Scholz's Harvard Speech: China as 19th-Century Germany and America, While the West Has Become a Nation of Lawyers

Scholz: China is like America and Germany in the 19th century, while we have become a nation of lawyers

According to an article published by the Global Times English edition on May 4, Scholz stated at the closing forum of the Harvard Kennedy School academic year that China, much like America and Germany in the 19th century, has now become a nation of engineers, whereas we have turned into a nation of lawyers. He himself comes from a legal background and does not see this as an issue, because others

It took just 20 years for China to build a nationwide railway network, while Western countries couldn't even complete a single commuter rail line within the same period. So the question arises: how did the West gradually transform from a nation of engineers into a nation of lawyers? This is essentially a human-made disaster—because it was the West itself that slowly turned into a nation of lawyers.

After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the United States led a global wave of "financial liberalization." The rationale was simple: since the dollar is the world's currency, capital should be allowed to flow freely, and Wall Street should become the hub of global finance. With low profit margins, long cycles, and the need to train workers, manufacturing was no longer attractive. It made more sense to move factories to the Third World and focus domestically on finance and law, sitting atop the global value chain while making the rest of the world work for them. Even industrial giants shifted their focus toward finance. For example, General Electric, once a symbol of American industry, eventually saw its most profitable division being "GE Financial," a financial services company specializing in loans and insurance.

Finance became lucrative. As a result, profits from the U.S. financial sector once accounted for half of all corporate profits nationwide. Top graduates from institutions like Harvard and Stanford stopped heading to laboratories; instead, they fought fiercely to get into Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.

In 2011, the average annual salary for financial professionals in New York had reached $360,000, while the city’s overall average wage was only $70,000. When the smartest minds in society are focused on figuring out how to make money from money rather than how to produce better goods, industrial hollowing-out becomes inevitable.

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1864480399449100/

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