Russian Corruption and Authoritarianism Holding Russia Back in Nano Technology Race

A year ago, Russia placed US $5.5 billion into a state corporation that was meant to boost Russian nanotechnology R&D into competition with the west. Most veteran Russian observers were skeptical of the gesture, and they are being proven correct in their skepticism.

..... in 2007 Russia put 130 billion roubles ($5.5 billion) into a state corporation for nanotechnologies that is being likened to the Manhattan Project. Even China, which quit Dubna after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, has been lured back to the nuclear institute.

But the big problem for high technology in Russia is neither money nor ideas. It is the country’s all-pervasive bureaucracy, weak legal system and culture of corruption. This may explain why the nanotechnology corporation has so far found only one project to invest in (and that is registered in the Netherlands). The share of high-tech products in Russia’s exports is only 0.6%, “a shameful rate” according to Vladimir Fortov, a member of the Russian Academy of Science. Over the past 15 years, he says, Russia has not brought to the market a single significant drug. The average age of Russia’s scientists is well over 50. One of the main commercial activities of Russian research institutes is leasing or selling their property and land.

Scientific inventions tend to be developed abroad. The chain that turns a scientific innovation into a marketable product simply does not exist, says Mr Fortov. And the key to creating it, he argues, is not setting up state corporations, but unshackling the system from bureaucracy and letting private companies operate freely. “We have tried everything else and we know it does not work,” he concludes. _Economist_via_Nanodot_via_Instapundit

Many of the same impediments preventing Russians from developing new technology, also exist within the state-owned companies and research institutes in CCP-controlled China. A culture of collectivism promoted by Mao's communists, combined with a self-effacing Eastern culture millenia old, stifles individual initiative. Chinese scientists who move to western labs are often able to adapt to a more individualistic culture, and thrive.

In fact, scientists from virtually every authoritarian culture--whether Islamic, Communist, Fascist, etc--frequently thrive in a freer western atmosphere, once they are able to adapt to being under less restraint. Collectivism and invention are poor partners. Throw in the corruption that is always present in collectivist cultures, and you can see why in a world of accelerated technological advancement, collectivist and authoritarian cultures have a hard time keeping up.

Remind me again, why anyone in the US would want to bring in an Obama collectivism? What type of perverse security-craving culture-in-devolution would breed such a death wish? Psychological neoteny, academic lobotomy, legalised nepotism (affirmative action), and faux multi-cultural monoculturalism.