Arthur Kroeber: recommendation

Transcript context

…Why are they able to identify these kinds of sectors in advance? Central planning isn't supposed to work. There's been many cases of countries which have tried to do this. Germany, Japan, and many other countries missed out on the Internet because there was a centrally directed effort towards these heavy industries or manufacturing, which actually turned out not to be relevant in the 21st century. No, it's definitely perilous. China has a list of key industries. It's called the strategic emerging industries. They came up with it basically in 2010. It built on previous iterations of industrial policy. Most of it is not really an effort to predict with a high degree of specificity what comes next. They're mostly pretty obvious things like semiconductors, industrial automation, new materials. It’s all this kind of stuff that would be on anyone's list if you were running a VC fund and saying, “What are the sectors that we think are—” But most VC funds are losing money. Actually, maybe only a couple of firms in the world were able to make this prediction correctly. So it's like a couple of firms in the world plus the Ministry of Information Technology in China are the only people who can predict the future?…

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