliation
In 1839, the big trade war that gripped the world was between Britain and China’s Qing dynasty. Britain was buying large quantities of Chinese silk and tea, but China was buying little in return, creating an uncomfortably large trade deficit. So Britain turned to smuggling Indian opium, a product that proved hard to resist, into China, and its resistance turned a trade war into a real one.
The three-year war ended with the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Britain control of Hong Kong and opened several new trade ports in China. British merchants were allowed to come to China and trade freely with no restrictions.
That was just the beginning. By the 1850s, the United States, Russia and France signed treaties with China with the same terms, allowing foreigners to sell goods with low tariffs and giving them privileged status in mainland China. Rather than show respect for the superiority of Chinese culture, China was forced to adhere to the traditions of Western diplomacy. The influx of foreign culture reoriented China’s economy, eventually leading to the dynasty’s downfall in 1912.
When President Trump’s trade team presented Chinese officials with a list of bold economic demands in Beijing last May, one of China’s state-controlled news outlets, Global Times, panned the request and blared a curious headline: “Is it now 1840?”
Five months later, China’s national news agency, Xinhua, accused Vice President Mike Pence of lacking knowledge of China’s past after he complained that Beijing was merely paying lip service to opening its economy.
Mr. Trump has accused China of essentially stealing from the United States for decades and his administration is demanding that China buy more American goods, stop subsidizing its own companies and treat foreign companies fairly.
In March, Chinese President Xi Jinping was in the Italian capital of Rome holding talks with Italian leaders and witnessing the signing of multiple bilateral cooperation documents, including a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on jointly advancing the construction of the Belt and Road.
“I have held in-depth and friendly talks and meetings with Italian officials, including the president,” Mr Xi said referring to his on-going four-day state visit to Italy. Before leaving, He attended a grand seeing-off ceremony hosted by his Italian counterpart, Sergio Mattarella.

Carnival of Viareggio 2019 17 Feb 2019. A giant, godlike President Trump float made its debut on the first day of one of Italy’s most famous carnival events this weekend. The Carnevale Di Viargeggio festival in Viareggio, Italy, is attended by about 600,000 people.
Saying “the mutual trust and the practical cooperation between our two sides in various areas have been deepened,” Mr Xi called on China and Italy to further intensify high-level exchanges to advance their comprehensive strategic partnership to a new level.
“Chinese citizens have the sense that they’re in a country that can do anything. I remember that growing up. America felt like that in 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s and it went away.”
“You know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fuckin’ smart then how come they lose so goddamn always?”
“We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.”
Superpower dreams: China has put forth a concerted effort to grow into a leading AI powerhouse over the last few years. Beijing deemed the discipline in need of special attention as early as 2012, and in 2017 it released a detailed national strategy for advancing and harnessing the technology.
Home-grown army: In a new analysis, Joy Dantong Ma, the associate director of MacroPolo, a Chicago-based think tank focused on China’s economic growth, showed how this top-down push has affected AI talent. The report analyzed the authorship of papers accepted to NeurIPS, one of the most prestigious international AI conferences, and found a nearly tenfold increase in the number of authors who did their undergraduate studies in China over the last decade. Whereas there were only around 100 Chinese researchers in 2009, accounting for 14% of the total number of authors, there were nearly 1,000 in 2018, accounting for a quarter. The largest increase happened between 2017 and 2018 after the release of the national strategy, primarily driven by the rush of second-tier universities that have opened up AI specialization and degree programs.
Brain drain: Despite the country’s success in cultivating domestic talent, however, it has struggled with retention. Roughly three-quarters of the Chinese authors in the study currently work outside China, and 85% of those work in the US—either at tech giants like Google and IBM or universities like UCLA and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Why it matters: Among the four major inputs into a country’s AI ecosystem—talent, data, capital, and hardware—the first has the greatest impact. The concentration of expertise determines whether practitioners will direct their energy more toward AI research or applications, for example. It’s also the main driver of innovation in algorithms and hardware, which will likely be more important in advancing the technology in the long run than, say, the availability of data.
The analysis shows that China’s investments in the field could be insufficient in building up its long-term capacity for AI leadership. The government is aware of this problem and recently began taking steps to address it: in the 2017 AI national strategy, it committed to luring top scientists back home with competitive compensation packages and other incentives. In the meantime, the US’s position as an AI leader has benefited greatly from an influx of Chinese scientists—even though that goes against the current presidential administration’s push to minimize collaboration on AI development.
“It’s very unfortunate,” says Ma. “Because of the AI race mentality, people see this as a zero-sum game.” A more fluid movement of scientists would benefit both the US and China, she says, building up both countries’ AI ecosystems while making it easier to create much-needed global standards for AI ethics. A lot of Chinese researchers, for example, receive a PhD in the US, return to China for the first part of their career, and then move back abroad back to the States to continue it. “It’s that type of movement that lets researchers start to coauthor papers in different places,” says Ma, “and that opens the door for people to have discussions on best practices.”
Large tech companies such aren’t hiring Black and Brown workers but this may actually be an opportunity.
Facebook Inc. says that 3 percent of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2 percent in 2014, while black workers in technical roles stagnated at 1 percent. Only 2 percent of Google’s workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The Alphabet Inc. unit’s efforts to increase that have sparked an internal backlash, with one former employee suing because of perceived discrimination against white and male candidates.
Among 8 of the largest U.S. tech companies, the portion of black workers in technical jobs rose to 3.1 percent in 2017 from 2.5 percent in 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. The latest data from the U.S. government, released in 2016, reinforces the point: Blacks made up 7 percent of U.S. high-tech workforce, and just 3 percent of the total Silicon Valley workforce.
“Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history,” John Lettieri, the co-founder of the Economic Innovation Group, testified last week before the U.S. Senate. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen by 65 percent since the 1980s and is now at a quarter-century low, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data.
Where does growth come from?
The cost of capital is nearly zero and we continue to behave as if capital is scarce. And if you want to know where America is headed, just look at Japan.
~ Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen brings up some important points, but let’s also analyze innovation with a difference lens. Generating valuable new ideas and manifesting new ideas into profitable products and services are two very different processes. We can make this analysis case with any of the below billionaires, but this post will initially focus on Larry Ellison and Oracle.
The early success of Oracle was based on the confluence of three technologies: 1) Relational databases, 2) the C programming language, and 3) VAX minicomputers. The co-founders of Oracle were not involved in the initial conceptions and development of any of these technologies.
Governments, corporations (corporations are entities created from rules put into place by governments), and capital markets (capital markets play by rules determined by governments) overvalue the the contributions of entrepreneurs such as Larry Ellison and undervalue the contributions by people such as Dennis Ritchie (creator of the C programming language), Edgar F. Codd (inventor the relational model for database management), and Ken Thompson (designer of the original Unix system).
To encourage growth, governments need to address both the capital issue and also the imbalance of valuing contributors to growth.

Photo from 1978 of Oracle’s co-founders celebrating their company’s first anniversary, from left to right, Ed Oates, Bruce Scott, Bob Miner, and Larry Ellison.
Larry Ellison met his Oracle co-founders, Bob Miner and Ed Oates at Ampex. Miner was Ellison’s supervisor. Ellison left Ampex and went on to work at a company called Precision Instruments, where he became a vice president.
Precision Instruments was preparing to put out for bidding a contract for writing the software for its mass storage system. Ellison told the CEO that he knew some super programmers that could save the company a lot of time and money. Those super programmers were Miner and Oates, who formed a company called Software Development Laboratories (SDL) and won the bid for the contract at $400,000, a third of the price of the next lowest bidder.
Ellison soon left Precision Instruments and joined Miner and Oates at SDL. Ellison got 60 percent of the company and Miner and Oates each got 20 percent. Realizing that contracting work didn’t scale very well, they decided on building a software product. After a great deal of research, Ellison convinced his co-founders that they should build a relation database product based on some papers on IBM’s System R.
Their first customers were government agencies such as the CIA, Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and the NSA. They first made sure that their code worked on Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) VAX, the most impressive minicomputer to come onto the market. Their intelligence clients were buying them as quickly as DEC could make them. By 1984, 70 percent of their software license income was coming from DEC’s machines.
To make sure that their software would be able to run on any type of computer, Oracle made the decision to write Version 3 of their software in a new programming language called C. C was developed at Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie.
When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does.
And as Daniel Pink tells us in Drive:
When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system–which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators–doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: 1. Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives. 2. Mastery— the urge to get better and better at something that matters. 3. Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Ask, and it will be given to you;
Seek, and you will find;
Knock, and it will be opened to you.
~ Matthew 7:7
Click the images above or below for
A rough draft of Seven Magazine.
Dear Mr. Man: We Want Economic Justice!
If you ain’t know, you’re part and parcel of the problem
You say no you ain’t, and I say yes you is
Soon as you find out what planned obsolescence is
You say no they didn’t, and I say yes they did
The definition of unnecessary-ness
Manifested
~ Lupe Fiasco
The factories are not going to be here anymore. We don’t need these people so the least we can do is hunt them. And when we hurt them we at least provide jobs for cops, DEA agents, lawyers and prison guards.
~ David Simon
Co-creator of HBO’s The Wire
The Black Census Project is the “largest survey of Black people conducted in the United States since Reconstruction.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, one issue area stood out as top priority for Black Americans across the spectrum: economic (in)justice. As summarized by Justin Maxson — executive director of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation — in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “Financial systems are some of the primary mechanisms maintaining racial oppression… Big banks and traditional investment vehicles can exacerbate existing inequities; conversely, new financial partnerships, supportive economic policies, and place-based institutions can increase access to capital and return decision-making power to communities.”
“Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”
In The Economy of Cities, published in 1969, [Jane Jacobs] argued that the elements most scholars cited when trying to explain metropolitan success—access to natural resources, for example—obscured one monumentally important factor: the random collision of ideas.
Statistical measures of new business creation have been halved since the 1970s. As one economist testified last year before the Senate Small Business Committee: “Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”
Beyond asking whether investing in better schools or more research and development, it’s time we entertain another possibility: American innovation may be suffering from the fact that Americans today have less exposure to ideas outside the realm of their own experience.
Mark Zuckerberg was born and raised in Westchester County, New York. His parents, Dr. Edward Zuckerberg D.D.S. and his wife Karen, a psychiatrist, live in the same home in Dobbs Ferry they bought in 1981. So why did Mark feel the need to build Facebook in Silicon Valley and not in New York? And what policies can we implement to encourage the next Mark Zuckerberg to build her or his company in New York?
Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Robert F. Smith of Vista Equity Partners both worked on Wall Street. Why didn’t they stay in New York?
Public schools were invented by factory owners who didn’t have enough compliant factory workers, and it worked great.
For 100 years, we had this wonderful system…
People who have the hubris to dream of something bigger change the status quo.
Schools tend to focus primarily on developing children’s cognitive skills rather than fostering skills like problem solving, creativity or collaboration.
~ World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum released its Human Capital Report with the subtitle “Preparing People for the Future of Work.”
The report states that “many of today’s education systems are already disconnected from the skills needed to function in today’s labor markets”.
It goes on to underline how schools tend to focus primarily on developing children’s cognitive skills – or skills within more traditional subjects – rather than fostering skills like problem solving, creativity or collaboration.
This should be cause for concern when looking at the skill set required in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are the three most important skills a child needs to thrive, according to the Future of Jobs Report.
“Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history,” John Lettieri, the co-founder of the Economic Innovation Group, testified before the U.S. Senate. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen by 65 percent since the 1980s and is now at a quarter-century low, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data.
K-12 education has remained basically the same since the 1850’s. School children have two times the restrictions as prison inmates.
In the presidential campaign there is very little talk of K-12 education, even though 50 million Americans are effected by the decisions made by policy makers regarding public education.
New York has the most segregated schools in the country: in 2009, black and Latino students in the state had the highest concentration in intensely-segregated public schools (less than 10% white enrollment), the lowest exposure to white students, and the most uneven distribution with white students across schools. Heavily impacting these state rankings is New York City, home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation.
Education quotes:
[L]earning is the human activity that least needs manipulation by others; that most learning is the result not of instruction but of participation by learners in meaningful settings. School, however, makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
~ Ivan Illich
You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.
~ Sir Ken Robinson
…and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren’t let in on this plan; they didn’t need to be. If they didn’t conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn’t last long.
John Cleese claims that creativity is not a special talent. People are either in an ‘open’ or ‘closed’ state of mind. The closed mode enables people to apply themselves to tasks with vigour and concentration; the open mode is more relaxed and conducive to creative thinking. Cleese talks about how leaders can induce an open mode in their team members and establish confidence in them to accept that there is a succession of learning steps on the road to total quality.
It’s a New Golden Age
The way forward in technology is building a vertically integrated company with a diverse team.
Your phone’s battery life could always be better, but it could have been much worse. Decades after John Hennessy and David Patterson invented the technology that made high-performance, low-power gadgets possible, they have received the ultimate honor—the $1 million ACM A.M. Turing Award, billed as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” You can thank them quietly whenever you pull your phone out.
In the 1980s, the two professors (Hennessy from Stanford, Patterson from Berkeley) developed technology called RISC—the reduced instruction set computer. The gist: A CPU runs more efficiently if software feeds it a lot of simple instructions instead of fewer, but more complicated ones.
99% of Processors today are RISC!

































